Campaigns
What happens when we truly enter the ocean? Not observe it, not cross it — but descend into it, leave our atmospheric cradle behind, and become momentary participants in something ancient and flourishing that makes all life possible?
We call it the Innerview.
As the Overview Effect describes the profound cognitive shift astronauts experience seeing Earth whole from the void of space, the Innerview describes its counterpart — the shift that occurs when we go the other way, into the blue. It is not new. Indigenous and coastal communities have held it for millennia; it was simply the condition of their existence. What is new is the attempt to name it, gather its many expressions, and offer it to the wider world.
In May 2026, Nekton — in partnership with Oceanographic Magazine — published The Innerview: a Special Edition bringing together fifty-three of the most extraordinary ocean voices alive. Heads of state and astronauts. Submersible pilots and freedivers. Marine scientists and artists. Comedians and theologians. Indigenous leaders. People who have spent their lives inside the ocean and people who have translated it into fabric, into science, into sculpture, into law, into music.
Among them: Kathy Sullivan — the only person to have walked in space and reached the deepest point in the ocean; Victor Vescovo — the first person to reach the deepest point in all five oceans, climb the Seven Summits and ski to both Poles; Presidents Whipps of Palau and Faure of Seychelles; Ambassador Peter Thomson; Sir Richard Branson; Brianna Fruean; Callum Roberts; Enric Sala; Wendy Schmidt; Sir Robin Knox-Johnston; Steve Backshall; Dona Bertarelli; Helen Czerski; Alexandra Cousteau; ‘Aulani Wilhelm; Andrew Forrest; and thirty five more voices from every depth and perspective.
The result is not a scientific report but a cultural act. A collective imagining of what the ocean does to us when we truly enter it — and what that might mean for how we understand and care for it.
On 3rd June 2026, Nekton celebrates the Innerview — and ten years in service of the ocean — with a landmark public lecture at the Royal Geographical Society in London. Five keynote speakers shared their Innerviews before an audience of contributors, partners and the public, in an evening of ocean exploration, reflection and conversation curated by theologian and ethicist Carmody Grey.
It began on a clear night in Bilbao in 2025. Oliver Steeds, Nekton's founder and Guest Editor of the Special Edition, was looking up at the stars with his sister-in-law Lulu, talking about the Overview Effect. Then she asked: is there something similar when you go the other way? When you enter the ocean?
That question became this collection.
The ocean reaches the part of us that nothing else can find. We hope this is the beginning of its voyage into the fabric of our lives and consciousness.
Ad Astra. Ad Profundum.
