Hello to everyone out there listening, This is Ross Kenyon.
I am the host of Reversing Climate Change.
I want to tell you about two events coming up in the month of
October and a little bit of November too, that I'll be at
that You should be at 2:00 if you can.
One of them is in Seattle and one of them is in the open
ocean, and that is intentionally provocative.
Please continue listening. I recently started a role as an
Executive in residence at Maritime Blue, which is a
fascinating strategic alliance dedicated to accelerating
innovation in the blue economy. I'm working essentially to help
commercialize ocean tech companies, one of the many
things that I'm filling my time with right now, and I'm very
excited to begin working more deeply with them moving forward.
They've actually have two amazing events coming up really
soon. One is 1 Ocean Week 2025 in
Seattle, October 20th through 26th.
If you're listening to this show, presumably you care about
a healthy ocean. You care about its ability to
sustain life. Maritime Blue is gathering all
of the innovators, researchers, startups, policymakers, artists,
educators, and communities to accelerate solutions for
sustainable, inclusive maritime future.
We need the ocean. We need it healthy.
I think that's pretty well beyond dispute and this is a
great event. If you're going to be in
Seattle, I'll be at a number of the events here and hope to see
you there. And then additionally, the thing
that I teased you with so, so cruelly is the one Ocean
expedition. There is a three masted sailing
bark called the Stotzrad Lemkuhl that is sailing around the world
right now to raise awareness about ocean health.
It's essentially A diplomatic mission to the world, telling
the world that we need to be caring about the oceans to a
much greater extent than we are now.
A big part of this mission is actually having people come sail
on the ship. Sailing any kind of ocean
passage at this point is not a common experience.
We mostly just fly over the ocean at this point.
If you do interact with it, it's probably pretty close to shore.
It's just a different kind of experience.
I think getting people out there on the ocean and having a
tactile experience can be really powerful way of connecting them
and showing them that we need to take better care of the ocean.
So I think this is just a great opportunity and a really smart
initiative. I'm happy that it exists.
Right after One Ocean Week in Seattle, the One Ocean
Expedition is occurring. Maritime Blue put together this
Seattle to San Francisco leg on the sailing expedition.
So you'll be able to see the ship during One Ocean Week and
then if you would like to, you can buy passage on this ship,
become a working member of the ship.
And for a week we will be sailing from Seattle to San
Francisco. And I am a podcaster in
residence. Not to drop too many in
residence titles at you this episode, but I'm going to be on
the ship. I'm either going to be
interviewing people there or taking notes to do a monologue
show when I'm off and just trying to process this
experience because I love sailing literature.
I've read enormous quantities of it.
I've even had the great privilege of interviewing the
legendary John Kretchmer. He's written some of the best
sailing books. One of those shows that I was
sort of amazed I was able to get him on to do.
But I've never done it myself. All the sailing I've done has
been littoral close to the shore.
It hasn't been deep water passage.
No, no blue water sailing for me.
And I've really been curious, like, would I actually like this
or not? Is it gonna scare the crap out
of me being so far away from? Sure.
Those waves certainly do look big.
The North Pacific off the coast, I think get some pretty big
waves. So I don't know.
I'm, I'm curious about testing myself and learning about this.
And I also just have a great deal of affection for things
that are not as convenient as we've come to expect.
I think in 2025, we basically expect everything to be streamed
to us to be immediately accessible.
If it's not, we're really upset. You can order basically any
product in the world. It'll be at your house soon.
But I grew up primarily in the 90s and my recollection of
getting into basically anything back then was that if you wanted
to explore a hobby, you had to like look up what kind of hobby
that was in the Yellow Pages or in an earlier crappier version
of the Internet. And you would find out that 40
minutes from your home, there would be a strip mall run by 1
old man who was an expert on remote controlled aircraft.
And you would have to convince your parents on their day off to
take you to this weird place to learn about some expensive thing
that they don't actually want to let you do.
Is it, is this a universal experience or is this just, this
might just be me who experienced this, but OK, here's a more
relatable version of that. I like going to Blockbuster.
I remember at the ritual of trying to get there early enough
on a Friday that the game that you wanted or the movie that you
wanted would still be there. And then sometimes you would get
there and Spaceballs would be gone.
He'd be like, oh man, someone beat us to it.
Or you would want to get the the video game that had just come
out that you didn't want to pay $60 to buy and the Sega Genesis
cartridge would already be gone. And now you could just play
basically any game that's ever been made, even though they're
just released. It'll download and not that much
time to your device and you have it there.
And I don't know that we've always been made better for
things being amazingly more accessible and immediate.
I, I sort of liked the inconveniences.
They didn't feel that fun at the time.
It's only in hindsight. And so maybe I'm falling into my
own nestled trap that I've criticized as recently as a few
weeks ago on the podcast. But I like that about sailing.
I like that in the idea of sailing because I actually
haven't done very much of it, as I've noted.
But I also connected to something like bike touring.
I'm going to do a show on bike touring soon because I've done
several bike tours and I love them.
I think there are wonderful ways to travel for so many reasons.
I think it intersects with climate and ways beyond the
obvious low emission transport angle.
I think that's pretty obvious, but one thing that I like that
connects sailing and cycling is that you have to be aware of
your surroundings in a much more observational way than you are
when you're just driving. When you're in some sort of
enclosed capsule on a road that's often pretty straight and
your job is just to stay in your lane, enjoy the audio book that
you're listening to and stay in your lane.
Of course, there's lots of danger things that you need to
pay attention to, but I also find that biking is moving at
just the right speed. That allows you to cover a lot
of ground, but you're still paying quite a lot of attention
to where you are, and you have to be much more aware of things
like the weather and traffic and how things feel.
We're in a car. You're pretty isolated.
From what I understand about sailing.
It's a lot like that too. I think one of the issues that
humanity, especially humans in the Global N, have been feeling
and dealing with is that they're disconnected from their bodies.
They're disconnected from their feelings.
And moving in this way I think is a great reminder of how
disconnected we are from actual experience.
We intellectualize, but we don't feel.
When we do feel, that's just a distraction from the podcast
we'd rather be listening to Again, is this me or is this
everyone? It might just be me.
I think one thing that's humanizing about this is being
able to say I'm also working on this, and this is one of the
reasons why I'm so excited to be going on the 1 Ocean Expedition
on the Seattle to San Francisco leg.
So I'm trying to find more opportunities to fine tune these
skills and to become more aware of my environment and just be a
more present, happier, observational person.
And I think things like this are a good way to do that.
Moreover, it's a highly cinematic way to do that.
How often do you get to make an offshore passage on 111 year old
sailing vessel? Not often.
I've actually never been offered this before so I'm really
looking forward to it. You can join too if you'd like
to come along. You can.
There's a link in the show notes that has pricing information and
dates and has everything that you would want to know about how
to actually do this. If you've been looking for a
chance to get some sailing experience, this seems like a
really fun way to do so. Or at least I've judged it by my
lights to be that. I'm really looking forward to
it. If you'd like to sail on the
stats rod Lemcool, you want to hang out with me on an old
wooden sailing vessel? The link is in the show notes.
Come check it out. I hope you will.
If nothing else, if you're in the area very much want to see
you at 1 Ocean Week 2025. Come say hello and let's hang
out and let's just drive the brain power that we can into
making the ocean a regenerative economy.
Thanks for listening. I hope to see you out there.