What Does the Ocean Want Us to Grow?

Reflections from London Climate Action Week

I gave two talks during London Climate Action Week — a Rooted Leadership session, and a webinar asking a question that’s long inspired me: What does the ocean want us to grow?

I've already written elsewhere about the Rooted Leadership series, so I want to stay with the ocean talk here. It’s the one that surprised me.

Starting with a mindset shift

I didn't open with data or diagrams. I opened by asking people to shift how they were holding the question itself — not "how do we fix the ocean," but "what is the ocean asking us to grow?" The room responded before I expected it to. Claps. Hearts. A kind of collective exhale, like people had been waiting for permission to think this way.

From there, we explored something I care deeply about: how a restorative ocean farm becomes a restorative ocean community. That’s where we step into a new era of regenerative sustainability; a farm operating in isolation can hit walls, but when we act as a collective, that’s when we turn bottlenecks into opportunities, obstacles into support, and the “ideal future” into today’s practice. (If you'd like to watch the full talk, the recording is up on YouTube.)

A room that reached capacity

Before the big day, I watched registrations pour in. I was deeply moved. And when the waitlist started to grow, I was shocked. Again, by people showing up, I learned something important: people are hungry for a different kind of sustainability conversation. Not the status quo version, which increasingly feels like maintenance at best, delay at worst, rather than actual change. People know, on some level, that it isn’t enough. This question—what does the ocean want?—gave language to something a lot of people were already feeling.

The Q&A: where the real work started

The Q&A ran long, and it ran hot — in the best way. So many people asked, in different words, the same thing: how do I get involved? That question mattered enough that I built a survey that same day, a first step toward building a real network out of everyone in that room. Even if you weren’t there, everyone is welcome to join in this work. The survey is simple: getting to know you, what you’re looking for, and how you want to be involved. Check it out here. 

The question I keep getting asked: how do we scale this?

This comes up regularly, and I was not surprised to hear it again.

My answer is another mindset shift, maybe the most important one. Before we can ask how to scale something, we have to ask why we're scaling it—what’s the actual end goal? If the goal is to be responsible ecosystem citizens, then the answer isn’t economies of scale. It's ecologies of scale.

One ecosystem was never meant to feed the world. Local food systems, local culture, local resilience—these aren’t smaller versions of a global solution. They’re the solution, tailored to the place and the community that holds them. I think of it as reverse-scaling: instead of designing one model and stretching it everywhere, we design for the specific ecology and the specific people who belong to it.

Is that harder than monoculture? Yes. Is it more beneficial? A thousand times over.

We’re conditioned to want the perfect tool, the clean answer, the thing that works everywhere the same way. Those rarely exist—and chasing them is often what keeps us stuck. The real work is learning to function within the ecosystem we actually inhabit, not the one that would be easiest to standardise.

What’s next

For nonprofit leaders and practitioners who want a structured way to build this kind of programming, I’ve made a tool available on my resources page. Or, if you’d rather learn it alongside your peers, the Restorative Ocean Communities workshop on 12 August includes the tool as part of registration—with flexible ticket options that can even come in under the standalone tool price. I never want cost to be a reason the work doesn’t get done.

And for the grassroots organisers and community members who want to start this work without a budget behind them—a free version specifically for you is on the way.

Thank you to everyone who showed up with open minds, asked hard questions, and stayed authentically in the room. This is exactly the kind of hunger I hoped to find at LCAW. Now the real work begins—building the community, not just the farm.