Consider the Seas
Early last May, Regan Nelson sat on a 23-foot skiff in the Gulf of Mexico, watching dolphins surface through the shimmery slick and fighting off the nausea-inducing reek of oil. NRDC's senior oceans advocate had flown down from her Washington, D.C., home to take the measure of the damage from the Deepwater Horizon spill, and while she recalls lamenting the countless shrimp likely to be contaminated and the marshes already despoiled, what haunted her most was the sound of the man behind the wheel. Captain Corey O'Neill had built his boat by hand in his backyard, and as he stood there pointing out his preferred haunts for landing redfish and speckled trout, his voice cracked with heartbreak.
Having grown up hunting and foraging with her dad in the Michigan woods, Nelson related instinctively to O'Neill's "deep connection to our wild heritage," and to the hurt that its loss might evoke. She will never forget the day during her freshman year at the University of Southern California when, sitting in an introductory environmental studies class -- the only science course the then–broadcast journalism major had intended to take -- the professor talked about how the oceans had become littered with plastic. "When you're from the Midwest," she says, "you get taught very early on that you have to take responsibility for your actions. It was like, wait a minute -- we have a responsibility to make sure these types of attacks don't continue. I mean, this is just wrong."
Nelson arranged to spend part of her sophomore year in the Caribbean, where she did research among the reefs of the Turks and Caicos Islands and met with locals to talk about their fishing habits and economic challenges. Back in California, she switched her major to environmental studies, and after graduation she moved to Washington State to work in forest conservation. Monitoring cutting was one part of the job, but Nelson spent the bulk of her time organizing "working groups" that brought together such traditional adversaries as loggers, tribal members, conservationists, and the U.S. Forest Service. The goal was to figure out strategies for restoring the health of the forests while also ensuring the well-being of local communities.
These days, the mom-to-be regularly flexes those relationship-building muscles as she advocates for NRDC's oceans initiatives. She makes it a particular point to give voice to the people whose lives are directly affected. To mark the one-year anniversary of the Deepwater spill, for example, she organized a congressional briefing at which the owner of a Gulf fishing lodge and the wife of a fisherman explained how their lives had been upended by the disaster.
Nelson also has been working with a scientist at NRDC to advocate for the creation of an international network to monitor carbon dioxide in the oceans. As levels of CO2 in the atmosphere increase, seawater is becoming more acidic; this shift in pH balance threatens the survival of marine animals. Nelson is concerned about how people dependent on seafood for their diets and livelihoods will cope with consequences that she says are more imminent than most of us realize.
She also gets her point across by writing on Switchboard, the NRDC blog, and for the Huffington Post. "People only have so much energy to put toward thinking about these issues," Nelson says, so you have to focus on how to capture their attention. "Lots of folks have an attachment to their fishing heritage, for instance. Tapping into that emotional connection to nature reminds you why this is important, and why you do it."
