Dear OCR Community and Friends,

I am both honored and delighted to introduce you to our new staff member Tamela Fish. She comes on board as our Director of Communications – a skill we have frankly needed for some time. Tamela comes with a healthy list of bona-fides as a media and communications contractor for a number of fabulous environmental and climate action organizations; from local groups in the SF Bay Area, national organizations such as Bioneers, to international organizations such as Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) and the Arab Youth and Climate Movement. She has also worked with one of my favorite activists – Rev. Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir!

OCR has been privileged to have a supportive cadre of subscribers and members. You are a select group of educated and inquisitive people who we have harvested from professional and scientific conferences, public and university presentations, publications of papers and articles, and friends and colleagues I have met through my ongoing work on ocean noise pollution. And while OCR has accomplished a lot over the years informing and working within our community, it has become really clear that public policy – which we aspire to inform – is driven less by knowledge, thoughtful arguments, and persuasive presentations than it is driven by the momentum of public opinion. This is a numbers game.

It is our hope that we can take our message – along with the larger conversation on ocean noise pollution purveyed by many of you – the stakeholders, academics, and scientists on our current mail list, and propel it out into a larger public. We don’t intend to dilute the veracity or amplify the “shock value” to garner more public attention, as we hope to be considered an “honest broker” of scientific data and technical information on the noise pollution issue. What we do want to do is to inform a larger public – and by extension, policy makers and legislators, about the critical and growing challenge that human-generated noise pollution is posing to the health of the ocean.

It is clear that Ms. Tamela Fish is up to the task. In the last two weeks we have already seen a dramatic increase in social media engagement (and we just hired her on Monday!) I look forward to working with her. “Welcome Aboard” isn’t a phrase that most fish would likely want to hear, so I’ll just say “Welcome into the Ocean!”