Anastasia Mastrocola 

Professor Ferrara 

English 100 

11/15/19 

How to use the Ocean without using it up 

Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a Ted Resident, who talks about the ocean sociology, 

ocean conservation, and ocean politics. She earned a B.A. from Harvard University in 

Environmental Science and Public Policy, and a Ph.D. from Scripps Institution of Oceanography 

in Marine Biology. Her passion to work with the ocean and become a Marine Biologist started at 

an early age, when she visited the Florida Keys as a young child. In her professional years, she 

has worked with philanthropies, nonprofits, and government. She was the executive director of 

the Waitt Institute, and co-founded the Blue Halo Initiative, which was “comprehensive, 

science-based, community-driven, ocean zoning on the islands of Curacao and Monsorac.” 

(00:04:24-37) During her Ph.D. research she “designed a fish trap with escape holes in the 

corners that allowed juvenile fish and unmarketable fish to escape, that is now required by law in 

several countries.”(00:01:40-50) Her list of accomplishments is impressive and admirable. Her 

prominent status has allowed her to establish ethos in her field and across others.  

Dr. Johnson’s main point was that “Ocean conservation isn’t about fish, it's about 

people.”(00:00:52-58) This point was brought up multiple times during her talk. She said that 

you can find fish swimming around, hunting for food, but they are not the issue. It’s the people 

that need to change. “We are on track to have more plastic than fish by 2050”(00:01:24) The fish 

are not throwing plastic into the ocean, people are. Her work is focused on how to change 
people’s actions to help enhance the health of the ocean. She has found that if you want change 

to occur on a large scale, you need a community approach to achieve the desired results. Her 

Logos comes from her studies and from the people being directly affected by the ocean changes. 

She works with numerous coastal communities that rely on the ocean to support them financially, 

and from a nutritional standpoint. She applies her knowledge about the ocean and her 

communication skills to collect information from “over 400 fishermen and scuba 

instructors”(00:02:20) to get a community-wide understanding of people’s opinions and ideas on 

the matter. While she was interviewing people, she said, “The majority of the people I 

interviewed were eager to see more sustainable management be put into place, and at a 

comprehensive scale. They were thinking of the entire Social Ecological Economic 

system.”(00:02:47-58) The people were eager to help because they are seeing the repercussions 

that humans have created. Once you get people in a collective mindset then you can make the 

political change that allows for new laws to be created. In her Ted Talk, she says “the biggest 

factor in policy change is political will, and fisherman are voters.” (00:02:05-10) Her background 

in public policy allowed her to meet with people to achieve these community and island-wide 

tasks. Her eighteen months of conversations worked “to get the government to sign new laws 

that included one-third of the waters as protected areas.”(00:04:17-24) The reason why this law 

was passed successfully, was due to a “comprehensive, science-based, community-driven,” 

approach. (00:04:37) This plan was the first island-wide ocean zoning in Barbuda, a Caribbean 

Island. She describes ocean zoning, just like land zoning, “Allocating places for fishing, 

shipping, scuba diving, alternative energy, aquaculture, and conservation.” (00:03:24-32) As 
previously stated in the essay, this approach was also used in Carasau and Monsorac.(00:04:35) 

She wants to continue this approach in other coastal areas.  

Dr. Johnson displayed pathos in this talk. In the beginning, she shared about her first 

childhood experience with the water and coral reefs of the Florida Keys (00:00:01-30) Later in 

the talk when she was talking about triage, she brought the Keys up again. Triage she explained 

was the best, most realistic way to save the ocean right now. She says, “By designating places as, 

Not at immediate risk, Needs immediate attention, and Beyond help, we can strategically allocate 

resources in order to maximize conservation benefits.”(00:05:02-12) She then talks about her 

beloved Keys, “As much as it pains me to say so, this may include giving up on places that have 

already been decimated, like the coral reefs of the Florida Keys, where I learned to swim.” 

(00:05:20-24) The pause she took after her statement made you feel bad sad, even if you hadn’t 

seen what the Key’s were like before. She is not afraid to say that the ocean is not well. She 

states, “Given the severity of climate change and the rate at which our enormous human 

population is consuming resources and producing pollution, we can not save everything right 

now. (00:04:47-55) This is the sad truth of what is happening to the ocean. Pollution and climate 

change are not the only things harming our oceans. Overfishing is an issue as well. She shows 

this by saying, that when she was interviewing a 15-year-old fisherman, he says, “Previous 

generations used to show the size of the fish they caught vertically, now we show them 

horizontally.” (00:02:22-30) Fishman that rely on the ocean for their livelihood are now 

struggling. In the beginning, she says, “we have caught and killed 90 percent of the large fish and 

sharks that once swam in the sea”. (00:00:50-52) There are no more big fish to be displayed 

horizontally because we have killed them all. This is a sad fact that has affected more than the 
local fisherman. These statements show that there is no time to wait. At the beginning of the talk, 

she also states that “93 percent of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef was hit by bleaching because of 

climate change. The waters have become to warm for the corals.”(00:01:08-12) These facts 

incorporate Kairos to this speech. The ocean is in urgent need of rehabilitation. Climate change, 

overfishing, and pollution are factors humans have done to ruin the home of countless organisms 

that cover about seventy percent of our world. There has already been irreversible damage done 

to it, but we need to make an effort to clean the ocean. Johnson states, “Communities embrace 

conservation when it is part of a broader discussion about sustainable use, and how this 

discussion is grounded in local culture.” (00:04:40-52) By having communities contribute, there 

is a larger impact being made, and community cohesion is also elevated. 

Her speech focused on educating concerned citizens of the world on her works and 

spreading the word about her mission to help the ocean. During Dr. Johnson’s talk, she had a 

very serious formal tone, which followed through with the message. This tone was consistent 

with the talk. If it wasn’t then the audience might not view it as the serious threat that it is. Her 

voice did not change, but her words allowed the urgency to shine during her talk. Her talk was 

not condoning people for polluting the Earth, rather trying to get people to work through policy 

change to make changes to improve the ocean. The title of the talk is “How to use the Ocean 

Without using it up.” We have been using the ocean for our benefit, it is time to help the ocean.   

 
Citation 

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. "How to use the Ocean without using it up." TED. Jul. 2016. 

Lecture.https://www.ted.com/talks/ayana_elizabeth_johnson_how_to_use_the_ocean_without_u

sing_it_up