Krill Baby Krill: Piloting an Activist Investment Trust for the Antarctic

Overstories builds campaigns for nature through culture and storytelling. The aim is hearts and minds, and also markets and governments. Most people do not know what biodiversity means, the hosts say, and they do not need to. If a campaign moves them, they will act. Every major social movement has set off a wave of art, from the civil rights movement to the arts after both world wars. The hosts want the same for the planet. Their example from this year is a Rembrandt drawing of a young lion, sold at Sotheby's with every dollar going to lion conservation. Jeremy Irons, the voice of Scar in The Lion King, narrated the campaign.

Overstories' other public campaign is Friends of Aldabra. It opposes a Qatari-funded luxury resort on Assumption Island in Seychelles, the gateway to Aldabra Atoll. Aldabra is a UNESCO World Heritage site, home to about 400 species found nowhere else on Earth. What began as posts on Instagram grew into a coalition of more than 30 organizations. The lesson the hosts draw is about framing. They told it as a story of sovereignty and corruption, and that reached more people than an environmental story would have. The resort became a central issue in the 2025 election, and the incumbent lost.

Antarctic krill is a small crustacean at the base of the Southern Ocean food web. Different groups have different goals. The hosts want the fishery ended, the way campaigners want to end fossil fuels and seabed mining. They reject the assumption that there is a surplus to shave off. Krill is a wild animal in a wild ecosystem, and every tonne taken is food taken from whales, penguins and seals. In 2025 the catch reached the limit CCAMLR sets for the Atlantic sector, for the first time, and the fishery closed early. The hosts call it a delicate balance being pushed past what it can bear.

The hosts tie the fishery to what is happening to the animals that eat krill. Emperor penguins were recently listed as endangered. Chinstrap and Adélie colonies in parts of the Antarctic Peninsula have fallen by more than half over recent decades. The hosts link many of those declines to falling food, in chicks that starve and in birds that breed less. They say this goes into a product nobody needs, and that the case for ending the fishery rests there.

Compared with fossil fuels or seabed mining, the krill industry is small. The hosts describe one Norwegian group, Aker BioMarine and its spin-offs, doing most of the fishing. Its trawlers are the size of city blocks and process the catch on board. Krill becomes three products. Most of the volume goes to feed for fish farms, and a lot goes to pet food. Most of the revenue comes from omega-3 supplements for people. Each has a replacement, the hosts say, some of them cheaper. Algae oils deliver the same nutrients, vegan, with no boats and no bycatch.

Campaigns in Europe and Australia have already taken krill oil off shelves. Holland & Barrett in Britain has left the category, Coles in Australia no longer sells it, and Germany's biggest drugstore chains have followed. Sea Shepherd publishes a krill-free retailer map that any organization can host on its own site. The United States is the largest market, and the campaign there is only beginning. The hosts see an American opening: investing is social here in a way it is not in Europe. That is where the capital model comes in.

The lab starts from an imbalance. The extractive economy returns more than the regenerative one, and that difference steers where money goes. The shortfall in regenerative investment runs to trillions of dollars, however it is counted. The groups fighting extraction work with tens of millions in aggregate, against industries that make hundreds of billions in profit. The hosts describe coming to this later in life and meeting it as grief. The question they ask is which interventions could bend the curve fast enough to avoid the worst of the damage.

The hope comes from moments when people pooled money on their own. GameStop in 2021 was easy to dismiss as people trying to get rich. The hosts saw a social movement: joyful, collective and aimed at Wall Street, with tens of billions of dollars in play. This year, after Spirit Airlines shut down, a TikToker proposed a people's bid modeled on the Green Bay Packers and drew hundreds of millions in pledges within days. Each time, the campaign hit the same regulatory hurdles, because the system was not built for it. None had a long-term vision of what the money was for.

The larger prize is savings. US retirement accounts hold about 51 trillion dollars, most of it invested in the extractive economy. Vehicles that move part of it could bend the curve. The lab's program has three parts. First, learn how to mobilize people around an issue, drawing on those who make culture and viral moments. Second, work out the rules. Everyone who has tried this has paid the same lawyers and run into the same limits, but the hosts believe those limits can be worked through. Third, write templates, then run a series of pilots next year. Krill is one of them.

The structure has two layers. At the top is a trust dedicated for the long term to ocean conservation, or to the Antarctic in particular. Under it is a special purpose vehicle that people can invest in. The amount raised would be negotiated against what the activities cost. Investors would accept a cap on their returns, and everything above the cap would flow to the trust. The vehicle has two sides. One invests in the alternatives, across the supply chain. The other funds pressure on the incumbent, such as litigation finance for cases that need serious capital to bring.

Most algae omega-3 brands buy their oil from a few suppliers, so the difference between them is brand. One option is to capitalize an algae brand of the campaign's own, whose profits go openly into the effort. People could buy it and also own pieces of it. The hosts imagine a Spirit Airlines moment for a supplement company owned, in effect, by the Antarctic. Anyone who holds shares in an algae omega-3 company has a stake, financial and emotional, in the krill industry's decline. An open question is whether to back a company that exists or start a new one.

Anyone who has raised money for nonprofits knows the grants team and the impact investment team at a foundation are different people. The hosts guess that most money in this fight so far has come from grants. A vehicle like this lets them ask the investment side too. Legitimate spending from the structure could still be granted out to the organizations already doing the work. That makes it additive, alongside any long-term profits. The campaign can also reach past an environmental story. As in Seychelles, a case framed around honesty in advertising or corruption can reach people who would never follow a fishery.