Alyssa Irizarry: As the Senior Vice President at Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Programs, Alyssa Irizarry is engaging young people in ocean conservation and advocacy through the arts.

• Position: FIVE QUESTIONS FOR ...

Last year, Bow Seat presented the Healthy Whale, Healthy Ocean Challenge in partnership with CLF. Students of all ages from across New England created art, poetry, and film to raise awareness of the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.

1 Where did your love for the ocean start?

Two places shaped who I am: Long Beach Island, New Jersey, and Hilton Head Island, South Carolina--barrier islands that I visited every summer throughout my childhood. The expansive Atlantic, and particularly the intertidal, was a site of endless discovery. I'm grateful that my parents allowed and encouraged unstructured exploration of these beautiful places; curiosity and wonder were, and remain, the foundation for my connection to this watery world. Love for the ocean, as I understand it now, is a feeling of deep gratitude and belonging.

2 Tell us about the intersection of art and advocacy.

Art changes people, and people change the world.

By creating spaces that invite reflection, inquiry, and imagination, environmental art serves as a powerful conduit for advocacy. Artists provide new ways to understand our changing world. They stimulate our minds by shifting the way we see the world and open our hearts to emotional or empathetic experiences. Their work may act as a means of truth-sharing--shining a light on destruction, revealing systems and structures of power, reflecting our role in the process of ecological breakdown or recovery. Artists make visible, audible, or felt our interconnection with nature and offer possibilities for a better path forward in our collective future.

3 What role can and do youth play in protecting our oceans?

We all have a role to play, and the responsibility, to protect the ocean. But young people increasingly understand that adults did not do enough in the last 30 years to avoid the planetary emergency we are now facing.

Nearly half of the world's population is under the age of 25, and they are a force to be reckoned with, as we've witnessed through the youth-led climate mobilization in the past two years. Young people look at the state of the oceans-plastic-choked shorelines, graveyards of coral, oil-soaked seabirds, island nations disappearing under rising seas--and they know something is fundamentally wrong. They recognize that the impacts of a changed climate, a warmed and acidified ocean, will be the defining feature of the world they inherit and inhabit.

But they're resisting, disrupting, and rejecting the narrative...