Sound Solutions

You grew up on Long Island. What was the marine situation like back then?

My family’s originally from Brooklyn, but we moved to Long Island when I was a little kid. You could fish and crab and go clamming right off the docks in the neighborhoods. I had fishing-rod holders on my bicycle. And long before you could drive a car, you could drive a boat. My dad became a commercial fisherman, and I think maybe I would have ended up going that route, but that’s a really tough business. To keep our family afloat he had to give that up. And so I went to school for oceanography instead.

Right out of grad school, you went to work for New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation. That gave you a front-row seat as the Long Island Sound lobster fishery nosedived.

I helped write the disaster declaration that President Clinton eventually signed, and watched that fishery completely collapse. When I was a little kid fishing, the old men used to tell me stories about what it was like back in the ’40s, when they were fishing off the shores in New York City. But I found myself telling stories like that when I wasn’t even 30 yet. I was like, “Wow, things are disappearing really quick.”

You joined TNC in 2003 to work on a project to restore shellfish grounds in Great South Bay, along Long Island’s southern coast. What’s the story behind that?

In the mid-1980s, we started having harmful algal blooms in Great South Bay, which we’d never had historically, and they were having these cascading impacts. The science showed that when shellfish were abundant, the bays were a lot more resilient and resistant to these things happening.

TNC acquired underwater land in Great South Bay in [the 2000s], very close to where I grew up, that had been in private ownership since the 1600s and had been used by the Bluepoints Company, which was world-famous for its oysters and then its clams.

We started to survey the property and there was nothing there. It had basically been strip-mined. So over about a decade, we invested a bunch of energy testing different ways to bring the clams back. But we would take two steps forward and then we’d have one of these harmful algal blooms, and it would knock everything back.

Let’s go a little farther offshore. For a long time, TNC’s been actively involved in pushing for stricter catch limits and management of Atlantic menhaden, a small fish that’s an important part of the ocean food web. You got that, and you saw big increases in menhaden—and then, all of a sudden, in whales, too.

We were definitely thinking about the ecosystem—really about fish and birds, not whales. But then the whales came back. It was pretty incredible.

It seems like that’s created a lot of excitement. A whole whale-watching industry sprung up in New York in just a couple of years, and today you can take whale-watching cruises from New York City. But there’s been a downside, too.

Now we have whales swimming in one of the busiest waterways in the world. I started to see whales with propeller scars, as well as washing up on beaches. It was really troubling. You never, never want to witness that, I promise you. No one wants to hit a whale. But it happens, and it happens all too often.

You initially launched an online course, “Eyes on the Water: Boating with Whales,” to help boat operators learn how to avoid whale strikes. But you just got another big boost on that front, too.

2025 was the first year that everybody who drives a boat in New York had to take a boater safety course. But there was nothing about whales. And so we had this idea that we could put together a training module for private captains. Just this legislative session, we got a law unanimously passed in both houses—it hasn’t yet been signed by the governor—that will require the curriculum to be added to the New York state safe-boating class.

We want these animals to come back. But we got used to doing things a certain way. We need to rethink some of the things that we’re doing.