Welcome to the Speak Up For Blue Podcast session 82. Today we're going to talk about our new year's resolution as a Speak Up For Blue community. What I think it should be. So stay tuned.
Welcome to the Speak Up For Blue Podcast helping you get involved in ocean conservation. And now here's your host, these still puts his hands in the air because he doesn't care. Andrew Lewin. Hey everybody welcome back to another exciting episode of the Speak Up For Blue Podcast.
Your voice for the ocean. I am your host Andrew Lewin, founder, speakupforblue.com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed oceanpreneur. And today is the first episode of the new year 2016. So happy new year from me to you and your family and your friends and all your loved ones.
I appreciate you listening to this podcast on this day and every day in the new year. Like if you haven't been, if you haven't been listening to this podcast, it's your first episode. Welcome. But if you haven't been, I essentially put out a podcast five days a week from Monday to Friday.
We usually get a podcast out. They vary in subject matter from each day. I've been toiling with toying around with new episode segments, for instance, species Tuesdays and research Thursdays and interview Wednesdays when I can get an interview. And for Ocean Talk Fridays, Monday is essentially a random day.
And today to really cap off the week, it's something that I talk about a special day like today. We're going to talk about a news resolution. But a lot of times it's just random something's happened over the weekend that I wanted to really talk about or last week that I missed on the week before. So it's usually a random Monday day is really what I'd like to call it.
But today we're going to talk about New Year's resolutions. Now I know every year we come up, you probably get sick of it. We're talking about news resolutions, we make news resolutions, then we say, oh well, it's just a way of disappointing ourselves because we never really follow through with our new year's resolutions. But this is not necessarily something that you have to put up in there's certain goals that you have to meet.
You can make it really small, you can make it really big. I always have news resolutions. I enjoy news resolutions because I stick to them because I don't make my new year's resolutions huge. I don't make it difficult to meet.
I make them very easy to meet. And I only do a few of them. And I kind of segregate them or categorize them, I should say, to different parts of my life. For instance, I have a nutritional and sort of all encompassing health resolution that I make.
Like this year, I want to drop 20 pounds by March. And I'm already halfway there because I got sick over the holidays. I got a flu. So I'm already halfway there or almost half, I'm 12 pounds out.
But excuse me, but that's essentially, you know, that's what I do for my my health. I have a business goal in terms of what I want to release. I'll be releasing a product this year. That's my business goal.
But on my everyday, you know, ocean goal, how can I better protect the ocean? My news resolution is make better decisions for the ocean. That's essentially what my goal is this year is to every decision that I make in terms of buying products, in terms of eating, in terms of cleaning my house, including including like the way I choose my energy usage, I'm going to make sure that I have the oceans in mind. Now, I'm not going to say that I'm perfect.
I'm not going to say that every decision I make will benefit the ocean. But I'm going to find out if it doesn't benefit the ocean, why it doesn't benefit the ocean, and how can I make it benefit the ocean? Because I know a lot of people, the big headache in terms of getting, you know, making decisions for the ocean, sometimes it's just not convenient or it's too expensive as the biggest one. You know, the convenience actually believe it or not comes into play a lot.
But we've seen what happens when we don't make decisions for the ocean. We've seen the fact that the oceans can kind of show us the consequences of our actions. A lot of our commercial fisheries are overfished. Climate change is kicking our butts right now.
And it's because of us. And there are just so many problems. Plastic pollution is just entering the ocean at record rates. And we haven't done anything about it.
And it really comes down. Yes, there are some overarching are some bigger things that need to happen for us to really gain access, gain a hold of these consequences in terms of, you know, governments need to talk and our governments to act, you know, all our governments need to act for the ocean as well. But we have a part in this because we consume all the things that cause the consequences. We consume the seafood.
We consume the energy. We consume what we use and consume all the cleaning products for our houses. And we buy the products. But we don't think about the ocean when we buy these products, when we use the energy, when we eat the seafood, or any kind of food, you know, or cleaning.
We don't think about this kind of thing. So that's what I wanted to talk to you today. I wanted to kind of give you an overview of how you can make better decisions for the oceans by talking about the four things I've just repeated overly and over and over and over again. And I think this will help us in making these decisions.
Now, you don't have to make everyone. It may not work out all the time. But if you make that effort, make that conscious effort to eat and just pick one and say, Hey, let's do something about this. Then we can really do something.
We can really have an effect and you can feel better about yourself because you will say that you've made better decisions to live for a better ocean. And I think that's amazing just to say that. Now I live in Ontario, Canada. I live beside a great lake, like Ontario, and Lake Erie's not far and Lake Erie's not far as either.
But I don't live by an ocean, but I make decisions for the ocean because I know we're all connected. So it doesn't matter if you live on the coast, or it doesn't matter if you live inland. You, every decision you make will affect the ocean. So let's break down what I mean by this news resolution, how we can make decisions for a better ocean.
Let's talk about seafood choices. Okay, eating choices. Actually, let's just not, let's talk about eating choices in general. We know that food, obviously is essential to us.
And we know we have a food problem. And we know when we go to the grocery stores, we get food from all over the world here in Canada, we do. And I know in the States, you do as well. And a lot of other developed countries.
And we love it. We never ask where it really comes from. Like, Oh, these are important. These are great.
You know, but that costs the environmental cost of them coming over that food coming over is so great. It's it it it contributes to climate change, having imported food contributes to climate change. And a lot of times the imported food doesn't really have to happen. You know, back in the day when we didn't have this capability, this globalization is capability, we relied more on seasonal foods, the stuff that could be grown by local farmers in your area.
And that was good enough. And that helped us survive. But now we have all these other options, which is great. It's nice to have all these other options, but it's having a huge consequence on our on our bodies and on our climate.
And we talk about health impacts of, you know, pesticides and all these chemicals and hormones being put into our meat and, you know, seafood, having, you know, a lot of major, a lot of larger fish having mercury in them, having an effect on our bodies. So what we need to do, and also it has an effect on our oceans. Climate change has an effect on our oceans over fishing has an effect on our oceans. So the food we buy, you categorize, let's talk about the non aquatic on oceanic food.
So let's keep seafood away for now. Let's just talk about our meats. We have a huge problem in in the US and Canada, where we have factory farm food. You know, our meat is factory farm is documented in a lot of different documentaries and a lot of papers where we have a food problem in the way that's made up.
We have, you know, grain fed cows that are not supposed to be grain fed. We have the transportation system, like the transportation system getting caused a lot for climate change, the hormones and medicines that are put into these cows because they're eating grains and shouldn't be eating grains, effects us because that gets transferred into the meat that we consume. So it's just not good for us. Now, I'm not, I'm not a vegan.
I'm not professing veganism or vegetarianism. I'm not , it's that's your choice. If you want to do that, that's your choice. However, I think we should make better decisions based on the fact that one, these meats can harm our bodies, our children's bodies, and the contribution to climate change is so great that it's actually having an effect on the overall climate because it happens all over the world, especially in developed countries.
So what I would suggest is you buy leaf by meat from local farmers that you know, go right to the farmers. I know it may not be as convenient, but you buy in bulk. And I think that's a much better way. We have a system here in Ontario or in Southern Ontario.
Anyway, I haven't contributed, I haven't gone towards it, but I'm seriously considering it this year. I'm going to look into it. It's expensive because you buy meat for the year and you freeze it, but it's by local farmers. So you're supporting local farmers.
You know where the meat comes from. You know how it's processed. You know how it's raised. And it's there's no medicines.
There's no hormones. And when I think about it for my two young girls and myself and my wife, I think this is a much better thing because it's natural, right? It's more natural than it would be to buy from a grocery store where we don't know where the meats come from. You know where the chicken breasts are massive, but are they should they be that big because they're injected with something?
A lot of times the meats are injected with water, right? Just to make them heavier and make them look bigger. So you always wonder, you know, what goes into our meat and you always want to make, okay, let's make sustainable choices. Let's make our the meat that I eat better for myself, better for me, better for my family.
That's what's important. And also it'll decrease your contribution of climate change. Now we talk about fruits and vegetables, right? We have that fruits and vegetables in our diet, right?
Tasty, yummy, and summer's refreshing, all that kind of stuff. There are programs that are regular programs, but they have the same kind of effect on climate change, the transportation that has to come that brings the in all the fruits and vegetables that you know and love all year long, can have effect on climate change. It's emissions. So there are programs, local programs in a lot of major cities and even non-at major cities.
There are around where you can sign up and you can get seasonal foods from local farms. And they will provide you with those things. And it's wonderful. They keep giving you vegetables.
I haven't subscribed to it yet, but I plan on doing it this year. And a friend of mine does it and he says he loves it. He even has a day where he says, let's cook this vegetable day because I don't know what it is or what I'm supposed to do with it. And he has a little bit of experiments making his cooking a little more experimental, but it's natural.
It's organic. There are no chemicals and there are no injections of medicines or anything like that that you have to worry about. And it has a decrease on climate change. So those are two ways you can do that with your non-aquatic, non-oceanic food.
Now let's get underwater now. Talk about seafood. Now seafood is a bit of a pickle these days that I find out. Now I'm going to have a program.
I'm going to interview somebody, an expert on fishing and fish markets and buying seafood because I still profess and I still think it's good to have a guide like seafood watch or ocean wise. These are two very good programs. Ocean wise is based in Canada. Seafood watch is based in the States.
However, you can use them worldwide. They both have apps, although last time I used ocean wise, they're apps wasn't working. But seafood watch has an app, a very descriptive app that talks about the different types of seafood you can buy and which ones to avoid, which ones are more sustainable. So essentially it empowers the consumer to say, hey, I want tuna from the east coast of the US that's not long-line.
And you can do that. Now that the challenge is to go to a store, a grocery store or a fishing market or a restaurant that knows these descriptions that I just described to you, do they know that you can do this? And if they don't, then what do you do? Usually, a lot of times I've come across, I go to the supermarket and I say, hey, I'm looking for the salmon, is it farmers at wild caught?
And they'll tell me they don't know. And so I say, okay, I can't buy from you because you don't know and I do not want to buy something that I shouldn't be buying. So there are, you may have to sacrifice your meal, but in essence, if more people do that and more people use these apps and you get a lot of people saying, I'm not going to buy because you're not using the seafood app, seafood watch app, or you don't know where you're fishing from or how they're caught, then maybe they'll get a little smarter and start figuring that out. And that'll make them buy better food, better seafood.
Now, I guess a little complicated from there because I've heard reports where some some marine biologists and marine conservation have gone into stores and from prominent or prominent grocery stores and that say they're sustainable. And then the fish is not what it says it is. They made a mistake or they're trying to sell something that's not shouldn't be sold. And it's very unsustainable, that fish that they're selling.
But they're selling under a sustainable name. So we have to be careful of that. And it's very difficult to say, I don't know if I could tell. You know, other than if you're a fish expert and you know that particular fish, it's very difficult to tell what you're buying is why it says it is, especially if they're similar.
Whitefish is whitefish to a lot of people. You know, maybe salmon is a little easier to figure out because it's normally pink, but maybe people don't know. And I think it's very, it makes it very difficult. There's also a report out of Oceana, a nonprofit organization I believe was a year or two ago where they tested a couple of prominent fishing markets in the states and in Canada, where they said they were selling under a specific label and they weren't selling that fish.
It was a different fish, but they didn't realize it because it was already cut when I got it. And they couldn't tell the difference. And you can only tell by genetic testing. So what does that mean for the fishing industry, for the fish retail industry?
What does that mean for consumers? What do we do? It's very difficult. And the advice that I got from some people is by if you can, by straight from the fisherman or a fisher person, by straight from the fisher person so that you know what kind of fish it is, where it was caught and how it was caught.
Plus, you know, the money goes right to the fisher person. That's probably really the best way of doing it. If you're not near a local, you know, not near a coast or not near a fisherman, hang out. Well, maybe it's time that we scale back on our seafood and only have it only traveled to those areas.
Because the seafood retail industry is a huge, huge problem right now. And not only is it a problem for us in terms of what we're eating, but it's a problem for them in terms of where's this going to go. How's this going to be handled in the future? That'll be very interesting.
I promise you, there will be an episode dedicated towards that. So let me go on to another couple of items that will really kind of make your decisions easier when you want to live for a better ocean. Cleaning choices, cleaning products. We need cleaning products daily.
That's what my wife says. You know, you want to clean your countertops, you want to clean your bathrooms, you want to clean your floors, your tables, everything. You got to keep it clean. Don't aim old.
You don't want any dirt to build up. Everything's got to be clean, spook and span. And the cleaners we use have chemicals in them. And when that gets into our water system, our waterways, for however it gets thrown out or used, when you wash a sink, when you wash the toilet, all that cleaning goes down the drain and that gets into our systems.
Plus the smell can't be good for you all the time of other cleaning products. So I think what we need to do is we need to start moving towards cleaning products that are more eco-friendly. That when they're made in the factories or in the warehouses that they're made, they don't have an impact. The chemicals that are used are healthy for us and for our home, or wherever we're using these cleaning products or business.
And that when it goes down the drain, the chemicals that do go down the drain are not bad for our systems, or they'll reduce what it's originally bad. So these are ways, you know, we have to start by products, cleaning products that are eco-friendly. And if you think about just if everybody buys a set of those products and uses them, the difference it'll make in how our systems are treated and how our systems react and how they, you know, adjust will be a lot better just in terms of the water pollution that gets into our system. So to do that, I have a bit of a solution.
Epantery.com, this isn't from my understanding at this point, Epantery is only available to people in the States. I haven't actually tried them out. I did interview the founder of Epantery last year for another podcast that I'm coming out with for a social entrepreneur podcast that will be coming out soon. And he's got, he basically sells online an entire pantry full of dish soap, cleaning supplies, toilet paper, paper towels, anything, toothbrushes, disinfecting wipes, laundry detergent, you know, he's got everything you can imagine.
And the great thing about this is you can get the entire your entire pantry full in one shot. I like it. If you go to epantery.com, it'll take you to it. You sign up, put your email address in, you get started.
It's a wonderful way to get all your cleaning products in one spot. It gets delivered right to your door and it's awesome. Now, I must say I haven't used the products, but these are well known products, and they've been tested and they're environmentally certified. So it's and the founder, and I'm going to link to the new podcast that when it comes out, the founder just is highly invested into the environment and wants these products to be the best.
And they go through a lot of scrutiny to even get on his roster of brands to be sold on Epantery. So it's something that I would highly recommend. I'd love to hear your feedback as well. I don't I don't get any money from this.
This is not an affiliate account or anything like that. I would tell you if it if it was. I just think it's a great idea. And it's really easy to get.
So go to epantery.com and that that will solve those problems. The bike cleaning products that are eco-friendly is really what you want to do. When you go to the grocery store, find them, get the eco-friendly ones. Look them up online, review them once you buy them and use them and they work, then everything you know, it's easy to go out and buy them again.
Right? So that's the first one. That's the second one, cleaning choices. Energy choices.
This is always a fun one. We're in winter. Right now here in in Ontario, it's minus 15 or minus 13 right now. I just checked.
It's degrees Celsius. So that puts us probably around 20 degrees Fahrenheit, I guess. I don't know the entire conversion. But that's what we're looking at.
And it's cold. So you want to put your heat on? Well, in my house, we have a digital thermometer. We want to make sure it's warm enough so that we're not all freezing.
But we also don't want to put too much heat on because we don't use too much energy. So we have a digital thermometer that's set and it goes and it's set at different temperatures at different times of day. So when we're gone for work during the day, our temperature is set to 68 degrees Fahrenheit. When we're home, our temperature is set to 71 degrees Fahrenheit.
So it's it's it's at night, it goes back to 68 degrees Fahrenheit because we have our covers on everything like that. And we're getting, we're used to sleeping a little bit cold. But in the wind in the summer, it's kind of the opposite. Our digital thermometer is set during the day at 77 degrees Fahrenheit.
And then it goes to 75 degrees Fahrenheit, I believe, and then it goes back up to 77 degrees Fahrenheit at night. So essentially, we're not using the air conditioning as much. But what it allows us to do allows us not to use as much heat during the day. And only times when it heats up.
So only times when we come home or we get up for in the morning and then it goes back to 61. So it goes up to 71. When we get up in the morning, it goes down to 68. When we go to work, it comes back up to 71 and it goes down and it actually works out better that way.
Now, of course, our energy bill is a skyrocketing because we have high energy prices here in Ontario. And that I don't really completely understand but they're high. And energy seems to be going price of energy seems to go higher and higher. So we're also reducing our energy uses just because of that.
So that helps. We also drive less. We have two cars we do because my wife and I work in separate separate directions. But my car luckily, my work is only 10 minutes away.
So a lot of the times I will do I will drive by only drive 10 minutes back and forth. So I don't really use that car very often. I only use it for work. We carpool whenever we can.
We use our HOV lanes whenever we can. So we're not idling somewhere. We're not stuck in traffic a lot. So that's really, you know, the energy choices that we use and that's the energy choices that you can use.
I will be buying a new vehicle this year. And it's going to be a lot lower in emissions. It's going to be a lot better in terms of mileage and driving and whatnot. So that'll be better for the environment, but for me, which I'm really excited about.
And yeah, I mean, energy is just a matter of coming up with the smart ways. There is technology out there for having smart ways of you know, adjusting energy usage during throughout the day. There are a lot of ways you can use energy. Don't leave the lights on when you don't have to use LED lights.
I'm slowly converting my house to all LED lights. And I haven't had to change any of the LED light bulbs for a while. And yeah, they're more expensive, but they last a long time. I haven't changed an LED light at all that I put in.
They're supposed to last like 50,000, 60,000 hours. It's awesome. So anyway, that is our energy choices. We I've gone over them before.
They're pretty easy to do digital thrombres do not cost a lot of money. And they're actually you're going to save money from it. Like that I guarantee because you're not going to have your heat on all the time. Product choices.
This is always a fun way is just essentially just all products. We live in a very wasteful society. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but a lot of our products, the boxing and the marketing that goes that's involved in selling those products are very wasteful. They get a small chip, a small memory card or a small SD card.
The amount of packaging that goes into a plastic packaging that goes into it is just unnecessary because it gets cut and it gets thrown away. If you throw it in recycling, you probably get recycled once. If not, you get thrown in the garbage doesn't get recycled at all. And then after that recycling period, it can't get recycled anymore.
It's just not built for that. So it's very wasteful in terms of what we use our packaging for. So it's good to buy products that one, you don't really need a lot of packaging for it. And two, you know, if you don't need to buy it with packaging, don't buy it.
You know, online purchases come in boxes. They don't always come in packaging, which is nice because they don't have to sell in packaging, which is fantastic. Actually, it just reminds me when I spoke to the founder of E-Pantry, he was talking about how one good thing about going online is that you don't need specific packaging to attract customers to go to your product in an aisle. And that made it a lot better for them because they could have smaller packaging actually spend less on the packaging, which transfers over to spending less from the consumer by the consumer.
So that helps, right? So online also helps in terms of buying online. Buying from companies that really show that they don't need a lot of packaging to sell their equipment, to sell their products is really helpful. But one good thing that I always go to, I started to go to as I discovered it last year, was bcorporation.net.
Now, what is a B Corp? Well, a B Corp is essentially a certification that corporations that are sustainable, essentially any kind of social enterprise can become a B Corp, but they have to qualify. And I'm just on the website right now, if there are 14,098 B corporations in 42 countries, 130, 130 industries, and with one unifying goal. And these are fantastic, because you can go there and that you can go to each company and you can find out what their rankings are.
And I think it's actually quite nice. They'll say how they treat their employees. They have a ranking on their social sort of change. They have a ranking on their environmental effect or their environmental change.
And it's just, I mean, it's just awesome. And to be able to see how they're rated to be able to look at these B Corps and actually use their go on their websites and use their products or buy from there or find out where those products are being sold is just so great. And to be honest, it's the where I've gone to actually, for my other podcast, I'm going to have coming out, it's where I've gone to actually get their names and start interviewing people. And every time they said the B Corps, you have to be paid into to certify.
And each one of them said that to pay in and to certify themselves was worth it. It's worth the cost because they make sure that they follow their goals that they want to get. They want to be mission based and not just profit based. So their mission and profit driven and the certified B Corporation actually helps that program actually helps them meet that mission.
So it's fantastic to get companies around that. So if you go to bcorporation.net, we'll put the link to the show notes for speakupforblue.com forward slash session 82. But you can see all of that. So product choices just in general, go to a B Corps if you can find out what these B Corps sell, find out where you can get them.
A lot of them are environmentally friendly, a lot of them treat their employees really well, and they also have a social change that they want to bring about. And that is what we need to do. So I highly suggest to go there, you can get them bcorporation.net and it'll help you buy your products. It'll make you do it.
So even if you just pick one one B Corp, you can actually go and buy something from them. You've helped make a decision. You've helped. You've made a decision to help live for a better ocean.
And that is the key to this New Year's resolution is what we want to do. You pick any of those choices that we talked about today, and you can make a better decision, make a decision to live for a better ocean. So that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed this first episode of 2016.
I will be back tomorrow with a species of the day. I can tell you which one. But it's going to be a bit of a surprise. So just come on, come on by tomorrow, listen to it, listen to the podcast and the rest of the weeks.
We're gonna bring back Ocean Talk Friday. I took a little break for the last couple last couple of weeks because of the holidays. But thank you for listening. I hope you enjoy your 2016.
I hope you enjoy your New Year's You've been listening to Speak Up for the podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lohan. Happy lunch, baby.