Not many people see how they can help the planet in less than nine months! Brian Meux and the team of marine biologists and volunteer divers at Santa Monica Bay Keepers are helping the Planet and restoring our giant kelp forests. Taking an urchin barren back to a healthy kelp forest is amazing and the work that SMBK does is fantastic!
For my fourth grade science classes, we are using their classroom study of Island of the Blue Dolphins as an entry point to understanding food chains in our area. In the book, Karana has interactions with elephant seals, sea otters and devilfish.
Each student discovered cool facts from Sea Otter Bingo and made their own Sea Otter as origami. As fourth graders, they found the noises of the elephant seal a bit funny but interesting. They were amazed at the size of the creatures and their large six inch teeth; the video we saw of them fighting was a bit scary! The devilfish (octopus) amazed us and we learned about the giant Humboldt Squid as well.
Brian Meux from Santa Monica Bay Keepers came to explain the restoration of the Giant Kelp Forests here in Southern California. Divers move thousands of sea urchins and within five to twelve months in some areas in Palos Verdes and Escondido Beach in Malibu the health of the ecosystem and the Giant Kelp are restored.
When the predators of the urchins (mainly the sea otter who were hunted to near extinction in the last century which is also discussed in the novel) were removed, the entire food chain is unbalanced and can lead to the destruction of the kelp, which is a habitat for 800 species. This real life food chain helped us to understand how fragile our ecosystems are and how we need to take care of them.
Santa Monica Bay Keepers and the volunteer divers in this program are doing great service to the ocean and all of us by helping to reestablish a healthy community under the sea. If you are a certified diver, you can join in and help with this project. Learn more at Santa Monica Bay Keepers and help restore the giant kelp or join in one of their other amazing projects!
Lisa Ellen Niver is an award-winning travel expert who has explored 102 countries and six continents. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she worked on cruise ships for seven years and backpacked for three years in Asia. She is the founder of the website WeSaidGoTravel which is read in 235 countries and was named #3 on Rise Global’s top 1,000 Travel Blogs. Niver is a speaker at the Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Dallas Travel and Adventure Shows for 2023. Her podcast, “Make Your Own Map,” has been watched in more than 11 countries on 4 continents. Niver is represented by Chip MacGregor of MacGregor Literary, Inc. Look for her memoir in Fall 2023 from Post Hill Press/Simon and Schuster.
You can find Lisa Niver talking travel on broadcast television at KTLA TV Los Angeles, Satellite Media Tours, The Jet Set TV and Orbitz travel webisodes as well as her YouTube channel, where her WeSaidGoTravel videos have nearly 2 million views.
With more than 150,000 followers across social media, she has hosted Facebook Live for USA Today 10best, is verified on Twitter and listed on IMDb, and is the Social Media Manager for the Los Angeles Press Club.
As a journalist, Niver has interviewed Deepak Chopra, Olympic medalists, and numerous bestselling authors and been invited to both the Oscars and the United Nations. She has been a judge for the Gracie Awards for the Alliance of Women in Media, and has run 15 travel competitions on her website, publishing over 2,500 writers and photographers from 75 countries.
For her print and digital stories as well as her television segments, she has been awarded three Southern California Journalism Awards and two National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards and been a finalist twenty times.
Niver has published more than 2000 articles, in more than three dozen magazines and journals
including National Geographic, Wired, Teen Vogue, HuffPost Personal, POPSUGAR, Ms. Magazine, Luxury Magazine, Smithsonian, Sierra Club, Saturday Evening Post, AARP, AAA Explorer Magazine, American Airways, Delta Sky, enRoute (Air Canada), Hemispheres, Jewish Journal, Myanmar Times, BuzzFeed, Robb Report, Scuba Diver Life, Ski Utah, Trivago, Undomesticated, USA Today, TODAY, Wharton Magazine, and Yahoo.
https://bit.ly/m/lisaniver
Awards
National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards
2021 Winner: Book Critic: Ms. Magazine “Untamed: Brave Means Living From the Inside Out”
2019 Winner: Soft News Feature for Film/TV: KTLA TV “Oscars Countdown to Gold with Lisa Niver”
2019 Finalist for: Soft News, Business/Music/Tech/Art
Southern California Journalism Awards
2022 Finalist: Book Criticism
2021 Winner: Technology Reporting
2021 Finalist: Book Criticism
2020 Winner: Print Magazine Feature: Hemispheres Magazine, “Painter by the Numbers, Rembrandt”
2020 Finalist: Online Journalist of the Year, Activism Journalism, Educational Reporting, Broadcast Lifestyle Feature
2019 Finalist: Broadcast Television Lifestyle Segment for “Ogden Ski Getaway”
2018 Finalist: Science/Technology Reporting, Travel Reporting, Personality Profile
2017 Winner: Print Column “A Journey to Freedom over Three Passovers”
Social Media Presence
YouTube Channel: We Said Go Travel (1.7 million views)
Short form video:TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, YouTube Shorts
Twitter: lisaniver (90,000 followers)
Instagram: lisaniver (24,000 followers)
Pinterest: We Said Go Travel (20,000 followers and over 70,000 monthly views)
Facebook: lisa.niver (5,000 followers); We Said Go Travel (3,000 followers)
LinkedIn: lisaellenniver (9000 contacts)
Article first published as You Can Restore the Ocean! on Technorati.
When the predators of the urchins (mainly the sea otter who were hunted to near extinction in the last century which is also discussed in the novel) were removed, the entire food chain is unbalanced and can lead to the destruction of the kelp, which is a habitat for 800 species. This real life food chain helped us to understand how fragile our ecosystems are and how we need to take care of them. 
