Oceana, the world’s largest international advocacy organization focused on ocean conservation, held its annual SeaChange Summer Party on Saturday.
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The Laguna Beach party, hosted this year by Ted Danson, raised $1.5 million for campaigns to protect and restore the oceans in California and around the world. “We’ve been doing it for 17 years, and we’ve raised over $20 million just from that area alone,” Danson told THR .
“They are such a dedicated, supportive, generous audience down there, it’s one of our favorite events,” the actor said, adding that the organization is “usually able to get Hollywood to come down” for the fundraiser.
This year’s event, which honored longtime supporter and SeaChange co-founder Valarie Van Cleave, included an address from the organization’s new CEO Jim Simon. Singer Lisa Loeb also performed a private concert for attendees. The party had a slew of celebrity guests alongside Danson, including Diane Lane, Oscar Nuñez, Dennis Haysbert, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Sam Trammell and more.
Throughout the event, Oceana highlighted more than 25 victories over the past year including convincing Amazon to reduce single-use plastic in North America, new habitat protections in several countries, and actions in California to reduce whale and sea turtle entanglements in commercial fishing gear.
Danson, a board member of Oceana, can easily recall the organization’s many wins. “Plastics is just this huge problem wherever you go, including southern California,” he explained, mentioning that the organization worked with Amazon to reduce single-use plastic. “They are going to be stopping the use of plastic pillows by the end of 2024,” he added.
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“When it comes to plastics, we work with partners all the time to get these things done,” Danson said. “We’re definitely leading the charge,” he continued, adding that “there are many other organizations that have been working on this with us.”
The actor emphasized how detrimental plastics are. “It’s a huge problem,” he said. “Plastics are projected to triple by midcentury.”
He also pointed out that it’s not just about being better at recycling. “That’s a great marketing slogan for the plastic industry, but it doesn’t work. It never has,” Danson said. “I think something like 8 percent of all the plastic created has been recycled, and a lot of the time that’s just down-cycling, so that bag is now a plastic lawn chair because it’s recycled, but then that chair becomes an issue at some point.”
In between his time with Oceana and Danson’s many other professional gigs, he’s been working on a Cheers podcast with his former co-star Woody Harrelson. “I feel like it’s this privilege to sit down with somebody for an hour and a half and have a genuine, relaxed, deep-as-you-can-go conversation, and learn how that person became that person.”
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