Aquarium staffer breaks down top threats to the sea – and what we can do about them.

Almost 20 years ago, Sarah-Mae Nelson started volunteering at Monterey Bay Aquarium. That work led to a staff position, where she helped shape the Aquarium’s messaging about climate change. (Check out her related work at http://climateinterpreter.org.) Recently, Nelson’s title expanded to conservation interpreter: translating scientific jargon into simple language for docents to share with the public. She focuses on four issues: sustainable seafood, marine protected areas, climate change and marine debris.

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released an updated report. What’s the gist of it?

Ocean acidification, which is an unfortunate term because most people don’t understand it, is a real threat. Basically, the chemistry of the ocean is becoming less hospitable to life as we know it. It’s the sister of climate change, because it has the same cause: the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels. Everything is happening faster than we previously thought. Sea levels are rising faster than we thought. We’ve always known there were tipping points, and after we got to them, things would become radically different. We thought those tipping points were farther away, but we have already reached a few of them. The polar vortex is one. We have changed the circulation of the atmosphere enough that the jet stream is not flowing in the way we’ve been used to, so the off-spins are occurring more frequently.

What’s the latest on marine debris?

A lot of the animals we eat, especially seafood – fish, and even crabs and lobsters – have eaten plastic. A lot of people who eat organic and GMO-free also eat wild-caught fish, but they don’t realize pretty much everything in the ocean is consuming chemical-laden plastics. Plastic is everywhere. It’s on the surface, it’s on the bottom of the sea. The plastic particles have gotten small enough that they have been taken up by the atmosphere, incorporated into clouds and rained down into freshwater mountain lakes. That’s the thing: Plastic never goes away. It only breaks down into smaller and smaller particles.

Those are what we call microplastics, right?

Essentially, they’re plastics we don’t see. We wash our fleece clothing, and the water goes into the sewer. Our sewer systems are not designed to catch these plastic microfibers, and they end up in the ocean. Then they get ingested by plankton or fishes. We see plastics at every level: There are microplastics, there are nanoplastics. If I lost a bottle cap in the ocean in the 1950s, it’s probably not a bottle cap anymore. Through wave and sun action, it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. Our oceans have become a plastic soup.

What do you do about it?

I don’t use plastic. I don’t purchase plastic. I’ve been plastic-free since 2011. It was hard at first, but once I got in the habit, it was easy. I don’t buy anything in plastic bottles, plastic bags, anything wrapped in plastic. I don’t buy canned food, because most cans have a plastic liner. I carry my own coffee cups, bamboo utensils and a glass straw in a hemp carrying case. My lip balm is in a metal container. I know I’m not at 100 percent – I have a 16-year-old cat, and he only eats wet food. I cannot find a brand that doesn’t have a plastic liner, and I called pretty much every cat food manufacturer. So I still buy the cans, because that’s what he eats, and he’s my kid.

What do you want to change next?

My new crusade is to get rid of plastic drinking straws. [In Monterey], we’ve been on the forefront of the styrofoam ban and the plastic bag bans. We care about our bay, and we’re working to move forward faster than other municipalities. We’re working on the plastic chowder cups on Fisherman’s Wharf; some of the vendors have changed to stainless steel cups. Plastic straws are not recyclable, and they’re frivolous. Here [in the Aquarium’s cafe], we had the corn starch straws that just melted in hot beverages, so we went with paper straws. Where I’m a regular diner – like at CRBC, First Awakenings and Lopez – all of the servers know it’s important to me that there’s no plastic straw.

What’s your latest major victory?

Our big push was to get the state of California to ban plastic bags, which we accomplished, and we’re so excited about that. But those of us who are ocean advocates, we’re never satisfied. We’re never like, “Yeah, we did it!” We’re like, “What are we going to do next?”