World Ocean Radio

This week marks the 750th episode of World Ocean Radio: 15 years of weekly short audio that reaches millions around the globe, sharing concepts, demands, and solutions related to ocean technology and science, policy, examples of best practice, personal reflections, and solutions for how the ocean connects, sustains, inspires, and engages us in common history, traditions, sustenance, communication, community, and well-being. Thank you for listening! 

 
World Ocean Radio
15 Years,
750 Episodes!
Ocean is climate,
Climate is ocean.
The sea connects all things.

World Ocean Radio is a weekly se...

This week on World Ocean Radio, host Peter Neill reflects on the importance of water in our lives, our culture, our memories, our very being. Water, he argues, is the essence of home, and the grace and gift of knowing it’s there for our return. 

About World Ocean Radio
World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at no cost by college and community radio stations worldwide. Peter Neill, Director of the World Ocean Observatory and host of World Ocean Radio, provides coverage of a broad spe...

Pope Francis, outspoken voice for climate and the environment, passed away on Monday, April 21st. Throughout his reign as leader of the Catholic Church, he was very clear in his views on climate change as a real factor in today's world, and expressed that we must understand and respond to these problems for our future survival. In 2015, Pope Francis issued a papal encyclical entitled "Laudato Si--on Care of our Common Home" in which he addressed the moral imperative to steward our natural world for the benefit of succeeding generations. At many times in the address, he mentions fresh water...

Earth Day is April 22nd. In honor of our watery planet we revisit a land-centric episode this week on World Ocean Radio. 
What About the Land?
40% of the planet is used for farming and livestock, often degraded by unsustainable or destructive practices. Coupled with coastal, wetland and reclaimed land development in the name of urban expansion, we are fast-approaching a tipping point. What are we to do? Are we destined to repeat the mistakes of the past? Or do we possess the collective will to develop creative solutions for repair, redesign and reconstruction for our 21st century t...

Discovery of a curriculum developed for coastal Africa some years ago sent World Ocean Radio host Peter Neill on a journey of discovery and revelation about salt as a construct to be observed, understood, and taught. A western scientific perspective might teach students about salt from a chemistry-led lesson, whereas the African curriculum taught salt as serving a role in the enhancement of and as means to preserve food, the harvesting for work, as way of life, and as financial support by its production and harvest. This latter perspective is not first and foremost chemistry-led but community-focused, with methods...

ter·ra·que·ous
/terˈākwēəs/
Adjective: consisting of land and water

Mud season: a special time of year in the northeastern corner of the United States, when winter and spring collide in a soggy muck: the rains come, ice and snow melts, saturating the land, creating a terraqueous mess for cars and boots. This week on World Ocean Radio, we're applying the metaphor of "mud season" to fresh water and ocean systems, to climate and biodiversity, to the human condition, to community--all the cycles and systems that rely on the balance of nature.

March 22nd is World Water Day, a celebration of what Jacques Cousteau called The Great Hydrosphere, expanded beyond Ocean to include the entirety of the water cycle: the one natural system that controls our planet's utility. From mountaintop to abyssal plain, water is the great circulatory system that connects all things. This week on World Ocean Radio we pay homage to water, without which we would not exist. Think about it: where and when is water not present in our lives? 

About World Ocean Radio
World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute a...

This week on World Ocean Radio host Peter Neill shares a smart, succinct new title from the Forerunners: Ideas First series entitled "Coralatations" by Melody Jue. The book is a philosophical exploration of coral reefs, technology, and media and how, through co-relation, we might expand our understanding of natural resources beyond endangerment to how we communicate about climate change. 

About World Ocean Radio
World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at no cost by college and community radio stations worldwide. Weekly insights into ocean science, advocacy, e...

Ocean Literacy is a bottom-up movement driven by classroom teachers who understand the full implication of education, adaptation, and innovation for our future. In Venice, Italy, in 2024, a conference gathered to address today's issues, and to produce the Venice Declaration for Ocean Literacy to provide goals and agenda items for the UN Ocean Conference in Nice, France in June of 2025. New goals and new items, or a new arrangement of old ideas? How might the agenda be revised? Tune in to World Ocean Radio this week to learn more.

World Ocean Radio: 5-minute weekly insights in ocean...

"Power is like water. It flows all around us at all times. Sometimes it takes the liquid form of politics-in-action...Sometimes it takes the solid form of settled law: policy is power frozen. Sometimes it is like vapor in the air, invisibly shaping the climate and our behavior in just the way beliefs or ideology or emotions do..." 

So states Eric Liu, founder of Citizen University and Director of the Aspen Institute Program on Citizen and American Identity. This week on World Ocean Radio, founder Peter Neill expands upon water as metaphor for our changing political landscape a...

Eco-psychology studies the relationships between people and nature, and seeks to develop ways to expand the emotional connections between individuals and the natural world. There is progression in the term: understanding of Eco-psychology presents plans, promise, and action toward transformational outcomes, strategies, and prognoses for the future. 

About World Ocean Radio
World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at no cost by college and community radio stations worldwide. Weekly insights into ocean science, advocacy, education, global ocean issues, challenges, marine science, policy, exemplary projects, advocacy, and s...

Eudaemonism: What does it mean? What does it have to do with happiness? And what is its context for the ocean? Tune in to find out. 

About World Ocean Radio
World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at no cost by college and community radio stations worldwide. Weekly insights into ocean science, advocacy, education, global ocean issues, challenges, marine science, policy, exemplary projects, advocacy, and solutions. Hosted by Peter Neill, Founder and Strategic Advisor of W2O. Learn more at worldoceanobservatory.org.

What are the five key reasons for ocean conservation? What are the five areas where progress matters most? With the world in an off-axis state of turmoil, W2O founder Peter Neill is taking stock this week, asking the questions and distilling the essential reasons why the ocean is central to human survival.

About World Ocean Radio
World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at no cost by college and community radio stations worldwide. Peter Neill, Director of the World Ocean Observatory and host of World...

This week on World Ocean Radio, host Peter Neill shares views and observations of the town of Isafjordur, Iceland, and the values it possesses that give the area its unique identity.  

About World Ocean Radio
World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at no cost by college and community radio stations worldwide. Peter Neill, Director of the World Ocean Observatory and host of World Ocean Radio, provides coverage of a broad spectrum of ocean issues from science and education to advocacy and exemplary projects.

KNOT: a word with many definitions: from a tight constriction to something hard to solve; a cluster of persons or things; an ornamental ribbon; a closed curve in three dimensional space. And of course, the word comes back to the ocean: is not the ocean a dynamic of knots: entangled and integral, inter-placed with ornamental flexible bodies, comprised of the ties that bind. 

About World Ocean Radio
World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at no cost by college and community radio stations worldwide. Peter Neill, D...

At the Fishhouses, is among our favorite poems here at World Ocean Observatory. In its richly-detailed mastery, it distills poet Elizabeth Bishop’s seaside meditations, evokes the clarity of meaning contained in personal encounters at the shore and with the ocean, and holds the reader and the listener in the space that lies between land and sea, a site of transience, mystery, and the sublime. 

World Ocean Radio: 5-minute weekly insights in ocean science, advocacy, education, global ocean issues, challenges, marine science, policy, and solutions. Hosted by Peter Neill, Director of the W2O. Learn more at wor...

Each holiday season on World Ocean Radio we return with a special reading of "Christmas at Sea", an evocative poem by Robert Louis Stevenson written in 1883. Stevenson, the son of a lighthouse engineer, had intimate, first-hand knowledge of extreme weather, storms and nor'westers.

Christmas at Sea
An evocative seasonal poem by Robert Louis Stevenson published in 1888, five years after his beloved novel, Treasure Island, was published. Christmas at Sea appears in an anthology of poems compiled by the Radio4 program Poetry Please: The Nation’s Best-Loved Poems, with a forward by Roger McGough, published in 2014 by Fa...

This week we're providing our listeners with a list of intentions that describe the World Ocean Observatory's statement of beliefs that drives all action. And we provide suggestions for those who may ask, "What can I do?" while encouraging determination to pursue the causes that you believe in. This week's episode is a statement of belief and intent that dates back to the original principles of W2O, begun more than 20 years ago.

About World Ocean Radio
World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at no...

The debate over the reality of climate change is over. There is no place on land or sea that is immune from the effects of extreme weather, fire, flood, inundation, erosion, and social impacts. This week we're discussing carbon as the key culprit to our current condition, and the multitudinous methods and suggestions and investments to remove carbon from the atmosphere and the ocean. Is it possible we've made this all too complicated? Might the solutions be right there, in front of us, having already been discovered at the technological, political, and regulatory levels? What does it look like...

The face of war is changing quickly: cheap, unmanned, versatile drones and remotely operated aircraft, coupled with rapidly-advancing technology, ambiguous algorithms, accountability, and responsibility are shifting the shapes of war around the globe, especially as it pertains to the unseen and largely unmonitored high seas. With a world struggling to keep up, the instruments of war are becoming invisible, ephemeral and uncontrollable. What laws are in place to protect the ocean and the natural systems on which life is sustained?

About World Ocean Radio
World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available...

This week on World Ocean Radio we are examining Renewell, a company that has developed a method to repurpose abandoned oil wells across the United States into displacement reserves, effectively capping the more than 2 million abandoned, methane-leaking oil wells and converting them into renewable storage and renewed financial return. 

World Ocean Radio: 5-minute weekly insights in ocean science, advocacy, education, global ocean issues, challenges, marine science, policy, and solutions. Hosted by Peter Neill, Director of the W2O. Learn more at worldoceanobservatory.org

This week on World Ocean Radio, two new books for readers to consider this fall: "The High Seas: Greed, Power, and The Battle for the Unclaimed Ocean" by Olive Heffernan, and "What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World Ocean" by Helen Scales. Both books evoke hopeful possibility while exploring the extent of the ocean and the implications of ongoing exploitation and excess. 

About World Ocean Radio
World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at no cost by college and community radio stations w...

Insurance is everywhere, established to transfer risk or to compensate for loss. Deep-sea mining has attracted much attention lately, as we look to offshore exploration and extraction for energy and mineral resources. As the UN International Seabed Authority deliberates standards and regulations related to drilling into the ocean floor, insurers of deep-sea risk are calculating potential loss as potentially so great that no coverage would be adequate to cover the costs of consequence, and no payment large enough to mitigate the risk of deep-sea mining. 

About World Ocean Radio
World Ocean Radio is a w...

The maritime industry is a major contributor to our global systems: our economies, security, and stability. More than 80% of all international trade and transport moves across the ocean: shipbuilding, port operations, shipping, cruise lines, offshore energy, pipelines, salvage, communications, cables, insurance, ferries, exploration and science. This week we are discussing a 2023 United Nations review of maritime transport, and the technologies that rely on the men and women worldwide who work in the maritime industry.

About World Ocean Radio
World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at...

As we discuss resiliency, adaptation, and mitigation of climate and ocean, we must also invent--not to merely rearrange the elements of an old plan, but to imaging and consider some things new and different. If the ocean movement is to embrace the change required to respond to challenges worldwide, we must imaging new ways forward, confident in our abilities to solve problems through imagination, action, and energetic response.

About World Ocean Radio
World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at no cost by college and community...

It has been nearly twenty years since the Ocean Literacy Principles and Framework were first adopted by classroom educators to promote the ocean as a central focus for climate, water, food, health, exploration, science, and more. Today it has been incorporated into the agenda of the UN IOC; it seems Ocean Literacy is riding a new wave of interest and possibility. This week on World Ocean Radio we are laying out the basic tenets and truths of Ocean Literacy, describing the foundational assumptions that underlie the matrix, including the first principle: the earth is one big ocean with many...

Eustacy is a word used to describe worldwide changes of sea level. This is a new word for us: even though it seems we live in a eustatic world. We're using this newly-discovered word to distill the five areas of our existence where the ocean matters most: fresh water, the ocean-fresh water continuum, energy, food, health, and exchange. 

About World Ocean Radio
World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at no cost by college and community radio stations worldwide. Peter Neill, Director of the World Ocean O...

This week on World Ocean Radio: synopsis of a recent report by the UN Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission entitled "Call to All Voices of the Ocean – Consultation of Civil Society in Preparation of the Next United Nations Ocean Conference" addressing issues and providing recommendations and specific actions related to ocean climate, science, and policy. One glaring omission: a powerful specific call for action--a plan through communication that will amplify, advocate, educate, and initiate the change required to connect us all through the sea. 

About World Ocean Radio
World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of fiv...

In this episode of World Ocean Radio we take listeners to the shore, to be reminded of the importance of silence, solitude and renewal in our lives, and of the healing power of the ocean--or water in any form--that is there for us, if and when we choose to stop and listen. 

World Ocean Radio offers five-minute weekly insights into ocean science, advocacy and education, hosted by Peter Neill, Director of the W2O, author, and lifelong ocean advocate. Episodes offer perspectives on global ocean issues, today’s challenges, marine science and policy, and exemplary solutions. Available for...

This week we are discussing two technological innovations—both bright ideas that could have huge impacts for useful, sustainable change for the future. The first is WaterCube, a machine that pulls vapor from the air and condenses it into liquid form for household use and disaster relief; the second is Sway, a farmed seaweed application designed to create a compostable packaging that is biodegradable and chemical free. 

About World Ocean Radio
World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at no cost by college and community radio sta...

As we review the state of climate change challenge and response, it becomes clear we are not succeeding. Is it possible to craft a new economic system that values natural resource sustainability over depletion of those resources? Can we conceive a new economics, a forward-directed system of financial valuation and exchange based on the asset value of Nature? We're discussing this and more this week on World Ocean Radio.
About World Ocean Radio
World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at no cost by college and community...

Plastic. It is ubiquitous. It is everywhere in our lives, yet we do not possess the cycle or recycle to continue production in a sustainable or environmentally friendly way. If offsets and recycling do not provide the answer, what does? 

About World Ocean Radio
World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at no cost by college and community radio stations worldwide. Peter Neill, Director of the World Ocean Observatory and host of World Ocean Radio, provides coverage of a broad spectrum of ocean issues from science a...

How old is water? Where on earth is water found? How is it circulated, cycled, and recycled? We know where water is distributed on the planet down to the fraction of a percentage. We know that water is finite in volume and its utility is constant. What happens when we pollute water? What happens when there is no water? We discuss this and more this week on World Ocean Radio. 

About World Ocean Radio
World Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at no cost by college a...

World Ocean Observatory is ever in search of new systems that convert knowledge into action, especially as they relate to ocean education and communication. Here on World Ocean Radio we often discuss the concepts and principles of ocean literacy, and the ways in which they can be distilled into learning opportunities for educators and students everywhere. We are pleased to report a prospective turning point in the ocean literacy movement: concepts that have been articulated into a new report out of the first Ocean Literacy World Conference held in Venice, Italy 7-8 June, 2024. 

About World Ocean R...