Matt Mellen: I'm joined today by Dr. Lucy Gilliam, who is one of the most inspiring people I know. She's done nothing but cool things. I've got written down here a list. She's a doctor, a scientist, a sailor, an adventurer, a climate activist, and many other things beyond. So, Lucy, thanks for joining us. What got you into it? What kind of scientist are you?
Lucy Gilliam: I'm a molecular microbial ecologist originally, which means that I studied bacteria in soil systems and I developed techniques to be able to study those microbes with DNA based techniques. So that's quite specific. But since doing my PhD, I worked on greenhouse gas emissions from soil and then from there I've really kind of broadened out and worked on climate change issues, biodiversity, food security, chemicals, nanotechnologies, policies in government, before then really quitting it all and becoming more grassroots activist and working on sail cargo campaigns, but also on plastic campaigns. And recently I've taken the step back to the kind of policy science interface of campaigning at a kind of more kind of government, intra government level.
Matt Mellen: Okay, brilliant. Well, I want to ask this to every guest we have on the podcast, like, how bad do you think the global environmental situation is? As a scientist looking at the data, what's your take on it?
Lucy Gilliam: We're at an absolute crisis point. We've got to solve this problem in our lifetime. You know, I'm halfway through my kind of working career and within the next 15 to 20 years, we've got to really have got the planet on another trajectory. Climate change is proceeding very rapidly. The warming is accelerating. We're seeing more and more extreme weather systems, weather incidents around the world and temperatures are rising very rapidly. You know, we've got to solve this now. It's our generation that's going to have to tackle it.
Matt Mellen: Right on. Where did you do a PhD and what actually was the PhD on?
Lucy Gilliam: So I did my PhD at an agricultural research institute just north of London, a place called Rothamstead Research, and it's one of the oldest agricultural research stations in the world where they did some of the original kind of crop trials. So a place with a lot of history and heritage and it had a dedicated soil science department, which I was within.
Matt Mellen: And what were you studying about soil.
Lucy Gilliam: Really trying to identify all the different elements of that soil community. So, so I was using techniques that are very similar to the techniques that are used in forensics to solve crimes, but I was using them to be able to understand what were all the community members in that soil and what they were actually doing, trying to link that diversity to the function of that soil. And soil is one of the most diverse things on Earth. There's billions and billions of bacteria in soils, and they all do different roles. And we're really trying to understand this kind of black box of what's going on in there and why. And the relevance to climate change is that we have got, like, 10 times more carbon in soils than we've got in the atmosphere.
Lucy Gilliam: A proportion of climate change comes from release of carbon from soils and from forests and things like that. So if you can actually increase the amount of carbon that's in soils and restore those landscapes and those systems, you can actually go some way towards solving climate change.
Matt Mellen: Yeah, so that's a solution. And then, of course, at the moment, we've got the crazy situation that industrial agriculture is wearing away all the soil. And there's a report out that said there's a hundred harvests left in the UK before the soil's gone.
Lucy Gilliam: Yeah, that's quite. That's quite terrifying. And indeed, if we do continue with our industrial kind of practices, using huge amounts of synthetic fertilizers, growing crops time and time again, the same kind of crops, then, yes, the soil becomes depleted. There's huge number of elements and nutrients that are really important for soil function. And, you know, yes, we apply some of those nutrients in order to keep crops growing, but over time, all of those smaller micronutrients are also being depleted.
Matt Mellen: Yeah. And so if you spray your pesticides and your fertilizer on the field, you can get some degree of organic growth and you can have food in supermarkets you can eat. But does it have the same nutritional content as if it had the healthy soil with all the diversity?
Lucy Gilliam: That's a really big question. And, yeah, it's kind of a little bit outside the scope of what I really know about, but I have seen reports that have said, research that has shown that actually, you know, over time, our crops are becoming less nutritious. Certainly some of my colleagues at the time at Rothamstead Research were doing studies on, like, micronutrient levels in kind of major crops, things like selenium. They were studying and looking at the relationship between soil selenium and what ends up in the crop. So, yes, there are indications that over time, not only is our soil become more depleted, but actually the. The micronutrient content of our crops has gone down as well.
Matt Mellen: So you're a doctor of soil science.
Lucy Gilliam: Yeah.
Matt Mellen: Then did something specific happen to make you get. Did you go from that to being a Climate activist or was there kind of various steps you took in between?
Lucy Gilliam: I would say, really I've been concerned about climate change all my life and my concern for climate change and environmental degradation basically set me on my path. So I would say that it actually comes before everything I first started learning about climate change, I think when I was really still quite young.
Matt Mellen: Secondary school or primary school?
Lucy Gilliam: Secondary school, really. I was very concerned about the ice caps. I even had, I had bed linen that had a map of Antarctica with all of the animals. And so, yeah, I was very concerned about polar bears and melting ice. And so that really shaped my academic choices. So I pursued like sciences and environmental sciences with the original intention of becoming an environmental lawyer. Because I thought, right, okay, that's how I'm gonna, how I'm going to, you know, fight climate change. However, when I did my degree, I just got really, like, far more interested in the science itself. And so that's when I ended up volunteering in the Greenpeace research laboratories while doing my degree. And then from there I went on to do my PhD.
Lucy Gilliam: And it was always my intention to do the science and then use the science to kind of campaign or fight at kind of like a policy level. But, yeah, I guess I got sidetracked by the science a bit more than I originally intended when I was making my A level choices.
Matt Mellen: And the science is crazy, isn't it? I mean, it's, you know, if you look at the data, it's hard not to be really seriously concerned. I did my second science degree 10 years ago. I graduated in 1990, sorry, 2006. And a lot of the stuff were being taught then about climate change was sort of projected for decades in the future. And it's all happened now, faster than expected. More severe than the wildfires happening around the world right now. The thing that really just freaks me out is ocean acidification and this happening now. And where's the science going? I mean, do you feel like scientists are sort of. It's all certain now and it's in agreement. What are climate scientists looking at now? Is it, oh, does everything just speed up?
Lucy Gilliam: Without a doubt. Like, the science is clear, you know, the temperatures are rising, they're rising as scientists predicted, you know, well over 20 years ago. And the speed of temperature change globally is accelerating. And yes, like you said, it's not just the temperature rises, but it is ocean acidification as well. All of these phenomena globally are proceeding exactly as scientists said, well over 20 years ago, there is very little debate. You know, this is happening. And we have now got to respond to these phenomena, these things that the Earth is telling us are happening. And we need to get on a new path because if we continue on this path, it is really bad news for the human race. It is going to impact our ability to survive in the numbers that we are on the planet.
Matt Mellen: I suppose this is really why some scientists become activists, right? Because the science can tell you what's happening, but not what to do. And to some degree, we can keep having more and more facts, more information about the PH of the ocean changing, the climate, the risk of wildfire, whatever it is. But I think for a lot of people, the data isn't enough. You need to feel we need to.
Lucy Gilliam: Translate it into policy, but we also need to translate it into stories that are meaningful for people. Because actually, change happens at a human level and, you know, it needs to be going hand in hand with global agreements. We need to agree globally that we're going to make change happen because we live within, we live one planet, and our decisions are impacted by what's happening globally. However, we also need to act locally. We need to redesign our own systems of living and we need to look at what are we creating personally. So, you know, it's joining up those two branches together really, in order to make change happen. One can't happen without the other. If you're kind of acting within your bubble, but nobody else gets it, then you're just like one drop in an ocean.
Lucy Gilliam: But if you're in an ocean of lots of drops and you all start acting in a similar way, then you can actually make change and make those waves of change happen. So I see it really important, this translation space between what scientists are observing and telling us, and what policymakers and rule makers can do and actually how we act as humans within our families, our communities, you know, our societies.
Matt Mellen: Yeah, I think that's amazing. I think that a missing piece there might be emotion because it's like you have the scientists have the data, and then I know that you've worked a lot on policy, but I think for a lot of people, policy is something that leaves us conscious. Like, what is policy? You know, how does it relate to our lives? And I think if we have stories about how we can live better and improve our quality of life in a way that is also restores ecosystems and responds to climate change. I mean, the challenge for us is can you get people excited about that or feel happy about that, or feel optimistic that there's a future that they can move to that is sustainable but not boring or a sacrifice.
Lucy Gilliam: Yeah, it is a real challenge because actually the environmental science, the climate science, when you extrapolate it to the future, it is actually really quite terrifying. But we also know that terrifying people is not the greatest way to get them to act. And I think we do need to be realistic about what's happening, but we also need to be optimistic and hopeful and give real practical actions. And I think that is the critical space. And when you're talking about global policy and you've got all of these big negotiations that are happening around the world in these cycles, and people like, you know, people are traveling around the world year on year to make really small incremental change in, like, global policy making, thinking, wow, it's happening so slow. Will it actually get there in time? But actually, what other choice do we have?
Lucy Gilliam: You know, we have got to share our knowledge and understanding with people around the world and we have got to make this change happen in harmony with people living in South America or in China or the United States, because we can't just solve it alone. And we, and I think ultimately we have to do it transparently and democratically and not leave people behind. But that also can be quite disheartening if you're, you know, if you're sitting and you're watching and you're thinking, you know, it's been, what is it, 17 years since Kyoto and how far have we really got? Yes, we've got the Paris Agreement, but even so, you know, the bundles of measures that people are taking to UNFCCC still get us to a planet that's warming 3 or 4 degrees, which is probably going to lead to complete systems collapse.
Lucy Gilliam: You need to be way more ambitious.
Matt Mellen: Yeah. Was it just cop 23?
Lucy Gilliam: We had, we just had. Yeah, the cop meeting in Bonn. Yeah, just before Christmas.
Matt Mellen: So that's conference of the parties, which are nation states. It's the 23rd time they've met to discuss climate change. And amazingly, each year global greenhouse emissions have gone up.
Lucy Gilliam: Yes, they're still increasing.
Matt Mellen: So the scientists are pulling their hair out and going, oh, my God, the world's falling apart and the world needs a meeting. And the emission is still going up. And this was something we talked about over lunch. But I feel really strongly that a lot of environmental communication in the UK and maybe elsewhere really puts the onus on the person at home, the consumer, to change their life, to recycle or take one less fly or do whatever they should do, grow some food. All of which is brilliant. And of course everyone should do that. And a lot of that stuff is actually a good way to improve your quality of life. But if while we're doing that, national government are taxing us and then subsidizing massive fossil fuel corporations with trillions of pounds, there's absolutely no hope.
Matt Mellen: And it's crazy to think that governments are still subsidizing fossil fuel companies. How is this happening?
Lucy Gilliam: Yeah, and to a far greater extent than renewables. And yeah, we've actually seen in the last few years actually, you know, quite a lot of initiatives to support the rollout of renewables. That, that investment, you know, has declined. But yeah, I think we do need, we need much more transparency really about what's going on. And we do need to call on government stuff to stop investing in fossil fuels. We also need to be persuading insurance companies and investment companies not to be investing in those assets. You know, we need to make it clear that if they invest in those assets that they will become stranded assets or they, or we will have so seriously messed up the planetary ecosystem that we will face ecosystem collapse. And anyway, you know that there is, you know, you can't win on that pathway.
Matt Mellen: You know, everyone loses.
Lucy Gilliam: Everybody loses. If we keep investing in fossil fuels, you know, we need an absolute rapid about turn. We need to be dramatically cutting our energy consumption and what energy we are consuming. We need to be getting it from renewable sources. End of story. And that needs to be a much more kind of clear, open conversation.
Matt Mellen: Cool. Now, as well as being a scientist and policy expert and all the rest of it, you're a woman of action because you've done several ocean crossings.
Lucy Gilliam: Yeah, yeah, I've sailed with a couple of different projects. Yeah.
Matt Mellen: So what were you doing?
Lucy Gilliam: Well, the first project that I was involved in after quitting my job was sailing with sail cargo projects. So this was in the aftermath of Copenhagen and seeing that kind of climate action was proceeding far more slowly than I thought was necessary and I felt like there needed to be more positive stories about a world beyond fossil fuels and that's why I kind of made the leap into sell cargo because I thought it was a really eye catching, interesting story that could get people engaged in climate change in like in global trade.
Matt Mellen: Was that 2009?
Lucy Gilliam: No, it was 2012. And so I set sail on a sail cargo trip with a beautiful English vessel called the Irene. And we set out to trade whatever we could, like rum, chocolate, spices by sailboat and I have to admit it wasn't the most successful of voyages. We managed to get to the Caribbean and back. We did manage to get some products, but it was not a viable initiative. Nonetheless, super fun and engaging and amazing being at sea and like learning a bit more about kind of global shipping as well, which was the kind of whole intention. I didn't know very much about the environmental impacts from shipping. So then I started to investigate how much shipping contributes and kind of really got this feeling that it was one of those industries that underpinned globalization.
Lucy Gilliam: And I thought that was an interesting story to explore and to think about like, you know, trade through the centuries. I mean it's like, you know, we've been trading globally for thousands of years and if you think about, well, we need to decarbonize shipping and we need zero emission shipping. Well, you know, we have had zero emission shipping, but it was on a much smaller scale.
Matt Mellen: Yeah, I mean that ocean voyage you did, which is quite a far out, crazy thing to do nowadays. I mean that is what ocean trade used to be like. You'd be on a sailboat, you know, it might take a couple of years. You go there, get the stuff and come back.
Lucy Gilliam: Yeah.
Matt Mellen: And you compare that today where you have these super container ships, these vast vessels which like have emissions comparable to a city and they're loading up in China with all the, you know, the containers that go in the back of lorries firing up these massive engines, powering across super fast fuel. Right. Well, what's so dirty about the fuel?
Lucy Gilliam: Well, the fuel that's burned in conventional shipping these days is something called heavy fuel oil. It's crude oil. It's really the thickest, dirtiest, bottom of the barrel fossil fuel. So you know, when you're kind of refining fossil fuels, you know, you've got the light fractions that become kerosene. You've got the kind of medium fractions that becomes our, like our road fuel. And then you've got the bottom of the barrel. And that's what we burn in ships. It's full of, you know, contaminants and sulfur and it's hugely polluting.
Matt Mellen: So yeah, it's. And it underpins the global economy. So, you know, now the world we live in is a lot of the stuff that we consume in the UK is manufactured in the Far East.
Lucy Gilliam: Well, 90% of what's around us has come on a ship at some point in its time. Whether it's raw materials or it's the finalized products.
Matt Mellen: So. So 90 of the things we're using around us have burnt that dark shipping oil that is just being.
Lucy Gilliam: In order to get to. In order to get to the markets. Yeah, yeah. So, but then you think about the scale of the industry. Now. I'm thinking of these small sail cargo vessels that I was on and they maybe take like one container of goods and then you think one journey from China with a container ship is the equivalent of maybe 100 years of these smaller sail cargo vessels. So you know, I'm not here saying like the solution to shipping or climate change is these small sail cargo vessels. What I'm saying is that time spent doing that small scale trade was fantastic for really illustrating kind of the global challenges of trade and climate change and solutions. So, you know, now I'm working at kind of an international policy level on shipping and also aviation emissions.
Lucy Gilliam: And you know, we need to get these giant ships, some of the biggest things that man regularly creates and we need to shift them to alternative fuels or alternative propulsion. So that's, you know, that's a really interesting challenge and it's one that will impact on, you know, everything that we consume.
Matt Mellen: I imagine alternative fuels, that sounds easier because maybe you can put a, of piece biofuel in the same engine, but alternative propulsion. I mean, how far away is an electric cargo ship?
Lucy Gilliam: Well, there is a section of the shipping industry that could be decarbonized tomorrow or today even, you know, that about 15% of European shipping is actually things like ferries and roll on, roll off cargo ships. And you know, the idea is that a good proportion of those could be battery electric given the innovations that we've had in battery technology. Certainly for deep sea shipping, it is a far bigger challenge. And so you might be looking at alternative fuels, but you know, the current alternative fuels that are available come with their own challenges. I don't think we should be shop, we should be swapping heavy fuel oil for biofuels, for example, because otherwise we're going to be putting in drivers for.
Matt Mellen: Further kind of deforestation and.
Lucy Gilliam: Exactly, all of that. Yeah.
Matt Mellen: You are now tuned in to the Eco Hustler podcast, Ecological news, views and vibes. Yeah. And I suppose I should just say as an aside that, you know, we live in a time when it's a given that the economy should always grow and all this kind of thing and that trade is good and that is kind of the purpose of government is to enable more trade. But perhaps some of that trade isn't needed. You know, maybe some of the things we're shipping over in the massive boats could be made in England again. And I know that, you know, then we have. What is that protectionist? Are we being nationalistic? But maybe just from an environmental point of view, there are benefits to that.
Lucy Gilliam: Yeah, definitely. I think it's. It is a very difficult conversation to have, and it's certainly not a conversation that's happening at that global level when people are like negotiating an industry sector's response to the climate change. You know, that people in South American countries or in Chinese countries, they want to get their product to market and they argue that's absolutely necessary for the development of their countries and to, you know, improve the quality of life for their people. So, you know, that's a very difficult conversation to have globally. But, you know, I do think, you know, we should be thinking about how do you. We have. How do we have quality of life, how do we meet our needs in the most efficient and environmentally sustainable way possible?
Lucy Gilliam: And, you know, I think those conversations will start with things like the Chinese now saying they're no longer going to take our plastic waste back. You know, now we have to look certainly in the UK and say, right, what are we going to do with all this plain plastic that's generated from our consumers and our supermarkets? Are we just going to incinerate it or are we going to try and close the loops and are we going to get better at reusing those resources? And those conversations are well overdue. So we've kind of got this crisis that has erupted because the Chinese are like, we don't want to deal with your waste anymore and we've got to solve it.
Lucy Gilliam: And, and I hope that instead of building like waste to power plants that we will actually start saying, okay, what materials do we need to use? Can we make sure packaging is of far fewer materials so it becomes easier to recycle? And can we also put things like taxes on it so, you know, like bottle deposit schemes so that material then goes back to source to be manufactured back into bottles or refilled? So, yeah, we ultimately, we need to be closing those loops. And I think as long as there's this ability to exploit cheap labor or to get someone else to deal with our waste, then that's something that's going to hinder our pathway to the circular economy.
Matt Mellen: And certainly the market doesn't always give the best solutions because that might make economic sense. Pack it off. There you go. But there's all sorts of externalities or Problems that mean that doesn't work. But I find plastics a really interesting one because it sort of feels like suddenly everyone's talking about it. And I've worked on environment issues my whole career, and you sort of think, how could you devise a campaign for that to happen? I suppose it's like a confluence of different things coming together at the same time. But it does feel kind of amazing that people can shift their attitude and suddenly loads of people have reusable coffee cups, loads of people don't want straws. It's becoming. That's becoming normalized. And it's really interesting how that happened.
Matt Mellen: But you did a sailing trip, right, where you were measuring plastic in the ocean a while ago.
Lucy Gilliam: Yeah.
Matt Mellen: So when was that?
Lucy Gilliam: I was working for the last four years on plastic campaigns with a project called X Expedition. And, yeah, we've organized 10 trips, either ourselves or within our network to look at the amount of plastic that's in the oceans. And certainly, yeah, last summer was like a zeitgeist moment, I think, for plastic campaigns. And I feel like were. Yeah, we definitely were part of that. And I was having a conversation with someone who arranges direct actions from one of the big global NGOs, and. And he was saying, you know, this is the first time in my career that we've really seen that it just exploded. It became the environmental zeitgeist, you know, moment topic.
Lucy Gilliam: And I think from my perspective of, you know, last year, X Expedition had a trip sailing round Britain and campaigning in the British Isles in different port stops and doing plastics research. And we had been in conversations with lots of other NGOs, and we'd also seen lots of initiatives that other NGOs, like Surfers Against Sewage or City to Sea in Bristol, or who is it? Is it MCS or, you know, the Maritime Marine Conservation Society? Everybody's had plastic campaigns and somehow everybody was in contact and, you know, there just managed to be this big kind of explosion of plastics as the issue. And then obviously, you've got Planet Earth 2, which couldn't have come at a more perfect time. And suddenly, you know, we've got all of our politicians and we've got global leaders and everybody unifying around this issue. And that's.
Lucy Gilliam: That's super exciting to see. And I think what I would like to see is that kind of. That kind of intuitive push between, like, NGOs and charities and grassroots organization to then transfer that knowledge to. Right, okay. How do we nail climate change in the same way? Yeah, that would be my, like, dream.
Matt Mellen: A bigger beast. I think the thing about plastic is that people get really upset about it.
Lucy Gilliam: It's so obvious.
Matt Mellen: Yeah. Even if you see to the side of the road, that's upsetting. You see a hedgehog with its, you know, all tangled up in a thing that footage that was on Blue Planet. I mean, my mum just had a holiday to Mexico. Hi mum. And she, and she, you know, I said, how was holiday? She was like, you had a great time. Loved it. But she was really upset because there was plastic all over the beach.
Lucy Gilliam: Yeah.
Matt Mellen: And it kind of feels like that, you know, it's cross threshold where plastic's just everywhere. It's in the fossil record. We produce so much of it, we're drowning in it.
Lucy Gilliam: Yeah.
Matt Mellen: So hopefully we didn't figure it out too late.
Lucy Gilliam: Yeah. I mean one of the reasons why I then switched to plastic campaigns from kind of climate campaigns was that I kind of saw it as a gateway drug to environmentalism. You know, like the really easy win. And after having done a lot of work on climate change and also like food security and agriculture, I was a bit kind of jaded and I needed to work on something that seemed much more obvious and easy to communicate. And so I teamed up with ocean advocate Emily Penn and we founded X Expedition. And X Expedition is all women. And we bring women together from lots of different disciplines and we use the sailing vessel Sea Dragon as kind of an innovation platform. Platform. And we go sailing and we do some research on plastics and toxics while we sail.
Lucy Gilliam: But the idea is that as a diverse group we inform each other and we try and come up with solutions. And then after the trip in which we will have gone on an adventure, we will have bonded and we will have shared ideas that then people go on to do their like speaking spin off plastic actions. And that's actually there's been some amazing initiatives that have been set up by the women who have sailed with us and you know, from kind of setting up like plastic free campaigns in their hometowns to kind of, you know, doing art exhibitions or like running like schools projects or you know, one of the, the people that sailed with us, she's an engineer and before she came on expedition she had designed an underwater drone.
Lucy Gilliam: And you know, she's going forward like you know, giving people access to the oceans in new ways with her underwater drone to be able to understand like this hugely not well understood environment of the oceans. And so it's, yeah, it's really exciting to see all the things that have spun out of that. And also to have been to have run a campaign this summer that has connected so many other people campaigning on plastics and to feel like we're part of that wave that is now really pushing for changes in policy. You know, supermarkets are making pledges, governments are making pledges. You know, people are like going, right, okay, I am going to, you know, we are going to switch bags and bottles and, you know, taxes and deposit schemes are now becoming, you know, very real prospects.
Lucy Gilliam: And I remember in my times when I was working at DEFRA that, you know, that was back in a time when, you know, the Daily Mail would have said, you know, you can't tell people how to live their lives. And plastic bands were a no go. So, you know, there's been a real shift and I've seen that in my time.
Matt Mellen: Brilliant. Well, I mean, thank you for doing that. And I think people in the green movement should celebrate that, you know, ratchet up successes. And a lot of the time when you work on green issues, it can feel like progress is so painfully slow. So to have those kind of breakthroughs. I remember when, you know, when I was like studying environmental stuff, it was CFCs was like the one example you could give of we actually managed to stop a pollutant and get rid of it. And, like, it can be done. And I think, you know, people that say it's got to be the totally free market and anything goes and everything should be laissez faire and like, it's just, if you do that, the planet's just going to be dead within 30 years. Yeah, you know, you need regulations.
Matt Mellen: And I think that what this. Hopefully we're going to see the government take strong action on plastics now. And I'll be thanks to you guys, you know, and your awesome campaigning, all the rest of it. But why was it important that those expeditions were women only Crews?
Lucy Gilliam: Yeah, because I think it was really important because through my lifetime, I had seen that there still wasn't women equally represented across all of these different spheres of engineering or science or technology or adventure or even voices in activism as well. I feel like it's very important that we do have a balance of representation and diversity of perspectives in order to solve environmental challenges. And I wanted to create an innovation space that enabled diverse voices to come together and solve a problem. And, you know, it's not to say that I think only women can solve this problem. And I don't think you need to have all women's groups to solve these problems, but I did feel like we needed to create a space and that could be a contribution to the change.
Lucy Gilliam: And I often get asked, you know, oh, you know, why is it all women and isn't this discriminatory to men and blah, blah. And I always say, well, you know, if you are a man and you want to go sailing on an environmental expedition, there are plenty of opportunities for you to do so. I do think it's valuable for there to be mixed groups also tackling these problems. But I just felt that we needed a space where all women could come and they could make their contribution and they could be inspired to be kind of to lead on these issues. So that's really. That was one of the motivations. Also. I'd seen some research that also said that on balance, women are still making a lot of the buying choices in households.
Lucy Gilliam: And so it was also really important to also understand that it's also important for people to have role models, people that look like them, in order to understand that they can be empowered to make change and to be able to. So we, I won't say that we are the most diverse group sailing. I would love there to be more diversity on the trips, but actually that is a challenge in of itself. But I do think it's great if people following the adventures of can look and say, oh, there's somebody who's like me. And we. In terms of age, we've had a really broad representation. One of the oldest members is 74 sailing with us. And we've also had. We've also had participants that are 18. And that.
Lucy Gilliam: That intergenerational mixing and discussion and working together to solve a problem, I think is also really important. And I don't think there are that many places to kind of go and to be a woman and to do something really quite adventurous and interact with that intergenerational diversity.
Matt Mellen: Amazing. You know, you sort of been ahead of the curve on two really big issues of our time that we're living through, because we're living through a time when plastics have gone from being totally normal and someone will just get disposable cup and throw it away. And that's, you know, normal to that being a thing. We're also living through a time when male power and male dominance is really suddenly being challenged everywhere. You know, kind of starting in Hollywood, but it's also pay dispute at the BBC. And, you know, I think a lot of people are looking at those things differently now. And I guess it's great that you're, you know, female scientists, environmental leaders, taking Strong positions. And that's obviously sort of really important.
Lucy Gilliam: Yeah, it is a really interesting time. It feels like. Yeah, at every scale there's this kind of, this sort of battle between the masculine, the feminine and these ideas of like, you know, we really do need to rethink the way that we live our lives with each other and this, these power issues. I mean, the issues of the patriarchy, you know, it's about power and who has power and the issues of climate change and our energy systems and, you know, the way that we live our lives, that's also about who has power. You know, they're really, yeah, they're totally linked. And it, you know, it's something that's really quite hard to kind of explain and get a handle on. And I don't know the answers.
Lucy Gilliam: All I know is that I think it's really important that we have more diversity and that I want to be able to help, you know, make that happen. You know, even if it's on a small scale, like helping my friends be empowered to speak up. You know, meeting with confidence colleagues and, you know, like, trying to understand some of the underlying dynamics that might go on, like in the workplace or, you know, being proactive to speak up when you found out that, you know, your colleagues are involved in manuals, you know, like male only panels, and to say, you know, speak up and say, you know, we really need to make sure that we've got more voices, that these things are important. You know, it's.
Lucy Gilliam: Sometimes it's those small things of just being able to help your colleague and say to another colleague, you know, actually that's not right. There's, there's something underlying here and that we need to challenge and it's really important. And yeah, I, yeah, I think it's.
Matt Mellen: Something that everyone needs to be thinking about and working on. I mean, I definitely feel like I get it from a big global perspective because for me, I've definitely felt from what I've read in sort of loading and stuff, that if it feels like the world is too male at the moment, and what I mean by that is sort of, you know, it's, you know, we can all feel to some degree responsible for environmental harm, but the reality is, you know, I don't know the exact percentage, but 90% of the damage being done to the environment is being done by corporations. They're behind fracking, they're behind deep sea oil drilling. They're the, you know, when you see forests Being cleared for palm oil. It's not, you know, people like you and me doing that. It's not random people. It's corporations that are doing it.
Matt Mellen: And corporations tend to be run by men. And it's a very male energy to go and extract and take and make money and dominate and fight wars. These are sort of male traits. And so I feel that in the part of creating the ecological society, part of becoming more sustainable, is some kind of shift more towards the feminine. And that can be, you know, that can be. Politically, that can be on panels that can be in each of us. Know what I mean?
Lucy Gilliam: Yeah. I mean, it's. It is quite difficult, isn't it? Because sometimes you're talking about the forces of masculine and feminine, which are actually within all of us in a certain balance. You know, I've certainly got some masculine traits and feminine traits, and, you know, I know men with both, but it's like this. This domination, you know, it's like this domination over people and this domination over power over the planet as well. You know, that's what we need to equalize. And it's not to say that there aren't fantastic men leading on these issues as well, but it's like, yeah, we need to get that balance. We need to get that balance in the ecosystem. We need to get that balance of taking what we need and regenerating ecosystems. And. Yeah, you know, it is challenging. I mean, I work now on.
Lucy Gilliam: On transport emissions, specifically on shipping and aviation. And, you know, it's. It's quite usual to walk into, like, a conference or a meeting and, you know, the. The women really are outnumbered, you know, and then they're not the ones, you know, leading that decision making. And.
Matt Mellen: Yeah, yeah, so that is. That is an ongoing struggle. So on the expeditions, how are you sampling the ocean? Were you just doing nets over the side? What were you scooping up?
Lucy Gilliam: Yeah, that we're using something called a manta draw net, which is. It's basically a big net that's kind of behind a float that looks a bit like a manta ray. And it's sampling the top 10 cm of the surface, and everything kind of collects in a sock at the back. And we do that for a set period of time. And then when we get on board, we turn out that sock and then we filter things through different sieves and we count how many fragments of plastic we get.
Matt Mellen: Is it all tiny stuff? Do you get the old welly boot?
Lucy Gilliam: Most of it is actually quite small. And what happens with plastic is when it gets into the environment, it doesn't really ever go away. It just breaks into smaller and smaller fragments. Sometimes you do get bigger bits of plastic, but mostly it's these smaller microplastics that are the problem.
Matt Mellen: And it's everywhere now, is it?
Lucy Gilliam: Yep. Everywhere. Everywhere.
Matt Mellen: There's nowhere on Earth you could go and dip a net?
Lucy Gilliam: No, no. My co founder, Emily, she's gone up and she sampled in the Arctic and she found plastic there as well. And I know that Greenpeace are currently in Antarctica and they're sampling down there and, you know, they're finding, they're finding plastic wherever they sail as well. So it's, you know, it's a global problem. And, you know, I have a, a colleague within the shipping campaigns and he went to Antarctica and the Arctic and he found like a, a toy on the beaches. And that was identified as a free toy that was given away in cereal packets in the 1950s. Like it was a model of a boat. And you're like, this is how long this stuff sticks around. You know, Emily's found versus and yogurt pots and all sorts of things are clearly like, you know, 20, 30 years old.
Lucy Gilliam: So this stuff sticks around.
Matt Mellen: So if the plastic campaigns work, if governments properly regulate, if the flow of plastic was stopped completely now, what would happen to all the plastic that's currently in the environment? All those floating bits, would they sink and go into the mud and become. Or do they just keep circulating?
Lucy Gilliam: I think some of the plastic will just keep circulating. Some of it breaks into smaller and smaller fragments. Some of it ends up, you know, becoming kind of like plastic snow that goes to the bottom of the ocean. I don't think we've really got a handle on exactly what happens to plastic. And certainly there is a gap in our knowledge. Like we can estimate how much plastic are in these five revolving gyres of plastic that are in each of the oceans, these accumulation zones. But when we estimate how much is there, and then we estimate how much has been produced by industry and has leaked into the oceans, we find that there's a gap. So it is disappearing somewhere, whether it's being ingested by fish or, you know, it's ending up like in sediments on the sea floor.
Lucy Gilliam: So that's actually a big challenge for scientists to understand where that plastic is going and what's happening to it. And that's ongoing research. You know, people around the world are trying to understand that question.
Matt Mellen: So what happens to the plastic that goes into animals? Because I Know, whales scoop up albatross, scoop up and then regurgitate, try and feed their chicks. That's one of the most upsetting things, isn't it? That, like, you know, turtles are swimming along and they see a plastic bag, they think it's a squid. I mean, it goes into their belly.
Lucy Gilliam: And it's getting into the food chain. And also one of the other really awful things is that these small bits of plastic, they break down into smaller bits and then they have quite a large, like, surface area to volume ratio. And also because they're plastic, they end up attracting pollutants like in the water or in the air. So they end up becoming these, like little toxic sponges. And so they end up kind of enabling kind of toxic chemicals to also enter into the food chain. So you've got little fragments of plastic, they're in the environment. You've also got pollutants being admitted to the air or, like, washing into rivers or being kind of spilled by industry. And then they can be quite dilute. But then when they come across plastic, they end up adhering to the surface that ends up being ingested.
Lucy Gilliam: And we're ending up with contaminants, toxic contaminants accumulating in the food chain. And that is potentially impacting on us. I know that. So scientists have been looking at the gut contents of mussels, for example, and actually finding, you know, up to 10,000, like, fragments of little plastic in, you know, the average kind of kilo of muscles. And, you know, and there will also be the trophic transfer into the food chain of those toxics.
Matt Mellen: So, yeah, that's kind of disappointing for me because I, I sort of. When I think about what it's okay to eat from an environmental point of view, I kind of think that things lower down on the food chain, like filter feeders, oysters, mussels are probably better to eat, but definitely better to eat than a tuna or anything like that. But, yeah, the thought that they're just filtering all this plastic, probably you shouldn't eat them.
Lucy Gilliam: From a health perspective, yeah, that's a really good question. And it's something that the fao, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN body, was looking at, I think, a year and a half ago to really understand what are the risks to the food chain from plastic contamination. And, you know, because obviously there's huge number of people around the globe that are dependent on seafood and fisheries for their protein. So, you know, I think, yeah, there's definitely some indications that plastic is entering the food chain to what extent it poses a hazard to human health. I think the jury is still out, but definitely it is getting into our food chain.
Matt Mellen: It's probably not going to do you any good.
Lucy Gilliam: No.
Matt Mellen: The way that plastic is going to play out kind of comes back to the thing about individual action versus regulating corporations. Because I read this super disturbing article about. Okay, quickly. Yeah. Just going to say that in the States, because fracking is now so cheap, they're creating this whole new wave of like cracking facilities to make new plastic.
Lucy Gilliam: Yeah.
Matt Mellen: Which is like projecting. Yeah. And you think, I mean, well, one, why are they doing that if plastic use is going to massively drop and all the rest of it.
Lucy Gilliam: It's oil companies looking for new markets.
Matt Mellen: Yeah.
Lucy Gilliam: They want to like, plastic is made from oil. It is the same companies, it's the same fossil fuel industries ultimately that are also making plastics. You know, these issues, climate change and plastics are actually, you know, they're almost the same issue underlying it. And the, and the forces that are, meaning we have a plastic problem are the same forces that we've got a climate problem. You know, ultimately it's the speed of life, it's the convenience aspect, it's the over consumption of resources. And you know, that's the same issue whether you're looking at plastics or you're looking at climate change.
Matt Mellen: Yeah. What we're saying on the one hand, all of us have to take a good look at our own consumption patterns and how we're living, but also we have to be organized and look at the global picture politically.
Lucy Gilliam: Our institutions, how we run institutions, industries.
Matt Mellen: Yeah. And make sure the right policies are in place.