November 13, 2003 | Read Time: 7 minutes
Andrew Sharpless has always used the beaches of the Outer Banks in North Carolina to mark important occasions in his life. He got married there, goes back on vacations, and recently took his children there in advance of another major transition, one that will force him to wade out a little further into the water.
In September, Mr. Sharpless, 47, became the chief executive officer of Oceana, a three-year-old environmental organization that has set for itself a broad, ambitious goal: cleaning up the world’s oceans. The $10-million organization was formed from a pair of older organizations, the Ocean Law Project and the American Oceans Campaign, and receives most of its support from foundations.
Cleaning up the 71 percent of the earth’s surface covered by oceans is a big job, and Oceana isn’t trying to do it all at once. Mr. Sharpless says that over the next three years, he hopes to score “in-the-water victories” by encouraging steps toward an overhaul of fishery management and by putting an end to cruise ships’ dumping of waste into the seas.
“We’re trying to show that we can change conduct and regulations,” Mr. Sharpless says. Steve Roady, the founding chief executive of the group, and others “felt there was a need for a campaign-focused organization that would set very tangible policy goals and focus clearly on them, and avoid spreading itself too thinly,” he says. Mr. Roady announced last year that he didn’t want to run the group once it got past the start-up phase.
Ocean preservation has traditionally been left behind when it comes to raising money and gaining attention in the world of environmental activism, in part because the deterioration of oceans is less visible to the public than other conservation threats. Money earmarked for ocean preservation represents less than half of 1 percent of the total budget for U.S. environmental groups, but Oceana and its new leader are hoping to change that. The group has established offices in South America and Europe, as well as in fishery hot spots like Alaska and Maine, with the hope of reducing environmental damage and restoring the diversity of fish species.
When it comes to changing commercial fishing practices, “we think that in the next three years we can reduce the amount of habitat that is ripped up through bottom trawling in the coastal areas of the U.S. by a significant amount,” Mr. Sharpless says.
The other campaign, against cruise-ship pollution, is also likely to draw a lot of attention, as it will put the organization squarely in the face of a major segment of the tourism industry.
Mr. Sharpless, who has a law degree as well as a master’s of business administration, has most recently been working for major Internet ventures, the kind of industry in which a project-oriented focus can result in handsome rewards. He was part of the senior management group that helped to start RealNetworks, the Seattle company that has become a leading online provider of the software that allows computers to play music and videos. After leaving RealNetworks, Mr. Sharpless worked as executive vice president of Discovery.com, the online division of the cable-television network responsible for the Discovery Channel, the Learning Channel, and Animal Planet.
After working in high-level jobs at those companies, Mr. Sharpless was in a financial position to retire, so he did. But he returned to work when the Oceana job became available to fulfill a longtime desire to work for a nonprofit cause. (He refused to say how much he is being paid by Oceana.) While at Harvard University, which he attended as an undergraduate, “I wanted to be an executive director of an interest group,” Mr. Sharpless says. “I’m returning to what was kind of my first career goal, the one I had when I was 18 or 19.”
In an interview, Mr. Sharpless spoke about his plans for Oceana.
What is your specific role in the organization?
I feel like I have three full-time jobs. I have to define a strategy to figure out what we should do to prevent an irreversible collapse in ocean fisheries and prevent pollution worldwide. Two is to recruit, to finish attracting the staff. Three is to score some real policy victories in the next three or so years in the areas of fishery management and pollution controls.
What are your priorities?
We’re going to build a constituency of people who believe in sustaining our ocean fisheries — and that’s an important overall goal. All we can do right now is slow down the pace of destruction of the ocean, but once we build the constituency — and the Internet is a huge help with that — we can start making the changes that will keep the ocean alive forever.
If you were trying to build an international constituency for the ocean, you would wish for something like the World Wide Web. You’d wish for an international mass medium that people could use to coordinate campaign work across three continents. So we have to take advantage of this aggressively if we’re going to achieve our goals. One of the ways we’re going to do that is to separate fund-raising tasks from community-building tasks. We’re encouraging people to take action on behalf of the ocean first, before we ask them for money, by asking them to send letters and petitions, to take photos of damaged reefs and other habitat problems and post them to our Web site.
You were basically retired. What drew you to Oceana?
What is exciting about this issue and what got me to come here is that this is the most serious environmental problem that the world faces for which there is a politically achievable solution.
What drew me to it is that we can win this fight — we know what to do and we can win it. With so many environmental problems, it’s hard to know what to do, or the tasks of doing it require changing too many people’s habits.
Fighting global climate change, for example, requires altering our approach to carbon-based transportation and energy generation, which means regulating the conduct of billions of people and years of established practices, while this involves simply regulating the conduct of industrial fishing companies so that they act in a more responsible way. It’s not like changing the economies of the whole world.
Are there similarities between building an Internet enterprise and an environmental campaign?
The rules for success in running a rapidly growing enterprise are very similar. You have to remember that everyone is learning to do their jobs for the first time, so people need to be encouraged not to constantly make assumptions about what one or the other is doing. I tell them to please define your job broadly. You need to consult broadly but make decisions. Don’t wait to make decisions because there’s no organized track record.
Finally, we need to recruit people who are incredibly experienced, smart, and energetic. And if you can’t find those who are experienced, then you just need to recruit smart and energetic — in three years, the smart people will be smart and experienced.
There’s a big difference in the scale of Oceana’s two chief campaigns right now. How do they fit together?
We are all about setting achievable goals. In thinking about cruise-ship pollution, we wanted to find a problem where we could set a three-year goal and achieve it. It’s not as big as preventing run-off from big agricultural projects, but that’s much more difficult to achieve, and the cruise-ship pollution problem is one where the technology for advanced treatment is available, and the industry needs to take heed.
And we’re not picking a fight with a patsy. We’re battling Royal Carribean Cruise lines, and we’re battling industrial fishing. We’re going to become known as an organization that doesn’t take part in campaigns that everyone agrees with, but one that people who love the ocean can be proud of.
In my experience, unless there’s an opponent, you’re not making a change. The status quo benefits somebody, but we’re not at all happy with the status quo in regards to the ocean.
ABOUT ANDREW SHARPLESS, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF OCEANA
Education: Earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, a law degree from Harvard Law School, and a master of business administration from the London School of Economics.
Previous experience: Executive vice president, Discovery.com; senior vice president, RealNetworks; vice president, Museum of Television and Radio; consultant, McKinsey & Company.
What he’s reading: Blue Frontier: Saving America’s Living Seas, by David Helvarg, and The Truelove, by Patrick O’Brian.
