This is part 1 of a 2-part series exploring the future of farming seafood in the Gulf. Americans eat a lot of farmed seafood — but the vast majority of it comes from overseas. We just don’t farm fish on a big scale in U.S. waters. Now that might start to change. There are proposals to build massive fish farms in U.S. federal waters. And guess which coast is likely to be the first home for these new farms? You guessed it, the Gulf.
So is this a miracle cure or a looming ecological disaster?
EPISODE CREDITS
This series is produced in partnership with the Food and Environment Reporting Network. This episode was hosted by Carlyle Calhoun and Boyce Upholt. Boyce also reported this episode. Editing by Jack Rodolico. Carlyle Calhoun is the executive producer. The episode was fact-checked by Garrett Hazelwood. Our theme music is by Jon Batiste, and our sound designer is Emily Jankowski.
Voices featured at the top of the episode in order of appearance: Melvin Jackman in Newfoundland, Fay Orfanidou in Greece, Nick Underdown in Scotland, and Leticia Caro and Claudio Carocca in Chile.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Sea Change is also supported by the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
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TRANSCRIPT
Carlyle: Hello. Can you hear me? I think you have your mute on
Carlyle: We're so close. just with your little mouse. If you go click
Carlyle: I've been emailing back and forth with Melvin Jackman for a couple of days trying to get this interview set up. He told me he’s not too into computers and this may be his first zoom call.
Melvin: Now are we there?
Carlyle: Yes. Yay!
Melvin: How are you? Oh my Lord. There you go. You're a long way away.
Carlyle: I am. I'm guessing it's a little chillier there.
Melvin: We had heavy frost last night and it was minus two.
Carlyle: Woo.
Melvin: So wanna come for a swim?
Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I can’t take Melvin up on the offer. He’s a long way away on the island of Newfoundland in Canada. He’s talking to me from his cabin, where he and his wife live most of the year. He loves it.
Melvin: It's beautiful. Uh, Where we are, there's 800 to a thousand foot cliffs on the side of our bay. They're beautiful, beautiful coves, beautiful rivers. And I'm looking at the Bay right now.
Carlyle: And are there a lot of salmon farms where you live?
Melvin: an incredible amount, not that far away from us. Almost every cove around here has a salmon farm.
Carlyle: When you look at a salmon farm, what do you see?
Melvin: Garbage, absolute garbage.
All these salmon farms have popped up in Melvin’s lifetime. I wanted to talk to him about what it’s like to be a neighbor to a big facility that farms fish. Melvin says these farms have ruined what was once a pristine place. He and his wife walk the beach, picking up their trash.
Melvin: …buoys. Plastic feed bags, cages beaten up, rope, tons of styrofoam. And we only see what's on the surface. There's no oxygen left in the water. You go around these sites and you see methane bubbles popping out of the water. That's from all the feces and the feed on the bottom. The bay is pretty much dead.
Carlyle: Do you blame that on the salmon farms?
Melvin: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And the government knows all of this and they do nothing about it.
It wasn’t all that hard to find people who agreed with Melvin. Not from Newfoundland, but from all over the world — I spoke to people who live close to sea bream and sea bass and salmon farms in Greece, Scotland and Chile. And I heard a lot of similar things.
Fay: What you see is a very, very, ugly sea and land environment wherever these fish farms are. and now it's, uh, dead. It's a moonscape. There's nothing there.
I heard about farms releasing tons of uneaten feed, tons of feces...
Nick: It piles up on the seabed. It is smothering the marine life. You end up with a sort of anoxic black sludge.
And I heard from people who say fish farms aren’t only bad neighbors because they’re dirty, but also that the corporations that own them are bullies.
Leticia: Los operadores políticos de la industria son extremadamente violentos.
Claudio: The political operators from the industry are extremely violent.
Leticia: No respeto por el territorio y su espiritualidad.
Claudio: No respect for the territory, for the spirituality of the territory
I actually heard about this bullying from almost everyone I spoke with, including someone from the states, a neighbor to a fish farm in Maine, who didn’t even want to be recorded. And from Melvin, too, who's so upset over what he’s seen happen that he says he had to speak up. He was even featured in a recent documentary.
Melvin: But I've had serious threats since that because I am exposing them of their garbage. But at 73, I don't give a damn, you know?
Let me explain why I’ve called all these people from all over the world, and what it has to do with the Gulf.
Right now, Americans eat a lot of farmed seafood — but the vast majority of it comes from overseas/other countries. We just don’t farm fish on a big scale in U.S. waters.
But That might start to change. There are proposals to build massive fish farms in U.S. federal waters.
And guess which coast is likely to be the first home for these new farms? You guessed it, The Gulf. So as I started to think about this possible future for the Gulf, I thought it might be useful to hear what others who live near fish farms had to say about them.
Melvin: Think twice before they put that in your area. It makes a few jobs, but the jobs don't justify the environmental damage. It simply doesn't. I want my grandkids to walk on a clean shore, and it's not going to happen.
This is Sea Change … I’m Carlyle Calhoun.
This episode is part 1 of a 2 part series exploring the future of farming seafood in the Gulf. It’s a partnership with the nonprofit the Food and Environment Reporting Network.
THEME SONG
The thing that was most heartbreaking to me, talking to Melvin and all those other people living near fish farms, is it sounded like they'd been cut off from their local patch of ocean. Which is kind of like being cut off from a piece of home.
And that brings me to the big questions we wanted to ask in this series: how will a shift from wild seafood to farmed seafood alter our connection with the ocean here in the Gulf? What is the future of seafood in this place whose culture is so tied to it?
That’s coming up.
MIDROLL
So …. there are proposals to build big fish farms in the Gulf. It’s a whole new kind of thing.
We do farm some fish in the U.S. right now. We have a handful of salmon farms along Maine’s coast. And we have fish farms in ponds on land — like catfish in the Southeast.
But what’s being proposed in the Gulf, though: farms way off shore in the open ocean. These would be big, floating net pens with fish. Those barely exist anywhere.
So I enlisted reporter Boyce Upholt to dig into all this. And when I sat down with him, I had a lot of questions. Would it be a good thing or bad thing to farm fish out in the Gulf? What is the promise and the peril? What could go right, what could go wrong?
Boyce: You’re coming in with the BIG questions. And I’m going to answer them for you. But … I want to start by noting how HARD it is to answer, because this is so new . Some people think this new type of fish farm won’t have all the problems of those fish farms we heard about earlier…that actually they could be a miracle cure, fixing some big global problems. They say we could feed the world. We could stop importing so much seafood to the U.S., grow it here instead. Create tons of jobs in places where wild fisheries are just gone. Others say — Gulf fish farms are going to do the same thing that happened to Melvin, in Newfoundland. Ecological disaster. So we’re going to need to spend some time to dig into both sides those arguments.
Carlyle: Tell me then what’s on the table? What exactly is being proposed in the Gulf?
Boyce: Two different companies are currently seeking permits to open fish farms off the coast of Florida. I should say – there are a few other proposals out there, too, in the northern Atlantic and in California. But the farm that’s furthest along in the process is here in the Gulf — which means we’re likely to be the first place in the U.S. where this kind of farm appears.
Carlyle: Ok so what’s that proposal?
Boyce: So the plan is to build a pilot project — ONE big floating net, 45 miles off the coast of Sarasota. he founder of this company is something like Mr. Aquaculture … he has been banging this drum for a long time, and he wants to open the doors to fish farms in the U.S.
Neil Sims: My name's Neil Anthony Sims, and I'm the founder and CEO of Ocean Era. We're an offshore aquaculture r and d company based here in Kona, Hawaii.
Boyce: So Neil Sims grew up in Australia.
Neil Sims: grew up, almost literally on the beach in Australia. Chose marine biology as my career. I did the Australian version of the Peace Corps out into the Cook Islands.
Boyce: while living in the Cook Islands, Neal had this idea that would end up really changing his life. There were all these problems with overfishing in the Cook Islands – and that included oysters, which people were ripping out of reefs, searching for the ones that had pearls inside. But … what if we just farmed oysters … and do it in a way MADE them MAKE pearls
Neil Sims: rather than just ripping a pearl oyster outta the lagoon and killing it nurture that pearl oyster and, and implant it with a, a pearl nucleus. And in two years time you'll have a pearl.
Boyce: So … the fishermen aren’t out there overfishing. That protects the ocean. They’re making good money on pearls. Neil knew he’d hit on something. And he wondered what if you expand this idea. Can we protect the ocean by farming fish instead of chasing wild fish?
Neil Sims: Boom. This confluence of environmental imperative and economic incentives was right there, and that's where I wanted to work. I felt the firm hand of fate in the middle of my back saying, this is where you can really make an impact.
Boyce: Neil decided – this was going to be his career. He eventually moved to Hawaii, where he’s been working for decades, launching fish farms that are as sustainable as he can make them..
And he has a good reason to do all this. There are big problems in the ocean. Most wild fisheries in the world are being fished at or beyond capacity. And at the same time, people all over the world are eating more and more fish.
Neil Sims: If we're going to feed the planet with the seafood that everybody craves and that their doctors are telling them they should be eating. We need to find a way to increase the supply of seafood.
Boyce: One other thing to throw in here … if you’re a person who wants to eat meat, but also wants to think about the climate impact of what you eat … farmed fish is a better option than farmed red meat like beef. Regardless of all the other environmental impacts, it just takes less energy to grow fish in the water than it does cows on land .
Carlyle: Sure … but we’re not just talking about climate right? I talked to people all over the world that are neighbors to fish farms. And they weren’t talking to me about climate change. They were saying these fish farms have destroyed their local ecosystems. So … what does Neil have to say about that?
Boyce: He says they’re right basically. And that’s why we need a better fish farm.
Neil Sims: In the first decade of when people were figuring out salmon farming it was an environmental nightmare because you're in really shallow water with really poor circulation and they didn't understand salmon nutrition very well. So there was a lot of either feed waste or excessive feces.
Carlyle: And that is what I heard from pretty much everyone I spoke with… plus other issues with all these fish jammed together, being pumped full of antibiotics, pesticides to kill parasites, water's getting polluted, plastic garbage everywhere …
Boyce: Yeah. There are even more issues … These domesticated fish can sometimes escape – which means they might mess up wild gene pools.
There are worries about corporatization – these farms are run by big companies – it’s just … Big Ag in the ocean.
And then there's an argument that none of this even solves some of these problems of overfishing. Salmon, for example, need to eat other fish, and so we have to go out and catch other fish to feed them. Often, it’s little fish caught in Africa — fish that local ecosystems and local people depend on.
So raising fish in the ocean has become really unpopular in the places where it got a foothold. Alaska has a ban. Washington passed a ban this year. British Columbia is in the process of phasing out fish pens. Oregon is considering a ban.
But Neil says — HIS method of fish farming, it doesn’t cause the same problems.
Carlyle: So what does that look like? I mean, Neil hasn’t started a farm in the Gulf … though he wants to. But you talked to Neil about how he’s tested this new method out in Hawaii.
Boyce: Yeah. Decades ago, he started this farm is off the big island consists of these giant net pens — big, floating pyramids made out of netting. Each is as big as a house, and holds tens of thousands of a fish called kampachi, or almaco jack. The pens sit way offshore — it’s a kilometer from the coastline, in water 60 meters deep.
Neil Sims: The Kona operation here outside my window has been in place for 20 years, and it's half a mile away from a really beautiful stretch of coral reef here, where every night there's 15 or 20 tourist dive boats doing the manter dives. If there was any impact on that coral reef from that fish farm, people would've been kicking and screaming.
In fact, there’s some evidence that this fish farm actually provides a bit of a refuge for wild fish. I mean, this is a place where otherwise it would just be sort of empty water. And so the physical presence of an object there actually creates a sort of habitat, almost like a reef, that fish are drawn to. And then those fish draw in fishermen. We talked to a guy from Kona named Nate Tsao who goes out of his way to fish right alongside this fish farm.
Nate Tsao: I fish around that fish farm a lot. Uh, kinda like how a lot of the guys in, in the Gulf go out to the oil rigs and that's where they catch their snapper and their coia and that type of thing. I do the same thing here. I know that if I put my boat in the drift downstream of the fish farm, I'm in a, a highly productive zone where I know that I can produce fish for my family.
Carlyle: So Nate says the fishing is great around this farm, and Neil says there’s no pollution …but you know, it’s been his operation. So is there really no pollution, no issues?
Boyce: Well, I should say: some people point out that changing fish – that IS an issue. It can ripple through the ecosystem. Researchers have noticed that some dolphins that hang around the farm are getting into more aggressive encounters with other species. But in terms of POLLUTION. The EPA looked at eight years of data supplied by this farm which shows that , if you move just outside the farm's boundaries, there's no impact.
Neil Sims: all of the evidence confirms that if you do this in deep enough water. With a bare sand bottom and with some reasonable water movement, you have no significant environmental impact and often no measurable environmental impact at all. The experience has demystified all of the hand wringing and fretting that the anti aquaculture activists were waving their arms about before we put this farm in place.
Boyce: And this is where the story comes to us, in the Gulf. Because after what felt to Neil like success in Hawaii, he wanted to take the next step to expand fish farms in the U.S. Like I said, he’s got this big vision … save the oceans, feed the world.
And he decided if he was gonna petition the federal government to ask its permission to start farming fish in federal waters, then he had to pick a place to build that next farm. And the place he picked to do that was here, in the Gulf.
MIDROLL 2
Carlyle: Okay, so Neil Sims seems to have kind of proven his point in Hawaii. He wanted to farm fish in the ocean without wrecking the environment. And it sounds like the next phase for him is to expand, to build more farms. Which means he’d have to go from state to federal waters. Why does that matter?
Boyce: Let’s be clear what federal water is — it’s ocean owned by the federal government. Where that happens varies state to state, but typically it’s 3 nautical miles offshore. That means federal waters are almost automatically the kind of deep water Neil says is necessary for his kind of farm.
But also … every state has its own rules. Out in the federal water, you are just dealing with one set of rules, no matter where you go. It can help you scale.
Carlyle: And he’s picked the Gulf as the place that he wants to do that? Why here and not New England or California?
Boyce: Yeah. I asked Neil this, and he said he's a warm water biologist, so he understands the kind of fish that we have down here. But also … in my reporting, I talked to other people in the aquaculture industry and they talked about how on the Gulf, our politicians often and decision-makers pushing are pretty pro-big business. It’s a friendly place.
Carlyle: Right … we’re already the coast of oil and gas. There’s a lot of big industries here.
Boyce: And one of the big industries we’ve historically had … it’s’ dwindling. I’m talking about seafood. The fleet is shrinking. I've talked to a few seafood distributors who are all in on developing fish farms in the Gulf – it’s a way to be able to have local fish to serve. And Neil says he’s finding a warm reception from the seafood industry here.
Neil Sims: The fishing community in the Gulf was like, more fish if please, this is seafood. Doesn't matter whether it's wild or farmed, we need more seafood
Carlyle: Ok sure some people but I don’t believe that everyone is for this.
Boyce: No, not everyone. Here in Louisiana, I’ve heard from shrimpers that are worried about farms -- they feel like big business is taking over everything. In Florida, too, where these farms will be there, there are anglers and fishermen who have been fighting this. There have been legal fights against farming in the Gulf for a decade. So I talked to the lawyer really involved with this.
George Kimbrell: My name is George Kimbrel and I'm the legal director and co-executive director of the Center for Food Safety.
Boyce: George has been making one key argument. It depends on the fact that, if a fish farm is going to operate in federal waters, it needs a bunch of federal permits. And in 2016, one government agency came up with a plan to become the one-stop shop for all that stuff. And George took on not the fish farms, but the federal government. Basically, he said, you can’t do that. Congress did not give you that authority.
George Kimbrell: we haven't lost a single case. In a series. And it's been about 10, 12 years now on the litigation front. And I think we've basically single-handedly stopped this industry from becoming a reality. I think we'd have millions of fish being grown in our federal waters
Carlyle: Wow. So it’s his kinda technical legal argument that is pretty much the reason we don’t have a lot more fish farms. Okay, so why hasn't Congress done this? Why haven't they put an agency in charge of handing out permits?
Boyce: I mean, they've tried for years. There's been bills coming up again and again trying to do that. There's one live right now in front of both the house and Senate. But George’s coalition, and other environmental groups — they keep fighting it. And they have a pretty persuasive argument about the possible future of fish farms — one that resonates.
George Kimbrell: Do we want Iowa? A cornfield in Iowa, a factory farm from Iowa. For the oceans. We have a choice as a society to choose differently and to learn from those mistakes and not repeat them.
Carlyle: Right he’s saying the Big Ag that’s famous in Iowa, that’s what we should expect in the oceans if this continues.
Boyce: Iowa is famous for these vast cornfields. There are more and more factory farms of pigs there. Both of those things have caused a ton of water pollution problems. There are cancer clusters in Iowa, right? This is just, it's become a place that is a picture of the problems with farming as we've done on land. It's also a place there are fewer and fewer independent farmers in Iowa or really anywhere in the MidWest. These farms themselves have become corporatized, and so that is the fear — If we let ocean pens come along, that's what we're gonna see in the ocean.
George Kimbrell: What's happened globally in the places that have been early adopters of industrial aquaculture, is their local fisheries have been destroyed and their local fishing industries have been destroyed. And it's been replaced by centralized, industrialized, aquaculture , to the detriment of their ecosystems as well as their local economies.
Carlyle: That's what I heard on the phone calls. The ocean trashed. Corporations pushing people away. Disconnection from the waters that used to be home. But that is the total opposite of what Neil is saying.
So you've done all this reporting, what am I supposed to believe here? Where do the facts lie?
Boyce: Facts. Turns out the facts are so complicated. But one thing here is — George Kimbrell and the people he represents … they’re absolutists. They want NO fish pens at all, ever, anywhere.
And I understand that inclination, given the history. Fish pens HAVE been a catastrophe. All those stories you shared earlier are real. But that doesn’t allow room for — the industry to improve.
Remember, Neil wants to put his farms WAY offshore — and the studies that have been done on the few farms of this type? It looks … pretty good.
Carlyle: Let’s talk about the fish specifically. so this way offshore farm he wants to open in the Gulf, Neil is going to be raising redfish right?
Boyce: Yes, redfish. That’s good, because it’s a native fish. If there’s an escape, it won’t muck up gene pools. Commercially, though — it’s also a famous Gulf product — one we did a whole episode of Sea Change about. Today, though, most of the redfish we eat is already farmed, mostly in Asia or Africa. If it's labeled as GULF redfish, then almost certain that means it’s not wild, but raised in a community around Palacios, Texas
So I went there… to visit a facility run by a company called Homegrown Seafood. And I got a tour by a sales manager named Amanda Corporon.
Amanda: So fish comes in from the farm, it'll get dumped into the big vat, ride the conveyor belt up to the two ladies, up at the top, and where they'll check, for any deformities, anything that just doesn't look right on the fish.
Boyce: Almost no one I’ve talked to has heard of Palacios, but it’s a really important place for our food culture in the Gulf. This goes back to the 1980s.
That decade, catching redfish out of the actual Gulf was outlawed almost everywhere. But people still wanted to eat them. And a farmer in Palacios was like — what if I dig up my soybean fields… and turn them into ponds, for redfish. Now there’s a BUNCH of redfish farms here. this Homegrown facility I visited – they process something like three quarters of domestically raised redfish.
Amanda: We have to account for every single fish that we grow and we sell. So that's what she's doing.
Boyce: The farms here are really different from what Neil is proposing. The fish are grown on land, in ponds, so you don’t have the same worries about ocean pollution here. BUT – the place was fascinating to me.
Because after redfish took off … people started farming catfish, too. And … shrimp. Which was sort of crazy to me, because Palacios is considered the WILD shrimp capital of Texas. It’s the home port for these HUGE shrimping boats
Carlyle: So you were seeing a place that is home to both a wild and farmed seafood industry… That’s a bit of a preview for the rest of the Gulf, right? What happens when these two things sit side by side?
Boyce: well I talked to a number of shrimpers, including a pair of brothers, David and Jacob, Aparicio, whose family has been catching shrimp for several generations and they love what they do. Here’s David.
David Aparicio: It's the best job in the world, but it is very mentally hard to do. 'Cause when you leave this dock. You're gone for 40 to 60 days, I mean, you don't come home until you run out of fuel or you fill that boat up with shrimp.
Boyce: And you might think that someone like David would oppose the rise of fish farms. But . He was excited by it. The rise of land-based fish farming had created were more jobs here. Homegrown has a shrimp processing facility — and that’s useful to the actual Gulf shrimpers. Some of them take their shrimp there.
And so, David and Jacob, actually, in a down year recently for shrimping, they decided to diversify, and open an oyster farm. David actually told me he'd heard about Neil's proposal and he was really excited to hear about it.
David Aparicio: I've been reading up on it. I know some people are for it, some people are against it, but, you know, I'm like, I, I push really big for aquaculture in general,
Jacob Aparicio: I'm with you on that? Anything to provide more jobs down in our community, I think is is better.
David Aparicio: We're probably one of the few young people actually getting back into it. We need to start making jobs and making it sustainable for families to actually pursue a career and stuff like this.
Jacob Aparicio: And imports is just what kills any industry, you know, from seafood to manufacturing, anything. It's just if we can make it here, you know, buy local.
Carlyle: So their point is more “buy local” …they don’t seem worried about whether it’s wild caught or farmed
Boyce: Yes, exactly. In this series, we’re thinking about how seafood connects us to the Gulf — and it’s easy to think that farming seafood would lead to DISconnection. BUT (here’s the thing) ... right now most of our seafood doesn’t COME from the Gulf at all. The vast majority is imported. FARMED seafood, so long as it's actually FROM HERE, actually might bring us closer.
Carlyle: Okay, that’s a good point. But one thing sticks with me from talking to all those people — the bullying, and the way .. big corporations control all these fish farms.
I trust Neil that he’s doing this for all the right reasons and maybe his little farm would be totally fine. But … his mission seems to be not just to start his one little fish farm, but to open the door to a much bigger industry.
Boyce: That’s his mission precisely. He’s described himself as a “pioneer” – forging through the complicated process of getting one of these farms permitted. So your question raises a good point…. while there are promising studies of individual farms that are way offshore — we may not fully know the impact of LOTS of farms out there until we build them.
All that said, Neil said something that made me think about this question of small versus big business, and how it related to this idea of connecting to the ocean. It made that whole concept of connection feel … kind of, too sentimental for the modern world.
Neil Sims: Those folk that have an emotional attachment to this idea that the oceans should always be wild and we shouldn't ever be domesticating fish in the oceans. Corporatization of the oceans, it's happened.
Boyce: Even in wild fisheries, there’s been a lot of consolidation we’re worried about. There are big corporate players catching wild fish in the ocean. And that’s really not a good thing.
Neil Sims: It can't be this romanticized view of, a guy buying a boat and making his living one lonely man against the sea can't happen anymore, anymore than you could go out and, and stake out a piece of Illinois. and start farming it. The oceans have to be managed or it's going to be open pillage and plunder, and we know where that leads.
Boyce: Neil’s got a kind of grim realism thing going on here. Like, we live in a capitalist world. That’s the system we’ve got and we’ve got to work within it. Some of the opponents of fish farming talk about – hey, if we moved our fish around differently, more justly, more equitably, we could probably meet demand using wild products.
When I mentioned that, Neil basically said – that’s a very pretty dream. “Please show me the magic wand that is going to make this happen,” he wrote. He mentioned the “food police” — like, is that what we’ll create, to dictate who can sell where?
Carlyle: Huh. I guess, part of the question is, which problem is more realistic for us to solve … the technical challenges of making cleaner, better fish farms? Or the … social problems created by big corporations controlling the food system.
Boyce: Exactly. And each of the sides here say — the other approach, it’s not just ineffective, but maybe DANGEROUS. I find some of the arguments, on both sides, pretty convincing.
I guess the one thing I’ve decided is if or when Neil gets his farm open … I’d eat one of those redfish. I don’t see any problem there. Beyond that, I’m not making any promises about what I’d be willing to eat.
Carlyle: So Neil’s farm will be the first step to whatever that future is going to be. And where is it now? How long til we see his fish farm out in the Gulf?
Boyce: Just earlier the year, Neil got a wastewater discharge permit from the EPA. This was a major step toward getting this fish farm up and running. And it was immediately appealed by George Kimbrell and his coalition.
As we were finishing up this episode, I emailed with Neil about this latest delay. And he said, “We have no idea when this will be resolved.”
“Still, we persevere. Because it’s the right thing to do.”
Carlyle: Well thanks Boyce for your reporting
Boyce: Thanks Carlyle
OUTRO
Thanks for listening to Sea Change! This series is produced in partnership with the Food and Environment Reporting Network. This episode was hosted by me, Carlyle Calhoun and Boyce Upholt. Boyce also reported this episode. Editing by Jack Rodolico. I’m the executive producer. The episode was fact-checked by Garrett Hazelwood. Our theme music is by Jon Batiste and our sound designer is Emily Jankowski. At the top of the episode, you heard from Melvin Jackman in Newfoundland, Fay Orfanidou in Greece, Nick Underdown in Scotland, and Leticia Caro and Claudio Carocca in Chile.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. And to help others find our podcast, hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Sea Change is also supported by the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux (Meer - O) Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
We’ll be back with the second part of this series in two weeks.
