EXPLORE WILD HOPE

Boyan Slat is the founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit organization developing and scaling technologies to rid the world's oceans of plastic.

Boyan Slat’s team at The Ocean Cleanup has developed and deployed an open-ocean system that can haul in 7000 kilos of garbage in just a day and a half. Their current target is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The hope is that a fleet of these systems will remove 90% of floating ocean plastic by 2040.

Fishing gear entanglement happens when fishing gear like nets and longlines gets caught around the limbs or body of an animal, causing serious injury or death.

The Pearl Islands were a paradise off the Pacific coast of Panama, until industrial fishing fleets threatened fish stocks and endangered wildlife there. Local residents have teamed up with biologist Callie Veelenturf to propose—and pass—a new national law that grants legal rights to nature itself.

Personhood for whales, a big conservation study, and egg-citing news for sea turtles

This community in Hawaii is rallying together to study and protect local corals. Students, volunteers, and scientists work to collect and categorize fragments broken off from the reef, which then become candidates to breed before the new coral is reintroduced back into the ocean.

Corals are vital to ocean health, but they’re susceptible to rising water temperatures and can “bleach” under too much heat stress. Hawaii’s Coral Resilience Lab is breeding corals that are resilient to these hotter ocean temperatures – then they populate reefs with new corals that can finally beat the heat.

In 2021, an Oregon farmer decided to convert his 400-acre farm back to the wetland habitat. Now, just two year later, the new wetland supports migrating waterbirds and endangered fish.

After decades of fighting to regain ownership of their ancestral lands, the Winnemem Wintu Tribe marked this year’s Indigenous People’s Day with the purchase of 1,080 acres of land along the McCloud River in northern California.

Removing dams from the Elwha River allows salmon to return upstream—and bring precious nutrients from the sea that eventually spread throughout the forest.