(guitar music) - Ken, thanks for having us today.

- Great to have you, welcome!

- I can't help but see this piece of artwork behind you, and I think it's probably a good place to start.

- [Ken] So Chris Jordan is this amazing artist who uses multiple small bits to tell big environmental stories and does it through art.

So he's created a hokusai wave here out of 2.4 million pieces of plastic.

And that's the number of pieces of plastic that are going into the ocean worldwide every hour.

- It reminds me of some of the beaches back home in Hawaii.

- Which is a sad story!

It's one of the most beautiful places but yet our pollution reaches everywhere.

- [Chef Ed] So Kim and Jack launched a project called Plastic Free Hawaii and they're really encouraging stopping the use of single-use plastics.

- Ending single-use plastic and creating a plastic-free ocean is high on our priorities because it is such a big threat to marine life, to food webs, ecosystems.

We're trying to educate the public through art.

We of course have living animals here that are particularly affected by plastic.

Sea turtles, they will look at a plastic bag and they're eating jellies out in the ocean.

Well they don't know a plastic bag from a jelly.

So we want people to know that their decisions on single-use plastic, single-use plastic bags, straws, all the other disposables, are things that will directly affect the ocean and they can stop it and make the ocean healthier.

- I've worked so closely with the Monterey Bay Aquarium and this actually wasn't something that I was aware of.

I was really more familiar with Seafood Watch, the ratings of sustainability and seafood.

- It ties into our work with plastic because there are so many things that people do that they don't even think about that have a profound effect on the health of the ocean.

Seafood is something that people are doing all the time.

Every fish that's caught, every fish that's farmed or raised, is going to have a effect on the ocean environment so we want people to know, to start, that their choices about seafood do have an impact on marine life.

It's either taking food that animals need to eat, or it's harming other animals inadvertently, or it's creating other disruptions.

- When we were young, we'd go out for a day of fishing, we'd catch a big boatload of fish.

We'd bring it back and the best thing about it is you're eating with your family, you're sharing fish with your neighbors.

Now, sometimes we're lucky if we go out and we catch two or three fish.

I heard the California groundfish fishery was rated red, avoid, a year or two ago.

And now, many of the species are back on the green list because of effective management.

- That's exactly it and it was California and the entire west coast.

Fishermen were struggling, they couldn't be expecting their kids or grandkids to be fishing for a living the way they had enjoyed.

Management came in and looked at the entire ecosystem, said these fish are part of a bigger system, we need to protect the system and the species.

They put those practices in place.

The fishermen bought into it because they saw the problem themselves and now, it went from a federal disaster in the 1990s, to the point that it's now on the seafood watch green list.

It shows that when people step up and do the right thing, the life in the ocean can respond and we can have a healthy ecosystem and seafood for our plate.

(water splashing)