Art & Culture

OCEANIC SOCIETY ARTIST-IN-NATURE RESIDENCY! BALI TO KOMODO

Pam Longobardi

2014 marked the start of a new adventure: I became the official Artist-In-Naure with Oceanic Society! Founded in 1969, Oceanic Society is the oldest ocean conservation non-profit in America, focused on using the experience of travel in nature as a tool to deepen the connections between people and the natural world. Their progressive leadership has introduced two initiatives in 2014: to address plastic pollution and to promote art as a conservation tool. My first trip as Artist-In-Residence was co-leading the 10-day Bali to Komodo expedition on the live-aboard schooner Sea Safari VII with naturalist and Oceanic’s Director of International Travel and Sustainability Wayne Sentman. My role as ‘Plastic Interpreter’ meant that, given the plastic plague in Indonesia, like most island nations, my work was cut out for me.

Our 10 day voyage took us to remote large and tiny islands sprinkled between Bali and Komodo:

Lombok, Moyo, Gili, Banta, Satonda. We usually spent 5-6 hours in the water each day, snorkeling through the underwater marvels that are Indonesia. The fellow voyagers were spying and photographing fish and sea creatures for Wayne to identify with his encyclopedic knowledge of Indonesian flora and fauna, and I took 1000s of photos of the teeming life of the coralline ecosystem.

Coral Garden

Coral gardens of indescribable beauty in multitudinous forms and textures, myriad fish in ten thousand hues, cuttlefish, sea snakes, nudibranchs, crawling oddities like the feather sea star (looking like a blood-red feather duster on spider legs), echinoderms, “sea stomachs” (actually tunicates) and more! A manta ray. A few small sharks, whose general absence was troubling: where there should have been many sharks, they were scarce, victims of nefarious shark finning. And areas where luxurious coral gardens had been blasted into rubble field thanks to the insanity of dynamite fishing.

But even amid the destruction, there are signs of hope: new coral heads budding out of the rubble with the attendant sea life they attract. I am thankful for the ingenuity and creativity of nature, whose regenerative force builds anew in a field of destruction~

new coral grow amid the destruction of dynamite fishing

I spent my time diving down to remove sunken plastic (not all plastic floats) and cut fishing line and nets free from coral. Some plastic had been underwater so long it had been colonized and encrusted with life, pieces that had so many lives attached I left them in situ. Soon, many of the fellow voyagers were collecting underwater plastic along with me.

Sea stomach tunicate and sunken plastic

Fellow voyager Jim finds a superhero balloon

80% of ocean plastic originates on land, and has its impacts on wildlife there as well: this mother and baby macaque on Lombok are both chewing on plastic, the mother scavenging food that looked like carrots packaged in plastic while the baby makes a plaything and teething device out of a plastic bottle.

Mother and baby macaque on Lombok eating plastic. Photo by Wayne Sentman

Komodo dragon ‘smelling’ with their eerie white forked tongues

A highlight of the trip was Komodo Island, the only place in the world home to the living dinosaurs, the Komodo dragon. Truly fearsome, venomous, these very large and powerful predators will cannabalize their own young, and lay in wait, camoflauged in the dust, for the unaware deer -or human -to stumble on them. Fangs rip flesh and inject venom, but the smart reptiles save their energy and wait for death by infection to overcome their victims. We saw dozens upon dozens of the creatures , a rare day indeed that included witnessing a mating attempt, a gathering of adults and young at a water hole, and a scrabble over the remnant ribcage of the morning’s deer kill. Guides and visitors watchfully hike through the dragons’ land: there are no cages, barriers or protection, and attacks do occur – last year 3 guides had been bitten as dragons entered their offices and attacked. In the presence of these creatures, in all their ancient-ness, their otherness, I experienced spine-tingling awe.

Komodo dragon bolus with plastic RIO water

And then I noticed a bright blue piece of plastic enmeshed in a compressed, elongated ball of matter. I realized it was a 5 gallon plastic bottle cap of the kind that all the cruise ships carry as their fresh water stores. It had been eaten, swallowed and regurgitated by a dragon in a ‘bolus’, just as albatross, owls and other birds do to get rid of undigestible matter they have eaten.

Shockingly, even the komodo dragons are eating and swallowing plastic, creatures whose evolutionary path leads as far back as the fossil fuel that the plastic is made from.

I made many beach landings, usually by swimming from the Sea Safari, to survey and clean the remote island beaches. Some of them were completely inundated like Gili Lawa Laut Island. I gathered as much as I could swim with and bundled it all together or utilized the large plastic mesh produce bags that appeared everywhere, even underwater, where they readily break up into micro-plastic.

My most heartwarming moment came when I was joined by a half dozen beautiful children as I cleaned their island of Moyo . They saw what I was doing and enthusiastically joined me. It didn’t matter that we spoke not a word of each other’s languages. But Amir, our Balinese naturalist guide, was able to give them a spontaneous environmental lesson about plastic’s dangers for the sea. Amir has been acting as a plastic warrior for years, and our being together on this expedition was providential. He is now the newest member of the Drifters Project team.

Gili Lawa Laut Island beach inundated with plastic

Indonesia is a place of untold physical beauty alongside the abundant problems of a developing country. But there is action underway: a plastic bag ban on Bali is well on its way to becoming a reality, started by a group of local and international children in Denpasar. You can help them by signing their petition here. I am sending Amir 100 stainless steel straws to begin the conversation with Sea Safari and other tour companies to replace the plastic straws onboard ships. And Oceanic Society is

looking to incorporate a ‘Plastic Free Travel Kit’ as a perk for their expedition participants. Little by little, my vision of plastic free islands can Gili Lawa Laut Island beach inundated with plastic become reality. Gili Lawa Laut Island beach inundated with plastic.

Please visit: driftersproject.net

Art & Culture

Protected: Sailing Toward a Sustainable Blue Future: An Interview with Emilie McGlone, Director of Peace Boat US

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Art & Culture

Protected: Sounds of the Ocean: A Journey from Inspiration to Impact

Art & Culture

No Blue, No Green: How Droga5 São Paulo Is Printing the Case for Brazil’s Ocean

Phase one of the campaign, launched at Rio Ocean Week in October 2025, stripped the blue and green from the Brazilian flag entirely. The absence was the argument.

Blue plus yellow creates green. Remove the blue, and the green disappears. That is the color-theory argument at the core of a Brazilian creative campaign that has spent the past six months making an unusually elegant case for marine protection, using screen printing, mineral pigments, and a very deliberate reimagining of the national flag.

The campaign is called No Blue, No Green. It was created by Droga5 São Paulo, the Brazilian office of the global creative agency, for SOS Oceano, a Brazilian coalition of NGOs working to expand the country’s marine protected areas. Phase one launched at Rio Ocean Week in October 2025, when the agency stripped the blue and green from the Brazilian flag and let the absence do the work. Phase two, which rolled out in early April 2026, moves from subtraction to craft: six original screen-printed artworks, produced in collaboration with Black Madre Studio and Joules & Joules Laboratory, each one pairing a marine species with its terrestrial counterpart inside the yellow diamond of the Brazilian flag.

A Campaign Built Through Craft

Screen printing was chosen for its chromatic precision and layered ink application, which together allow the prints to honor the tradition of Brazilian naturalist illustration while landing the campaign’s political message with clarity. More unusually, the pigments themselves are natural mineral-based, developed over months of research with Joules & Joules Laboratory to achieve accurate hues without any synthetic solvents. A campaign about reducing marine pollution, produced with no petrochemical inputs, is a different proposition from one that merely names the problem.

Each of the six prints draws a visual equivalence between marine and terrestrial ecosystems: a humpback whale alongside Amazonian flora, coral structures set against forest canopy, reef fish interlaced with rainforest birds. The yellow diamond of the flag remains the framing device in every piece, a visual constant that gives the series its unity and grounds the argument in national identity rather than abstract environmental appeal.

The Coalition Behind the Campaign

SOS Oceano is less a single organization than an alliance. Its seven member groups include Sea Shepherd Brazil, Rede Pró-UC, Instituto Baleia Jubarte, Divers for Sharks, the Seaspiracy Foundation, Núcleo de Educação e Monitoramento Ambiental (NEMA), and Projeto Golfinho Rotador, with support from the Blue Marine Foundation. Their shared advocacy focuses on expanding Brazil’s marine protected areas and aligning the country’s policy with UN Sustainable Development Goal 14, Life Below Water, alongside the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

For context on the stakes: Brazil’s coastline runs more than 7,400 kilometers, but the country’s coastal marine protections have faced sustained pressure from development, industrial fishing interests, and shifting political winds over recent years. Public awareness of ocean conservation in Brazil, despite the scale of its maritime territory, remains significantly lower than awareness of Amazon deforestation. Campaigns like No Blue, No Green are one of the ways the coalition is trying to shift that imbalance.

The Creative Reasoning

Diego Limberti, Chief Design Officer at Droga5 São Paulo, described the throughline across both phases:

“The beginning of this project showed that design can condense a complex environmental truth into a single, felt symbol. In this phase, the elements of the flag remain part of the campaign’s visual process, but they are now reinterpreted to emphasize the animals that live in marine parks and their relationship with the forest. One biome depends on the other, and this is highlighted by the colors of Brazil’s greatest symbol.”

André Maciel, Creative Director at Black Madre Studio, framed the underlying logic more plainly:

“The project is rooted in color theory. When we say without blue there is no green, we’re working with the fundamental logic of primary and secondary colors: blue and yellow create green.”

The Science Behind the Metaphor

The campaign’s central claim, that terrestrial life depends on a functional ocean, is not rhetorical flourish. The ocean absorbs approximately 30 percent of human-generated carbon dioxide emissions each year and produces somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere, figures tracked consistently by NOAA and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission. Marine ecosystems regulate global temperature, drive the water cycle that sustains terrestrial rainfall, and hold the majority of the planet’s biological carbon stocks. Degrade the ocean as a functioning system, and the conditions that allow forests, agriculture, and human settlement to exist begin to degrade with it.

Put more directly: the color metaphor at the heart of the campaign is, in ecological terms, almost literal.

Where to See the Work

The six original prints are on view at Galeria Plano in Barra Funda, São Paulo, and the campaign is running nationally across billboards, newspapers, and magazines. A short film documenting the project, produced with Black Madre Studio and sound design by Bumblebeat, is available below.

A complete project gallery, with high-resolution views of each print and the full list of production credits, is hosted on Black Madre Studio’s Behance page.

Why the Work Matters Beyond Brazil

There is a broader argument embedded in the campaign that is worth naming. Environmental advocacy often struggles because the science feels abstract and the rhetoric feels tired. No Blue, No Green sidesteps both traps by letting the image carry the argument and following through with craft that matches. The prints can be looked at as design, read as advocacy, and held as a physical object, each of those modes reinforcing the others.

For the coalition behind SOS Oceano, which still has to do the slower and harder work of policy change, that kind of layered visibility is the real prize. A campaign that gets attention in design publications and award shows can travel into classrooms, government offices, and international press in ways that a conventional advocacy message rarely does. The coalition structure itself, with multiple organizations working under a shared visual identity, also points to something replicable: civil society groups pooling their advocacy through unified creative strategy rather than competing for the same attention.

The yellow diamond, reframed as a site of ecological argument, can carry new content indefinitely. That is a useful thing for a coalition still in it for the long haul.

Learn more:

SOS Oceano coalition members: Sea Shepherd Brazil, Instituto Baleia Jubarte, Divers for Sharks, Projeto Golfinho Rotador, and others
Campaign film: vimeo.com/1178605134
Full project on Behance: behance.net/gallery/247332271/SOS-Oceano-No-blue-no-green
Exhibition: Plano Estúdio, Barra Funda, São Paulo (on view now)