William McKeever: Author, Film Maker, and Ocean Conservationist | Shorewords!

June 14, 2022

I think we're gunna need a bigger pod!

Emperors of the Deep Sharks – the Ocean’s Most Mysterious, Most Misunderstood and Most important Ocean Guardians.  William McKeever attended a shark tournament and it started him on a multi-year campaign to learn about sharks and change our perceptions of these amazing creatures from cold-blooded killers to critical ocean habitat managers.  Emperors of the Deep Sharks – the Ocean’s Most Mysterious, Most Misunderstood and Most important Ocean Guardians, and a feature-length film are two outcomes of this campaign.  In this podcast, William discusses many of the stressors on sharks, including commercial and recreational fishing, sports tournaments, and finning; the many economic benefits from live sharks and compares those to the limited values of dead sharks; and many of management options that may protect sharks and maintain their integral role in the ocean ecosystem.  William is working on another book, so this is not the last we’ll hear from him.

Show Transcription
This transcription was generated by a computer. Please excuse any errors.
Lesley Ewing

Hello. I’m Lesley Ewing, host of Shorewords!. This podcast combines two of my favorite things – the ocean and books. I learned to swim before I could walk and looked forward each summer to my family’s vacation at Ocean City, Maryland. As a student I was interested in science and engineering and became an environmental engineer before learning that there was something called coastal engineering. Both my 1 st and 2 nd mid-life crises resulted in me going back to school – first for a Masters of Engineering at UC Berkeley and later for a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. The first crisis also moved me from DC to the SF Bay. The second crisis reminded me how much I liked to read. Getting a Ph.D. while working a 40+-hour/week job meant that my only reading was work reports, text books and technical articles. They were all important and interesting books, but as soon as school ended, I replaced my academic text books with broader literature and realized that the coast was often a character in the fiction and non-fiction that I read. I am still fascinated by every visit to the ocean and remain in awe of what others write about the coast.