yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

There Are Better Ways to Save Sharks—Here's How | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

My name is Jess Graham, and I am a shark researcher and responsible marine conservationist. Lots of hammerhead sharks, frisky seals, huge yellowfin tuna, massive snapper—I've never seen anything like it! I'm studying the effectiveness of marine reserves on wide-ranging animals, and the first thing I did was I dived into the policies.

I wanted to look at the laws that were actually outlined to do this so I quote unquote protection. But unfortunately, one of the very, very first things I uncovered is that while we think there are, you know, all these protected areas and all these places, in fact, a lot of these don't have any laws at all; they were never written. We really need to follow through, and we really need to make sure that these laws not only exist, but they exist to the effect that they are protecting both the species and think about the people that utilize that area, because they need to be enforceable.

And if they're not enforceable, then they don't work. Then what's the point? To me, what's key about creating impactful policies and ocean conservation is actually first understanding why you're creating the policy. Are we creating it for a political win, or are we creating it because a species or area actually needs protection?

I like to refer to that as responsible conservation. So, I feel like as conservationists, we need to be more responsible about the policies that we do create. But then on top of that, that responsibility doesn't stop once the announcement is made. It means that we continue to show up and ensure that the locals actually buy in.

Then they will then keep the gas on their politicians to ensure that those are actually upheld. It's awesome when we go out and we make these commitments to save a species, but if there's no backbone there, then it's really kind of useless, right? And that backbone mattered to me, whether or not, you know, the numbers of sharks or the numbers of fish that we said we were protecting, if they weren't being protected, then I felt like a fraud.

And it doesn't sound glamorous, but to me, it's really exciting and fun. It feels like exploration in a way, because you're trying to look at things through the lens of someone who's trying to break that law, and you look for loopholes and you look for ways that they can be improved, so that you can improve the lives of the animals that need it and for the people who are relying on those resources. [Music]

More Articles

View All
Meet the 18-year-old making $100,000/mo
How do you find a winning product nobody wants? TV show strategy? You know, I mean, I’ll give a little bit of my secret sauce. Like, I haven’t really taught many people this. This is a big one, guys! Like, this is a big one. But I’m serious! Like, go to …
How Art Alters Our Reality
The idea that a film, radio program, or TV episode can influence a generation of people seems like a scary thought. Yet, time and time again, we’ve seen that events in a fictional world can have consequences in our real world, some far more sinister than …
Reasons Not to Worry What Others Think
You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing. It’s generally a good idea to care about other people’s opinions to som…
Centripetal force | Physics | Khan Academy
You may have seen astronauts floating in the space station. Is it because there’s no gravity? No, there is gravity because it’s very close to Earth. Then why are they floating? Well, turns out that they are not floating. In fact, the whole space station i…
Introduction to negative numbers
In this video, we’re going to introduce ourselves to the idea of negative numbers. Now, you’re already used to the idea of positive numbers; you just called them numbers, not positive numbers. And just to give you an example, I will draw a number line her…
Cows for Cash | Explorer
So I joined the Oklahoma State Police Department in 1974. When I retired in 2008, I was at home watching The Young and the Restless on the TV when my wife came through there, and she said, “You will find something to do.” Back in the 1800s, you got caugh…