Ocean Hoptimism

Why We Need More Wild, Unscheduled Wonder in an Unraveling Moment There’s a phrase we’ve been playing with lately at Ocean Hoptimism . It began as a joke after a talk. Something muttered between sips of a pint as we tried to describe that unpredictable spark the ocean gives us. The thing you can’t script or optimize. The swell of feeling that arrives on its own terms, not ours. Stochastic ocean joy. The words are a little unruly (as they should be). Stochastic—born from rando

How Gathering, Not Compliance, Keeps Us Human There’s an antidote for despair. There’s an antidote for fear. There’s an out for our anger. And compliance is not it. Right now, we are being trained—deliberately—to obey. Or else. We see it in the suspension of consent decrees that once held local police to account. We see it in federal dictates that override the safety laws our own states passed . We see it in the way human rights are reframed as "ideologies" to be purged . We

Why Hope Needs Containers Up close, the interior surface looks almost geological: a repeating, jagged pattern of ridges and hollows, catching light in unexpected ways. It feels less like cookware than a landscape—something shaped by pressure and time rather than human hands and machinery. Only with distance does it resolve into something familiar. A pine tree ring Bundt pan, received this year as a Christmas gift. A vessel. Something meant to hold. That shift in perception ma

Why the Future We Want Will Require More Than Good Intentions A blunt challenge has been circulating across climate and ocean advocacy spaces. Marine biologist and strategist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson posed it without softening the edges: “ Fuck hope. What’s the strategy? What are we going to do so that we don’t need hope? ” The point was not to reject hope as an emotion or a motivator. It was to reject hope-as-a-stand-in for action—the kind of passive optimism that allows pe

An End-of-Year Reflection on Anger, Hope, and the Choice to Keep Building Ocean Hoptimism was born out of defiance. Not the performative kind. But the kind that shows up when something essential is under threat and you decide, consciously, not to give it away. This year asked us to surrender a lot. It asked us to accept the steady dismantling of environmental safeguards. To watch expertise mocked, silenced, or deliberately ignored. To see cruelty rewarded with clicks, power,

A Neutral Word That Isn't In conservation, stakeholder is a word that sounds responsible. It carries the tone of inclusion, the posture of care, the suggestion that many voices matter. On the surface, it appears benign—someone with a stake in a plan, a future, an outcome. But listen more closely and the word begins to reveal its limits. A stakeholder is not a leader. Not a decision-maker. Not an author of the plan itself. A stakeholder is someone who has a stake in something

What Happens When a Community Hits Pause on Fishing and the Reef Responds? Some solutions don’t arrive with a policy announcement or a global summit. Sometimes they begin with a quiet, culturally rooted reminder: “ Try wait ”—a Hawaiian Pidgin phrase meaning, simply, pause and give things time. In 2016, along the west coast of Hawaiʻi Island, the community of Kaʻūpūlehu made a decision that would ripple far beyond the tide line. Faced with declining fish abundance, changing

Nazca, Amador, and the Geometry of Intention Few things inspire curiosity like the Nazca Lines —those enormous geoglyphs etched into the desert plains of southern Peru. They feel like messages from another world, and in a way, they are: giant hummingbirds, spiders, monkeys, and ruler-straight geometric pathways drawn at a scale that defies everyday perception. The desert itself is ancient, but this is something older than old—an entire landscape turned into a canvas, its line

Because Waiting is Inconvenient (*A Satire) There comes a solemn moment in every civilization when we must ask ourselves: What is more important—preserving one of the least-disturbed ecosystems in Earth’s history, or keeping our upgrade cycle on schedule? It’s not that anyone wants to pulverize deep-sea habitats older than the human concept of writing. But we must be realistic: human progress depends on metals, metals depend on access, and access depends on not letting ecosy

How Deep-Sea Mining Sells Certainty Before It Exists Disclaimer : This piece is grounded in published science, public reporting, and industry statements. Where uncertainty exists, it is acknowledged. Where interpretation is offered, it is clearly presented as informed opinion on a matter of public and environmental concern. Some industries launch when science and due diligence is complete. Others launch while science is still being written and call the uncertainty progress. D

How Environmentalism Lost Its Spark–and What a New, Faster, Braver Model Could Look Like The strangest thing about this moment in American environmental history is how predictable the response from big green NGOs has become. The second Trump administration is tearing through half a century of environmental protections with breathtaking speed : scrapping methane rules, shrinking monuments, gutting climate reviews, silencing scientific expertise. And yet the sector’s reflex rem

Impermanence as Teacher in a Changing Ocean There’s a moment—usually right after the last rake stroke—when an Andres Amador sand drawing becomes something more than geometry. Amador, whose monumental sand designs span entire stretches of shoreline, treats the beach as both canvas and co-creator. The pattern is immaculate, huge, and briefly ours: an imprint of intention across an impossibly shifting surface. And then the tide rolls in. Image © Andres Amador To some, that era

A Nostalgic Look Back at Niskins, Messengers, and the Ritual of Knowing the Sea There’s something infectious about the energy that lingers after an Ocean Hoptimism night—ideas still swirling, conversations echoing, curiosity cranked wide open. The morning after Liz Taylor’s deep-sea showcase felt exactly like that: the kind of buzz that pulls you right back into ocean tech with fresh wonder. And nothing captured that feeling more than one of the images she shared: a beast of

What a Pokémon Can Teach Us About Real-World Hope We’ll admit this up front: we had to do a fair bit of Wikipedia-ing (and, more accurately, Poké-pedia-ing) to write this piece. We’re a little too long in the tooth to have come of age during the Pokémon era. Our childhood touchstones were different: Showa-era kaiju matinees, Star Trek: TOS reruns, the strange comfort of rubber-suit monsters destroying miniature cities on Saturday afternoons. Creature worlds, but from a diff

Diane Arbus and the Discipline of Overlooked Hope Diane Arbus made a career out of pointing her camera toward what most people turned away from. Her portraits of persons with dwarfism, circus performers, drag queens, and ordinary people in their private strangeness unsettled a world accustomed to conventionally perceived beauty as symmetry and perfection. Arbus once said, “ A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know. ” She understood th

What We Owe to the Minds Beneath the Waves Mercado de San Miguel, Madrid, Spain. © Liz Foote A colleague recently sent us a photo from Madrid’s Mercado de San Miguel, one of those cathedral-like food halls where every counter gleams and every bite is a small act of art. Among towers of pastries, bright wedges of Manchego, and glistening fish on ice stood a single, striking centerpiece: pulpo a la brasa , grilled octopus tentacles skewered with potatoes and stacked like crimso

Brinkmanship with the Planet's Life Support Systems There’s something deeply irresponsible in the view that it’s acceptable for civilization to ride into the eye of the storm and hope we have enough tech, enough adaptation and enough money to get us through. When Bill Gates writes that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” and that we should pivot from emission targets to disease and poverty relief, he’s signaling a dangerous slide into complacency. It’s a stra

Why Giving Ourselves Away Makes Us Whole There’s a quiet paradox at the heart of modern life: the more we chase happiness directly, the more elusive it becomes. Scroll any feed, and you’ll find endless prompts to optimize yourself; your routines, your productivity, your skincare, your calm. But a six-year research project from Cornell University recently reported in the Washington Post reminded us of something older and truer: the fastest route to happiness isn’t inward, it

How Optics Shape Reaction, and What That Can Teach Ocean Work The East Wing is rubble. However you feel about the presidency, watching excavators bite into the White House has detonated a public response faster than any press briefing could catch up. It’s not that presidents haven’t undertaken big changes before— Truman literally gutted and rebuilt the interior between 1948 and 1952 —but the meaning of seeing it happen, everywhere, all at once, is different now. What we’re se

On Speaking Plainly and Believing Deeply There’s a peculiar art form that’s taken root in modern politics: the word salad. You’ve seen it. Someone asks a direct question — “Do you support this?” “Would you vote for that?” — and instead of a clear yes or no, we get a buffet of phrases like “ what’s important to remember here ” or “ we need to have a national conversation. ” Suddenly, five sentences later, you realize they didn’t actually say anything. It’s like watching someon