Brian Skerry has been a National Geographic photographer for more than 25 years, focusing on life under the surface of waters around the world. He’s photographed whales, sharks, scallop farms and kelp forests, and through it all, he’s been inspired by what visual storytelling can accomplish.
“Good science and good visual storytelling, and people just sharing what they know, is an important way to move that needle in favor of a healthy future,” Skerry said in a recent interview. “I started diving 47 years ago exploring these waters, and it’s staggering to see just how much it’s changed.”
But Skerry has been alarmed of late by what he’s seen through his camera lens: nothing.
“It’s very hard to tell a story about loss by going out and photographing nothing,” Skerry said, referring to some dramatically different marine habitats. “Going out to some of these places that I describe, they don’t look anything like they used to.”
One way that Skerry is bringing the ocean – and specifically, the Gulf of Maine – to people around the world is through a new three-part PBS series Sea Change, for which he is the co-producer and a photographer. Sea Change examines the history and condition of this 7500-mile-long stretch of water.
One of the Gulf’s historical features is that it is fed by cold water from the Arctic, the warm Gulf stream from the South, and inland rivers that flowed out in the ocean, creating a near-perfect oceanic mix.
“It was formed after the last ice age, after the Laurentian ice sheets retreated,” Skerry said. “It left this perfect recipe of ingredients to create the proliferation of life.”
This life includes not only the lobster and seafood that the East Coast is now famous for, but 3,000 other marine species, not to mention marshes, estuaries and kelp forests. But the other famous fish, cod, from this region, was fished almost to extinction.
“As we’ve overfished this body of water, I think we’ve created a lack of resiliency. It is weaker because of that,” said Skerry.
The overfishing of cod has been well-documented, but in more recent times, climate change has become the more immediate threat to the Gulf. The temperature of the Gulf of Maine water has been heating up faster than 99% of the world’s oceans, a result of glacier melt. This data is expounded on in a recent article Skerry wrote for National Geographic.
“It’s like making a perfect cake. If you change the recipe a little bit, or don’t mix it just right, it changes dramatically,” Skerry said.
Sea Change is a way to visually localize climate change.
“I wanted the audience to understand that climate change is not something that’s far away,” Skerry said. “It’s not happening just in the poles. It’s happening in your own backyard.”
One example covered in the series concerns Eastport, a place where he used to go on dives when he was younger. “You would see big schools of juvenile fish, pollock, codfish on the shipwrecks in Cape Cod Bay,” he said. “We would see invertebrates, sea anemones. There was just that abundance.”
And his experience when he returned to photograph for the documentary?
“I went into that same place, and it was just mud and bad visibility, and hardly any of those animals that I used to see,” Skerry said. “It was very dispiriting. You come out of the water at night or during the day, and you just kind of shake your head at how quickly this all changed.”
Another example of the change in the gulf is the explosion of the green crab population. Green crabs, an invasive and destructive species that feeds on seagrasses, thrive in the milder water. But the documentary puts a more positive spin on the species by showing some of the people who are adapting to climate change.
Mike Masi is a fourth-generation lobsterman who has made the shift to green crab fishing. Once the molting pattern of the green crabs was discovered, they could be fished and sold as soft-shell crabs. These soft-shell green crabs are now turning up on menus in the region.
Sea Change also explores the indigenous population of the region and how clam farming is being affected by climate change.
“Gaining the wisdom from those types of voices and the scientists and other people who have a deep connection to this region helps us understand the natural history,” Skerry said.
Skerry and the crew also took some cameras out to Cashes Ledge, which is 80 miles off the coast of Maine and is known for its healthy kelp forest. The forest there has maintained its health mainly because it’s far enough off the coast.
“The scientists said it was as good as it was in the late 1980s,” Skerry said. “But there were troubling signs. There were these invasive red algae that we were seeing in the coastal forest that helps accelerate the decline of these kelp forests. So, this is a place that remains largely unprotected, and is a place that really cries out for protection.”
And as deep-sea mining begins to become more accepted, it’s places like the Cashes Ledge, and perhaps the 36,000 square miles of the Gulf of Maine at large, that need to be protected against not only climate change dangers, but the forthcoming devastation that will inevitably come from the mineral extraction of ocean floors.
“We’re living at this pivotal moment in history where maybe for the first time, humans understand both the problems and the solutions, and we just need that collective will to move toward the solutions,” Skerry said.
“At the end of the day, I think there is great hope. You know, I think what was exciting and encouraging for me were these people’s stories that, with every one of these characters, you see a resilience, you see a recognition of what’s happening, but also a desire to try to solve the problem.”
The post Gulf of Maine in Peril: PBS Documentary Explores the Ocean’s Threats and Resilience appeared first on EcoWatch.
https://www.ecowatch.com/brian-skerry-sea-change-documentary-maine-ecowatch.html
Green Living
Sustainability In Your Ear: Peter Fusaro’s Wall Street Green Summit Explores Financing The Renewables Transition
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Global investment in the energy transition reached $2.2 trillion in 2025, up 5% from the previous year despite political headwinds intensified. Peter Fusaro has watched this market evolve from a niche curiosity into a systemic financial concern. As founder of the Wall Street Green Summit, he’s spent a quarter century connecting capital to climate solutions. This year’s summit, the 25th in its history, will take place on March 10 and 11 in New York. This critical conversation arrives at an historic inflection point: insurance companies are withdrawing from climate-vulnerable states, AI data centers are straining electrical grids, and the economics of clean energy have fundamentally shifted.
The energy transition’s bottleneck isn’t capital, it’s infrastructure. The U.S. went from 110 investor-owned utilities in 1992 to just 40 today, and consolidation meant underinvestment in transmission and distribution. Data centers consumed 2% of U.S. energy demand in 2020; Peter sees that climbing to 10-12% by 2030. Blackouts and brownouts are inevitable, he says. Yet his message is pragmatic optimism: ignore Washington and watch the capital markets and blue states where climate policy is embedded in law. Many companies are “green hushing,” quietly pursuing sustainability without public positioning. The energy industry thinks in 40-year cycles, making the current political moment a blip. “I’ve spent 56 years now in sustainability, before it had a name,” he says. “What I’ve learned is change takes decades.”
Peter argues that Wall Street has genuinely internalized climate as systemic risk—not because of ideology, but because of opportunity. “Wall Street likes exchanges, likes to trade, likes volatility, and certainly likes uncertainty,” he explains. “What people don’t understand about Wall Street, it’s about the edge. What’s the arbitrage opportunity?” The reinsurance industry has stepped forward aggressively, funding carbon credits and sustainability projects. Peter’s recent Earth911 article, “Climate Risk Has Become a Defining Economic Issue,” explores these themes in depth.
However, he sees natural gas and renewables dominating the next 15 years, while geothermal is enjoying a genuine renaissance. His optimism rests on a demographic bet: “I have a tremendous valuation on young people. I’m 75. They’re inheriting this world, and they get the sustainability message globally.” The summit attendees includes no government officials and no academics, just people in the trenches building and financing solutions.
You can learn more at TheWallStreetGreenSummit.com. Earth911 is a media sponsor for the event.
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The post Sustainability In Your Ear: Peter Fusaro’s Wall Street Green Summit Explores Financing The Renewables Transition appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/podcast/sustainability-in-your-ear-peter-fusaros-wall-street-green-summit-explores-financing-the-renewables-transition/
Sustainability is a series of experiments. No one is perfect and too many people don’t try to help the Earth because they think they won’t make a difference. Author Alice Waters reminds us that every tree is beautiful and we can be, too, if we forget perfection and focus on living well: “In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is still perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.”
Earth911 inspirations. Post them, share your desire to help people think of the planet first, every day. Click the poster to get a larger image.
This poster was originally published on November 29, 2019.
The post Earth911 Inspiration: Nothing Is Perfect and Everything Is Perfect appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/living-well-being/earth911-inspiration-nothing-is-perfect-and-everything-is-perfect/
Green Living
Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: USEFULL’s Rob Kutner On Easing Reuse Adoption With Plastic Buy-Backs
The scale of our plastic waste crisis is staggering: the U.S. alone uses over 100 million plastic utensils every day, most of which are used once and tossed into landfills where they’ll persist for centuries. From ocean pollution to overflowing campus dumpsters after lunch rush, single-use packaging defines modern food service—but universities and businesses are under mounting pressure to embrace sustainable alternatives. Tune in to a conversation with Rob Kutner, Chief Revenue Officer at USEFULL, which offers a practical solution to food service waste: a reusable takeout container system designed for the high-volume and fast pace of college cafeterias. USEFULL’s latest move challenges throwaway culture head-on with a plastic buyback program that pays institutional cafeterias to ditch disposables and go reusable.
The company has already made waves at universities like the University of Pittsburgh, Emory University, and the University of North Carolina Wilmington, achieving a remarkable 99% return rate for their containers. The economics are compelling. Rather than asking institutions to absorb the cost of switching to sustainable packaging, USEFULL creates financial incentives by purchasing a cafeteria’s existing plastic inventory, removing the sunk costs barrier and providing immediate value to cafeterias ready to make the transition. USEFULL built an ecosystem to improve the convenience of reuse, developing tracking systems, POS integration services, and local washing and inventory management to solve the campus reuse challenge. The timing couldn’t be better. As Bain & Company recently reported, ROI has become the driving force for growing adoption of sustainable practices. As companies recognize the threat to future business performance represented by the take-make-waste economic model, USEFULL demonstrates how simple steps, not grandiose plans for revolution, can create tractable, attractive, and profitable paths to reduced waste. You can learn more about USEFULL’s reusable packaging system and their expanding campus network at https://usefull.us/
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Editor’s Note: This episode originally aired on April 11, 2025.
The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: USEFULL’s Rob Kutner On Easing Reuse Adoption With Plastic Buy-Backs appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/podcast/sustainability-in-your-ear-usefulls-rob-kutner-on-easing-reuse-adoption-with-plastic-buy-backs/
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