Bringing the Edges of Earth to Corporate Decision-Makers - Andi Cross
About Andi Cross
Andi Cross uses her extensive experience as an explorer and as a trade strategist and venture capitalist to design solutions for corporate groups. Her company Edges if Earth works with individuals and communities to advance nature-based solutions and to bring these perspectives to corporate decision-makers. Andi offers actionable strategies to achieve tangible changes for organizations on the front line of the climate crisis.
Climate Storytelling, Scuba Diving, and Frontline Ocean Heroes
Andi first learned about the ocean through books and visits to aquariums. Her early career took her in a very different direction, working as a corporate strategist and climbing the corporate ladder. But by 2017, she had become increasingly focused on the climate crisis and wanted to make a meaningful change.
Her next step was bold: she moved to Australia and learned to scuba dive. There, she met people who had grown up by the sea and began to understand new ways of seeing, respecting, and connecting with the ocean.
That experience helped Andi build an ecosystem of media partners and a storytelling network where she could publish stories about frontline heroes working to protect the planet. Through those relationships and connections, she began traveling the world to document positive progress in the face of the climate crisis.
Through Edges of Earth, Andi shares stories of ocean conservation, climate action, and the people creating real change in coastal and marine communities around the world.
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00:00:07 Pam Ferris-Olson Today on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast on WomenMindTheWater.com, I'm speaking with Andi Cross of Edges of Earth. Her company works with individuals and communities to advance nature-based solutions and to bring these perspectives to corporate decision-makers. Andi offers actionable strategies to achieve tangible changes for organizations on the front line of the climate crisis.
00:00:38 Pam Ferris-Olson Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast on womenmindthewater.com engages artivists in conversation about their work and explore their connection with water. Through their stories, Wo(men) Mind the Water hopes to inspire and encourage action to protect water and all the creatures that depend on it.
00:00:59 Pam Ferris-Olson I'm talking to Andy Cross of Edges of Earth. Andy uses her extensive experience as an explorer and as a trade strategist and venture capitalist to design solutions to be applied in corporate board groups.
00:01:16 Pam Ferris-Olson Welcome, Andy. I'm very grateful to you for joining us today. I believe you are the most distant guest that I have had the pleasure of talking with. I have many questions. But first, let me ask you, how did a gal born in Pennsylvania winds up in living in Perth, Australia, some 10,000 miles away?
00:01:40 Andi Cross Thank you so much for having me. It's really great to be here. I very much appreciate it. And that's a great question. I guess it all had to start with my love of the ocean from a very young age, except I wasn't one of those people who had access to it. So for me, my exposure to the ocean was always through books and aquariums. And I spent my whole childhood wondering if there would ever be a chance that I'd lived near the ocean or about to build a career around the ocean.
00:02:14 Andi Cross But life takes its toll. So I ended up becoming a corporate strategist, moving to New York, working up the corporate ladder. And by 2017, I couldn't unsee the climate crisis that was unfolding all over our news feeds. And I had a catalytic moment where I saw the National Geographic had published a polar bear standing on a piece of ice that was melting and the polar bear was starving. And I said, “I have to use my skills for something that I deeply care about. I have to leave corporate New York. I have to stop selling expensive sneakers to people who don't need them anymore in my marketing and brand roles and apply all these skills for the things that I care about most.”
00:02:59 Andi Cross And so I bought a one-way ticket to Perth, Western Australia, which is the furthest point on Earth from where I live and grew up. And I went there to learn to become a diver and to connect my passion, profession, and purpose together. And I thought, “Why not go to an extreme to radically alter my life and see where the world takes me?
00:03:24 Pam Ferris-Olson I've got to say that is an incredibly gutsy move to take a one way ticket to go halfway around the world to learn how to dive. I mean, there are places closer in the US. So what possessed you to become a world traveler and explore the edges of the earth?
00:03:45 Andi Cross When I was working in corporate, my job was taking me all around the world, and I would go on pitch meetings to major cities in the US, and sometimes they'd go global. And through that experience, my eyes were just opening to other ways of life, how other people lived, how other people spent their time. And everywhere I went, I would ask people, “Are you happy?” Just a very simple question, and for the most part, most people said “No.” Especially in the United States.
00:04:15 Andi Cross The big cities, everyone was working. Their lives were revolving around the grind and getting ahead and being successful in their careers. But as I started making my way over to the Eastern Hemisphere, I started meeting Australians, and they were the first people, every single one, who told me that they were happy with their life. And so I got quite inspired by this and I wanted to see what Australia was all about.
00:04:41 Andi Cross And when I started touring around. I realized quite quickly that life moves a little bit slower down under and you can really connect with nature. And so that's what inspired me to move to Australia. And in that time, I started exploring all over the country. And I was meeting these amazing people who had grown up by the sea, people who've been diving their whole lives swimming their whole lives surfing. I never had those experiences, and a few of them were willing to take me under their wing and show me their Australian ways.
00:05:12 Andi Cross And through that process, I just started traveling a lot more for diving, and I fell in love with the sport. And although I was a wildly terrible beginner diver and very nervous and absolutely horrified of the ocean and its creatures with the right training and some really, really amazingly patient people I started moving up in my credentials. I started going deeper and farther and staying down longer. And just instead of seeing the megafauna and the obvious, I started seeing the littler things, the ecosystems that go overlooked and with that meeting a lot of people who were working to protect these fragile environments, and I just fell in love with the stories.
00:05:58 Andi Cross I was just meeting such amazing people all around the world through diving, and it became this gateway. And it made me want to continue. But it also identified a gap. While we love telling stories about the ocean, there's a lot of people who go unnoticed for their work in contributing to its conservation, protection, restoration. And I thought, “Maybe I could create an ecosystem of media partners and a network where I could publish stories and publish content about these amazing frontline heroes whose story just need to be told more.” And through all my relationships and connections in New York and my ability to bring stories to main stages, it actually unraveled rather quickly. And I found myself traveling the world documenting positive progress in the face of the climate crisis.
00:06:49 Pam Ferris-Olson So tell us some of the places that you’ve visited.
00:06:52 Andi Cross For sure. So we've been to 47 countries in the last three years.
We've been everywhere from traveling Oceania through to Africa, all over South America, Central America, back home in the United States. We've done quite a bit in Canada. We've done a bit of Europe, but I would say most of our travel has been in the southern hemisphere, which has been so spectacular. And when we say the edges, originally when we started our journey, it meant going to the most remote or the farthest away places. But that's changed because edges to us means so much. It means coastlines and it could be coastlines.
00:07:36 Andi Cross It could be coastlines of an urban estuary. It could be coastlines of a remote island. It could be coastlines of, you know, incredibly special forest meeting reefs. The edges mean so much to us now. So we really don't discriminate in the places that we go. We're chasing the stories of the people who really are making meaningful change when it comes to restoring and protecting our blue planet.
00:08:04 Pam Ferris-Olson Okay, now I'm beginning to see the pattern here. How did you select the places? And was it your intention always to apply these experiences to corporate boardrooms?
00:08:18 Andi Cross Yeah, so when we first started, we were chasing marine aggregations because I always thought we needed to look big: dolphins, whales, sharks, big congregations, big schools of fish, sardine runs. And I had this view that if I chased these aggregations, I would find people who were protecting them, which was amazing. And I've had such incredible encounters and I've loved my megafauna experiences. But I started to realize that some of the most powerful and potent stories of climate resilience or nature-based solutions that are actually succeeding come from the most overlooked places.
00:09:00 Andi Cross So, for example, these oysters behind me: Billion Oyster Project in New York is restoring a billion oysters to the New York Harbor by 2030. I had no idea this project was happening in my very own backyard. So when you start to look a little bit closer, maybe at a species like the native eastern oyster that can be found all up and down the east coast of the USA and was incredibly abundant in the New York Harbor, you know, from the 1600s on until colonization. You start to realize there's these incredible, incredible solutions happening all over. And so I wasn't always chasing the same thing. But with time, what happened while I started the expedition, reaching out and contacting people that I thought had incredible solutions. We started to bring on quite a few partners to the equation.
00:09:56 Andi Cross So we have about eight sponsors and partners that work with us really closely to help identify positive solutions that have the potential to scale if they get the right exposure, the right resources, the right access. And that's what started to get me thinking, “Okay, what if I connected my consulting world and strategy with these grassroots teams that I was meeting on the edges of earth while in order to provide more access, resources, and support that otherwise these grassroots teams would not have. That could be in the form of funding, that could be in the form of media exposure, that could be in the form of pro bono consulting, bringing on my team of experts to help where there's critical gaps, but that could help elevate the teams in pretty significant ways.
00:10:40 Andi Cross And so my consulting business, that I've been running for quite some time out of New York, in the strategy capacity was now funding all of my expedition work and the pro bono work that I was doing in the field with these incredible scaled solutions. So some of our partners that would help us identify strong grassroots teams. Marine Conservation Institute, which has been one of our longest term partners. They work to identify the best marine protected areas in the world. Scuba Schools International, SSI, they've been one of our long partners as well who helped identify where the most critical dive locations in the world that must have good, positive, conservation work happening in order for them to continue to be so pristine and special. We work really closely with ScubaPro, who've outfitted us. And 1% for the Planet, for example, where our pro bono work is being tracked and monitored by that organization to prove that there really is value in business connecting with environmental conservation groups.
00:11:46 Pam Ferris-Olson All right, let's focus on that because that's the piece that I don't understand. How does you're identifying people who are on the front lines working. What does a company gain from investing in it?
00:12:04 Andi Cross By partnering with us and working with us, they know that their money is going towards grassroots projects that otherwise they wouldn't have connection to. And similarly, the grassroots teams are getting funding from unlikely sources where they would never have thought to go there. So it's just creating a new stream of funding and capacity where it just didn't exist before.
00:12:27 Pam Ferris-Olson So are you finding it difficult to either encourage corporate sponsors to focus on ESG or even to locate corporate partners?
00:12:40 Andi Cross No, actually not really at all, which is quite promising. We have not had issues in any way. We haven't been blocked. We haven't had any sort of pushback. And that comes down to the networking and the relationships that have been forged over the years from corporate New York. And so while it sounds really nice that I left America and went to Australia to become a diver, I never really quit my day job through this process. And I think that's one of the most valuable pieces of advice or insights that I can give to others who are looking to figure out how to connect their world, their profession, and their purpose.
00:13:23 Andi Cross I have to say the biggest value and the biggest asset that I've been able to provide grassroots teams is giving them a connection back to the States, and giving them connections to people who really believe in the work that they're doing, and want to support them and don't require and don't necessarily have a tie to government or a policy. They're quite independent operators, independent organizations, and have the ability to put money where it matters.
00:13:51 Andi Cross So I think that relationship building that I spent so many years working on in New York has really paid off. And that piece, that bridge, which is unique, which is why you asked. I don't know how to, I don't understand this, because it's not normal. And it's not a model that currently exists in abundance. But that's what's been really exciting about this is being able to bridge those worlds and have no roadblocks really at all.
00:14:19 Pam Ferris-Olson So at the end of each podcast, I ask guests to offer advice to listeners on how they can make a difference. And clearly, you're someone who is knowledgeable about both the business world and concerned with environmental issues, sustainability. So what advice do you have for listeners on how they can make a difference?
00:14:42 Andi Cross This might be an unpopular thing for me to say as a capitalist and a conservationist. Those two worlds can exist, and I've seen it work. Understanding how business works and spending time within large organizations or agencies or enterprises and observing and absorbing, I think is so valuable. And a lot of people don't want to participate in the corporate grind. And I understand because there's definitely cons to working in that capacity.
00:15:15 Andi Cross And now with the ability to work remote and to travel more freely and all the access that we do have at our fingertips, it's easy to want to just go live in the field. Or become a diver or become a content creator. But I have to say, “The biggest piece of advice that I could give is: ‘if there's a skill that you can harness and you can learn from corporate or you can learn from an enterprise, and then you can come out the other side. And create something of your own. Or work with people who share the same vision and values as you in a startup capacity or in a way that you're really truly leveraging your skills.’”
00:15:51 Andi Cross It's so valuable to see the multi-sides of business. Whether that's the enterprise side, the startup side, the mid-market and then also finding your connection with nature and figuring out how those worlds can coexist. It's a really powerful thing and not enough people are doing it. So there's white space, there's a gap..
00:16:12 Andi Cross And I say this all the time: “I can't say that my core day job is the sexiest in the world, but it's opened up doors for me that I didn't expect. And it's been able, it's been the catalyst for what's allowed me to do all of the things that I do today.” So marketers, project managers, accountants, lawyers, it doesn't matter what skill you have. If you can really hone in and harness that and become an expert and then figure out how to apply it to your passion. Hopefully it's the ocean. Hopefully it's water. And it's a real opportunity for you today.
00:16:45 Pam Ferris-Olson So Andy I have to say I can feel your passion but more important, you know, you’ve said you moved to Australia because you found happy people. Clearly, you're a happy person. And it's amazing that you've found a way to mesh it. And I do hope that more people will figure that out because they'll live happier and hopefully our environment will be healthier.
00:17:12 Pam Ferris-Olson So I again want to thank you for being on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist series. Yours is a very different perspective than we might otherwise hear, because companies are often thought of as the bad guys when it comes to the environment. So it's good to hear that companies can be earnest in wanting to contribute to a sustainable environment.
00:17:35 Pam Ferris-Olson I'd like listeners to know that I've been speaking with Andy Cross of Edges of Earth. Andy is the latest guest on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast. The series can be viewed on womenmindthewater.com and YouTube. A transcript is available on womenmindthewater.com, and an audio-only version can be heard on iTunes and Spotify.
00:17:59 Pam Ferris-Olson Wo(men) Mind the Water is grateful to Jaine Rice for their use of her song, Women of Water. All rights for the Wo(men) Mind the Water name and logo belong to Pam Faris Olson. This is Pam Ferris-Olson.
00:00:40 Pam Ferris-Olson The Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast on womenmindthewater.com, engages artists in conversation about their work and explores their connection with the oceans. Through their stories, Wo(men) Mind the Water hopes to inspire and encourage action to protect the ocean and her creatures.
00:01:00 Pam Ferris-Olson When Ashley Kidd worked in public aquariums, she learned about animal husbandry, aquaculture, and marine conservation projects. During COVID, Ashley drew upon her experiences with public aquariums and explored the feasibility of involving them in the research and restoration of the Sunflower Sea Star. In 2021, she met Vince Christian, who wanted to start a Sunflower Star Initiative. Within a few months, the Sunflower Star Laboratory was born. The lab, based in Moss Landing, California, is the source of hope that sea stars and kelp forests that depend upon them will once again be a key feature of the nearshore community.
00:01:49 Pam Ferris-Olson Welcome, Ashley. I'm happy that you're here on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast. I was near you in Long Beach, California during Christmas, and I had an amazing tour of the Aquarium of the Pacific. One of their conservation projects involved sunflower sea stars. I learned there's a lot of work that goes into raising these creatures. I was excited to learn that the Sunflower Star Laboratory has begun field experiments to see if sunflower stars grown in the lab will survive in the wild.
00:02:26 Pam Ferris-Olson So a little about you. When did you become interested in diving and in conservation of the marine environment?
00:02:33 Ashley Kidd Well, thanks. I'm very happy to be here. And it all began a long time ago when I was certified as a scuba diver in 1998 in Egypt. And I didn't quite understand, I was 12 years old at the time. And I was very excited to be underwater and just in that weightless environment and having that ability to explore as a kid anywhere and everywhere, up, down, all around. But I really didn't put two and two together with being a scuba diver and a scientist until the end of my undergraduate degree.
00:03:16 Pam Ferris-Olson So when did you get interested in sea stars?
00:03:19 Ashley Kidd I came upon sunflower sea stars when they were listed as critically endangered on the IUCN, which is the red list. IUCN stands for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
00:03:39 Ashley Kidd And we had sunflower sea stars at the Aquarium of the Pacific. That's where I used to work. So it's great that you have been there. That's those are my old stomping grounds. And it was actually because when I looked, when I was looking up the IUCN Red List listing, they'd mentioned different aquaria that were holding sunflower sea stars and The Aquarium of the Pacific wasn't one of those listed. So I was like: “Oh, what's up with these data sets?” And I just wanted to understand, you know, how data was being compiled to make these assessments.
00:04:19 Ashley Kidd And I used my expertise of just having, being in that field and working with other aquarium specialists, working in aquaculture, working in temperate or cold water, with cold water species to sort of figure out like: Where all these sunflower sea stars are? Where could they be hiding in plain sight in public aquariums? and “Could it be feasible to work with sunflower sea stars in public aquariums to be the basis of a conservation program, whether it was in California or across, you know, its historic range from Mexico to Alaska?”
00:05:08 Pam Ferris-Olson So could you please describe what a sunflower sea star is and why it's proper to call them sea stars and not starfish?
00:05:19 Ashley Kidd Well, really, there's no right or wrong way to call them. Starfish and sea stars are just the common names to describe all the sea stars or the stars that fall under the Class Asteroidea. So from a five-armed starfish, there's thousands of different species. So you can call any star that you see underwater a sea star or a starfish. Some people … don't want people to misinterpret the name starfish as sea stars being a vertebrate because they're invertebrates. They don't have a backbone. But that's a little bit nitpicky, I think.
00:06:02 Ashley Kidd And it doesn't matter whether you call them a sea star or a starfish. If we start from the top down, sunflower sea stars are part of a group of animals called sea stars or starfish. And all these animals share common features. They all start off their life with five arms when they're little newborn settled stars on the sea floor. And they have a water vasculature system, which means they don't have blood. They have basically seawater that courses through their bodies, that helps with digestion, move their tube feet around, move things around their body, and actually inflates them. You know, they actually take in water just to give them that turgor.
00:06:59 Ashley Kidd If you look at a picture of a sunflower sea star, you might say: “Hey Ashley, this sea star doesn't have five arms, it has many arms.” So the cool thing with sunflower sea stars, and there are other species that are multi, more than five arm sea stars, they can just keep adding arms as they grow. Sunflower sea stars have been observed to have up to 24 arms. But even the biggest sea star that I've seen didn't have 24 arms. So it's not like, “Oh, they reach, they grow 24 arms and they're done.
00:07:35 Ashley Kidd Science has not yet explained why sunflower sea stars have varying numbers of arms. There's no like terminal number. So they get the name sunflower because of all those arms. So if you think of the petals of the sunflower, they have multiple arms. They're very fluffy, like the central disc is, looks like all the seeds of a sunflower star. And they are really colorful. I don't think any of them are particularly like a bright yellow, but they're radiantly colored from oranges and blues to purples and reds. And there are yellows and splashes of yellows and they are striped. They have all sorts of very unique colorations.
00:08:23 Pam Ferris-Olson Yeah, what is their importance to the marine community?
00:08:27 Ashley Kidd So their importance in the marine ecosystem is that they are found everywhere and they eat whatever is present. They're not really picky eaters, but in kelp forests where there are sea urchins, and if there are lots of sea urchins, the sunflower sea stars will just eat them up. They have no problem galumphing across the sea floor and mowing down sea urchins.
00:08:58 Ashley Kidd So when we're talking about why sea stars are important in along the coast, again, they live in many different ecosystems or different areas of our nearshore coast. When it comes to kelp forests and helping kelp forests, they have the ability to sort of be that frontline of defense to sort of go clear the area if there were sea stars. Sort of being a security guard moving across these urchin fronts and sort of starting to pick off the urchins that have been starved after they've eaten through a whole kelp forest and the kelp forces haven't come back. So that's one of the big overarching reasons why we're excited to bring or start looking at how bringing sunflower sea stars back may help tip the scales back to a healthy ecosystem by just restoring biodiversity.
00:10:09 Pam Ferris-Olson So why is the sunflower sea star so critically endangered?
00:10:15 Ashley Kidd In 2013, there was a, what we call or have been calling it, a sea star wasting event. Up until recently, we didn't know what could be the source of wasting. And when we say wasting, what people have been describing for years is, just sea stars sunflower sea stars in particular, just dissolving into white patches of goo overnight, like within a day. And it was so shocking because wasting has been observed for hundreds of years in sea stars all around the world, usually with just one species or just one small region. But in 2013, it very rapidly was, it was identified in Washington but very quickly spread down the south, down the south coast, down to Baja, wiping out not just sunflower sea stars, but up to 20 different sea stars were observed with this wasting syndrome. They just turned to goo overnight.
00:11:20 Ashley Kidd So between late 2013 and 2018, it had wiped out five and a half billion sunflower sea stars, which was 95% of the population across its historic range from Baja to Alaska, as well as numerous other species that also showed problems succumbing to this wasting syndrome. And it took researchers over a decade to sort of try to figure out what could be all the different causal factors.
00:12:02 Ashley Kidd So in 2025, we finally got a answer that there is actually a bacteria that can become pathogenic, so it can actually cause disease. And that's called Vibrio pectenicida, or we call it VPEC for short, because it's just easier to say.
00:12:24 Pam Ferris-Olson Let me launch a different kind of question on the positive side. What does it take to raise a sea star to the size that can be returned to the wild, which is what you're doing? And how long does it take to grow the sea stars to that size?
00:12:40 Ashley Kidd Well, the good thing with sunflower sea stars is that they grow really fast. Now, I don't know if you or those listening know how quickly animals grow or don't grow relative to each other but, you know, they start up like tiny little embryos. Under the right conditions they were, you know, 2 1/2 centimeters in six months. Right now at two years of age, we have at our lab, our largest one is 28 or 29 centimeters, so like over a foot and that was at two years. So they're big.
00:13:18 Ashley Kidd They can grow big fast. At 25 centimeters is about the size where they can become reproductively active.
00:13:31 Pam Ferris-Olson Well, I gotta say, if you have people down in Southern California at Scripps all the way up the coast to Friday Harbor and beyond. And you have a sea creature that can grow that quickly and be reproductive quickly. You got all the right elements to bring them back but they still have to deal with this wasting syndrome. So how do you personally cope with the knowledge that these efforts by so many, that are raising and trying to plant the sea stars might not be successful.
00:14:11 Ashley Kidd Oh, I just have reckless optimism. The coolest thing about working in conservation is it is a field that requires the expertise of so many different scientists from developmental larval researchers to disease ecologists to geneticists to field ecologists to cryobiologists and like reproductive experts. And the team that has assembled, that has come together, with sunflower sea stars; with every set of questions that we've put in front of each other and challenged each other to find solutions for, we have been meeting those answers.
So I am very, you know… “Yes, this could be a, there could be a insurmountable wall that we’ll hit at some point.” But what gives me hope is that the action that has been taken, up to this point has been overwhelmingly collaborative. that has led to very speedy results on so many different fields of work. It is just inspiring to be a part of that in a small way.
00:15:54 Pam Ferris-Olson So for those who are listening, who want to do more to assist in the survival of sea stars, how can they help?
00:16:02 Ashley Kidd Oh, everyone can help wherever you are. I mean, what's great, what has been really wonderful to see from, again, we are a community nonprofit. We started because of the community's response to this kelp forest issue and the loss of sunflower sea stars. And the fact that you don't really know what you have till it's gone. And the intricacies of a healthy ecosystem is hard to parse out. Like with, oh, this is the most important animal if we put this one back. That's not how an ecosystem works. It's more nuanced, it's more layered. There's so many different variables. But the fact that through, you know, community, science programs like Reef Check or this is all in California or on the West Coast. Just being out and being vigilant and knowing resources where you can log sightings of sea stars. It's like going to iNaturalist, going out, take a walk on your beach, or on your intertidal rocky reefs. Or if you're a scuba diver and you see something, it's like sounds silly, but if you see something, say something. If something looks out of the ordinary, report it. Go online if you're on Instagram or if you want to check out our website and report a sighting. Or if you go to a place where, you know, you've gone for a long time and you've never seen sea stars, you can also report zeros. Because, you know, just lack of sightings can give us a baseline for if stars do return to that area.
00:17:48 Ashley Kidd But the coolest thing was the Sunflower Star Lab didn't exist. There were no-- Again, there were myself and all the people that formed or co-founded the lab had all individually asked the question, like, “How can I help?” And it just took one person, Vince Christian, to actually say it out loud. Just like when you're in class, it's like, if you're thinking of a question you may as well say it, because like ten other people are probably thinking the same thing. That was sort of how the sunflower star lab began. It just began by saying out loud, saying I want to start a sunflower star restoration program in California. At the time there wasn't any. This was in 2021 just a year after sunflower sea star were listed as critically endangered. And I had just finished, was finishing up, my master's on working with sunflower sea stars and looking at the feasibility of using public aquarium stars to start research into the restoration of this species.
00:18:48 Ashley Kidd And action begets more action. And it was just such an inspiring thing to be a part of, just to be swept up, in truly a community-driven conservation action.
00:19:06 Pam Ferris-Olson Yeah, your passion and your energy are really infectious. So I'm going to say, given the perils that sea stars face in the wild, and your efforts to help them become established, I think that you are well qualified to offer listeners who believe the perils facing the ocean are insurmountable. How can they reframe the issue and work to make a difference?
00:19:32 Ashley Kidd Well, this is taken from Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, who I take her advice to heart. And it's, you know, in your Venn diagram. You know, what is it that you love doing? What needs to be done? And oh, gosh, I'm going to forget the third part.
But, and like, what skills can you do to lend to it? And if you can put those three things together, you'll find something that you can do. Whether it's well, if you're in finance, and you have no background in biology at all. You can volunteer at nonprofits to help manage finances or project management. Or if you're a woodworker, you know, building systems, or anything, there's always a need. And you can then work vicariously through the science and be a part of it and help. I think the biggest thing is, we don't need to be a scientist to do conservation science. There's so much community involvement as well in collecting data.
00:20:57 Ashley Kidd The work that we've been doing in the last few years, you know, collecting samples and logging sightings. These are so important to building the bigger picture on how these animals will come back. And yeah, don't be afraid.
00:21:23 Pam Ferris-Olson Thank you for joining me on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast. I think the work that you are doing is fascinating, and I might even consider it heroic. You helped pioneer a model that offers hope that sea stars and kelp forests may once again thrive off the coast of California. Your efforts are also an example of how people can make a positive difference.
00:21:48 Pam Ferris-Olson I'd like to remind listeners that I've been speaking with Ashley Kidd, co-founder and conservation program manager of the Sunflower Star Laboratory in California. Ashley has been on the forefront of research efforts to restore the Sunflower Sea Star, a marine creature critical to the kelp forest off the coast of California.
00:22:11 Pam Ferris-Olson Ashley Kidd is the latest guest on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast. The series can be viewed on womenmindthewater.com and YouTube. An audio-only version of this podcast is available on womenmindthewater.com, on iTunes, and Spotify. Wo(men) Mind the Water is grateful to Jaine Rice for the use of her song, Women of Water. All rights for the Wo(men) Mind the Water name and logo belong to Pam Ferris-Olson. This is Pam Ferris-Olson.
