Chad Nelsen grew up where the land runs out — raised on the beaches of southern California, working as a lifeguard before turning his eye toward coastal science and eventually to the fight to save the shores that shaped him. As CEO of the Surfrider Foundation, he now leads one of the ocean's most tenacious grassroots defenders: a 50,000-member coalition of surfers and saltwater devotees waging campaigns on fronts that range from protecting surf breaks to pushing back against plastic pollution, climate disruption, and the long-standing barriers that have kept the ocean's culture from being as open as the sea itself. In a moment when the tide seems to be running the wrong way, Nelsen holds to a conviction that bottom-up pressure — the kind that starts with people who simply love the water — can still change the course of things.

This week's guest is Linda Behnken, Executive Director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen's Association — a woman who has hauled lines in some of the coldest, most unforgiving waters on earth for more than four decades. Behnken is not the kind of person who watches a fight from the dock. As one of the most outspoken advocates for Alaska's fishing communities and the marine ecosystems they depend on, she has spent years going toe-to-toe with the industrial trawl fleets dragging nets across the seafloor and pressing lawmakers to reckon honestly with a changing climate. This episode takes on safety at sea, the creeping threat of large-scale gold mining and widespread logging, and the broader battle to keep Alaska's coastal way of life from slipping beneath the surface.

This week, David Helvarg sits down with Kramer Wimberley — lead dive instructor and board member of DWP, Diving With a Purpose — a man who has made the ocean floor both a classroom and a reckoning. Through the discipline of citizen science, DWP has become a leading force in locating, surveying, and documenting the shipwrecks of the Atlantic Slave Trade, pulling history up from the dark water and honoring the lives swallowed by it. But Wimberley's work doesn't stop at the past. He also helms DWP's youth program along the coral reefs of Florida, where a new generation of Black and other young divers are learning that the fight for the sea and the fight for a better future are, at their core, the same fight.

David Helvarg speaks with Nick Landon, a young mariner who chose to bet his future on the sea. Landon traces his path from four years at the California Maritime Academy to the working reality of life as a third mate aboard an oil tanker — the long watches, the constant decision-making, and the particular solitude of open water. He recounts the ship’s stretch in dry dock in the Bahamas, where steel meets salt and the unglamorous machinery of maritime commerce gets laid bare. The conversation moves through the environmental shifts reshaping the modern fleet, the marine wildlife Landon has encountered along the way, and the message he carries to high school students weighing a life defined by tides and trade winds over one anchored to shore.

Activist Hilton Kelley was raised in the segregated, predominantly African-American west side of Port Arthur, Texas—often cited as the most polluted coastal town in America. He went on to join the U.S. Navy and later became a successful actor. At 39, Kelley returned home to help restore his community and confront the pollution that had long defined daily life there. He emerged as a leading environmental justice advocate, winning key battles against air pollution, PCB incineration, and the Keystone pipeline. Alongside his reflections on oil spills and industrial harm, Kelley recites the poem that helped shape his path forward, “My True History.”

In this episode, host David Helvarg and Vicki Nichols Goldstein sit down with Dionne Ybarra, director of the Wahine Project, whose path to the ocean was anything but direct. Raised in an inland Mexican American farmworker family, Ybarra didn’t find surfing until she was 38 years old — and when she did, she looked around the lineup and didn’t see many people who looked like her. Rather than paddle back to shore, she did something about it. Ybarra launched the Wahine Project — wahine being the Hawaiian word for surfer girl — and has since taught thousands of young girls, along with some boys and adults, to read waves and face their fears, from the kelp-cold waters of Monterey all the way to Mexico, Gaza, and beyond. It’s a story about belonging in the surf, and about what it means to ride waves not just for yourself, but for the ocean itself.

From Iowa to an Oscar, Louie Psihoyos continues to engage people with his famed National Geographic photography, award-winning films including ‘The Cove’ and ‘Racing Extinction’ and projected images. His larger than life endangered species vying for our attention on the Empire State building and the Vatican and his evolving views on food and social movements are just a few of the things we discuss with him.