There is a particular kind of morning that comes to you only at sea. You are standing your watch in the grey pre-dawn, somewhere in the North Atlantic, and the water beneath you is not merely water — it is geology in motion, ancient and indifferent. The cold up here has teeth. It bites through your layers before you have finished your first cup of coffee. And yet you do not go inside. You stand there, and you look, and you understand — in a way no textbook ever quite managed to teach you — that you are floating on the lungs of the world.

I have been navigating international waters for over a decade. I have crossed the Barents Sea in November, threaded the Strait of Malacca in equatorial heat, anchored off ports where fishing communities stretched back generations. In all of that time, I have come to believe something that the maritime industry has been slow to say aloud: the ocean does not belong to the ships that cross it. The ocean is its own entity, and we are guests — privileged, often careless guests — who have been granted passage.

Norway, my homeland, has a relationship with the sea that is woven into our national identity as surely as our language. We are a country shaped by fjords and coastline, a people who historically understood that the ocean feeds, employs, and humbles in equal measure. The Hardangerfjord in bloom. The Lofoten Islands in the grip of winter. These are not scenic backdrops — they are living ecosystems that generations of Norwegian women tended, fished, and protected long before the word "sustainability" entered our vocabulary. I carry that inheritance with me onto every vessel I board.

What the Sea Teaches Women Officers

There are not enough of us, still. Women make up only around two percent of the global seafaring workforce. When I was coming up through my maritime studies in Bergen, I could count my female colleagues on one hand. The industry has its orthodoxies — its unspoken assumptions about who belongs on a bridge, who earns command. But I will say this: being a woman who works at sea has given me a perspective on environmental stewardship that I do not think I could have developed any other way.

We notice things. Perhaps because we have always had to work harder to be noticed ourselves, we develop a finely calibrated attention to the world around us. I have watched female colleagues spot subtle changes in water coloration that indicated algal bloom long before the monitoring instruments flagged it. I have seen women in engine rooms insist on proper bilge water management when it would have been easy — and common — to look away. This is not sentimentality. This is the practiced vigilance of people who have learned that the details matter.

Across international shipping, environmental compliance is improving — but the progress is uneven and frequently cosmetic. IMO 2020 sulphur regulations changed the fuel we burn. MARPOL Annex V governs our waste. But regulations are only as good as the culture that implements them. And culture, in my experience, changes when the people living and working within it change. The influx of women into maritime roles — slow as it has been — is part of what is shifting that culture.

From Onshore to Onboard: The Full Ecosystem

Ocean stewardship does not begin when a vessel leaves port. It begins on land: in the shipping company offices where procurement decisions are made, in the port authorities that govern ballast water management, in the maritime academies that train the next generation of officers. Some of the most consequential work I have seen done for ocean conservation has been done by women who never set foot on a cargo ship — women working in marine biology, port logistics, environmental regulation, and community advocacy along coastal regions.

In Ålesund, I met a harbour master who had lobbied, quietly and persistently, for years to improve oil spill response infrastructure along the Norwegian coast. In Tromsø, a marine biologist friend of mine has spent a decade documenting the retreat of arctic sea ice and its effects on cod populations — data that directly informs Norwegian fishery management. These women are not seafarers in the traditional sense, but they are ocean stewards in every meaningful one.

What connects us — those of us on ships and those of us on shore — is firsthand witness. We have seen the ocean. We have seen what it was. And many of us have begun to see what it is becoming.

The Weight of That Knowing

I want to be honest about something that the sustainability discourse often sanitises away: caring about the ocean, truly caring, is sometimes a heavy thing to carry at sea.

I have navigated through waters where the density of floating plastic debris was visible from the bridge. I have pulled into ports where the air smelled of discharged fuel and where the waterline was stained in colours that do not occur in nature. I have read the IPCC reports on ocean acidification and then stood my watch over the very waters those reports describe. There is a dissonance in that — a grief, even — that we in the maritime industry rarely speak about.

But I have also learned that grief, when it is held by a community of people who share it, can become something other than paralysis. It can become resolve. The women I know in maritime sustainability work are not optimists in the uncomplicated sense. They are clear-eyed about the scale of the crisis. But they have chosen, nonetheless, to work — to advocate within shipping companies for better environmental standards, to push classification societies toward stricter vessel emissions requirements, to mentor younger women entering the industry and tell them, plainly: this matters, and so does your presence here.

On a clear morning on the Norwegian Sea, when the light comes in low and golden across the water and the surface is calm enough to reflect the sky, there is a moment of absolute clarity. You understand, in your body rather than your intellect, that you are part of something vast. Not above it. Not apart from it. Part of it.

That feeling is what draws women to maritime careers, I think, even when the industry has not always welcomed us. And it is what keeps us committed to protecting these waters — not because it is our job, but because it is, in the deepest sense, our home.

The ocean does not ask us to save it with grand gestures. It asks us to pay attention. To show up. To be present enough to notice when something is wrong, and brave enough to say so.

In that, women of the sea have always had something to teach the world.