• TED DANSON

The tall straight-talker has come a long way since “Cheers” and “3 Men and a Baby” – two roles that Danson’s real-life associates say belie his deeper interests and aspirations: to help protect the world’s waters.

Today the act

Photo: Oceana

Ted Danson is focused on protecting the world’s waters.

or is regarded as one of Hollywood’s most committed and hard-hitting environmentalists. He is essentially the face of, and a co-founder and board member, for Oceana, the 7-year-old, 300,000-member nonprofit that has pressed the fishing industry to preserve 1.2 million square miles of ocean from bottom trawling (most recently in the Bering Sea); has pushed for major grocery chains to label fish that have particularly dangerous mercury levels (Kroger and Harris Teeter recently agreed to post warnings); and has been instrumental this spring in pushing the U.S. Congress to write the Shark Conservation Act of 2008, which would close the loopholes in the already-extant Shark Finning Prohibition Ban by stipulating that all vessels, not just fishing boats, follow the prohibition guidelines.

Danson started American Oceans Campaign in the 1980’s – which merged with Oceana in 2003 – and also is currently helping lead the charge to limit or eliminate ocean sonar testing used by the U.S. Navy.
Recently, the actor/activist spoke about his oceanic concerns a National Press Club gathering and also participated in major Earth Day celebrations, speaking at the PSEG Global Green Expo at Liberty State Park in Jersey City in late April.

As Danson told the Jersey Journal last month, “Here’s where the science is: 30 percent of the world’s fisheries are in collapse, and if you drop below a certain percentage, the fish aren’t guaranteed to come back. … Nine out of the 10 fish around when I was a kid are gone, such as the tuna and the marlin. If we continue these fishing practices, we literally could fish out our oceans and not have a fishery left.”

Danson pointed out that one-third of fish that are caught worldwide are either dumped or destroyed (approximately 16 billion pounds). And in Vanity Fair’s current “Green Issue”, which spotlights Oceana, among other organizations, the group indicates that 90 percent of the ocean’s big predator fish are “gone,” while 30 more marine species are endangered.

“We need government, big business, everybody in there to pitch in,” Danson said. “It may seem overwhelming to deal with all these issues, from global warming to lack of water, which is going to become a big issue soon. But if you look at the pyramids, it looked impossible, too. …But they did it one stone at a time, and that’s the mentality we need to take. But we need to wake up now.”

Oceana shared some other Danson insights with GreenRightNow. His favorite ocean creature, for instance?

“Dolphins, porpoises, are my favorite thing to watch. One of my favorite memories is of the first vacation that my wife, Mary Steenburgen, and I took together, to Lanai, Hawaii. There were spinner dolphins…we saw them out in the bay. So we snorkeled out there and we kind of held hands - neither one of us is a great swimmer, so we were holding hands as we went. We could hear the chirping way before we could see anything and then all of a sudden, about thirty yards out, we were surrounded by something like fifty spinner dolphins. They were just circling down below us, leaping up. We were holding each other’s hands and I think we were crying, it was just so magical.”

Through Oceana, Danson also explained what prompted him to start the American Oceans Campaign back in the 1980’s:

“I met Bob Sulnick, who was working for No Oil Inc. to keep Occidental Petroleum from digging up Will Rogers State Park and putting in about sixty oil wells. So we joined forces. After we succeeded, we decided we enjoyed each other’s company and thought about what more we could do. Also, at that time, I was getting paid lots of money for Cheers and I began to be concerned about how to be responsible about that kind of money, and almost as an experiment I decided to put all of my time, energy and money into one thing - AOC.”

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