Ocean Hoptimism

This April, we didn’t just talk about change—we sat with what it takes to try and reverse it.

On April 23, Keith Rootsaert, founder and director of the Giant Giant Kelp Restoration Project, joined Ocean Hoptimism fresh off a long day at a California Fish & Game Commission meeting, bringing a grounded, unvarnished field report from Tankers Reef in Monterey—where bull kelp forests have been pushed into persistent urchin barrens.

He walked us through how we got here. Not a single shock, but a slow unspooling: sea otters hunted to near extinction, Steller’s sea cow lost, marine heatwaves intensifying, sea star wasting removing a key predator. Piece by piece, pressure by pressure, a system that once felt stable tipped into something else.

Not gone. But stuck.

And then came the part that landed.

Where trained divers remove purple urchins, kelp comes back. Fast. Canopy returns. Fish follow. The system responds. But it’s not a one-and-done fix—when the work stops, the urchins reclaim the reef. Restoration, as Keith made clear, is not an intervention. It’s a commitment.

For the tenth time, Keith has now made the case to the state: allow trained, permitted divers to assist kelp forests inside marine protected areas in crisis. Keith wants permission to not just remove 35 urchins per diver per day. He wants to vacuum thousands of urchins in one go. Some can be ranched and fattened-up for the food market. The rest can be mulched as fertilizer.

The State’s response? Still pending. Months, maybe years.

So the slower work continues anyway.

With more than 300 trained divers ready to act, the Giant Giant Kelp Restoration Project keeps showing up—reef by reef, dive by dive—demonstrating what community-led restoration can look like when policy lags behind ecological reality.

This wasn’t just a talk about kelp. It was a conversation about endurance. About what happens when the rules we wrote for a different ocean meet the one we have now. And about who gets to participate in bringing it back.

—Keith Rootsaert

If you left that night with anything, it was this: restoration isn’t theoretical. It’s physical. Local. Repetitive. And deeply human.

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