For 17 generations, Wietse Van Der Werf’s forebears toiled as dockworkers, shipbuilders, and sea captains in the Netherlands and its colonies. By contrast, Van Der Werf dropped out of school at 15. After cycling through erratic gigs—bus driver, garbage collector, violin maker—his carpentry skills landed him a job on an expedition vessel in Antarctica from 2006 to 2010.
Van Der Werf was awed by the frozen continent but shocked by its 21st-century degradation: illegal whale hunts, melting glaciers, and plastic trash. He soon became an undercover investigator, reporting to the U.N. on fisheries’ ties to organized crime. Seeing a dire need for coastal protection, he hatched a plan to recruit young people for climate correction.
In 2008 in Antarctica, Van Der Werf met Douglas Tompkins, the billionaire founder of Esprit and The North Face. Van Der Werf intended to ask Tompkins for €30,000 (just over $34,700) to kickstart his venture. According to Tompkins’ biography, Tompkins preemptively apologized, explaining he had overshot his annual budget but could spare €50,000 (nearly $58,000). And with that, the Sea Ranger Service was born.
The goal of the service, set up as a social enterprise, is to recruit young people to help governments and industry manage ocean conservation and restoration. Ambitious government climate commitments often strain practical capacity, creating bureaucratic backlogs. Sea Rangers offer a Swiss Army knife’s dexterity, pursuing government contracts across the European Union and United Kingdom to tackle the tedium of climate compliance and the drudgery of clearing those backlogs.
Of the Sea Rangers’ 22 government contracts since 2018, 18 were never before outsourced—a triple novelty environmentally, financially, and politically. The combination has made Van Der Werf popular among Europe’s leaders for his savvy synergy of touting left-leaning environmentalism while supporting right-leaning rural communities. He has even rec
