It’s 1933 and the USA is in the midst of the Great Depression, the most severe economic downturn ever experienced by the industrialised western world.
Among the programmes launched by US president Franklin D Roosevelt to relieve unemployment is the Civilian Conservation Corps, which provides conservation work for young men. More than 80 years later, it inspired a pioneering project in Europe, as Wietse van der Werf reveals in the latest episode of Wild Lives.
Wietse, who has just been named on the 2026 TIME100 Climate list, founded the Sea Ranger Service in 2016. It’s a social enterprise with the dual aim of helping to protect our oceans and addressing youth unemployment in coastal areas – and it was all inspired by Franklin D Roosevelt.
“I had the chance from the age of 19 to go to Antarctica as a ship’s carpenter and a ship’s engineer,” explains Wietse in the podcast. “And as beautiful as it is, even there, furthest removed from anything, there’s pollution, there was illegal fishing. Plus every year we travelled south towards the South Pole, we would see the ice that had broken off earlier in the season. Climate change was literally unfolding in front of our own eyes.
“Then also in many of the ports where our ship would go, we kept thinking we need more people for ocean protection,” he continues. “But then youth unemployment is very high in these coastal areas. And I kept thinking, ‘You have these two problems. Surely they could act as each other’s solution if you could train and employ those young people to better protect the ocean.’”
The way in which this could be put into practice came to Wietse while on holiday in the USA. “I was in a national park and we get into this visitor area,” he says. “Somewhere in the corner is an exhibition board and it catches my eye. It talked about President Roosevelt who, during the Great Depression, started this programme to get young men from the inner cities to restore nature. It was called the Civilian Conservation Corps.
“And that became the blueprint. If they could do this almost 100 years ago – 800 of the national parks in the US today were restored by these young men – could we then replicate this to a modern-day maritime version? And that’s where the Sea Ranger Service grew from.”
Also featured in this episode of Wild Lives is Molly King, who made it through the arduous Sea Ranger bootcamp to become one of the UK’s first ever Sea Rangers. She tells us about her experience of conducting marine bird surveys in the Celtic Sea, as well a precarious voyage to the Netherlands to monitor shipwrecks.
You can hear the full conversation with Wietse and Molly in the latest episode of Wild Lives – listen below or search for Wild Lives wherever you get your podcasts.
Top image: A team of young crew members from the Sea Ranger Service. Credit: Sea Ranger Service
