Saving the Ocean

With the relentless pressure of the shark fin trade, sharks are in trouble everywhere — almost. Glover’s Reef marine reserve in Belize shows how sharks can thrive and local people can still fish.

On an exotic Zanzibar island, it was a classic clash: resorts versus villagers. Once threatened by resort development, Pemba Island’s spectacular reefs and lagoons are now managed by, and for, fishermen. Carl Safina fishes with the locals in traditional dhows and dugout canoes and meets the island’s influential imams, who preach that the Koran calls human beings to be the stewards of creation.

This is the remarkable story of how local people in Baja California, Mexico, stopped hunting “devil-fish”-- actually gray whales--and instead developed a whale-watching co-op that now caters to tourists from all over the world. They’re also getting rich by setting fishing rules for themselves that are stricter than the government regulations.

Carl Safina goes to sea with some of the last remaining swordfish harpooners to experience firsthand one of the world’s most sustainable fisheries.

Carl Safina finds out why swordfish are the world’s best big-fish comeback story.

Examine the huge project now restoring the Nisqually River, from its source on Mount Rainier to the estuary in Puget Sound.

Led by the Nisqually Indian tribe, the restoration of the Pacific Northwest’s Nisqually River aims to fill the river once again with abundant, magnificent wild salmon.

After local leaders launched a crusade to end the slaughter of Trinidad’s thousand-pound leatherback turtles, the turtles were transformed from shark bait to tourist attraction. Now Trinidad’s beaches support 80 percent of the entire Caribbean’s leatherbacks and nearby villages make a great living catering to the visitors.

In the rich fishing grounds of New England and Canada, it seemed as if cod would never run out — until they did. Widespread closures in the 1990s aimed to let the cod recover, but it’s been a long wait. Carl Safina goes fishing to find some of the first signs that the famous codfish just might, indeed, be coming back.

Lionfish are beautiful reef fish in the Indian and Pacific oceans. But in the Caribbean and the Atlantic, they are the perfect invasive species, where in the millions, they are damaging to native fish. Carl Safina learns how people are fighting back: clearing lionfish from Bahamanian reefs, sitting down to a lionfish dinner in the Yucatan and joining a lionfish-only fishing derby in Florida.