From Shoveling Coral Overboard to Negotiating at the UN

Before he ever sat across a table from UN delegates, Matthew Gianni spent 10 years working as a commercial fisherman up and down both US coasts. Gillnetting for Spanish and king mackerel in Florida. Bottom trawling off central California, New England, and Florida for sole, redfish, hake, sablefish, shrimp, and other groundfish. Hook-and-lining for salmon and albacore tuna in Oregon and California. Running pots for Dungeness crab and dredging for deep sea scallops on Georges Bank. In today's episode, I trace how that decade on deck, watching coral and glass sponges get shoveled back overboard from trawls that dragged the seafloor a thousand meters down, planted the seed for a career that would eventually take him to the UN General Assembly.

Two fights as a working fisherman pushed Matthew toward advocacy. First, he helped organize fellow fishermen to halt a $110 million plan to dump San Francisco Bay dredge spoils directly onto prime fishing grounds off the Southern California coast, a fight that eventually moved the disposal site off the continental shelf. Second, he represented the fishing industry in efforts to block new offshore oil and gas leases along the central California coast. Both wins showed him what organized advocacy could accomplish, and they set him on a path toward Greenpeace International, where he helped launch the international fisheries campaign, worked on the UN's 1991-1992 moratorium on high seas driftnet fishing [VERIFY dates], and eventually ran Greenpeace's global Ocean Program from Amsterdam.

In the early 2000s, Matthew co-founded the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, an international coalition of organizations working to protect deep sea biodiversity from harmful activities, where he now serves as political and policy advisor. What started as a fight against deep sea bottom trawling on seamounts has, since 2014, expanded to include deep sea mining, an industry Matthew argues is moving to tear into the seabed before scientists even have a baseline understanding of what lives there. This is the first episode in a week-long series on the deep sea, building toward my full interview with Matthew, airing Friday.