I addressed the 2026 East Pacific Kelp Congress on January 21, 2026.
The next time you are in one of those virtual professional settings where you are staring at a bunch of faces you don’t know and you have to do that awkward thing where you all introduce yourself, ask each person to finish their introduction by naming their special ocean place.
Yesterday’s meeting repeatedly evoked memories of my special ocean place, Obyan Beach on the southern end of Saipan, the island in the western Pacific where I am from. Every time one of you spoke about purple urchin harvesting or removal, I flashed back to my childhood and my father teaching me how to gather sea urchins on the reef flat during low tide. He convinced me when I was about 8 years old that I was the world’s greatest sea urchin hunter, that nobody did it better in the history of the Chamorro people. For years this inspired me to gather sea urchins on my own, and to deliver them to my aunties and uncles sitting on the beach. Tom Sawyer had white paint and a fence. My father had a reef flat full of tasty critters.
Everyone on this call, and the people we work with in our chosen profession all have similar stories of their special ocean places. They often invoke memories of family, childhood, culture, and identity – and this connection is often missing from the modern conservation movement.
Good afternoon. My name is Angelo Villagomez, and as always, I am grateful for the chance to stand with people who care deeply about the ocean. Over the past twenty five years, I’ve worked at the intersection of science, policy, and community—helping designate marine national monuments, advocating for the protection of 30% of the ocean, contributing to the MPA Guide, talking with leaders and trying to be useful wherever ocean issues and Indigenous issues overlap.
Today I want to talk to you all about conservation success. How is it measured? When does it count? Who gets to decide that? And what are our metrics for access, equity, and quality?
I also want to try to insert kelp into this talk, and frame that discussion around how our ways of measuring conservation success are changing, and how Indigenous knowledge—place‑based, community‑held knowledge—can guide us into the next decade. And I’ll tell you upfront: I am not a kelp scientist. I know the least about kelp of anyone on this call. I’m a diver who loves being in kelp forests. I’m a policy person who learns from scientists and fishermen and elders. And I’m someone who believes Indigenous values aren’t just something we remember—they’re something we use. So apologies in advance when my brain gets tangled in the kelp.
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| Sitting on some steps with my cousins while my Dad and uncle sing |
I was born in a village on an island next to the Mariana Trench – but today work for an organization in Washington, DC called the Center for American Progress. Much of my career has been focused on marine protected areas and shark protections and I’ve been an advocate for protecting 30% of the ocean for more than 20 years. The effort to protect 30% of the ocean is sometimes referred to as 30x30, because some people hope to accomplish this by 2030.
Back in 2005, elected leaders in the Western Pacific committed to “effective conservation of 30% of near shore resources” around our islands with the “Micronesia Challenge.” For two decades our islands have been asking questions like, what is effective management? What counts? What doesn’t count? And when does it count?
While I have my own professional interests and research projects, in my role at the Center for American Progress, when new issues around ocean and Indigenous peoples arise, I work with policy makers, elected officials, and communities all across the United States to help navigate those issues.
And that’s kind of how I find myself in front of all of you today. Most of – perhaps all of – my professional kelp experience has been through engagement with the Kelp Forest Alliance, led by my good friend Aaron Eger. I've worked with Aaron and the partners at KFA for about two years now – mainly with a focus on how to engage Indigenous partners in kelp conservation and restoration, globally.
I come to this work not just as someone who reads the science or writes the policies, but as a Chamorro person whose identity is shaped by my special ocean places. My worldview comes from a place where the sea is not a backdrop; it is home, relative, teacher. That shapes how I think about kelp, about conservation, and about the future of this movement.
So for the last 20 years, my corner of the ocean conservation world has looked like this. That area marked off as an oval is a marine protected area or an MPA. According to the IUCN, an MPA is “a clearly defined geographical space, recognized, dedicated, and managed through legal or other effective means to achieve the long term Conservation of Nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values.”
And typically with an MPA you're trying to address acute threats, things like overfishing or maybe oil drilling or deep sea mining
The number of MPAs around the world since the turn of the century have grown faster than the population of purple sea urchins in the Channel Islands. This is a graph of the growth of marine protected areas in square kilometers this century, the data is taken from the world database on protected areas. For most of the 2000s and into the 2010s, it was a very common reframe that we've only protected less than 1% of the ocean. But that hasn’t been true for some time now. The total area of global marine protections is inching up to 10%, but it is nowhere near 30%. Still, there has been a ten times increase in the area of protected ocean all around the world in the last 25 years. That is a huge accomplishment.
This has led to increased ambitions globally – perhaps you heard the news of the high seas treaty coming into force over the weekend? And up until a year ago, these ambitions were shared in the United States. The Biden administration had their own version of a 30x30 goal, and NGO partners were working together like never before to advance it. Most countries today have a domestic commitment to something like 30x30, or follow the 30x30 commitment that was made at the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2022.
But 30x30 has strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand it’s incredibly easy to remember and communicate, funders fund it, political leaders love it, and it’s inspiring for many people around the world.
But in the United States, if you were to draw an imaginary line between Hawaii and the West Coast – please advance the slide – you would have 99% of the people living to the right of that line. Yet 99% of the marine protections are to the left of that line. This is not just a mismatch prioritizing which habitats get protected – it is also a mismatch in who is forced to carry the burdens of conservation, and of who reaps the benefits. That’s not specifically the purpose of this talk – but it’s a large part of the work I do at Center for American Progress.
What has been left behind in the 30x30 movement are near shore habitats. Near shore habitats are incredibly important. They punch above their weight when it comes to biodiversity protection. When it comes to preventing storms and flooding. When it comes to pollution controls and economic benefits. And when it comes to carbon sequestration, they're also super important. But they have a very small footprint and can be overlooked by conservation efforts which are focused on racking up large gains towards 30x30.
Not only do they punch above their weight, but near shore ecosystems are also some of the most threatened ecosystems in our country. We've lost 7% of seagrass meadows globally, 2% of kelp forests globally, and 80,000 acres of coastal wetlands in the US alone.
In traditional conservation, you may have a place, maybe it's fished, and you remove the fishing threat by designing and implementing a protected area. The fishing pressure is removed, and boom, more fish!
But near shore is going to be different, especially if it's in a place that has lots of people nearby. There's going to be some of these non-acute threats that are coming from outside of the borders and they're just going to have to be addressed slightly differently – you all talked about this at great length yesterday, so I don’t need to convince you. The work you do is much more complicated than protecting massive marine monuments in the western Pacific because you have to deal with more complicated political and social dynamics, complicated governance systems – just getting your science permit can be a nightmare – and unique threats not addressed by MPAs.
So after yesterday’s talks, I don’t think I need to convince any of you that achieving healthy, sustainable nearshore areas requires conservation goals that go beyond acreage.
But we live in this 30x30 conservation moment, so how do we adapt 30x30 to meet the needs of near-shore habitats and communities.
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| 40% of Americans live near the coast |
This is where special ocean places come in. My working hypothesis is that all around this great country are people who love the ocean and have special ocean places. Nearly 40 percent of Americans live near the coast – so the potential for a large constituency is huge. I believe that there are people all around this country who love oysters reefs. People who love seagrass habitats, beaches and dunes, salt marshes, coastal wetlands, coral reefs, and yes, kelp forests.
I know that this gathering probably wouldn’t believe me when I tell you that kelp conservation is not a national priority right now. Yet Jeff Whitty told us yesterday that there are 88 kelp projects in Washington State alone. There is so much good work happening across the country with kelp, and other near shore habitats. So how do we do a better job of prioritizing this work in national and global efforts?
To answer this, CAP does what we do – which is write memos. We started with a survey – which I know some of you participated in. We reached out to legislators, scientists, conservation practitioners, community leaders, NGOs, even the Lieutenant governor of Guam was one of our respondents and we asked two questions: We asked what is already being done and then what are the ingredients to success.
We focused on six habitats because these are places with high biodiversity. They’re also important for cultural and economic reasons, and many of them have good examples of existing policies and programs. And there is a lot of national success already. And that’s about all I’ll say there. I encourage you to at least read the executive summary to see the broad arguments that we’re making for redefining conservation success with nearshore progress.
For most of my career, conservation success has often been measured in square miles – or kilometers if you are in Canada. I helped advance 30x30. I’m proud of that work. Big protected areas in remote places have incredible ecological and cultural value.
But kelp forces us to confront a reality we’ve been avoiding: you can’t creatively account your way to a healthy ecosystem. A line drawn on a map does not automatically cool the water or reduce urchin pressure or improve stormwater management. And when conservation becomes a numbers game, we risk protecting what is easy to count, not what is essential to protect.
Nearshore habitats like kelp are small. They’re messy. They sit inside complicated jurisdictional mosaics—city beaches, stolen Tribal waters, state fisheries, federal permits. They require coordination, not just designation.
I’m not suggesting that we totally walk away from area targets, but rather to point out that with 30x30 we’re missing the kelp forests for the fronds. Many of my MPA Guide scientist colleagues will point out correctly that the highest biological outcomes for fish are associated with no-take protected areas. But we also have the work of David Gill and others who highlight that the most effective protected areas are the ones with staff and funding. It seems elementary, but a no-take protected area with no local community support and no local funding results in zero biological outcomes – or worse. Barbara Horta e Costa is doing similar work to show that it’s not just about implementing protected areas, it’s about implementing them well over a long period. How do we measure that? How do we put it on a bumper sticker?
As I mentioned earlier, for the last two years I have worked with the Kelp Forest Alliance, who are leading a working group at NCEAS. Our working group is looking at creating a kelp forest restoration site selection tool using ecological, social, and economic data to ensure resilient and equitable restoration. We have met twice in person since 2023, with last year’s meeting focusing on Indigenous peoples and knowledge. We have members of our group from New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Namibia, Chile, United States, and Canada. Our data and conversations from that meeting are not published yet – but I want to share with you some of our discussions.
I also want to recognize the Tribal work we learned about yesterday taking place up and down the west coast. Maybe there are some parallels between the discussions in those communities, and what we talked about with our international partners.
We talked a lot about Respect. In Chamorro we say Respetu. In Māori, Whakaute. Respect means we begin by understanding what the community needs—not what we think they need. Sometimes their priorities are not kelp. They may need stormwater upgrades first. They may need safer access to the water. They may need better fisheries monitoring or youth programs. Respect means we start where people are, not where our grant proposals want them to be.
We talked a lot about Reciprocity. Another central value is Chenchule’ in Chamorro and Manaakitanga in Māori—reciprocity, interconnectedness, taking care of each other. In practice, that means we don’t helicopter into communities with solutions pre‑packaged. We bring decision‑makers to the tidepools, not the other way around. We support restoration in ways that create jobs, not just reports. And we make kelp visible in everyday life—through food, art, education—because people protect what they recognize.
We talked a lot about Responsibility. There is Inafa’maolek in Chamorro (literally: doing good), and Takohanga in Māori—the responsibility to restore harmony. That means understanding livelihoods, not undermining them. It means compensating people fairly. It means confronting histories of colonization and marginalization, and not pretending those histories don’t shape today’s conservation outcomes. And it means learning from the past. We don’t restore ecosystems by forgetting what came before; we restore them by remembering.
These values aren’t philosophical. They’re practical. They tell us how to manage urchins respectfully. How to engage youth meaningfully. How to make kelp restoration a community project rather than an academic one. They remind us that conservation is not only about ecosystems—it is about relationships.
If we take these values seriously—respect, reciprocity, responsibility—what does kelp conservation look like in the next decade? And how do we measure that?
I started this talk by invoking our special ocean places, and how that connection is missing from the metrics used to measure success in the modern conservation movement. Invoking the Indigenous values I just shared, I will end my talk by reminding us that there is an inherent reciprocity in special ocean places. Special ocean places also need special ocean people.
Dr. Asha DeVos is a whale biologist in Sri Lanka whom I greatly admire and she is prone to say that, “Every Coastline Needs a Hero.” She follows this up with “Protecting the world’s biggest habitat is going to need the world’s biggest team.”
What does this look like? All of the people who spoke during yesterday’s 25 presentations are ocean heroes working to protect special ocean places. How do we articulate the intangible and immeasurable metrics of all of that success?
Area targets are not new and I don’t think they are going away. In the 1971 book Encounters with the Archdruid (about David Brower) – there are repeated references to protecting 10% of nature.
On social media right now, a lot of people are reminiscing about 2016 for some weird reason I do not understand. But if you could get in a time machine and go back ten years to 2016 – influential people were already talking about “the post 2020 conservation framework.” Today we are just as far away from 2030 as we were from 2020 back then – but almost nobody is talking about the “post 2030 framework.”
Around the same time, in the climate world, we used to talk about 350 parts per million. Today we don't hear anybody really talking about 350 – in part because we blew by it years ago. Now most of the messaging is around the Paris Agreement and 1.5 degrees. Did you notice when that change happened? Conservation targets change all the time and we don’t even notice it.
But area targets are having a moment, and just like 350, I think that moment will pass. We will continue to use them, but we will talk about them differently, and prioritize them differently.
This should not be threatening to funders, NGOs, or scientists. There has always been an ebb and flow of conservation messaging. The American conservation movement was born out of scenic landscapes so that Ansel Adams would always have places to go take pretty pictures for Teddy Roosevelt. It evolved with the Land Ethic and Aldo Leopold, and again with Rachel Carson and Silent Spring. When I was a young man our messages were about Save the Rainforest and Save the Whales. Climate change became a prominent topic in the 2000s and equity and justice was important for a few years post-George Floyd in the 2020s.
At its core, 30x30 is just today’s way of saying that we need more conservation, we need better conservation, and we need that conservation to happen sooner.
And I’m not sure if I’m going to say this next bit in the most strategic way possible, but nearly all of the global targets set by international bodies are way off track. We are probably not going to achieve 30x30, and yet that does not mean that we stop striving towards it, or thinking about what will come after it – just as we should not stop saying that we strive to end war, extreme poverty, and inequality.
Global targets are ideals. Something to strive for. They are based on our values, informed by science. The way we articulate those values evolves, and the way we measure success changes.
The only time I heard 30x30 invoked yesterday was during Tristin Anoush McHugh’s talk about her work in Mendocino. In many of your talks yesterday and in your descriptions of your conservation interventions, the area bounded as study sites and control sites was described, but the sum of the area was the least important measurement. What mattered more were the conservation outcomes.
In Jan Friewal’s presentation yesterday, on the last slide read, “Different communities, different approaches.” I’ve heard before that purple sea urchin removal isn't scalable or durable – but in yesterday’s presentations I got the impression that every other community from Baja to the Salish sea is figuring out how to do just that, or learn if and how it would work for them.
And ultimately, that’s where ocean conservation success is going to be defined. It’s people like you, with your special ocean places, acting like ocean heroes.
Si Yu’us Ma’åse’. Thank you.
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