in this video essay, against a backdrop of coral reefs and mangrove forests, planet 世界杯欧洲预选赛免费直播 kaitlyn copland reflects on her coastal upbringing and connects it to the importance of ocean conservation and education.

i sat down with gregor sharp, an 18-year-old climate activist, to discuss.

podcast transcript:

kaitlyn copland 0:05

during recent years, it seems that an increasing number of social movements have improved their ability to organize and mobilize people around a cause. why? the globe is more connected than ever through social media. 

movements have harnessed the media’s power to revolutionize the spread of information about social change all across the world. one relevant example is the cop26 coalition, which is a uk based civil society coalition of groups, grassroots movements, trade unions and racial justice networks. 

activists from the cop26 coalition converged upon glasgow to protest the cop26 climate summit that ran for two weeks in the fall of 2021. while world leaders revisited the paris climate accords to create the glasgow climate pact, protesters from different countries and movements united under the cop26 coalition to march in solidarity through the soggy streets demanding more immediate climate solutions. 

i had the opportunity to sit down with one of the activists present at cop26. gregor sharp is an 18 year old climate change activist who is a content creator for friday’s for future. we discussed how social media mobilizes organizations and increases connectivity as demonstrated through the cop26 coalition.

the following dialogue is our conversation which has been edited for clarity and length.

gregor sharp 1:31

hi, my name is gregor sharp. i’m an 18 year old climate activist from lake bluff, illinois. i’m a social media contributor for fridays for future and earth uprising. i got involved in climate change around 2018 when i first discovered it when i was learning about it in middle school. and then from that i reached out and branched off to different organizations and kind of got myself involved more and more and here i am today. 

kaitlyn copland 1:56

perfect! i want to discuss with you fridays for future in regards to their history. what are their purposes? what’s their goals and why is this all important? 

gregor sharp 2:05

fridays for future was founded in august 2018 by then not really popular climate activist greta thunburg who had been striking outside of the swedish parliament every friday. she decided that she would continue to be striking every friday and she created the fridays for future movement, which then eventually branched off to different countries around the world where students and young people would strike in front of the parliaments, the white houses, the presidential houses and the legislature houses around the world and in different cities and states and everywhere, basically. it started off with one person and it’s eventually grown to its largest at 4.3 million. 

kaitlyn copland 2:56

how has social media played a role in the visibility and reach of your demands and additionally, how is it increased connectivity for fridays for future branches across the world? 

gregor sharp 3:06

okay. so social media is a really big factor in sharing information. it’s been scientifically proven time and time again that it’s [social media] been one of the greatest ways of scientific movements and scientific information sharing throughout these past couple years, even though it does have a massive amount of misinformation problems. 

but overall within the climate movement, as a whole, we’re able to reach audiences and other people who may have not really heard about climate change. 

kaitlyn copland 03:38

could you also talk a little more on the shortcomings of social media in regards to this movement? 

gregor sharp 03:46

some shortcomings with our environmental movement are with conservative groups and other republican, right wing political groups. they do denounce fridays for future and say that we are prompting misinformation towards environmental sciences and other sciences as a whole. that shuts off our outreach programs to the majority of the far right groups around the world as they do not want to listen to us and they don’t believe that climate change is real.

political leaders who want to profit off of fossil fuel companies and other companies that are basically prospering from climate injustice and environmental deregulations are generally some of the reasons why we haven’t been able to do as much as we possibly can. we keep on getting blocked by different organizations and companies, because they want to focus on their own capitalistic profit.

kaitlyn copland 04:41

would you say that you use social media to try to target these organizations? 

gregor sharp 04:57

yeah, we definitely do target these groups time and time again. we specifically called chase bank out before cop26 happened because of their massive involvement within cop26. they do massively fund fossil fuel companies. and that kind of greenwashing, as we would say, definitely does not, in fact, help the environmental groups and youth movements around the world as a whole because it seems like they’re just profiting off of a name that they are sustainable and doing stuff. they’re also supporting the organizations, companies and the fossil fuel organizations which have been basically polluting and damaging our world. 

kaitlyn copland 05:40

i want to move on to discussing the cop26 coalition. i know fridays for future is a part of it. i’m really interested to know how the coalition was formed, especially if it involves social media. 

gregor sharp 05:54

the cop26 coalition was majorly formed right around the beginnings of when cop26 was birthed. especially with mock cop, where a few delegates met online and established their doctrine that they really wanted to get passed within cop. that engagement with other youth environmental organizations and environmental organizations as a whole eventually led to the formation of the cop26 coalition. that’s just a coalition of environmental and climate organizations that wanted to work together to ensure that we get climate action done and climate action in the cop26 agreement that eventually came out. i think it’s called the glasgow accord. it does include a little bit of climate change action.

kaitlyn copland 06:42

just to recap, when the cop 26 coalition was forming, all of these groups that formed it, connected with each other through social media, and it was like, yes, let’s do it? 

gregor sharp 06:57

we mostly connected through social media, but other people knew each other in person from former experiences with other cops, and just meeting in general in real life. that kind of connection via social media and also real life, interjected and created the cop 26 coalition.

kaitlyn copland 07:15

awesome. during the summit when you were protesting, did social media increase connectivity between the organizations? was fridays for future able to gain new partnerships and allies?

gregor sharp 07:29

yes, absolutely. we definitely gained more partnerships and allies as the fridays for future international group as a whole. generally, because of the fact that most of the events that we were attending were live streamed, they were broadcasted on every single major news network around the world. basically, as you can see on the first friday, the major major strike that happened in glasgow that we saw that definitely happening, where our coalition definitely got the word out and definitely was able to form a big coalition to get the news groups around the world to broadcast this kind of event. it’s major to see around 1.2 million people protesting within the streets of a 500,000 populated city.

kaitlyn copland 08:16

i was going to ask you about, like the visibility and reach of the protests at the summit. were you and the entire coalition, were they effectively able to create high visibility and reach of the protests?

gregor sharp 08:36

i would say definitely, like i said, we got 1.2 million people to protest in a city which only has a population of 500,000, which is absolutely incredible. that’s about double the population. so i definitely agree with social media and other forms of connections outside of social media, working amazingly to get the word out to other individuals who lived around the uk and european area, and also who flew in as climate delegates and other delegates, to cop26 to spread the word of taking climate action now and doing something. 

kaitlyn copland 09:13

that’s impressive. could you speak a little about your personal experience, on the ground at glasgow? 

gregor sharp 09:20

it was really amazing. i got to meet a ton of incredible climate activists and engage in social media myself. after the first major strike, we were able to witness around 28 speakers, youth activist speakers, mostly, even from mapa related countries and bipoc communities speak up about their experiences with climate change as a whole. we were able to rally a lot of people towards climate action during that day. and it was generally something that i really enjoyed. i was down on the streets protesting myself. i got to meet a ton of incredible climate activists and people who generally supported the idea for climate action around the world.

and it was just generally one of those experiences where i will never forget it because it was such a positive experience as a whole because everyone was there for positive reasons because they wanted to support this movement as a whole.

kaitlyn copland 10:23

that’s really exciting. do you have any final thoughts on how social media influences social political movements overall? 

gregor sharp 10:30

yeah, social media does definitely in today’s world affect political movements as a whole because everyone’s really connected now. as we can say with online social media platforms such as instagram, twitter, facebook, tiktok, snapchat, all those different apps and getting the word out for those different apps and different social media platforms, really generally does benefit the climate movement and other movements as a whole. it’s basically become like a revolution because social media has become such an influential factor in people’s lives today, that we generally didn’t realize that until about like eight years ago, because there was no social media back then. the general expansion of social media, and generally increasing our social media as a whole has definitely basically affected the world for the worst and for better.

kaitlyn copland 11:26

awesome! thank you so much for your time. 

gregor sharp 11:28

thank you so much!

i sat down with gowans, who specializes in cetacean (or marine mammal) research at eckerd. gowans leads the school’s dolphin project and collaborates with amy siuda, an eckerd associate professor of marine science, on a microplastics monitoring project. 

when i sat down with gowans, she told me that the red tide this past summer “was one of the most severe ones i’ve ever seen. i’ve been here now 18 years and i’ve never seen the level of fish kills that we saw in tampa bay.” 

in the following conversation, we discuss how the dolphin and microplastics research projects have been impacted by the piney point spill and the past summer’s red tide event. we also discuss the value of long term studies and the insight they provide when dealing with ecological disasters such as piney point.

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this interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

kaitlyn copland: what research have you conducted that is related to the piney point spill? 

shannon gowans: amy siuda and i have had a long term monitoring project looking at microplastics in tampa bay. one of our monitoring sites that we’ve been monitoring for quite some time is close to the sunshine skyway, a bridge not that far from where the outflow was.

our initial concern was: how did this plastic barrier break down? and is it shedding microplastics into tampa bay? we found that the values that we got while the piney point outflow was going on were much, much higher than we’d ever seen before in our years of monitoring. 

we then set out to try to collect some more samples and try to see what was going on––and also to see if we could get some samples much closer to the outflow. we’re again seeing some elevated levels, but not as high as they had been.

the question is: were we getting elevated out-flow levels from piney point? there were so many boats in the area that it might have been stirring up sediments that may have had microplastics in them. or, was it after they started pumping the water that caused all this turbulence and registered things?

overall, we are not sure if these statements hold true. we’re continuing on with our long term monitoring to see what happens. microplastics were not the first level of concern with something like piney point, but because we had this long term monitoring program it was worthwhile to investigate.

kc: can you share how the dolphin project has been impacted? 

sg: currently, nutrient pollution is unlikely to harm marine mammals because the pollutants are not problematic for mammal’s health. we’re much more concerned about how the nutrient input that is having a long term impact on the ecology of tampa bay, and how that relates to these top predators.

we know that when we have harmful algal blooms that lead to large fish kills, we end up with issues with our dolphins because their food source has been largely removed. 

kc: how has the past summer’s red tide event affected the current dolphin population? 

sg: we didn’t see an uptick in mortality directly due to piney point, but we are concerned about what’s going to happen given the prey base that got lost with that red tide. it’s difficult to tie those two events completely together, but it is likely that these events may be related; the red tide was already present before piney point came in, but the nutrients that were released would fuel an algal bloom––which is exactly what we saw.

kc: was this past summer’s red tide more severe than in recent years?

sg: one thing is that it was within tampa bay itself and happened over a relatively short time period. that may mean that it didn’t impact all of tampa bay, which may mean fish and animals that are feeding on fish may be able to just move somewhere slightly different and find better conditions. 

so, we may not see that large an impact because it was a very intense event but over a short time period. in 2005, we had an exceptionally long red tide event that actually persisted over several years––there were high levels of red tide over several years. they weren’t as high as we saw last summer, but that’s what had a really profound impact on the dolphin population because they went through a long spell where their food––their prey––was produced. so, both can be problematic and it’s just going to be waiting and seeing what we end up with.

kc: do you have any thoughts on how this spill might play out over the coming months, and maybe even into the next year?

sg: so much depends on what happens with the interaction with the currents and the tides. at the initial input of nutrients, they were dispersing through skyway bridge and moving outwards into the gulf. piney point was initially very, very strong in tampa bay, but that has dissipated into the gulf of mexico. 

that’s also going to be something to watch because to remove (a lot of these nutrients) from the system they either have to be diluted in a larger quantity of water, or they end up in the sediments. if they get out to the deeper water into the sediments, then it’s harder to have storms that stir them up. in the shallow waters like tampa bay, those sediments can be easily disturbed by storms. so, again, it’s going to be seeing what happens to that nutrient influx. 

we don’t have the high algal counts right now that we were seeing earlier in the summer, but the nutrients haven’t completely disappeared from the system. we’re actually just starting to head into the time when we typically see larger red tide events, because red tide is typically a fall-winter event. seeing what happens to those is going to be something that we want to watch long term––and really looking at what kinds of larger-scale, ecological changes may be happening.

kc: if an event similar to piney point was to occur again, what do you think needs to happen? 

sg: what needs to happen is to have regulations to ensure that, if we have these phosphate reservoirs, (they) need to be well maintained, and, ideally, (regulations) working on removing them so that they’re no longer at this bar. that’s the work of land use policies and a lot of other people. 

we need to change legislation to hold the companies that are producing these pollutants responsible. even if the companies sold or closed down, they’re still the ones who created those pollutants.

kc: do you have any final thoughts, or something important to share about like the piney point spill regarding your research?

sg: i think one of the things that piney point shows is the value of having long term monitoring plans where we know what happened, what the conditions were like before something happens so that we can see what happened during the event, and then afterwards. 

if you go in at the crisis point, you don’t know what the conditions were like beforehand. yes, you can see what they’re like during the crisis point and what happened moving forward, but you don’t have that comparison. if we really want to understand what’s going on with our ecosystems and, if there is a catastrophic event, be able to then try to turn them back to those pre-existing conditions, we have to know what those conditions were. we don’t know if all we ever do is respond to catastrophe. we have to be monitoring (conditions) in the long term to see what’s going on and not waiting until it’s a crisis point.

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the value of research

ultimately, long term monitoring research projects provide great value when mitigating ecological disasters similar to piney point. gowans’ research has discovered that plastic levels have increased significantly and the dolphin’s prey population––fish––have decreased. 

it is currently undetermined if the spill is the source of the elevated microplastic levels and increased severity of the red tide that killed the fish. this is an event that will play out over the coming months, and its effects will be determined by currents and tides.

for more information and updates on the piney point spill, visit protecting florida together.

music courtesy of epidemic sound.
first track: paradigm shift by gavin luke
second track: azoic by max anson