On the release of our first Request for Proposals for our Ocean Biodiversity program – I wanted to take a moment to reflect on how we got here and reaffirm our commitment to the need to uplift communities.
I often think about how easy it is to take ocean biodiversity for granted. Most times you can’t see it – lying deep beneath the surface. Or if you do, it’s a quick glimpse of a dorsal fin cresting a wave. And yet, ocean biodiversity is central to our lives. I could read off a bunch of facts about how it bolsters our economy or improves ecosystem health. Those elements are critically important of course, but what I’m getting at here is how it directly touches us individually.
Over a year ago, the Lenfest Ocean Program hosted a webinar featuring participants in Marine Biodiversity Dialogues – a series of working groups Lenfest was supporting at the time. The webinar featured resource users, Indigenous leaders, and scientists – you can watch it here. When asked about why biodiversity matters, Jodie Toft, Deputy Director of the Puget Sound Restoration Fund, responded: “Biodiversity is the fabric upon which everything else sits. If biodiversity is the tablecloth, all the food sits on top of it. But biodiversity is also just what makes me happy.”
This wonderful insight captures how biodiversity is essential to survival – it’s food and livelihoods – but it also offers us personal well-being. I grew up in Baltimore, MD. As a kid, my absolute favorite place on earth was always the shore. I even wrote a poem about it that started with the lines:
I remember Bethany Beach, Delaware,
me, a child, digging up sand crabs the afternoon long,
as the cranky surf churned up the overflowing bottom,
so full of food for conks, crabs, gulls, more—
how exhilarated I was just to know they were there.
Our Approach to Ocean Biodiversity
The stewardship of biodiversity is usually not the primary objective of management decisions. Rather, it more commonly occurs as a co-benefit. In this program, we will center ocean biodiversity, including the ways in which people are intricately woven into its fabric. Our aim is to support a body of work that harnesses the deep biodiversity knowledge we already have, to seek additional knowledge we need, and to improve the decisions we make about it. We started with three regions of the U.S.—Mobile Bay, Chesapeake Bay, and Puget Sound—with the intent to expand elsewhere and to unlock solutions that can cross governance scales.
Listen.
Community-led projects will be central to our approach. We invited communities in each region to public listening sessions and other convenings. We held a written request for information. We are working to seek out and meet with those not necessarily prone to public events. All to say, we aim to meet people where they are, and we will do this work diligently to ensure we capture a cross-section of voices – from rights holders to resource users to managers, NGOs, Indigenous communities and more.
Support.
Based on what we’ve learned so far, we have now issued an open funding opportunity for engagement projects. Our goal is to support teams that can bring diverse groups of people together and harness opportunities to break down siloes and overcome barriers to use of biodiversity knowledge in management. With these projects, we hope to help create the enabling conditions for more equitable and sustainable decisions that better reflect the many ways in which communities value and steward ocean biodiversity.
Engage.
We will engage with project teams from the beginning, working with them to provide the engagement support needed to gain a seat at the decision-making table. We also aim to build a collection of case studies from across the regions that demonstrate how progress can be made, and to share new ideas and lessons learned. In these early days we’re calling it an Ocean Life Knowledge-to-Action Network, which we envision to be a gathering place that connects diverse voices from across the science and knowledge to action spectrum.
Join Us
We invite you to join us – to help drive our work and help us understand what ocean biodiversity means to you and the people you care about. To follow the program, you can sign up for our distribution here.
I’ll admit, with the news at large and the threats to natural ecosystems, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed these days. But when I think of what we can achieve if we bring our collective knowledge and talents together in good faith – I see only possibilities. There is much to be done. There is also much that can be done. Suddenly, I’m that little kid again playing on the beach – how exhilarated I am just to know we’re all here.