A new narrative with Hugo Tagholm: People want to hear about solutions; they want to hear about hope.

Ed Temperley

8 months ago

Imagine you are a pressure group who have managed to get your issue to the top of the news agenda. But now you must push home that advantage and turn column inches and public awareness into legislative change. How do you cross that divide?

You’ll probably be familiar with Hugo Tagholm, former CEO of Surfers Against Sewage. He’s a perennially frothing surfer and now the UK CEO of Oceana, who, after more than a decade leading the water quality debate, is acutely aware of the gap between rhetoric and meaningful change.

The conversation has been edited as it was pretty wide-ranging, so grab a cup of tea and settle down for a long read. I’ve known Hugo since he first stepped up at SAS, helping grow the organisation into the lobbying group it has become. And he’s not one to hold back, and I suspect 20-odd years of campaigning either breaks the spirit or forges irrepressible resolve.

Oceana has just published a report which exposed that half of the ‘top 10’ fish stocks on which the UK fishing industry relies are overfished, and if you want to hear more from Hugo will be speaking at the Blue Earth Summit, an event he feels he’s been a part of as a founding individual, having supported the idea since its earliest incarnation. Grab your ticket here.

Hi Hugo…Tell us, how’s life going at Oceana. Can you set the scene with your new role?

I’m the UK CEO and we’re effectively part of the biggest marine conservation organization in the world. You know, 300 plus people in the team, 15 country offices, great campaigns in South America, a lot of the work around marine protected areas and sustainable fisheries, a lot of work on oil and gas and stopping development of new oil and gas around the world.

And so some really, really good stuff. It’s been a privilege to work with leaders from each of the countries and learn from them. And start setting things up here, or set things up here, because there’s just such a big need, despite the organisations that already exist. There’s just so much more need for capacity, skills, expertise, and so I’m pleased to be bringing some of that to the table in a sort of punchy way. They wanted an outspoken, punchy campaigner and that’s what they’re getting.

It sounds like a big challenge.

You know what it’s like because of all of the stuff you’ve done with founding things. The first parts are always like this… you know where you want to be, you can see where you want to be, you’ve got to hire a team, you’ve got to deal with multiple dynamics and just build this sort of infrastructure. But it’s been a good sort of 11 months or so, I’ve hired some really good people, we’re just like now finding our place and getting our campaign deliverables out there and the fisheries audit of course is one of them. The oil and gas stuff we’re doing, the coalition we’re building, the alliance of marine organisations is coming together really well. And it’s just interesting. To be doing something new and different with some different areas, not just water quality, although I’m still working on that with the Good Law Project.

So you don’t miss your Surfers Against Sewage days?

Oh, of course you do. You’re always going to miss things that you did for 14 years. I was with Giles, the new CEO, yesterday. I talk to the trustees regularly. I talked to some of the team regularly. But you know, not many opportunities come up for you to join a sort of global organization, to build a new team again, to work on new issues, to learn again. And I’ve really enjoyed it.

I’m really grateful to be able to find that and still be based in Cornwall. I’ve got an office that’s even closer to the sea than the SAS office. I can see the left-handers coming off the harbour in Newquay on the right day and make sure that I can run down and get in for a quick 20-minute power session. So yeah, I feel very grateful to be working in an even bigger way on ocean issues.

Okay, well, I know you’re a keen surfer because I see you out in the water, and I know how much it means to you.

I’m a keen but very mediocre surfer…

Oh yes, join the club. I’ve dedicated most of my life to being average at surfing.

But yeah, it’s amazing. Of course, I miss parts of SAS, but it is its own thing. I’ve kept the water quality thing going with the Good Law Project and taking the government to court.

And how is the case going? Any progress updates to share?

We’re waiting for the announcement. We don’t know yet what the outcome will be, but it’s just good to keep on adding all this pressure because everything’s been kicked into the long grass or the deep water as it were. Everything’s 20, 30, 40, 50 years away and there’s just too much delay. We’ve got a government of paralysis by consultation pushing things into the long grass.

Do you feel legal action is the only way of quickly making the government stand up and take action to prevent sewage pollution?

I think I sort of think you’ve got to use all of the tools in the toolkit, and the legal challenges are a really effective one. I also think that the continued exploration and innovation around data is important. It’s something we pioneered at SAS, and you might remember the time when we started the Safer Seas service, it was just Porthtowan and it was one spot with a manually updated sort of alert. People were sort of dismissive of it. We added another couple of dozen over the subsequent couple of years and people took time to adopt it and now we see that being front-page news.

Those maps with green ticks and red crosses are often the leading image for stories around the sewage scandal and that’s good to see how data and evidence is cutting through and people are now using it, not just to expose profiteering water companies and ineffective government legislation, or enforcement of legislation, but also to keep themselves safe so they’re using that data to you know to inform where they go swimming or surfing they’re using it to maybe check if where they can safely run an event or not.

We saw a triathlon (Ed: making competitors sick ), and a swim race up in Lynmouth being cancelled recently, and so I think it’s really important that people have those tools to influence change whether it’s a personal change or a more national change.

But you know this is really 30-plus years of neglect from the water companies. If you look at what happened in the 90s, and subsequently, they created a debt mountain. They’ve given a paltry amount of investment comparatively each year since privatisation. They haven’t built the right infrastructure. And so they’ve created an embedded system that’s hard to unpick.

They say, “Well, look, it’s so expensive to do”. And yeah, it’s going to be expensive because what you’ve done is run away with all the money. You took away close to 70 billion whilst not investing enough, and now you’re saying, “Oh it’s going to cost a lot of money,” and I think independent estimates show that fixing the problem would cost in the region of 50 or 60 billion, the exact money that they’ve run away with. This is really worrying because there are limited chances to claw it back. We need to make sure that these private entities fix the problem before we get to what I think should happen ultimately which is renationalisation.

I suspect it’s the one industry most of the country is unified behind renationalising.

There’s zero way that our water should be in private hands and quite frankly, it’s a national security risk too. We just should not have our water in private hands.

Yes, indeed, with ownership spliced up and divided across opaque offshore corporations…

It’s front page news every day now, and it reminds me a bit of the plastics crisis and scandal in 2017 and 2018. It was literally on the front page of the newspapers every day, it was just like shooting fish in a barrel. But really, very little has actually happened since then; we’ve seen the U-turn on a nationwide deposit return scheme, which we helped deliver a commitment from the then Environment Secretary in 2019, a commitment to a nationwide deposit return scheme, and it’s still not happened. There are all sorts of problems with delivering that now.

And the water quality issue feels similar. It’s like we’re on the front of every paper. You only need a minor brush with sewage, and you’ve got a front-page story. And I want to make sure that every campaigner and every person is cognizant of our need to see this through to actual impact and delivery. It’s become an election issue. In much of the press, it’s the ‘toxic Tories’ versus the ‘saviours’ that people assume will come along and fix the problem.

But whoever wins the election, and I think it probably will be Labour, whoever wins the election will have to deliver the change. And it’s when it turns from that campaigning tone into what is the solution? We need to agree on a good pathway to delivering that change. And how do we hold the government’s feet to the fire in delivering the solution everyone’s agreed on? At the moment, people are still campaigning, “Sewage pollution is disgusting, and we see it shouldn’t be here”, but no one is set on the timeframe for delivering the change we need because some of the things proposed by the government are too far away. They’re claiming that it’s now a 2050 deadline, and they are ring-fencing 56 billion for this issue.

We haven’t flicked from campaign into delivery yet as a nation, and we’re going to have to make sure that the election doesn’t come, and then the media lose interest, and then the water companies get off the hook basically, and nothing happens. We can’t have that because remember those red crosses and green ticks on a map? As soon as the election comes, Labour will own those if they win, so what do we do?

I feel it’s never been higher on the agenda, and the situation’s never been worse. Over the past decade or more, you’ve worked on it, and we’ve worked on it, and the situation’s got worse during that time. I really hope there is going to be a positive decision because it’s never been so visible, you have people like Fergal Sarkey making a huge noise about it, but what is the catalyst? What’s the turning point where that pressure becomes something real?

Well, that is the question, and I think people should vote for the ocean and our rivers in the next general election, which will happen next year. It could be as early as next May, or it could be later next year. People should be really scrutinising the environmental policies of all of the parties. We should be calling for a green and blue manifesto from each of the parties that are specifically focused on environmental issues, and we should be really pushing those on there.

Because effectively, those are also, despite the cost of living crisis, the good environmental choices, whether it’s following the science on fisheries, which delivers healthier fisheries, on sewage, which will deliver healthier rivers and seas, or the science on carbon, which will deliver a healthier atmosphere and climate. We need to push governments to do that because it will deliver a more sustainable future and better jobs for everyone. The transition from North Sea oil and gas to renewables, following the science on fisheries, holding water companies to account to clean up our rivers. All of it is also an economic thing. It’s good environmental choices that create a good backdrop and an economy for people to live better lives.

There’s a lot of doom and gloom and “everything’s bad” in the media. And actually, we need to start painting a picture of hope because people are going to switch off. It’s like, “Our rivers are disgusting, the world’s burning, everywhere’s flooding, we can’t afford to live, let’s forget about it.” And actually, I think we need to start painting a picture of what can the world look like? What can our coastline look like? What can our local communities look like? What can our fisheries look like? What can our energy system look like? And you know, what is the story of hope? Because it’s not all bad. We have time to create the world we need to live in.

And is that what you’re going to do at Oceana? Are you going to be taking that next step and setting out the alternative scenarios?

Absolutely. Our three main issues are offshore oil and gas, sustainable fisheries and marine protected areas, and, at the moment, particularly, stopping destructive fishing in those areas. On oil and gas, we’re in the middle of building an alliance of marine organisations to stop new offshore oil and gas. We have got all of the big NGOs in there working with us, Greenpeace, Marine Conservation Society, Blue Marine Foundation, we’ve got leading academics, we’ve got leading influencers in there, and we’re painting a different picture.

We’re working closely with our good friends at Uplift, the people who run the Stop Rosebank and Stop Cambo campaigns, but we’re not going to adopt the same look and feel. It can be scary at times, you know, the climate movement. Everything is sort of quite dark and negative, but we want to paint a picture of hope of what we can see, you know, the transition to cleaner, greener energy, thriving oceans, people and coastal communities that depend on oceans and use our ocean and actually starting to start creating a new narrative around it, because now otherwise I do fear that we’re going to turn people off, and people want to hear about solutions, they want to hear about hope, and they want to believe and understand they can be part of the change in their local community.

The same goes for fisheries, we’re really standing up against big industrial fishing and have released the Taking Stock report that you will have seen. It’s a complicated issue, but really we’re talking about trying to stop the big industrial fishers from fishing out our seas and those small minority of companies and big boats that take the lion’s share of the quota.

In this country, about 80% of our fishing fleet is small-scale local inshore boats, generally under 10 metres, that take just a fraction of the quota, 2 or 3 percent I think it is, and the rest of the quota goes to the big companies that fish in marine protected areas. I think last year alone, 140,000 hours of industrial fishing were conducted in our marine protected areas and 7,000 hours of bottom trawling and dredging in those areas. So, these are really crazy statistics that we need to reverse.

We’re taking some of our most popular high street fish, cod and mackerel, to the brink of collapse. We’re overfishing many species, many of the top 10 species and the government are not setting catch limits in line with science; we need to follow the science on all of these issues. And how can we let the industrialization of our ocean happen in marine protected areas? New oil and gas, industrial fishing in marine protected areas, the new licenses Rishi Sunak wants to grant for oil and gas in the North Sea, 40% of those sit within marine protected areas.

How on earth are they going to deliver their 30×30 commitments if they do that? I mean, it’s completely incompatible with doing that. So, as the science says, from a climate perspective, of course, we’ve got no more headroom to open up new oil fields. We want to stop the big, bad industries. We want to promote the solutions and work with the people who truly care passionately about our seas, and that’s what we’re doing with the ‘alliance on oil and gas’. We will launch a lot more about that in a few weeks.

And is that what it’s called, the Alliance on Oil and Gas? I was just interested if this alliance has a name yet. It sounds like a big step.

No, it isn’t called that, but you can refer to it as such. It’s a marine alliance to stop new offshore oil and gas. Oceana led the legal challenge to stop bottom trawling and dredging in marine protected areas in 2021. We’ll follow up on that in the New Year if the government doesn’t stop activity in those areas. It’s completely incompatible from any marine conservation point of view.

What do you think about direct action in those marine protected areas, such as putting boulders on the seabed?

Yeah, look, I loved what Greenpeace did, and I talk to Will McCullum, one of the exec directors there regularly, about tactics. I love it, and I think we need all the different tactics we can. Let’s not forget that the government can also just move faster on these things. With the flick of a pen, they could put a licence condition on the fishing industry to say that you can’t fish in marine protected areas, and with satellite technology, that can all be monitored and regulated. We’ve seen the impact they can have. Oceana worked alongside Blue Marine and Greenpeace at the Dogger Bank ban and we see what a massive impact that’s already had in terms of stopping bottom trawling and dredging. And so now we need to sort of monitor how sea life is recovering there.

But you know, ultimately, the government has a lot of power, and we saw how quickly they can actually introduce new powers during the pandemic because we are all suddenly restricted from doing things; they passed new laws overnight, they found new money to make things happen, but yet when it comes down to environmental protection, they still haven’t kicked into that sort of emergency mode. It’s coming, it’s coming where their backs are going to be against the wall, and maybe we’re going to see rather than a linear sort of trajectory towards change, or gradual sort of incremental change, we’re going to see cliff edges a bit like the pandemic, where suddenly they say, “look actually that has to stop now”, and I think we’re going to see a lot more of that type of thing happening maybe not in the next few years, but in the not too distant future, where they say, “we can’t do that anymore” and whether it’s a carbon budget, or whether there are certain things that we can or can’t consume at the same rate as today; we know change is coming.

I wonder whether governments will sit there pretending it isn’t happening until the world’s on fire underneath them.

I don’t know. I think part of the problem is change from a government, and it’s part of that five-year cycle thing we’re talking about. Part of the problem is that politicians are terrified; they think change is synonymous with making people’s lives worse. They think, oh shit, if we don’t let them have smoked salmon every day and bagels, their lives will be so much worse, and then they won’t vote for us. But I don’t think that’s what we saw out the back of the pandemic. Despite all the tragedy, the silver lining was that people really liked some of the changes. People liked more flexibility and exploring their local area more. People like getting re-engaged with cold water swimming or finding new sports and activities. People found new ways of being, some of which endure, and some of which we’ve sort of lost. But I think change isn’t as bad as governments think, and I think people are much more tolerant and will go with sort of new ways of being in society much more easily than governments think.

I mean, geez, just before the pandemic, you’d never have thought that they could tell you not to see your parents, family or friends or go to the pub. You would have laughed in their face, and you did it, and we all did it. And it was like, “Yeah, we have to do this”. And so look, if they have to stop things in the future, I don’t think it’s going to be as catastrophic as they think. A super trawler can catch up to 250 tonnes of fish a day… (c) Suzanne Plunkett / Oceana[/caption]

Interesting. I like that comparison. So, in terms of what surfers can do on a day-to-day basis? Do we have to stop eating fish entirely?

No, no, I don’t think so. Our fight isn’t against fishing per se. You know, our office is right next to Newquay Harbour. All of those boats are small, under 10 metres, and there are no bottom trawlers. You know, it’s not about stopping fishing. It’s about stopping the most destructive types of fishing and those big industries hoovering up all life in our seas so a small number of people can make a large profit. We’re not trying to stop people from eating fish, and you should ask your local fishmonger about the provenance of your seafood/ Maybe you should try and avoid things that are causing too much damage, like farmed salmon, bottom-trawled fish and scallops, things that you know are going to have a disproportionately negative impact on our ocean. Farmed prawns from the Far East are destroying mangrove swamps and toxifying our near-shore environment. All of those things that you can make an informed choice about. But you can go to your local fishmonger and find the line-caught mackerel that comes from very close by. You can ask about the most sustainable types of fish and the seasonality of fish.

Just as people spoke about the choice you could make around plastics in 2017, people can do the same with fish or anything else they consume. I think this isn’t about telling people no; it’s just asking people to do things differently and have a different conversation. As surfers, we should all be pushing our politicians to adopt green and blue policies for this next election and commit to environmental conservation and restoration. Because what’s good for nature will be good for the economy too. We all depend on thriving nature. We shouldn’t allow big companies to keep doing what they’re doing. We should be getting people to vote for the ocean. We’ve got to look at the policies in this next election. In my opinion, the biggest thing you can do is vote for the ocean.

I’ve had to adapt my philosophy towards a hope that market forces are going to save the world because I now believe it’s the only chance we’ve got in terms of creating those structures and economic models that allow business to thrive, profit to be generated, but within some sort of a degrowth scenario.

I agree with you. There are sort of two parts to that, and I’m sure you’ve read the Jason Hickel book (yep, outted), but for me, this is about governments being involved, about what people really, really need, and where GDP takes us to as a measure of happiness and success in a country, and where it stops, and the infrastructure and the systems that need to be invested in the schools, the roads, the hospitals, the healthcare, all of the things that create wellbeing and happiness in society and more equality and less disparity across society.

So, I absolutely agree. I think we’re in a time when we should also accept that some businesses and things we’re doing have to go out of business. And at the moment, we’re sort of in a society that seems to think we need to not only sustain everything that has been done, and is currently done, but add to it too. And I think we just have to accept that we can’t, and some things are going to go out of business. You know I’m old enough to remember pre-cheap flights, and maybe we see the end of cheap flights in my lifetime. And there’s an arc for some of these things: they come and then they go. I’m sure that whalers were up in arms when the International Whaling Moratorium came in, and they couldn’t butcher whales and monetise them as they could before 1984, but sure enough, that’s how whale populations bounce back, and I think there’s we’ve got to be more cognisant that some businesses do need to go out of business and that other businesses need to take their place… just as we’re going to see with oil and gas and the transition to renewable energy.

When I was a boy, smoked salmon was a treat at Christmas, and I remember feeling almost proud. We’d have it before the turkey, and I felt it was really special. It felt expensive, it felt like a luxury, and maybe that’s how it should feel. But today, of course, it’s eaten daily in chain sandwich shops nationwide. And is that sustainable? Are the salmon farms in Scotland, in marine protected areas, sustainable? Is the fact that they use antibiotics and other sorts of hormones and things in them sustainable? Is the fact that it takes a lot of wild fish to feed those salmon to put them in everyday sandwiches sustainable? And I think people probably could live without smoked salmon every day if the world needed to.

Do we need to fly as much? We all like to fly a lot, and people like those holidays, but if somebody said you’ve got a carbon budget and you’ve got one short or one long holiday, people would maybe quickly adapt, and there’d be a different carbon market, so I think there are things that will change.

People want to hear about solutions, they want to hear about hope. (c) Nick Pumphrey[/caption]

What do we replace these things with? Everyone’s becoming so used to cheap meat, cheap fish, cheap everything. Is it vegetables, or do we go to high technology, cultured lab-grown meats?

I think it’s probably a combination, but also, in some cases, I don’t think it’s about replacement. I think that we live in the age of like abundance, maybe the tail end of the age of abundance. People are just used to having what they want rather than what they’ve got, and maybe we’ll go back to a more resourceful culture that we probably all remember from our grandparents. One where the waste was not such a big thing. I think we’re all surrounded by waste every day, and maybe it’s the waste aspect of society we need to focus on most because there is just so much of it. Food waste, packaging waste, wasted carbon, wasted energy, wasted electricity, wasted stuff, just generally. Maybe that’s what we really need to tackle.

And how do we work out the system? That’s the thing. Are we going to get an Ai model to present the utopian system that works for everyone with the absolute minimum environmental cost?

It’s a good question. Maybe we’ll also need to focus on some of the other things. I mean, people are doing more and more about, you know, happiness and, you know, how people are, we’ve got a health and wellbeing crisis, the mental health crisis, and people are trading stuff for their time and their happiness. And we’re sort of chasing the wrong things.

People seem to be less and less happy and fulfilled and, you know, more and more comparative, probably because of social media. And the levels of contentment of people seem to be going down, and we just need to have a whole new national and international debate around that. Of course, it’s a massive ask, but stuff and consumption clearly aren’t making people that happy. Short-term fixes, people are sort of junkies for more stuff, but ultimately, it’s not taking them on the right journey.

But I just wonder if there’s just not enough nice stuff to go around. So you need to have the electronics; you need to have the consumerism. Because we can’t have everybody coming down the beach, can we? That’s the problem. There are not enough resources to go around.

It’s not that everyone wants to come down to the beach. More people do. We want people to be able to go where they need to go. You know, some people it’s a local forest or local park, you know, some people it’s sitting in their garden, some people it is riding waves or swimming in the sea or river. And so, I think it’s about just giving people the choice and access to nature and other things that aren’t about consuming. Yeah. It’s about making the most out of your time.

I’m in a privileged position, so it’s probably easy for me. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is very much fulfilled for me, so I’m not fighting for the basics in life, but you know, ultimately, I think everyone needs to feel connected with nature in some way, so it’s not just about the beach and they need to feel connected with people too and have proper quality time with people because I think that is also like a challenge, people are more and more connected digitally but often less and less connected and with real people.

Thanks, Hugo; I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us and attempting to fix the entire system in a single interview.

It’s exciting to have the opportunity to work on this stuff, and I’m really pleased to see people coming together around the oil and gas issue and fisheries. It’s good. So look, it’s all a work in progress. We appreciate everyone’s help. It’s like a team effort, isn’t it? Ultimately, not one of the environmental organizations can fix it, and it’s going to involve everyone stepping up and doing things differently and innovating. Hugo will be speaking at the Blue Earth Summit
Grab your ticket here.