As the conservation field reckons with ecological breakdown and social inequity, a growing chorus of voices is calling not only for new strategies but for a transformation in who leads, whose knowledge counts, and how we define care for the natural world. That shift is especially visible in marine conservation, where centuries of extractive practice and exclusion are slowly giving way to more relational, justice-rooted approaches.

In this conversation among three Fellows of the Safina Center, the ocean becomes a lens for examining what conservation can look like when it’s guided by inclusion, storytelling, and deep community ties. Marine biologist and environmental educator Jasmin Graham shares how her work with endangered sharks and rays is shaped by local wisdom and her Gullah Geechee heritage. Danielle Khan Da Silva, a National Geographic Explorer and intersectional conservationist, discusses the power of ethical storytelling and Indigenous relationships with whales. And naturalist and captain Katlyn Taylor reflects on how firsthand experience and curiosity can spark lasting connections between people and the sea.

The following is an excerpted and edited transcript from a conversation originally recorded at Bioneers 2025. 

JASMIN GRAHAM: I view all my work through an environmental justice lens. In order to address marine conservation issues, people need to be able to communicate with each other, so science communication and education are really important to me. But science education has to be a two-way street: when you’re teaching people and communities how to protect species or ecosystems, you should also always be listening and learning, because folks on the ground often know the most about their environment.

My science basically revolves around endangered species of sharks and rays, so a lot of my work involves animals with weird faces, such as sawfish and hammerheads. One of the animals I study is the smalltooth sawfish, a critically endangered species of ray that used to be present in a lot of places but now is only found regularly in Florida and the Bahamas. I’m working to try to understand the threats these animals are facing, where they move, how they use the coastline, and how they interact with anthropogenic effects, such as bycatch (i.e., the accidental catching of sawfish). Because, you know, when you have a hedge trimmer on your face, it’s very easy to get tangled up in nets, and when you get tangled up, you rarely survive. 

I work with fishing communities to help understand how we can mitigate these bycatch risks. Fishers don’t want to catch them either, because getting one of those caught in your net just means you now have a giant hole in your net. The sawfish don’t want to be there, and the fishers don’t want them to be there. So that’s what I’ve been working on: trying to make them both happy.

One of the social justice components of my work is to try to expand who is involved in marine conservation conversations and decisions, so I’m sort of a marine biologist moonlighting as a social scientist. I want to include far more people in conservation and science. We’ve created too many silos and separations that prevent a lot of people from being involved and engaged.

“If you don’t have that buy-in, you won’t be able to leverage the social capital that’s already in the community.”

A lot of what I do is based on the ICON framework. I added an extra two letters to so I could call it ICONIC: integrated, coordinated, open, networked, inclusive conservation, which is dedicated to making sure all the stakeholders are involved from the beginning, not just brought on at the end. Local and traditional knowledge and values have to be seriously engaged with and respected in science and conservation, because local folks often know their spaces far better than you do. There needs to be clear communication throughout, so they, for example, don’t find out you made a law that stopped them from fishing in their favorite spot after the fact. Policymakers, scientists, and local stakeholders all have to be engaged in the process. If you don’t have that buy-in, you won’t be able to leverage the social capital that’s already in the community.

Part of what inspired me to do the work I do is my Gullah Geechee heritage in South Carolina. My grandma fished her entire life in the same area, and I realized she had 50 years of data on local aquatic life, which we call a long-term data set. But no one had ever asked her anything because she was Black, poor, and illiterate. The people in my family and community knew a whole lot about the local fish and ocean currents, but they had no idea what a marine biologist was. I noticed fast that the scientists in my field didn’t even think about paying attention to all that local wisdom. They thought they knew it all, or only they could figure it out. When you come into a community with an attitude like that, all you get is distrust and hostility.   

DANIELLE KHAN DA SILVA: I turned from conservation biology to storytelling because the conservation biology world was incredibly toxic, especially as a queer woman of color in science. I didn’t want to leave the field of conservation, but I wanted to see it from a different angle. I’m a National Geographic Explorer, and that has allowed me to work with many brilliant minds and travel the world to see different ways of being through my lens. I’ve worked all over the world, from Mongolia to decolonized anti-poaching projects in South Africa to volcano eruption recovery in Bali to Sumatra to Hawaii to First Nations in Canada. I’ve also done a lot of work on animals and animals in captivity.

I view my storytelling as a form of activism. Since this conversation is mostly about ocean issues, I’ll share two amazing experiences I had with whales and coastal people. Work with marine life is new for me. Diving and all the expensive gear required weren’t accessible to me in my youth, so it took me a while to get into the field of marine conservation. My work in Polynesia has taken me into a very esoteric feeling space where I’m trying to understand more about the things that we don’t know, the things in that liminal space, including interspecies communication.

I have had the honor and privilege of working with Ismael Huukena, who is well-known throughout Polynesia as being a sort of ocean whisperer, somebody who can speak to whales and other marine creatures. I come to these things with a healthy skepticism, but I’ve seen many incredible things this man has done. He was asked to help rescue a beaked whale that had crossed the coral reef and was trapped in a marina. It was exhausted, and a team of about ten people was trying to keep this beaked whale afloat so that it wouldn’t drown.

Huukena came from Tahiti, and I happened to be with him. As soon as he got there, he jumped in the water and started talking to the whale in Tahitian, and she started moving. As we stood on the reef, kind of just sending her off, Huukena instructed all of us to get in the water and give her a goodbye. She was able to leave successfully. 

Another project I’ve been working on is with the Coast Salish matriarchs, such as Kayah George, a young matriarch-in-training, taught by her mother, Deborah Parker, who is Tulalip, and her Auntie Charlene, who is Tsleil-Waututh. Their people have many stories that relate them back to orcas and wolves. They see the orcas as transformational beings that can transform into wolves, and some humans as capable of transforming into orcas.

Kayah’s great-grandfather was Chief Dan George. He was taken as a child and forced to go to one of those infamous, brutal, repressive residential schools where so many kids died. When he came back all the totems that had lined the beaches were gone. A number of the surviving tribal reservations are surrounded by toxic industries, including oil pipelines and refineries. One major spill could doom the remaining local orca population. The ongoing onslaught of colonization is never-ending for these folks, but they’re still constantly fighting for their orca kin and themselves.

“We feel a responsibility to capture their stories and messages because so many elders are dying without being able to transfer their knowledge, and so much is being lost.”

We’re doing a four-part series with National Geographic that tries to show the deep relationships between orcas and the Coast Salish people. We feel a responsibility to capture their stories and messages because so many elders are dying without being able to transfer their knowledge, and so much is being lost.

For Tsleil-Waututh and all Coast Salish people, paddling is an important part of their lives and culture. When they have their canoe races, the orcas sometimes come and swim alongside their boats. They have an orca song, and when they sing it, the orcas will often come and visit them. There is a really long-standing relationship between the orcas and people in that culture.

Orcas are some of the most intelligent beings on this planet. They have a proven capacity for empathy, and they have language, which is being studied. I think we’re really close to being able to have conversations with orcas, just as we are with sperm whales and humpbacks, but there’s so much there that we just don’t know, and, tragically, we are destroying so much before we’re able to find these things out.

KATLYN TAYLOR: I’m a marine biologist, but I didn’t really know how cool whales were until I got to university. I didn’t grow up on the ocean but along rivers in the Pacific Northwest in Oregon. I went to Oregon State and got a degree in marine biology, and I figured out that whales were way cooler than everybody was giving them credit for at the time. I wanted to share that with as many people as possible in a powerful way, to get them to love whales and to spread awareness and knowledge about our oceans. So I’ve spent the last ten years working in the eco-tourism space, starting in the amazing waters of Monterey, California.

My time in Monterey deeply informed my naturalist and guiding career. It’s a uniquely rich bay, and for a budding naturalist to try to guide and educate people about an ocean ecosystem, Monterey is a beast. You have to be prepared to explain 30 to 40 different species in the span of three hours, and not just identify them but explain how they’re all interconnected and how it all works together.

“The ecosystem literally hit rock bottom before we figured out how to start to fix it.”

Monterey Bay has a really interesting history. People like to call it the poster child for our modern-day definition of conservation success, but it also comes with a history of extraction and colonization. The ecosystem literally hit rock bottom before we figured out how to start to fix it. The Bay was so full of sludge and effluent from industry and commercial fishing that people didn’t want to be there anymore. We came close to absolutely destroying it, and it’s still got challenges, but it’s starting to recover. There’s still lots of work to do, but it’s a really unique place for interspecies interactions, especially with whales. Humpback whales don’t generally feed or cooperate with any other species, but in Monterey Bay, they have now started to feed with California sea lions on the same prey patches of anchovies. That’s something that’s new and cutting edge, and really interesting.

My day job is working as a naturalist and a guide, and now also for the last few years as a captain. Monterey’s an incredible place, but once I started to seasonally move around and follow the whales, I got a larger perspective. I observed them in different places, engaging in different behaviors at different stages of life. Getting a vaster sense of how they interact throughout their entire ranges has really helped me hone my skills as a guide, and it’s helped me up my game in sharing information and connecting with people. A conservative estimate of how many people I’ve talked to on whale watches and cruises around the world at this point is around 400,000 people in 10 years.

Shifting to the captain role over the last few years has presented a new challenge. I have to be in charge of where we’ll go, what animals we look at, and how long we stay in a place. Working on boats is not easy. A lot of my day is spent on checklists, protocols, safety management, guest relations, and managing the crew. On a whale watch, sometimes you see things such as a whale getting trapped in crab or lobster gear, or killer whales hunting a baby gray whale, or you see an actual still-existing whaling station. Some guests will say: “You’ve got to intervene; you’ve got to do something.” And you have to figure out how to have these tricky conversations on the fly, and still keep it a positive learning experience for people.

I have to face certain paradoxes. It’s not lost on me that we burn fossil fuel to go out and look at whales, so I have to believe the impact I’m having on people and the actions they take as a result of what they’ve seen will outweigh that harm. It’s really important to me that I be able to communicate with them in a way that will lead to their caring about the ocean enough to want to protect it, but I have to meet people where they are.

Given that these are people who can afford to go on an ecotourism trip, it’s perhaps surprising, but some of them think whales are fish and that the ocean is just water with salt in it. So I have to basically offer crash courses reteaching biology and ecology so these people who live lives so separate from the natural world can understand how everything is connected.

“I’m trying to get people to fall back in love with nature and realize we’re all connected.”

Ecotourism can do harm when it isn’t done with a lot of conscious thought, and there are places it has done quite a bit of damage. But I think people need to see things for themselves to connect with nature. I always advise them at the end of each trip to put the environment in their decision-making process in whatever way they can, whether it’s in voting, donating to organizations, shopping, etc. I’m trying to get people to fall back in love with nature and realize we’re all connected.

DANIELLE: One thing that’s important to acknowledge is that we wouldn’t even need conservation if there hadn’t been colonialism and extractive capitalism ravaging ecosystems. There’s often a well-intended eagerness to jump to the whole unity part without doing the work necessary to face what’s happened and continues to happen around the world. Colonialism is not a thing of the past, it’s ongoing. It shows up in so many ways in conservation, in storytelling. I am actually in the middle of writing a book about it.

“If we don’t have a clear-eyed understanding of our history, we are likely to do more harm than good…”

If we don’t have a clear-eyed understanding of our history, we are likely to do more harm than good, and that has happened a lot in conservation movements, whether intentionally or unintentionally. To cite just one example, as most of us know, several of North America’s first national parks were created by evicting their Indigenous inhabitants. But it’s become ever more obvious in recent decades with tons of data that, globally, Indigenous peoples are usually the best stewards of ecosystems. We need to learn from those cultures and elevate Indigenous science so it carries equal weight with Western science and support rematriation and land-back initiatives. We need to rethink conservation from the foundations and to be really intentional in the solutions we support so we don’t repeat the errors of the past.

JASMIN: I definitely agree with that. In my work, rethinking conservation is thinking about not only what we are protecting, but why and for whom. We tend to forget that we’re all part of the ecosystem, but we are all different parts. We have learned that when you take out a part of the ecosystem, it collapses. And, yes, that means plants and animals, but it also means that if you have a coastal community that can’t live and survive and thrive, your ecosystem will be damaged. We have to include people in the conservation equation. We have to understand how humans fit into the ecosystem in the same way that we study coral reefs, which form the base of the trophic levels of the food chain, because the conditions of people and human communities have a huge effect on the ecosystem. If they’re not on board, your solutions will fail.

“Those folks have to be part of the conversation and help design the solutions.”

It’s easy to tell people to stop eating fish because species are endangered or the water is too polluted, but if fishing is a poor coastal community’s only source of income and protein, that isn’t possible. Those folks have to be part of the conversation and help design the solutions.