Sea Rangers taking water samples in the North Sea for plastic pollution tracking. —Courtesy Sea Ranger ServiceFor 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 received handwritten praise from Sir David Attenborough that began: “Thanks for all you are doing in the battle to care for the natural world. It is reactions like yours that make us feel that things and attitudes are beginning to change.”With recruits capped at 29 years old, the program has shown broad popularity among younger people looking for a meaningful career. This effort could help address a global young unemployment crisis that has alarmed heads of state, U.N. agencies, and the Pope. In June, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York blamed 64% of the recent spike in unemployment among college graduates on the rise of remote work, which inhibits training and soft-skill development.The Sea Rangers offer what Van Der Werf, 43, calls “Gen Z jobs”: it’s a value-driven, adventurous, hands-on work environment that actively takes gender-balance into account—and, bonus, is Instagrammable. Sea Rangers earn living wages beginning at roughly $17 an hour. Van Der Werf takes a salary of about $65,000, and no employee can make more than five times the pay of the lowest-paid worker. Since its first cohort in 2018 it has recruited 208 people—teaching them skills they can take with them into other careers; half have transitioned into maritime jobs while others try craftwork like carpentry or silversmithing. “The climate conversation is always policy, science, or tech. It should be about people,” says Van Der Werf. “The Sea Ranger Service doesn’t just offer jobs. We offer purpose.”Van Der Werf recruits unemployed or underemployed Europeans as young as 18-years-old, into a five-week boot camp run by military veterans to teach teamwork, strength, and discipline. Those who advance are put to work on two teams: offshore sailors who handle marine life surveys, hydrographic mapping, shipwreck protection, wind farm development, and drone surveillance, or a coastal cohort focused entirely on seagrass restoration. While seagrass occupies only 0.1% of the ocean surface it accounts for 10% to 18% of underwater carbon capture. And unlike seaweed, seagrass has a root system that traps carbon in sediment and assuages storm surges. For tens of thousands of years, ancestors found seagrass endlessly useful: as bedding for Neanderthals and popes alike, food for indigenous Canadians and Mexicans, brick binding by ancient Minoans, and wall insulation for both Rockefeller Center and the U.S. Capitol. But as ports industrialized, seagrass was dismissed as a visual blight. “Humans relied on it for all sorts of different things,” said Ben Jones, chief conservation officer and cofounder of Project Seagrass, which partnered with the Sea Ranger Service to cofound the Seagrass Consortium. “And then we sort of forgot about it.” Sea Rangers restore seagrass chiefly in the Dutch Eastern Scheldt and French Étang de Berre. Last year’s seagrass sites bloomed well, with the French site growing nearly 94-fold from 8 square meters (86 sqft.) to 750 square meters (8,073 sqft.).“This is how I deal with my climate anxiety,” says Elise Chalcraft, 28, a Swiss Sea Ranger who has worked on both the Rangers’ roving and seagrass teams. “The only way to get into conservation is a Ph.D. or to be a volunteer. I didn’t want a Ph.D. because I’m dyslexic, and volunteer work is really privileged.”That logic resonates with Van Der Werf, the dropout. “Environmentalism is very White and very middle-class or even wealthy,” he says. “It’s not working-class.” It’s an issue that many are aware needs improving: At last year’s COP30 global climate summit, Brazil pushed to make social diversity a requirement of sustainability efforts. While the global maritime sector is just 1% female, 72% of Sea Ranger recruits—and 50% of those ultimately hired as Rangers—have been women.Democratizing climate labor is a priority. Van Der Werf’s crews have included a Welsh woman working in an Amazon warehouse, a Caribbean Dutch cater-waiter who previously found purpose mostly in video games, a quiet Czech-Belgian gardener, and a Portuguese father of two who pinballed working between migrant rescue ships for years.But the service draws credentialed experts, too. “I studied environmental science and looked at proper jobs. It was all staring at a computer,” said Sam Kerby, 26, part of the newest sailing cohort that began in April 2025. “The Sea Rangers deliver on the promise of action.”In the global maritime industry, which includes everything from wind power and shipping to cruise ships and fishing vessels, the niche and nimble Sea Rangers stick out. The sector is dominated by five massive European corporations deploying hundreds of industrial ships. Van Der Werf hopes to meet these Goliaths with an army of Davids. Upon expansion into the U.K. in 2024, he partnered with the Crown Estate, the holdings company for King Charles III (by law, the monarch owns the seabed). The Crown Estate announced that “social value criteria” would favor offshore wind developers whose workforce is at least 10% composed of British NEETs (youth not in employment, education, or training). The move created instant market value for the Sea Rangers.The Sea Rangers’ closest modern American analog is the short-lived American Climate Corps, created in April 2024 by President Joe Biden and scrapped in January 2025 by President Donald Trump. But Van Der Werf sees American promise in such a model, pointing to the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed millions of single men aged 18 to 25.Looking ahead, Van Der Werf is sharpening his strategy with a course on nonprofit management at Harvard Business School this summer and he aims to franchise the model globally. Dean Wenham, a Canadian entrepreneur who is “not necessarily proud” that he made his fortune in pharmaceuticals, is a prospective franchisee looking to build a better future for his children.“There are very few research ships available,” Wenham says, noting that Canada’s aging Coast Guard fleet leaves researchers with little ship time. “A Sea Ranger operation in Canada could be really important.”The need for Sea Rangers is growing where fragile ecologies meet fragile economies, such as the coastlines of The Bahamas, Egypt, and Vietnam. Van Der Werf hopes to use contracts in wealthier nations to subsidize work in the developing world. By 2035, he hopes to see a Sea Ranger franchise on every continent—except Antarctica. He laughed: “There’s no unemployment there.”