Activist - Benton Schroeder

In this series, we highlight activists, innovators, and leaders who used their voices and actions to create real change, reminding us that you are never too young to make a difference. At its core, this series is about showing that change doesn’t have to start big. Sometimes, it starts with one idea, one passion, and the courage to act on it. Today’s guest is someone who truly embodies what it means to turn passion into action. That is why I’m so excited to welcome Benton Schroeder.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hi everyone, and welcome back to another episode of our Change Starts Small series on Positive World Positive People. In this series, we highlight activists, innovators, and leaders who are using their voices and their actions to create real change today, reminding us that you are never too young or too old to make a difference in this world. At its core, this series is showing that change doesn't have to start big. Sometimes it starts with one idea, one passion, and the courage to act on it. So today we're gonna venture into that world a little bit deeper. But before we begin, I want to introduce myself or reintroduce myself to the listeners. My name is Sadie Sunaborn Malachy, and I'm your host today. I'm a 16-year-old based in Southern California, and I'm so grateful that you're here joining me for today's conversation. Whether you're new or returning, welcome. And I'm really glad that you are taking the time out of your day to just be here. Today's guest is someone who truly embodies what it means to turn passion into action. I'm so excited to welcome Benton Schroeder, a 13-year-old advocate who is using his voice and his bike to raise awareness about ocean restoration. Bennin is currently training for a cycle that is 300 kilometers long from Lisbon to Algarve to advocate for seaweed farming as a way to restore the ocean floor. His work is part of One Ocean's Planet Hero Kids, and he is raising funds for Hope Zones, an initiative working to rebuild marine ecosystems through regenerative seaweed farms in Portugal. Without further ado, Benton, I am so thankful that you're here today and welcome to Change Start Small on Pow Wow Popey. Thank you. And let's begin at the beginning. What initially inspired you to care about the ocean so deeply, and what made you want to take action to protect it?

SPEAKER_00 1:47

I think I've always loved the ocean. I've seen how important it is. Um, I've helped release turtles, learn from, for example, people like lobstermen or oyster farmers or something. So for me, protecting the ocean was something that I always wanted to do, never knew how to start. But now I really found a way to combine sports and the ocean for something for the ocean, kind of.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

That's wonderful. And I know that we're gonna go deeper into your cycling and all of that. But when did you start cycling and taking it up as such a intense sport?

SPEAKER_00 2:24

It's actually very funny. I only started about a bit more than a year ago. Wow. So I was living in Mallorca, Spain for a year. So I'm originally came, I was born in Germany, and I lived in Mallorca for a year, and that's where I started cycling. Started biking there, then I started joining a local team, which I still sound I go back to still when I'm there. That's awesome. And then I really started loving it. So then when I joined Hero Kids and we were told to start finding, you know, or we just start finding the projects that we or whatever we want to protect, and then what we want to do, and then we were saying, okay, how do we want to protect it? I said, okay, I want to use sports to protect it. And then we had the idea, why don't we cycle down the Portuguese coast? Because it's like if there's a famous route, which I don't know if we're doing that exact route, but there's a famous route Lisbon, even higher than Lisbon, I think, to the Algarve. And I think that's where it just evolved.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

That's incredible. And you not even starting cycling a year ago is crazy to think about, especially now that you're doing a 300-kilometer journey, which is incredible in itself. And how did you get involved with Hero Kids? Because I know you mentioned that as well, and how long ago was that?

SPEAKER_00 3:45

I think I started with One Ocean Planet. So I first met One Ocean Planet last October. So October 2025 or September, October, uh, September 2025, not very long ago. After Lily founded Hero Kids, I had the chance to join as the first cohort. And then that just evolved into now my project.

SPEAKER_01 4:11

That's incredible. And I can't believe all of this has happened in such a short amount of time, which really just emphasizes to everybody listening that things can come about in a short period of time if you really set your mind to it. And we'll go deeper into that later. But as we mentioned a little bit earlier, you're about to take on a 300-kilometer cycle journey, which is incredible and lengthy and super challenging mentally, physically, and everything in between. So can you tell everybody listening and me what motivated you to take on something this big and what the journey means to you personally?

SPEAKER_00 4:48

I think I wanted to do something big enough that people would notice. So that's the 300 kilometers. And then of course, cycling I love as a sport. I do it very often, and I just love going by myself, like not for something. And then I thought, why not use cycling to help the ocean? And it's I mean, my project is my way of kind of turning passion into action and showing that even, you know, everyone has something that they can use to protect the ocean. Some people have skills in arts, some people have skills in sports, whatever it be, or music, whatever. You can only use one way to protect the ocean.

SPEAKER_01 5:28

Exactly, which is such a big concept on this series because not everybody's gonna have the same interests. I am not a cycler. That is something that I will not ever embrace for 300 kilometers alone. That is crazy to me. However, there are other things in my life that I could do and make a true impact from that I care about, which is something that I think every listener can resonate with because there's gonna be something, whether, as you said, it's drawing or a sport or maybe just a hobby or reading or whatnot, you can turn it into a passion project to make real change in this world, which is something that we truly need in this time when, as we're gonna get into more, there's a lot of things happening in our ecosystems due to unfortunate factors in our society. But if we all take our little passions and kind of drive them into the future, real change can come about. So, on the note of climate change and things that involve the ocean, a lot of people might not know about bottom trawling or how damaging it is to the ocean floor. Can you explain what it actually is and why it's such a serious issue for the ocean ecosystem?

SPEAKER_00 6:40

That's true. That's actually a thing that I was thinking about during my cycle. So what's coming up is because a lot of people, as you said, don't know about bottom trawling and what it is, it's a fishing practice. Actually, a very disastrous one, in which heavy metal doors and nets are dragged along the seafloor, and often it's used to catch one species, but in that in that effort of catching that one species, sometimes up to ten times that amount of life is depleted, or sometimes people say three-fourths of uh the catch is thrown back dead, and no matter what the numbers, but it is proven and it is said and it's true that a huge amount or more than half of what is caught is thrown back dead. Whether that be ten times, whether that be three-fourths, it doesn't matter. It's just a highly destructive fishing practice. It I mean, it just if you're trying to catch a certain sc uh scallop trawl, you know, then they're going along there and then they can wipe out dolphins, turtles, rays, sharks, or even our coral reefs or seaweed farms or kelps. And there's all these ecosystems that take a very long time or take a long time to grow, and they're just destroyed in seconds. And also something that a lot of people might not know is that our ocean floor stores huge amounts of carbon, so CO2, and when these bottom trails go over it, they create like these dust clouds of sand, and then the sand goes down to the seafloor again, but the CO2 separates and goes into our clo into our clo into our atmosphere, contributing to climate change. I mean, climate change is already a huge problem, and then just makes it worse.

SPEAKER_01 8:22

That is insane. I didn't even know what that was before you just explained it and you articulated it so beautifully. But it seems like there's so many different factors that just are not okay for our society, whether it is the CO2, which I originally thought it only had to deal with the ocean floor and the animals within it, but now we're seeing that it's contributing to our climate change and our gas emissions in all. And also the animals that are down there, and as you said, it's more than half, which if you think about it as you emphasize, it could be three-fourths, it could be 10 times, whatever it is. It's all these different species that are now getting affected by this one act. And I'm assuming that this is happening worldwide, but have you seen people actually doing this in your society or in your area? Or how did you kind of invest in bottom trawling in the first place?

SPEAKER_00 9:16

That's actually a good question. I think I've always known something about trawling, and a one hand, you know, normal trawling with one line hanging off the boat is totally fine. But there's always been, you know, I've always known halfway about kind of these bottom trawlers. And now that we're living in Portugal, I've actually sadly not seen them. But they go along right off the coast here, and they go along and like a lot of the nights, not every night, I don't know, but a lot of the nights they're there and they're in the middle of the night, they're dragging their heavy nets along the seafloor. Wow. And I'm not sure whether it's certain, you know, I don't know who it who does it. You know, it can be lots of different countries that do it, but it's just highly disruptive. And I just thought that wasn't right.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

You are so true that it is not right. And the advocacy that you're gonna share through your cycling journey and everything you're doing with the extra hero kids in One World, it's gonna emphasize the idea that this isn't okay and that we need to change. However, you're advocating for a solution, which a lot of the times we don't always see in society. We kind of see the negative sides and see that people are saying that this thing isn't good. This thing is bad for our world, bad for our ecosystems, bad for the planet. However, we don't always see a solution to the issue, but you have one. You're advocating for seaweed farming, which what even is that? And what makes seaweed such a powerful way to help restore the ocean?

SPEAKER_00 10:53

So I mean, a lot of you might know when you go to the beach and you have seaweed on the beach, you might not like it. It might be disgusting, it might be whatever, you know. I don't like it either when I'm at the beach or in the ocean. But it's actually amazing and there's lots of different types of seaweed. Yeah. You know, and then so seaweed is amazing because it just once you put it in the water, that's why it's called a zero input crop. Once you put it in the ocean, so you lay these ropes out along the ocean floor. So actually how it does it how it grows is in labs, or this is how Hope Zones does it in labs. They grow it on the ropes, and then once it's halfway, I don't know how much grown, once it's a grown a bit on the ropes, they lay the ropes out and on the seafloor. And then I think I'm not sure exact about exactly the details, but it in some way it moves over to the ocean floor. Wow. And just once you've put that in the ocean on the ocean floor, it's called a zero input crop because you don't need any chemical fertilizers, you don't need any, you don't have to go down there and take out the weeds, whatever. You know, you put it in there and it use what it already has. It works with the ocean, doesn't work against it. It absorbs CO2 up to 30 times faster than any of our forests on land. Wow. And it includes big habitats for animals and also sometimes these baby fish, so that's why you hold um you have these juvenile, these places for juvenile fish. And what that actually is, essentially, is when you have a baby fish, that's why they go to lagoons or something where these baby fish can actually grow. Because if you just leave a baby fish in the open ocean and there's no way of protecting itself, whether that be its own camouflage functions, its size, its strength, its speed, whatever, when you're a baby, you you haven't developed your your specific way of protection that you're born with. So then whether, as I said, that be camouflage, whatever, and that's where they grow up in these habitats, and then until they can they've developed whatever their protection technique is, until they can go live out in the open ocean, or stay in these coastal habitats, depending on what type of species they are. So it's just it's an amazing way of regenerating our ocean.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

That is so wonderful to hear that seaweed, which as you said, a lot of us don't always appreciate, or going to the beach, it gets stuck in our toes and we're just annoyed by it. When in reality, it's doing so much for the ecosystem below. We don't see it, but when people like Hope Zones, which we're gonna talk about later, make it in the lab and then bring it to the ocean. As you said, it does a lot of different things. It provides protection, it takes out CO so much quicker than our trees, which is a crazy concept because when you look at seaweed and you look at a tree, you're gonna be like, oh, a tree's bigger. So it's definitely gonna suck up more CO2 when in reality.

SPEAKER_00 13:54

Seaweed is about it fits into the tree maybe what a hundred times. And a lot of people have the misconception that algae is the same as seaweed. And I'm not sure I don't I haven't really researched algae because that's not my project. But from what I know is there's there's a good deal of damaging kind of algae. So when there's it's another thing that seaweed does, it absorbs excess nutrients and chemical runoff, which happens in pollu polluted countries, whatever, you know, it absorbs these chemicals that run off from land before they can actually go into the ocean. And excess nutrients. A lot of people might think, why excess nutrients isn't nutrients good? But if there's too many nutrients, there can be an algae bloom in the ocean. And what happens is that, especially now in Portugal, when the temperatures are high, or especially down here in the south, temperatures are high, there's a lot of nutrients. This algae just grows so fast, yeah, and it just turns all the water in this slimy green water. And what happens is it covers all the corals, whatever it covers that all up and absorbs then all the oxygen, it covers all the corals with stopping animals from living there, from eating there, whatever, and killing the corals because they can't absorb their whatever they're working with, sunlight, whatever they have to keep alive. So it just that's something that I wanted to say before because sometimes a lot of people think that algae is the same as seaweed, and it's actually not. It's it depends, but there are certain algae that are very harmful or that are harmful for our ocean.

SPEAKER_01 15:29

I'm really glad that you mentioned that because many people and most of our listeners aren't gonna know all of these things, and it's really important to make those just distinguishing facts between algae and seaweed and all the different factors in our society because we don't want to mix things up or have an idea about something when in reality it's so good for our world and so productive for our ecosystem. And you mentioned that this regenerative seaweed can also absorb the carbon incredibly quickly, as we said, faster than trees on land, which helps rebuild rebuild ecosystems. But why do you think this solution, this algae, this regenerative algae solution, not algae, seaweed solution, isn't talked about more? And how can young people help bring attention to it today?

SPEAKER_00 16:17

That's actually a very good question. I think the main reason is that people don't really know a lot about it, you know? You don't see it. That's why if you see you see trees all the time, whatever, you know, it's something that you can relate to when you hear about the the do not deforest, yeah, the cutting down of these trees and how bad that is and all the habitats when you see birds in the trees and you see, oh, that trees cut down, they have no more home. That's something that you can relate to. If you think in the open ocean, you don't see the floor, you know, a very little amount of people actually go down there in certain divers, but even as a diver, you might go down there what? If you don't go often, you know, you might go there four or five times in your lifetime, you know, and then it's an experience that you have, but you're still not related to it. You don't see it every single day. And that's the first thing. And it's easy to forget because you don't see it. And young people, I mean, they can help by taking little steps, you know, and also thinking about what can't every can't every action has a consequence, whether that consequence be good or bad, a lot of people think consequences are always bad. But if you use whatever, a certain brand that has less plastics, that has that has a positive impact. And they can use if young people can help by just sharing the message, talking about it, and just raising awareness for it and turning what they care for, whether that, as I said, be arts, music, sports, into actions, whether then they're starting campaigns or channeling lists.

SPEAKER_01 17:51

That is so great to hear because as you said, we're not going to the ocean floor, or at least the ocean floor where ecosystems are thriving that often as a regular human. If you're not a diver, that's not part of your routine. But as humans, we also need to educate ourselves on things to know what's happening and knowing what's going on. Because of social media, as you said, we see a lot of the deforestation and when animals are losing their habitats on land. But the same thing is happening below our ocean waters. And if we educate ourselves on it, which is so significant for any part of society today, we can grow and we can learn. And emphasizing it now when we're young as youth is so crucial for our future because one day we're gonna be the adults in this world and we're gonna have to make the decisions about deforestation, about all of these things that are happening below the ocean waters. However, if we change our mentality and think about what we can do to positively impact our world instead of negatively impact it because we're educated on these topics, it's just gonna bring such light into everything and show that change can really happen. But it does really have to start now to get into our mentalities and to get into a habit that we want to make. So, you've also been speaking publicly in a lot of different areas, presenting your work and even recording podcasts similar to this one today. So, what has it been like sharing your message with different audiences, especially as you are a young person and two other young people? It's not always common to see young people as yourself advocating on such a crucial topic. So, what has your experience in the advocacy world publicly been?

SPEAKER_00 19:31

It's been really exciting, and I think the main thing is when you talk something about something you care about, and especially when you're in this young age, you really can reach out to people and they really listen to you. Especially other young people will listen. And it's really something that you really have to we have to do now, and it's just great because it's amazing that people really listen to you when you care about something. You're doing something for our planet and something that's really important. Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 20:05

Mm-hmm. And I think that for young children, adolescents, young adults, sometimes we don't always feel that we have the place to say something or act because we're not always going to be heard by those above us. However, as you just emphasized, a lot of the times adults and older people will listen if we seem passionate and excited about a topic and informed. It's just showing that we want change and we want something to happen and emphasizing it so greatly so that they see, okay, maybe they do have a point. Maybe what they're talking about in our ocean floors is truly significant to our world. But we have to do that.

SPEAKER_00 20:43

And so we can do something too.

SPEAKER_01 20:45

Exactly. And a lot of the times that leads to collaboration because right now, as we're young adults and adolescents, there's not always a lot we can do because we do have other hobbies, extracurriculars, school. We can't just travel to the other side of the world and always speak at a conference. And that's just not the routine for some people. However, if we collaborate with the adults around us and say, hey, I'm passionate about this thing, I'm educated on it. It is truly detrimental to our world today, but I need help. I can't do it alone. But you can help me. So if we work together, not apart, and make these connections, we don't distinguish ourselves and we become a society as a whole that can root for change, which is such a beautiful concept to thing. However, as you said, you have to start somewhere and you have to start with just advocating for yourself and advocating for what you love. Because if you don't, no one's gonna listen because there's not gonna be anything to share. Now we're gonna dive a little bit deeper into your 300 kilometer cycle, which, as I said earlier, is a project in itself that is so hard physically, mentally, and everything in between. So training for something like this must take a lot of discipline and commitment. So, how have you been preparing for it?

SPEAKER_00 22:01

I mean, as I said, I train a lot on my bicycle and I love going even when I'm not training for whatever race or something, it's just something that I really love doing. And so I've been training on it, of course, building the physical part, like endurance strength. And I think the more also part is mentally just staying focused and knowing what you're doing for. You know what I mean? So like I'm doing it for the ocean. And I think that just keeps me going when it's harder. Even though I haven't done my cycle yet.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

Yeah, that's so great to hear. And are you cycling with a team or a coach or somebody, or is it just yourself doing this whole thing?

SPEAKER_00 22:40

Well, no, I'm not cycling just by myself. I have my coach, Matteo Sigala, who's has a cycling corporation, uh company. And then my father, friends who are coming in from London, people who are part, a big part in uh One Ocean Planet. You might know Dominique Lesser, exactly. And then also actually the father of Lily, Ben Andres, who's a former competitive cyclist.

SPEAKER_01 23:09

That is so great to hear that you have a team behind you because it really just shows that yet again, collaboration is such a big thing. If it started, though, with your passion, you can now give it to other people and have them race with you to just emphasize the idea that together you guys are all gonna make change, but it does really start in one place. And we briefly talked about hope zones, not even briefly. It was really just a mention at some point in time. But you're raising money for hope zones and aiming to support new seaweed farms. So, what do you hope that this project will have, both immediately and in the long term? What do you want to see this money do with hope zones?

SPEAKER_00 23:49

So immediately I would say either raise funds for the seaweed farm that has right now been started by Hope Zones in Nazareth. Um, so a little thing on Hope Zones. It's a foundation started by a big wave surfer called Jalmacedo, and a few other people. He actually developed the fur Portugal's first seaweed farm, and it's very amazing because it's thriving in one of the places where the biggest waves on earth meet the coast, so Nazare. And that's the amazing part. And I think so immediately will be either raise funds for the seaweed farm right now, or have a second one in the Algarve. And for the future, I would say people to really start learning about it, you know, thinking differently about seaweed, because as I said often it's a misconception, people don't like it at the beach, which I totally understand, and to realize that the ocean floor really matters, and that I mean, for example, the science is clear, the solutions exist, and the ocean's future depends on what we choose next. So that's really something the message that I want to spread. And that seaweed farms are used a lot more. They're right now that um they're sometimes hard to build because you need a lab close by, you need all these collaborations to build it. But if you think about the the end goal of what these seaweed farms actually do, or the end, the final point that you reach with these seaweed farms, it's amazing. Once you put them in the ocean, it's done, you leave them there, and you just created a whole new habitat for thousands and thousands of animals.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

Well, that is such a great thing to hear because it does really start at one point and it can start with what's happening in Nazare, but then it can spread to the whole world, and hopefully that's what it will become. But by your one action and your one big cycle, it'll jumpstart that and it will start a trend for hopefully other people to see. Somebody did something incredible at such a young age. But I too can do something of that extent, which will hopefully start a trend globally and make sure that everybody in between can really realize what is happening in misconceptions about, as you said, seaweed and all the different things that are happening in our ocean world can become lighter and people won't always make them in our society today. However, with the ocean or with climate change in general, it's a very intimidating topic for most people. They hear all of this negative information online about gas emissions and about climate change, and they don't know what to do. It feels like something they don't have a part of, yet they're contributing to it. We don't always know how to prevent it or what we can do to make it lessen. But there is something truly we can do. It's about how we change our mentality and how we do things day to day to really change that kind of routine that we have. But when we're thinking specifically about the ocean, people are too intimidated because we don't know as much about the ocean as we know about the world or the land world per se. Even about deforestation and things of that nature, things that are happening in the ocean are even lessen in our mind. So when you think about the ocean, it can feel really huge and distant. However, you've changed your mentality to readdress this and say, huh, I can do something to change something. So, what would you say to someone who doesn't know where to start with ocean advocacy? And especially as it's such a big topic, how do they integrate themselves into that world?

SPEAKER_00 27:23

So, first of all, I totally agree with you, of course, on the part where you hear all about these disastrous effects of like whaling, whatever. And it's often you think, oh, these are these huge corporations of billion-dollar projects, there's no way I can make a change. And actually, you can. Of course, it's a lot harder to reach out to these bigger corporations. But as I said, if you either just have small actions, whether that's choosing a brand that uses less plastics, whatever, so that that doesn't end up in the ocean, that's already, if you do that every day, you know, if you do that one day, you might think, ah, not a big impact. But if you look at that after one year, every day I saved one bottle of plastic, you know, all these this concept of all these baby steps add up to one huge step that you just did. And then what if you start saving four bottles a day and then add that up to one year? You just saved what a lot of I don't know exactly exact number of life in my water, but like you just saved a lot of life in the ocean. And also, if you want to have a project where you really do something for the ocean, use what you're really good at. So I already have my cycling, even though I just started, but I already had that as a sport that I really enjoyed. Um and usually everyone has something like that, either it's art, music talent, sports talent, you know, a crochet, you know, whatever it is, you can find a way, you just have to find it, that you can use that and combine that to your love. So whether that means you want to protect cars, whether that means you want to protect sharks and have your own project. That's so one. And even step can just grow into something bigger.

SPEAKER_01 29:11

Truly. That is so true. And it's really important that yet again, we just emphasize the idea that anything in your life, anything that you love and cherish dearly to you, can become something of impact. You can take your interests that you do daily and turn it into an advocacy project, like Benton did with his cycling. It does just start with you looking inward and realizing, okay, I want to make change. How do I do that? I'm gonna find something that I enjoy and I'm going to advocate for myself and I'm gonna do a lot of little projects. And whether it starts really small, maybe it's just handing out flyers at your school or at your community library, whatever it may be, it can transform into something big, but it does have to start with one voice, one idea, one passion, so it can turn into a reality. So finally, if you could leave one message for everybody listening, Benton, about the ocean, the environment, or even taking action, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 30:09

I think first of all, that the ocean floor is the foundation of life. If we protect the ocean floor, we're protecting life in the ocean. Which means if we're protecting life in the ocean, we're protecting our existence on our our existence on our planet. And just without our ocean floor, nothing can grow because it's very low down, it's the base of the kind of the whole ecosystem of our earth, basically. Because if you think about it, you don't have a healthy ocean floor, you don't have start having all these kelp forests, you don't have these habitats, you don't have fish, you don't have oxygen that is uh the CO2 that's absorbed, you don't have oxygen production. And it goes up, and we're at the top, so if that collapses, it keeps going collapsing up the way, and at some point we're exactly and also you're never too young to make a difference, and that every little step over one year amasses into one big step that you're really proud of.

SPEAKER_01 31:08

That was such a perfect way to close all of this out. And Benton, thank you so much for sharing your story and your passion with us today. What you're doing is such a powerful example of how determination and purpose can turn into an impact, no matter your age. So thank you for taking the time out of your day to be here with us and sharing what you do and why it is important. Thank you so much for having me. That is so great to hear. And to everyone listening, I hope Betton's journey reminds you that change doesn't require waiting until you're older or more experienced. It starts with caring about something and caring about it deeply, but you have to have that willingness to act on it, have that purpose and drive to be able to actually change in society. The ocean plays a role in everyone's lives. As Benton said, it is the foundation of our world. What happens down there will eventually lead to up there, up here. And we don't want things to happen in between. So advocating for it now is really truly something that we have to continue to do and emphasize in our society. So thank you to everyone, Benton, and all of our listeners for being part of this episode today. And I'm so excited for what's ahead. And I hope you'll continue joining me for more conversations with young people and old people who are making a difference in our world. Until next time, signing off with loads of positivity, your host, Sadie Sunborn Malachy.