Evan Luo, a student at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, recently completed his internship with us as part of our “Resistance Office” program. Check out Evan’s thoughts on his experience with us as well as his excellent and educational research paper, Tears of the Tides.

What Six Months at TIRN Taught Me About California’s Oceans

 

By Evan Luo

I never touched the water once during this internship. I never stood on a research vessel or held a clipboard on a beach while volunteers cut fishing line from the tail of a stranded whale. For six months I worked from my apartment in Berkeley, from coffee shops, from the library when it got too quiet at home. And yet somehow this remote internship with Turtle Island Restoration Network became one of the most formative experiences of my life. I think about it constantly. I think about it when I walk past the bay. I think about it when I read the news. I think about it when people ask me what I want to do with my life and I struggle to give them a simple answer.

Let me try to explain how that happened.

How I Found My Way Here

I am a sophomore at Berkeley studying Business Administration at Haas and Environmental Economics. When I tell people that combination they sometimes look at me like I am speaking two different languages at once. Business and environmentalism. Profit and conservation. But I have never seen them as opposites. I have always believed that if you want to protect something you have to understand how money moves around it. You have to understand who benefits from exploitation and who bears the cost of protection. You have to follow the capital.

I came to TIRN in June without a clear project in mind. I knew I cared about marine ecosystems. I knew I wanted to do something meaningful. But I did not know what form that would take. Ken, my mentor throughout the internship, told me something in our first call that I have carried with me since. He said to explore. To read widely. To let the focus find me rather than forcing it. He said the best projects come from genuine curiosity, not from trying to fill a predetermined shape.

So I explored. I read NOAA reports on whale entanglements. I read about the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act and the Magnuson-Stevens Act. I read about kelp forest collapse and sea otter recovery and the politics of marine sanctuaries. And slowly, across weeks of reading and thinking and talking with Ken over video calls, a question began to form in my mind.

What has fifty years of federal marine protection actually accomplished for California’s coast? And what happens if that protection starts to erode?

The Research

I spent the summer and fall buried in data. I built spreadsheets tracking whale entanglements along the West Coast from 2015 to 2024. I traced the collapse of northern California’s kelp forests during the marine heatwave of 2014 and 2015, when over 95 percent of the canopy disappeared and urchin barrens replaced what had been underwater cathedrals. I followed the southern sea otter population as it briefly exceeded its recovery threshold in 2016 and then began declining again. I mapped the expansion of federal marine sanctuaries and the growth of California’s state MPA network.

The numbers told a story that was both hopeful and haunting. First off, the laws worked. The Marine Mammal Protection Act created a stranding response network that saved thousands of sea lion pups during the unusual mortality event of 2013 to 2016. The Magnuson-Stevens Act rebuilt nine of ten overfished groundfish stocks on the West Coast. The National Marine Sanctuaries Act protected critical habitat and kept drilling rigs out of biologically rich waters north of the Golden Gate.

But the laws also had limits. They could not stop the ocean from warming. They could not prevent the marine heatwave that pushed prey offshore and sent hungry whale mothers farther from their pups. They could not keep kelp forests alive when water temperatures rose and predatory sea stars died and purple urchins exploded in population. The legal scaffolding held, but the climate was pulling at it from every direction.

And now, in 2025, that scaffolding itself is under threat. Executive Order 14276 on seafood competitiveness is pushing to roll back fishery regulations. Proposed monument reopenings could allow commercial fishing in previously protected waters. New interpretations of the Endangered Species Act could narrow what counts as harm to listed species. The protections that took fifty years to build could be weakened in a fraction of that time.

Writing From a Distance

There is something strange about caring so deeply for a place you are studying only through screens and spreadsheets. I would read about whale entanglements and then look up from my laptop and see the Berkeley hills outside my window. I would analyze kelp canopy data and then walk to get coffee and pass students who had no idea that an ecosystem was collapsing a hundred miles north of where we stood.

But I think the distance also gave me something. It forced me to sit with the data rather than getting swept up in the emotion of being on site. It made me slow down and ask what the numbers actually meant. It gave me space to think about the policy implications rather than just the immediate crisis. I could not hand a clipboard to anyone or help cut a whale free from fishing line. What I could do was try to understand the system that determined whether those rescue teams would have funding next year, whether the fisheries that entangled whales would face meaningful regulation, whether the sanctuaries that protected migration corridors would survive the next administration.

Ken was incredibly supportive throughout this process. He connected me with researchers and policy experts who deepened my understanding of the issues. He read my drafts and pushed back when my analysis got lazy or my conclusions outpaced my evidence. He let me find my own path while making sure I did not get lost along the way. The flexibility of the internship made it possible to balance this work with my coursework at Berkeley. I could dive deep into research during breaks and maintain steady progress during the semester. I never felt rushed or constrained.

What I Made

My final deliverable was a policy analysis I titled Tears of the Tides. It examines how federal marine protection statutes have shaped California’s ocean ecosystem over the past five decades. It presents quantitative data on whale entanglements, sea lion

strandings, sea otter populations, kelp forest coverage, and sanctuary expansions. It analyzes the current policy landscape and the threats posed by deregulation. And it offers three scenarios for California’s marine future depending on which direction federal policy takes.

The piece ends with a sentence that I wrote for policymakers but that has become something of a personal compass for me. California’s whales, sea lions, and sea otters do not need perfect ocean conditions to thrive, but they do need a federal partner that treats science as infrastructure and protection as a public asset.

I believe that. I believe it more now than when I wrote it.

What I Carry Forward

I used to think conservation was about saving individual animals. The whale on the beach. The otter in the kelp. The sea lion pup in the rehabilitation center. And those things matter. They matter enormously. But I have come to understand that conservation is really about maintaining systems. The kelp forest is not just habitat for otters. It is a carbon sink and a wave buffer and a nursery for fish and a draw for tourism and a source of livelihood for coastal communities. When the kelp collapses, the effects ripple outward in ways that touch people who have never thought of themselves as connected to the ocean.

I have also come to understand that this work is never finished. The Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary was designated in 2024. That is a genuine victory. The first tribally nominated sanctuary on the West Coast. Over four thousand square miles of protected water. But it happened against a backdrop of proposed rollbacks that could undo decades of progress elsewhere. Conservation is not a problem to be solved. It is a practice to be maintained. It requires vigilance and persistence and a willingness to keep showing up even when the news is bad.

This internship clarified something I had felt but not fully articulated. I want to work at the intersection of environmental policy and economics. I want to understand how money flows through ecosystems and how regulation shapes that flow. I want to be someone who can sit in a room with policymakers and fishermen and scientists and conservation advocates and help them find common ground. I do not know exactly what that looks like yet. But I know it is the direction I am heading.

Gratitude

I am grateful to Ken for his mentorship and his patience. I am grateful to the broader TIRN community for welcoming me even though I was just a face on a screen. I am grateful to the researchers and experts who took time to talk with me and share their knowledge. And I am grateful to the ocean itself, even though I never touched it during these six months. It taught me something anyway.

If you are considering an internship with TIRN, I would encourage you to apply. Come with curiosity. Be willing to let your project evolve in unexpected directions. Do not worry if you are working remotely or if you feel far from the action. The work is real. The stakes are real. And what you learn will stay with you long after the internship ends.

I know it will stay with me.