Hi, I just started recording. Perfect. Thank you very much. So welcome everybody, Delta Talks number eight online. Great discussion that we've had so far last month we had Delta Talks Live, which was even a little bit better today again back online. And you know it's a webinar series hosted by Wacheningen University and the Asian MegaDeltas Initiative. Today we have an interesting talk around inclusive water governance in Bangladesh and I will hand it over to Deepa to give a quick introduction in a minute. But Marianne, would you like to say a few words from Wacheningen? I'm happy that we have again this Delta Talk whose number we still have to discover. And it's very nice to have now talk about governance in Bangladesh. I'm very much looking forward. We already earlier had Delta Talks on governance issues, so I'm really curious. So now what you learned from Bangladesh looking forward was the presentation and the discussion afterwards. So do I, and in order to have enough discussion time, that should be enough from us. Deepa, would you like to give a brief introduction and then hand it over to the speaker for today? Hi everyone, this is Deepa Joshi and welcome. The focus of Work Package 4 of the Asian MegaDeltas is on inclusive governance. And particularly our focus has been in understanding why Bangladesh has fairly progressive policies on inclusive governance, but we don't often see the outcomes of these processes on the ground. So what are the barriers, what are the challenges, what needs to change in order to move from policies that are quite progressive to ground reality that seem very resistant to change. So without further ado, I would invite my colleagues who will be presenting. Indu Sharma is part of the Asia MegaDeltas team and works at the International Water Management Institute. Muklesh Rahman is the director of the organization Center for Natural Resources Studies based in Bangladesh. And we have also Shanta Sohele Moina who works with Oxfam Bangladesh. And I think what is also interesting about this particular joint presentation is that we are working very closely with CNRS and Oxfam and really trying to see how the research in AMD can leverage some policy outcomes and impact on the ground through the Oxfam-Trosa phase 2 project. So over to you Indu, thanks a lot. Thank you so much Deepa and good afternoon everyone. I'm very much pleased to be a part of these Delta talks. So I'm just going to share the screen. I hope the screen is visible. Yes, the screen is visible. Yes, thank you so much. So as Deepa mentioned, we are focusing more on the inclusive water governance in Bangladesh. So for the next 20 minutes, we'll start with the AgriFour system governance as a whole. What does it mean like the distinction between the policies and the practice? And then after that we'll take more into the water governance from the AgriFour system. Looking at the real challenges from the field, we'll hear from Dr. Moklis from CNRS. And the third topic would be to really highlighting three key issues that is affecting the implementation. And finally, we'll talk about how the research will impact the overall, you know, like the Trosa activity that Oxfam and CNRS are doing. So here, talking about the AgriFour governance. Like last year, work package 4, we developed a governance matrix that includes for seven different dimensions of inclusive governance. So using the same framework, we reviewed 23 different policies on agriculture, food system, climate change and natural resource management to look into how they are inclusive of gender and different social aspects. So as Deepa mentioned briefly, we found that Bangladesh is very much going into this strategic shift in terms of inclusive policies in climate resilient and AgriFour system sphere. However, these policies significantly differ on their focus on social inclusion and gender inequality as very much fragmented across different sectors. So there is still a considerable disconnect between what we experienced from the field, the issues of AgriFour system, AgriFour and then in between the expert-led innovations that are implemented. There have been a lot of structural power hierarchies and other barriers that exclude women and marginalized groups in participating in accessing different resources. And one of the key findings is that there are a lot of, you know, like we have really good policies, however, accompanying guidelines are really missing. And then also it also leads to a lack of, you know, monitoring evaluation of kind of mechanisms. So the question for us is to really on how do we change these status from, you know, like making policies and then to this narrowing this divide between policies and practice gap. So in the next slide, I would like to request Dr. Mocles from CNRS to talk about the field level challenges focusing on achieving inclusive water governance from its experience. Over to you, Dr. Mocles. Okay. Thank you, Indu. Please put my slide on. Okay. Thanks. Good morning and good afternoon. Actually, we're going to talk about the Shakira area, which is located at the southwestern part of Bangladesh. It also represents the lower Ganges Delta and the place is very close to the Sundarbansh mangrove forest, which is shared between India and Bangladesh. The historically Shakira area is, Shakira and Kulna area is impacted by high salinity, soil and water salinity because of various factors. And we see now people blame and claim climate change is the factor that actually increasing the salinity, maybe true, but a little. What we have experienced working there for maybe about 20 years, that the contextual issues, the policy related things like leasing of coastlands and government on land and wetlands canal networks, the massive stream farming and the elite dominance of state on resources, privatization of Commonwealth resources are basically bent drivers of this freshwater scarcity and high salinity, which impact the production systems. So we want to address which we need to focus more on addressing the contextual issues rather than climate. It will come automatically, I guess. The other thing is, there are, especially if we group the drivers, some are indigenous locally. The changes happened at the local level, which is the elite dominance is very important and very robust and conversion and privatization of canals. And canal is basically the only kind of land water resource that could store rainwater, which is fresh water, and people can diversify crops and increase the cropping intensity and particularly during the dry season, they can grow varieties of crops. The dry season is the best season for us to diversify crops. But because of the high salinity, they cannot grow. So the land is only used for the monsoon season. When the rainwater is there and the salinity dilutes and that people can grow almond rice or monsoon rice. So this indigenous thing is also like the conflicts between the seed farmers and rice farmers. And denial of poor people access to leased canals, about 90% canals are either leased out and controlled by the leaseholders or elite capture. So hardly any scope for the poor people and the marginalized farmers to use what I including women at your. So these are basically the key indigenous issues. And from the indigenous part, the policy, the wetland leasing policy. Since the area is fresh water discards, governments should have taken special measures to protect the canals to store rainwater so that people can diversify their food systems. And this also supports capture fishing. But, you know, things are not happening. It is given to few people and they are converting it to agriculture, making houses, settlements. So there are examples of permanent loss of canals. There is no trace in the map. So that sort of things happen. The other thing is this massive shrimp farming. It is also unplanned. And our policy, shrimp policy said that it has to be, there has to be a joining where people do shrimp farming, saltwater shrimp farming and in areas where people do rice farming. So demand from the locality, but particularly from the rice farming communities, but things are not happening because of various political and other technical issues. The coastal embankments, which gets another structures, some are functioning, not functioning and somewhat unplanned. And this also cause, you know, kind of water logging, sedimentation, flooding and production loss. The climate change, of course, it is there, particularly the prolonged drought. Now we are having drought, but in some last three years we are having early monsoon flooding, rain-based flooding. So because of the canals are converted and many canals are grabbed by the stream farmers. So drainage is a big problem. So under the climate change we are having keratic rainfalls. So sometimes people suffer from water logging, particularly during common rice farming system. So this is because of the embankments and canal not properly supporting the drainage. Other thing is the obstruction of water or withdrawal of water from the river systems upstream. That's within Bangladesh and beyond. And there is hardly any practical or pragmatic initiative to actually restore the canals, cancelling the leasing and protecting water and a kind of community-based management of canal resources for food production. It's not there. So in the next slide, I just like to, as a testimony, like to show, Indu, can you move to the next one? Yeah. So the left couple of photos you can see, this is the first part of the Kuntuli canal coming out of the Malanchuri but that river actually pipe in between the settlements and the Sundarbans. And the households living in the banks of the canal, they are slowly kind of grabbing the canals by making ponds. And in front of everyone, nobody is protecting this. So this is the way that people actually grab government-owned land. And I guess we guess this point to the deputy commissioner, but nobody is listening to this. And I guess in next 20 years, this very good canal would turn into a small train or narrow train. And then it would be a kind of irreversible loss to state-owned resources or common food resources. The right one is a canal. This part of the canal is, it is a branch of the Kuntuli canal. It is leased out many years back. So now there is hardly any trace. So it is completely converted to, largely converted to cropland. So people here suffer from water shortage in the dry season. So they can only grow ponds and rice when there is rainwater and most of the time. So, yeah, now move on to the third one, that slide. Yeah, another sum of the photos of another branch of Kuntuli canal, which is we call Kuntuli canal, where Deepa Mo and I visited last December. Yeah. Yeah, actually, it's a large canal and a good opportunity to store huge volume of water for the farming and other purposes, fishing and farming, livestock, duck-rearing, this and that. But these are leased. So in this area, the leaseholders, they don't allow people to use fetched water and use for other purposes. So they strongly maintain this. Oh, sorry. Just to remind, we have three more minutes. So just to kind of request. Alright, I'm just finishing that. Yeah, so we have the testimonies that how the water systems available based on canals are actually grabbed by the people due to policy and political influences. And how the local people, the mass people are excluded from these resources. The next one. This is the last one. Good news. Yeah, so there are several policies aligned to these water systems. There may be some more, but these policies basically are interconnected interlinked. But in reality, on the ground, they are separated, isolated and applied in siloed, siloed uproar. So we really want a kind of coherent policy for addressing the water, biodiversity or agri-diversity, the land productivity, this and that, including the fishing and fisheries and aquaculture. But things are not happening in that way. It's a big problem for us. And the problems and issues of the local level is not transmitted to the central level, to the policy stakeholders, to the managers at the central level. So we experience that and we suggest that we need to work at both ends. At the local level, communities should be organized because they are actually not well-organized, not well aware. They are impacted, affected, but cannot take decisions what to do. So work with them, build their capacity and kind of making the movements so that they can influence local authorities and actors. And also we need to work at the policy level to influence them through evidence what is happening and what could be possible to better manage the water systems for food production. So this is what we suggest through workshops and dialogues and policy briefings and sharing and making alleys. It is not that someone only see an arrest or only water development board or fisheries are in the culture alone. We need a collective approach. So I want to end here. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Dr. Moklis. And now like I would like to focus on three key challenges that we found from our recent literature review on water governance issues. The first one on the power and hierarchy, how it saves the historical water management intervention. As Dr. Moklis just pointed out, it is not only the climate in a region that affects water governance and inclusion. So we looked historically into key intervention and we would like to focus on two key intervention that Bangladesh had focused on. The first one is the folders like in 1960s, there were like 139 folders were constructed to address this flooding risk and enhance agricultural production. The second key intervention was transition towards extensive stream farming that expanded by over like, you know, the stream farming area was expanded by over 400%. And then initially, like there was a lot of, you know, there have been positive effects that for example, the polders they contributed to flood prevention control of salinity intrusion. And it did actually bring 1.2 million hectares of land on the agriculture production. And the stream farming because it contributed a lot to economic, you know, like the boosting the economy and even in the data from 2012 to 2013 so that it was the second largest export industry after government. So there have been the positive effect. However, there have been some serious ecological challenges. For example, in terms of polders over 600 kilometers of the major waterways were obstructed, there have been sedimentation and some rivers also died. Stream farming, there was the clearance of a lot of land of the mangroves and other, you know, like some of the studies indicate up to 5 fold increase in soil and water salinity. However, like what we focus here is there have been more far reaching social impacts in different population groups. For example, if we look at the small holder farmers, they had to lose a lot of land. This particular case we found from Adnan is that in by Gaza is one of the sub district in Kula district where 84% of the residents they had to lose their land because of proliferation of a commercial stream farming. The fishers livelihood was also affected to hear fishers means we want to focus on the capture fisheries. There have been the substantial decline in the fish catch because of this investment. And for example, as you can see there, like one of the studies from one specific location, like we cited that example that 95% of fishing areas would cease for stream farming, leaving only 5% of these fishers to use those resources. There have been implications for waste laborers like as there are a lot of study that say that stream farming is less labor intensive than rice farming. It's like this is the particular study from Shamim that highlights that cultivating rice on 40 acres of land. Employee safety workers where it's only five from there and then there have been the worst consequences reported in terms of displacement and migration because of unplanned and unregulated stream farming. For example, in South Kira, as the examples and so the second issue is so what was there behind it. So we really highlighted the local power dynamics and water governance to see at the two issues, the power dynamics. We mean to say like, you know, how this interaction between individuals because of the power that affects the distribution and control of these resources. So three key power dynamics were highlighted from the literature that one is based on the resource ownership. For example, right to water is considered as right to land like the land ownership and also similar for like these large land owners dominate a lot of other resources. The second we found was in terms of gender in terms of men versus women's role and then how we are excluded from water management. The third is those who are close to politically elected representatives they could use more this water resources. So these are the power dynamics that affect this inclusive governance. However, looking at the governance structure like we focus on two different aspects, one from the water aspect that has really good policies in 1990s on inclusive, you know, participatory water management that focus on these different aspects for multiple livelihoods, not only producer, but also landowners, fissures and others. However, these different projects, there have been very much limited community participation, and there is no mechanisms to monitor where they participate and what is, you know, like how to what extent. And in terms of multi sector policies as Mocles, Dr Mocles was referring water sector is not only about water, but also it lets all other sectors and multi sectoral interest. However, on the ground that has been different. I just want to add here that you have another two minutes so the last speaker gets adequate time. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. Okay, so these two issues and the final one we want to highlight here is that because there are some institutional and culture and practices that save on equal power dynamics. We give the examples from women's exclusion, elite capture, a lot of aspects on the elite capture has been already presented by Dr Mocles. So what we want to highlight here is there have been some kind of institutional barriers, for example, this significant gender waste disparities in terms of women as they just have that of men and also the elite capture. There are the barriers that, you know, like not only in water, but also land and the canal and other grabbing. So that leads to the exclusion of this marginalized and other populations. So based on these three issues and this context, we are working with the trust the project on the transboundary river is the reverse of South Asia project with experiments. We are also working with the CNAres to get insights into the integrating of, you know, like the how the gender equality and social inclusion is integrated and what we can do to empower women and marginalized populations to increase their access to and participation in water resources. As you can see, we focus on three different research questions, first looking into different sectoral and institutional dynamics. And then the second really looking into their access to common pool water resources for multiple livelihoods. And then the third is looking into the power dynamics and how they participate in decision making and what can we do about this going forward. So this is the slide where we want to highlight like how this evidence will contribute to the trust that projects impact. So we as you can see there we focus on a lot of evidence, the literature reviews case studies and then we highlight like three key entry points where we can make a change first really looking into the Nordic way to specific intervention of the project and then the national level advocacy of district and district level advocacy and the campaigns. So that eventually in the outcome. Indu I think we need to hand over to Moina, please. Because she can take off from here. Yeah, so yeah, so we want to raise to two different outcomes highlighted before like one is at the marginalized population level to work on advocacy empowering and the capacity and second is the institutional level that they really understand these kind of issues. So I would like to request Moina from Oxfam to talk more about the approach and how we will be working at the way that the policy and practice aspects over to you Moina. Thank you Indu and thank you. So since 2017 Oxfam and his partners have been working for inclusive water governance to Joseph water governance program. If you see in the next slides then. So I would like to highlight that Rosa have been has been working to address these under the underlying causes of property and marginalization. Of the people living in the transponder legal basis of GBM and it is implementing in Nepal, India and Bangladesh. So it aims to ensure the river and communities have held their rights, build their resilience and participate in water resource management and in South Asia, we acknowledge that water governance and water is a management. are linked to rather challenging social, political, economic, and epistetic found strength. And river is a common for research. So we engage governments, civil society, NGOs, private sector, researchers, academics, regional institutes, youths, and the indigenous groups also. Here, I try to put a simplified version of how we engage with these different type of stakeholder in our water advocacy process. So the process is actually way more interlinked than it is shown here. And Rosa also emphasized on the regional cooperation which I did not put here. For example, if you take the issue of sun mining, which is a pressing but sensitive issue, we have found from the community which take place near and in the river, eventually accelerate the river erosion and causing loss of public assets and loss of biodiversity. So having heavy political influence and high demand of the sand, it cannot be stopped. So we activate our approach in this particular issue. If we see in the next slide, so Nodiboy took our river meeting that is in a specific intervention of Rosa project. And it's a process through which civil society, organizations, and local vulnerable community collectively work to identify water governance challenges and opportunities at the grassroots level. So through the Nodiboy took, we build mutual trust and understanding. We build awareness. We do the collective actions and capacity building of the community and the vice versa also for us. And ultimately making the community resilient. So through this process, the community capacity to engage with and influence daily barriers is strengthened to secure their water resource rights. And throughout those Nodiboy took, we already have seen the changes within the work women leadership and they have resolved illegal sand mining periodically and they made accountable the local governments and they promote the indigenous knowledge in river management. So in the next slide, we'll see the process of Nodiboy took how it actually goes to the water influencing. So the Nodiboy follows a bottom up approach starting with monthly meetings at the village level to listen to the stories of the communities living around the river area. These events are organized by partners. CNRS has been a partner from the very beginning of Strosa in Meghna basin here. And the partners use the reflections from the Nodiboy to forge partnership with other relevant CSOs. And then they decide whether the issue requires abstention of evidence before moving forward while also conducting a power analysis of the stakeholders involved. Based on that result, the most pressing issues that is common in multiple geographic location and which is actually possible for Trosa to tap within. Then we select the issues for the advocacy and accordingly CSO make an initial influencing plan for the partnership with the community. And with time this is escalated to national and basin level and several Nodiboy talks usually happen in between for coordinated planning and reporting back to the communities on progress of influencing. So basically what I do that we actually build capacity of the community to get involved in the water governance and we do evidence-based advocacy and we try to try community that so that they are able to solve their own problems throughout the process. So this is from my part, so thank you. Okay, thanks very much Moina and Indu and Moklesh. So as I think the key message was that policies on their own are not delivering very well and what is very much required is intervening at both ends to really critically examine why policies are not working and the sectoral lack of coordination between very different and isolated sectoral policies but also equally important building the agency and capability of marginalized users to be able to demand and be engaged in effectively in the governance of water. So, and we hope that through the research and through engagement with Rosa to AMD can contribute to this process. I would now maybe like to open the floor for questions, maybe we can take a couple of questions and then pass it on to the speakers. Sorry, I apologize for the internet issues, sorry everyone. Sure, I see your hand up Manu Ranjan, you have a question. Can I also request that the questions are short and the answers also by the speakers are short so we can have more active flowing conversation. Okay, thank you Deepak, I'm not a course in Dasha's position that I have been listening to this grabbing land, grabbing canal, grabbing problems by the elixir for a long time. So it is difficult to solve. So in what is on AMD, we have developed Dyson dropping technology techniques without bothering the canals or other things but the canals are tilted up and you cannot conserve enough water to irrigate entire area. Maybe five to 10% of the area and there will be a great conflict who will take water. So better we have developed the residual soil or fertilizer and infillation techniques for high value crops in the Dyson zone, in what part of the zone. That could help in this auto governance issues, I believe. Thanks very much Manu Ranjan. So how technology can be a disruptor or addressing these challenges when they are very complex and critical? But I can pass this over to Moina and Muklesh for their comments in a bit. Maybe let's take two other questions. Can I respond to this alternative way of handling the freshwater issue? Muklesh, can you wait just one minute and then we'll take one more question and then you can respond, yeah. No, Charlotte, please. Yes, well, thank you all for those very interesting presentation. I had work on this issue with Manu Ranjan, by the way, some 10 years back. And that's kind of, yes, striking to see that some of the issues that we had noticed and analyzed some 10 years ago are still there. So one specific question, I think we had came with the idea of the role that the Union Parishat could play in between the community level water management and issues they are facing and the policy level action with this issue that well, maybe the policies are there but on the ground we don't see them being necessarily applied. So we were thinking about empowering the Union Parishat, the local government institution to help with that. So I'm just curious to know if there is any step which has been taken in that direction and what is the role that the currency of the Union Parishat in terms of the water governance? Thanks a lot, Mayor Charlotte. I will hand over both the questions, first to Moinesh and then to Moina. All right, thank you. The first question is fine. I mean, we appreciate I think the technology that without water we can grow crops. But I think the way we see is a landscape approach. Not that only the production of crops using the water, but water is needed for the capture fisheries, the area, the capture fisheries, the wild species of freshwater is seriously impacted. So we have the evidence that if we excavate a canal or rehabilitate a canal, that this freshwater species, many Swiss that are small and people eat the whole fish and very nutritious, that they recolonize, they come back. And I have the photo of the testimony that the women, they go to the canal before making their lunch and spend an hour and get say half a kilogram of fish. And this is for the lunch and dinner of the family and the free fish. So what we want is a healthy production system at the landscape scale where we need, we have the land and water and other sort of resources that all collectively actually essential for a healthy production system. The other thing is, I appreciate that. I think it's not alternative rather in combination we can use that. The other aspect of this union, Parishad, basically canal restoration and creation of freshwater provision, it needs money. But the budget they have is not adequate to address all this. I think the allocation from the government is less. That's why in our previous work in policy briefing notes when we developed that we recommended for financing. Financing these food system initiatives in the impacted area like lower Kansas Delta. And Union Parishad as the good points you raised on different projects, we excavated several canals and the support of the Union Parishad particularly in conflict resolution was instrumental. And it was good. And in some of the areas the Union Parishad sharemen are also against canal restoration because they are also party to canal leasing. So it's really very tricky and we need to handle this thing very carefully because there are sensitivities in it. However, I think that those two are great answers. Did you want to add more? No, it's fine. I mean, Union Parishad engagement is fine, but Union Parishad cannot handle the leasing thing. Most of the canals are leased. If you want to cancel the lease, we need to address the local, I mean the Upojala sub-district administration, district administration and also the court and ministry of land. So things are complicated, not that easy, but doable. Yeah, so that's it from my side. Great, so I think you really answered the question well that the political implications are far more complex than just handing it over to a local government. And also I think the other question that in the interest of multiple livelihoods and also the biodiversity, there is a need to let these rivers flow through these canals. Moina, did you want to add anything to the first two questions? Then I would like to hand over to Maria. Oh, so actually Dr. Mucles has said it all, just one experience from Prusa. So the involvement of Union Parishad depends on the obviously on the political influence and also what sort of initiative community is taking or community is leading on that topic. Like if it is not that much of sensitive, then Union Parishad might get involved. But if it is a sensitive issue, then it will be a bit much crucial. Okay, thanks a lot. Maria, you have a question. I think you might mean me, Mariana. Mariana? Yeah, okay, thanks. Moisa and Moina both talked about evidence, that evidence is relevant of what works better to for informed advocacy. So my question is, what do you consider evidence and how do you generate evidence? And I have a second question for Indu. As we heard that electric capture is an important area and I heard that women's exclusion too and you work on it and you empower it, but how do you work on electric capture so that this is less a barrier? So these are my two questions for all three speakers. Great, thanks a lot. So maybe first Indu, you can respond to the question and then over again to Mokleisha and Moina for the first question. Yeah, thank you so much, Mariana, for the question. I think the first question was about what do you consider an evidence, right? Like it's, I think in this particular case study what we are trying to do with the true size that in, for example, particular Nordic-Voiterx meetings where there will be the participants from the community label women and marginalized. So we want to actually create evidence with them like we are conducting detailed, like the data collection. So working with these people to see what are the issues that are on the ground in terms of water governance, not only in terms of the food production, for example, how it affects for different livelihoods and what does that mean, or what does that access to water mean for different people who are dependent on these common pool water resources. So we would like to generate the evidence together with these people that we are trying to do. And in terms of elite capture, like it's like women's exclusion, we found that there have been issues of elite capture and women exclusion. So I think I would actually pass this question over to Mocles, Dr. Mocles from CNRS, because they have been working, you know, like for a long, for on these issues on, you know, like how they would, they see this and what would be the strategy to work with the elite capture on the ground. Maybe over to you, Dr. Mocles. Okay, thank you. And the elite. Yeah, yeah, okay. So the evidence generation basically in part of the Kultuli canal when we did this rehabilitation four years back and what we did, we did a kind of GIS based land use survey mapping and then we saw that, you know, the over the years, the cropping diversity and the areas changes because of this water availability. And we also engage the agriculture extension department to support the communities on the technical aspects, training and we also engage the agriculture extension department to do crop cutting, which is just to kind of what sort of production that we got per unit area in our new varieties or stress tolerance varieties that we collected from PDE and also PINA Bangladesh nuclear in the state of nuclear agriculture at Rice Research Institute. So these are the evidences that also we did the fish catch monitoring in one part of the canal to see what sort of species are there. But that project was not a research project like CGIR system that was kind of climate justice project. So that's what that was started. And there are evidences that, you know, the water availability. Say before we rehabilitated the canal, it was seasonal water body. And that's why it was not leased because it is tried in the dry season. So Leesolder was not interested to take it for fish culture. So when we excavate it, then it come perennial and can provide water. Dr. Borodanjan is right that, you know, we need to excavate the whole canal network that takes time and money.  And our job is not to do everything, but to show government that what is possible and how this food production system can be improved and enhanced in this sort of very climate or hazardous place, what is possible that the government should take the proactive measures to handle this sort of crisis. Okay, thank you a lot. The elite capture is there. And then to evict the elite people from there or those people who grabbed or had kind of illegal control, we actually engage, we made allies, make friends. Like there are local journalists, we engage them in the process. There is a local youth groups, we engage them in the process. There is one NGO platform on environmental issues, we engage them. And it's kind of collective force, as I said earlier. I mean, if we have, and also the, what Deepa is saying, the agency, what we have seen, the women, I mean, Deepak, I think you could remember Pushpore Animondo was a young housewife where we were in their house. She's so courageous. She alone with some of her peers evicted, removed the lease holder from the canal. So the house is there, but he left the place.  With so, that person left to adjacent villages, never coming to that point. But he put some, isn't that well. I mean, they have the, the question is, they understand problem, but unless the external facilitator facilitate and help them use their agency to shape up their work, it is difficult for them alone to do. Because there are both cases. Yeah, yeah. Thanks. I think you've made the point really well that water governance is a very political issue, especially where it's so contested and where freshwater resources are so scarce.  And I, if this is in relation to the questions, then I would ask you to please take no more than one minute each to add to this because Manu Ranjan has his hand up and I would like to pass on to him then for maybe his third question. Okay, so Moina, Indu, one minute each and then one around. Yeah, I just want to add in response to the questions of evidence that we start from our learning things back in our mind and then document the impacts in the ground from the people who are actually suffering. And when needed, we intervene with the citizen science approach and create a database and that is added to the relevant expertise, expert inputs, and we, Trusa has actually at least two examples where community initiatives and indigenous knowledge extracts experts from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology and development of fisheries who actually later take the information and do the research and eventually find out that what communities are saying, it was true. Yeah, that's all from mine. It's a lot, Moina, Indu, one minute please. Sorry, I'll be brief here. So I think it resonates with what Moina just mentioned. Like the approach we see here is, we'll be working with both CNRS and Oxfam. So documenting this and in terms of elite capture, like once we could create, like develop the knowledge using the Trusa's evidence, we want to focus on two different aspects. So one is making these policy makers institutions, like the kind of realization on that, there is the need to change this policy practice. And also working on the ground, like how we can increase the agency and voice of these different populations, like the women, smallholders, fishers, and some other marginalized populations. So once we have the evidence, we'll be working with the Trusa using their approach, as Moina just said, and then integrating with the advocacy campaigning and then at two different levels. One is the institutional level and also at the grassroots, the non-deboiter, really to focusing on increasing this agency and capacity of these marginalized populations. Yeah, maybe Moina wants to add more, but I just wanted to highlight that with respect. No, I think we should not add more. I think we should pass it on to Manu Ranjan for the last final question. Yeah, thank you. I'm going to go to Deepak. You know, this color-grabbing, early capture, this will be there in Bangladesh because this is a democratic country. Either you bring the Union, Prishad and Uttar Pradesh, whose interest is there. So the two issue, issue is the salary versus non-salary. Salary is a resource for the aquaculture. So there will be, there is, and it's a curse for the aquaculture. So this conflict is there, aquaculture versus aquaculture. And aquaculture will win because they are the influential people. And that is happening in the Shabtik idea. But you will come to my school idea, I'll tell it is less where shrimp farming and aquaculture is less profitable. The clumping are there. That's why Dr. Mokil has mentioned joining. We are also listening, joining for a long time. But again, I'm saying that it is a democratic country. Nobody will believe that joining or obey that. But we are influenced, they will do their own way. So my question is that, our suggestion is that, how about the resources are available for the aquaculture, we have to indirectly use that talk. And if it show the benefit to the community, then there will be some solution. Otherwise, I believe we will have to listen for a long time this lobbying and ellipsoid like of things. Thank you very much. Moklej, do you want to add anything? Very quickly for one minute, please. Okay, Moklej doesn't seem to be there. So Moina, do you want to add anything to the recent comment by Manu Ranjan? No, I think it's fine. I think, I don't want to go into debate about the democracy and the autocracy. But I think we need some sort of systematic approach that the enabling landscape environment and in Shakira as well, there are areas where stream culture is difficult because the watering, the stream plant or stream pond from river is not possible or very costly. So there are places where agriculture is feasible, low cost and profitable. So we actually need to think about the local differentiations or variability of the land escape and water escape and salinity escape. So yeah, I mean, so that's what I want to say, but yeah. Thanks a lot, Moklej. Maybe I can just add very quickly to that and then hand over to Ole for closing this session on time. So I do agree, Manu Ranjan, that there are different values and of different types of approaches, but I think there's enough documentation on Bangladesh that the expansion of saline water, shrimp cultivation has had very challenging prospects and in fact, now the economic gains from shrimp cultivation in the Southern coastal deltas is no longer viable and there is a collapse of what used to be earlier a very thriving economic driver and in the recent documentation on Bangladesh, there's also references to looking into new waterscapes and landscapes to carry on shrimp cultivation, whether that is a wise decision given the fact that it had so many outcomes in the Southern coastal deltas is another issue. But I think it also signals, I think, an issue for policies to really take on a much more integrated perspective where the consideration of ecological dimensions longer term economic gains and also equity are built into what is promoted as livelihood opportunities in the food systems context more broadly beyond agriculture. So over to you, Oleh. I think thanks to all the speakers and all the questions that was really interesting. Yeah, thank you very much also from my side to all the speakers and thanks for a very active discussion. As always, the recording will be posted on the NFP Connect platform under nfpconnects.com and also we can continue the discussion on that platform. So that will happen within the next few days. I would like now to give the last word to Mariana to tell us what we can expect during the next Delta Talks in end of April. Please. That's the exact plans for next time. So that is to be seen and it will be a nice surprise for all of us. To hear, I hope soon, who will be the next speakers or speaker defending. And I also would like to thank the speakers and the discussion that I really liked and also Deepa's methodology for a more integrated perspective. And so that is, I think what we try since the Delta Talks also, so that we expose ourselves to different disciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary approaches people are working on. And then we discuss it together. People who are working in this field or people who are not working in this field. So I think this broadens our views as researchers, as we also need to take a more integrated perspective. Thanks a lot. Thank you everybody and see you next time. Bye-bye. Thank you, bye-bye. Thank you everyone. Bye-bye. Thank you, bye-bye. Thank you. Thanks everyone. Just putting the camera to say hello to all friends. Have a good day. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.


I'm so glad I'm going first. I was so nervous. It's super nice to be back here. I actually, I grew up in Chester. I spent two and a half years there. So UK has such a special place for my heart and I feel like I'm in Downton Abbey. It's amazing. So my name is Linda Leogas. I'm a children's book author and an illustrator and a super mediocre programmer and a business full dropout. And because Scandinavian people, that's where I come from, from Helsinki Finland, because Scandinavian people are such self-deprecating people. The only thing I feel really confident saying is this, that I'm a dropout. As Simon mentioned, I was one of the co-founders of RailsKills, a first experience in software craftmanship back in 2009. And the thing spread like wildfire. Today RailsKills has been in over 227 cities, all everywhere from Amant to Australia from Bella Horizon to Berlin in Ukrainian cities that I can't even pronounce. It all started as a weekend thing in Helsinki. I never ever imagined that it would spread. It was something that I wanted to do for me and my friends. And then there was the Ruby community, the amazingly warm and welcoming community of people who said that, yeah, let's do it everywhere in the world. And that's been an amazing, amazing ride. I worked for a few years at Codecademy in New York. And I had a lot of the startup ethos still going on when I decided to move back to Helsinki to be with my family. And I thought, huh, where does the most scalable change in the world happen? Surely it's not dating applications or like dinner applications. And ladies and gentlemen, the most scalable change in the world, it happens when you're four years old. It happens if we can change the perception a four-year-old has about the world. We can have a totally different kind of group of adults. And that's when I decided to become a children's book author. There were only a few problems in this. First, I wasn't an author. I had never drawn before. And I still consider myself to be a pretty mediocre programmer, not someone with a PhD in early childhood pedagogy and a PhD in computer science. But I belonged to the Jeff Atwood School of Thought, where repetition is the king. And I started drawing. And I figured that drawing is like any other skill, mechanical repetition, rope repetition. And if you draw a thousand circles, eventually your circles are going to get better. And these are some of the first sort of pictures from Hello Ruby from 2009, I think, 2010. It was the time when I was teaching myself programming. And I would run into all of these words like object-oriented programming and garbage collection. And I was like, oh, what is this thing? And I had this little guide on my tour. She was six years old. She was Ruby. She would explain all of these things to me. And you know, when there's people who see numbers as colors, I started to see the world of technology as stories. And it really helped that I had the Rails Girls community around me. They sort of created this really weird reality distortion bubble for me where I felt that, yeah, sure, I could write a children's book about programming without really knowing how to program or really knowing how to draw. So they would send me pictures. And I even got a plush toy from Belo Horizonte once. And I figured like, yeah, maybe, maybe there's something here. And then the pictures started to get better too. And I had an idea of like the surrounding world of Ruby. So she would have the friend, the Snow Leopard, who's beautiful, but doesn't want to play with the other kids. The other kids are so messy. And the Androids who are really friendly. And the Linux, the Penguin. And she meets Cache there. And anyway, it's like wonderful whimsical adventures. And I decided that, okay, I'm going to make this. I have all these wonderful Ruby friends all around the world who will support me. And Kickstarter was picking up the time. And I put the project on Kickstarter asking for $10,000 to get like first round of books published. And I was thinking about basically all of you like people who are programmers who have kids who want to show all of the colorfulness and excitement of the world of programming. And then this happened. And $380,000 worth of pre-orders in a matter of a month. And during the first 24 hours, the project gathered over $100,000. And you, I still don't know if this was like the best day or the worst day in my life. I would like crawl under our bed and like cry. They're like, I don't know what I'm doing over here.   And there was no structure and no sort of resonant big idea that this is what I'm going to do in the world. But I needed to pick up pretty fast in order to make this happen. And this is kind of a story of the last year, what I've been working on with them, this whole project and sort of delivering on the promise of making a whimsical entryway to the world of programming. And I came up with three principles of programming that I kind of wanted to build my whole universe of little movie around, which I'm going to tell them pretty soon. But let's start. Oh, and all of the exercises I mentioned over here are also on the website. So they are free to download over there. And you can even see what the other kids have made. So here's a little girl who password protected her door with a tiny computer. I want you all to be Alice with me today. Take the red pill and fall deep, deep down inside the computer. So this is where I kind of started. I thought that, okay, if we all agree on the idea that the future important languages are going to be English and Chinese and JavaScript or Ruby or Python or whatever you take, maybe we shouldn't be teaching grammar lessons, maybe we should be teaching poetry classes. And what I mean with that is the same way when I go to school and I learn finish, I don't only learn about the grammar, the different past tense or future tenses, I learned to read other people's writings, different kinds of writings like essays and poems and everything. And then I learned to write my own stuff like newspaper articles and little columns and stuff like that. And in the same way, learning to program should be sort of this whole array of different things. And the thing is that little girls, they don't know that they are not supposed to like computers. When I was a little girl, I thought that I like, I knew that I didn't like computers. I was the girl who loved philosophy and art and meeting and all of these like colorful happy things. And I thought that computers, they are just sort of introverted and scary and boring and gray. And that couldn't be further away from the truth. But the little girls of today, they don't know that they are not supposed to like computers. They are really amazing at concentrating on things. They tell amazing stories.  The only thing is that we need to reinvent the curriculum of code, the way we teach programming for them. And I came up with a few different things I want to be teaching, like the concepts before you even learn to write a JavaScript array or Ruby hash. You need to learn to take a big problem and put it into smaller pieces. You need to learn about the concept of loops. Everyone who has ever done a free course meal has really done an algorithm in one way or another, has planned step by step instructions of getting through the problem of handling three different courses. Everyone who's ever had a dance competition has really done different kinds of loops, like dance until you hear the music stop or so forth. And anyone who's ever... Now I forgot the example I was having here, but we'll get to that later on. The point being that there's a wide variety of teaching these concepts. And when I talk to programmers, they almost always recognize these two types of joys in programming. The first of them is the more intellectual pleasure of having a beautiful abstraction, a wonderful function written down and feeling very idealistic and happy about your intellectual work. But then there's the other type of programming joy. That's when you bang the keyboard and you're like, I'm not sure if this is going to happen. But oh, like, I made the computer obey my will. It actually works what I was trying to do. And that's almost like a tangible joy. And that's play. And that's what I was after. But in order to understand all of this, I needed to go to the people who understand play best and understand what it is and how it works. And that says a mystery. I know says a mystery that's pretty big here. And it's unbelievable. They've produced 43 seasons of quality kids content that is both fun and educational. And they say that for our social and cognitive and even like our physical well being play is paramount. And then there's this other company called Lego that I think many of us loved growing up that says that there's actually five types of play. There's physical play. There's play with objects. There's symbolic play. There's pretence and sociodramatic play. And there's games with rules. But for some reason, when we think about programming and play, we only think about the last one games with rules. And Lego went further on and they listed all sorts of motivations for play. So they listed achievement based motivations, social motivations and immersion motivations. And again, when we teach programming, for some reason, we only use this side of the spectrum of play. We talk about progress and power and accumulation and numbers and optimization. And everyone who's ever programmed knows that there's a lot of self disclosure. There's a lot of collaboration. There's a lot of finding and giving support to one another in the open source community. There's a lot of exploration and joy of finding hidden things. And all of a sudden, I had this vocabulary like, okay, this is what I want to be doing. And I want to sort of have all of these slides present. So three principles. The principles of playfulness, rules and curiosity. And I'll give you a few examples of each of these. The first principle starts with asking the question, what if there's entire industries that have been founded around this very question like you had spreadsheets and then you ask the question, what if and then the modern finance world was born after that. But I think the most important thing here is to show the colorfulness and playfulness of computing.  Like you never know what's happening inside of the head of the programmer between the relationship of the computer and the programmer. And all of the culture and colorfulness that all of us know so well is hidden in this murky underground internet forums. And normal people don't see it. So I want to show all of the happy, funny stuff that happens in the programming community. And little Ruby. She's a little girl. She's not a computer, but she sometimes thinks like a computer. So when I tell Ruby that, Ruby, you need to dress up for school today, she will dress up, but she will leave her pajamas on because like I didn't tell her to take the pajamas off. And when I tell Ruby that Ruby, you really need to like clean the toys from your room. She's going to clean all of the toys from her room, but she's going to leave the pens and papers on the floor because, hey, pens and papers are not really toys. And you can't imagine how relieved six-year-olds feel when they hear about the role model of Ruby and how angry the parents also are for me after introducing these concepts. And the tiniest, the atomic bits of computers, the Boolean logic, and sores and knots, instead of making them into numbers, we can make them into a dress code. So Ruby is super particular about the clothes she wears. On Mondays, she wears clothes that are red and green. Can you point the right clothes for her? On Wednesday, she wears clothes that are not yellow.  Most importantly, Ruby knows that sometimes big problems are small problems stuck together, and you can really do anything if you start to solve problems one at a time. The second principle is that of rules, asking the question how something works. And here's another thing that people often sort of feel like computers are these black boxes and you're not supposed to take them apart and tinker and turn them around and twist them. And it's something that is there and someone else creates. And I know there's stuff like Raspberry Pi and Kano and all of these amazing things coming from UK. And I think it's super important that we give the kids, again, back the gift of asking the question, how does this work? And coming up with rules, imposing a logic on something that is otherwise hard to understand. Because technology, it's not magic. It's never been magic. It's been real people building real things.  They'll be like, really not sure about that. And it's not like a given. We can't wait that Apple gives us a new watch or Google gives us a new car. We need to build those things ourselves and we need to have a generation of kids who believe that they can do these things themselves. So Ruby, when she cooks, she knows that she needs to break the problem into separate pieces. She needs to abstract correctly the act of making cupcakes. If she switches certain ingredients, she will have different kinds of cupcakes. If she adds more to the cupcakes, ingredients to the cupcakes, she will have more cupcakes. And when she helps the snow leopard decorate her beautiful house, she can spot the right patterns from the wallpaper of that or the loops inside of the wallpaper. And she can learn Boolean logic with the icky little bugs over there. There's a few more exercises from the book. So the final principle, the principle of curiosity is asking the question, why? Why does something happen? Why, why, why, why? And it makes me really sad how we've lost the idea, the computers were born out of poems and practicality, like Ada Lovelace, the daughter of a mathematician and a poet. And we've lost that somewhere in the trenches. We've started to think that computers are these machines that don't have a soul in them. And when I work with kids, we start with the basic premise of, I show them a picture of a car and a grocery store, toilet and a dog and ask them, which one of these is a computer? And many of the kids, they start by projecting their parents' ideas of what a computer looks like and isn't there. None of these is a computer. And then we get to talk about it. And we talk that, maybe the dog would have a collarbone band that has a computer inside of it, or maybe in a few years' time, dogs will have chips inside of them that are computers. And actually, six-year-olds figure out pretty fast that all cars have navigation systems, cars really are computers. And then we talk about grocery stores and how there's different kinds of grocery stores, different kinds of computers inside of grocery stores. And you know what? When your parents were your age, computers were so big that they couldn't fit this hole. And when you're going to re-grown up, computers are going to be so tiny that they'll fit into each and every milk bottle. And then there's a spark in the kids' eyes and they start to think about, what, why, what if, how would happen if a computer fit inside of a milk bottle? And then I tell them, and it's hilarious for five years old, that in Japan, toilets are also computers. And we do all this, we teach our kids, like, how, I don't know, how, how them, how the combustion engine works, or how, how to become a spaceman, or how the human body works. But when the kids come to us and ask us, what is a bubble sorting algorithm? Or, Linda, Linda, what actually happens when I press play button on YouTube and like, what goes where and who talks to who? Or, Linda, is internet a place? We adults, we grow oddly silent. We matter something about it being magic or it being really complicated. Well, it's neither. It's not magic and it's not complicated. It all just happened really, really, really fast. Computer scientists are among the biggest idols I have in my life. They've built, like, amazing things in the past 20 years. But they've also built abstraction layers on top of each other, so that we, the consumers, we have iPhones, but we have no idea what happens inside of them. And that's why in these workshops, we build computers with kids and they get to know the bossy CPU and the helpful RAM and where their summer vacation pictures go to. And what happens if you drag a virus inside of the computer and they get to design their, like, keyboard and come up with different kinds of buttons. And I had this little boy, Arthur, four years old, who first designed a button that allows him to print out Lego coloring pages that his mother had printed out the previous day. But pretty soon, Arthur was like, this is boring. Like, I want to print out real Legos. And he printed out some Legos. And then he got totally wild and printed out a microwave and breakfast for the whole family on the next day. And Arthur's mom, who's one of my best friends, said, Arthur, that's not possible. You can't do that. And I'm like, that's exactly possible. Like, Arthur is going to grow up in a world where we will have Legos that are printed on computers. We will print breakfast on computers. And he's going to be part of building that future. And we should be sparking his imagination. And one of my other favorite stories is this little girl who wanted to be a dolphin doctor when she grows up. And she was really uncertain about computers at first. She was like, I'm not sure about these things. But then we talked about it and we figured out that, like maybe she'll design a dolphin health application. And she did this exactly. She designed a dolphin health application where she could manage her little dolphin patients, her pictures of them and like the different stats of the dolphin patients. And one of my favorite stories is the story of a little boy. He's six years old. And his favorite thing in the world is to be an astronaut or actually to be the mission control man for the astronaut. The astronaut is the father. So the father is on the opposite side of the room.  Because you know what? He's designed an intergalactic planetary navigation application. And his task, his role in life is to build, bring the father from the Martian atmosphere safely back to Earth. And these kids are going to have a profoundly different experience with technology and dream of different kinds of things and build a future that we all want to be a part of. So the ending is probably this. None of this is really new. I think computer science is an exciting field because we have all of these things from the past. Already Alan Turing in the 60s talked about a child machine, like how we could build artificial intelligence by modeling the behavior of kids and the way kids learn about things. And we have Seymour Popford in the 70s saying that we shouldn't be teaching kids how to calculate the root squares from the 21st prime numbers. We should be teaching kids to produce things and create stuff. And then we have Alan Kaye, who basically, if you haven't read this article, please do, in the 70s, imaged in a hackable iPad. And he has pictures and it's wonderful and beautiful. And storytelling. Storytelling is not new either. There's a few wonderful books. Ruby Wizard with computational fairy tales, maybe for kids a little bit older. So if you have like seven to 12-year-old kids, these are wonderful things. And I think everyone of us knows why is Poynkman guide to Ruby. That's the thing that got me excited. I learned no Ruby programming language from there. But I learned that there's people who have imagination and people who have passion. And that's why I wanted to be a part of the Ruby community. And that's why we need storytellers. Yeah. Because computers are about people. And when I talk to programmers, non-programmers, they have a hard time grasping that code is written for humans and programming languages are written for humans, not the computers. And that the very DNA of technology is humanity. And a computer used to be a person who was really good at calculating things. And in the past, in the Greek time, technology met not only the tools but also the skills to make things happen. So it was interrelatable of like you couldn't take the human and the technology apart from one another. And that's why we need people with different kinds of stories to sort of spread this message and get the word out. And we all have stories from our childhood that stay for us with years to come. And they affect the way we see the world as adults. I've definitely had many of those Scandinavian stories but also actually a British postman pad and Paddington and all of these childhood stories that have shaped the way I became as an adult. And when I was small, I wanted to be a world builder. I would wake up in the morning in Moomin Valley and roam around Tatooines in the evening and then go to sleep in, I don't know, in Alice in Wonderland's world. But the harsh reality is that you can't become a world builder. You can't graduate to become a world builder in university or in vocational schools. But you programmers, you found a little pole in all of this. You have graduated to become world builders. Programmers have the unique ability to build something out of nothing with only the power of your words. Create a whole entire universe with your own logic, your own rules. And that's why you are storytellers. Thank you.


Hi everybody, this is Andrew Champagne. This is the fabled Live at 525, Burlington's Democratic show. Burlington and beyond, I am joined in studio by my producer and cameraman. And my main guy today, Kevin Harms. Thank you, Kevin. Appreciate you, man. I'd like to thank the staff at Channel 17. It's always good to be on. It's been a month.  As we start, forgive me for getting my thoughts together here and I've got to put on my button, okay? I forgot this. I want to put on my Peter Welch button and let's see. Hold on here. Okay, hold on. This is live television. Well, anyway, so I'm trying to put on a button because I did a couple of events with Congressman Welch this weekend and we attended the Democratic, sorry here, sorry, it's hard to look at this on TV. We'll get this going in a second. There we go. Okay, how does that look? All right, geez. Sorry, everyone. So we attended a few events this weekend and we had a special guest come on up to Burlington and that was Senator Ed Markey. He is the Senator from Massachusetts and he has been in Congress since 1970. He's been in Congress since 1976 and he was elected when he was 30 years of age and after John Kerry left to become Secretary of State in the second President Obama administration, he was appointed Senator by Governor Devel Patrick and I don't want to take this off. I can't get this going. I hope not too many people are watching this but it was a long, late day for me. I was doing a lot of stuff. It's my birthday, so forgive me. I'm looking out here and I'm trying to get this right. Okay, there we go. All right, I'm gonna take this off and we'll work on it later. Anyway, so Senator Markey was up in Burlington. It was great, he did an event. I'd like to thank the Burlington Beer Works on Flynn Avenue and Flynn Ave in the South End of Burlington. And we had a great time at the, oh my God, I can't believe this. All right, we had a great time at the event and we also, Senator Markey was the head speaker, the lead speaker at our Curtis Awards, our Democratic Awards. And so he's a really interesting guy. He's been in Congress since 1976, as I said, when he was 30 years of age. And he has, by the time his Senate term is up, he will serve 50 years in Congress. That's incredible, there he is. Thank you, Kevin, for putting him up. And of course, of course, a very, very long-term serving Senator Patrick Leahy, Vermont's own. Mike, I look up to him, I think he's fantastic. He announced, there he is. I'd like to say hello to he and Marcel. Hi, Mrs. Leahy, I wish you both the best. You're both the best. You see when we get these public servants like Senator Leahy and Senator Markey, you know, their life is public service and that's what they've done their entire adult life. And they're so good at it, they've built amazing staffs in Burlington and Rutland, and White River, Montpelier, all over Vermont, and then all over Massachusetts, all the way over to Great Barrington, or all the way on to Nantucket. Massachusetts is a big state. It's very rural in the West, and then most of the population is around Boston, and then the beautiful Seacoast, the history. It's always been a very proud democratic state. As a matter of fact, in 1972, the only state that was carried by the Democrats was Massachusetts, and when I was a little kid growing up in Connecticut, just down the road from Springfield Mass in Hartford, I would see on cars an old bumper sticker that said, Massachusetts, don't blame us. So it's been, Massachusetts has got that rich tradition of, you know, back to the colonial days, the John Hancock, you know, Benjamin Franklin's original from Boston, and then that tradition all the way through the Kennedys, and now Senator Elizabeth Warren, and I'd just like to thank Senator Markey. He could not have been more gracious.  I don't believe he's ever lost an election. But anyway, what he talked about at the Curtis Awards is gotta be, you know, it's obviously the lead topic of this month's show, and that is the fact of the leaked draft of the Supreme Court argument that potentially could overturn Roe versus Wade. We believe that it was written by Justice Samuel Alito, very, very conservative justice, a someone who believes in the Constitution word for word, and I'm sorry, I'm sorry respectfully, Judge Alito, I think that the founding fathers, James Madison, James Monroe, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, George Washington, I do not believe that they meant the Constitution to be, I guess, well, I don't wanna offend anyone here, but like the Bible, I think it's meant to be taken literally as a fable, and you look to the story, and Judge Alito supposedly has said before that he thought Roe versus Wade was poorly written, and I would have to respectfully disagree. There's a number of great books about that era of the court and beyond, and I remember reading a book by Bob Woodward called The Brethren, and they worked on that, they worked on that decision for months and months. Now, I'm not sure anyone really approves of a leak. These things usually do not get out. The law clerks are very, they become almost part of the justices' family in a way, so somehow someone felt very strongly about this. Now, I'm not gonna get into whether I think that's right or wrong to leak it. I don't think I personally would have done that, but sometimes things are so grave, like the Pentagon Papers, or like the stuff that has been leaked about what we are, our terrible acts in Iraq and Guantanamo, and sometimes things are too important not to come out. Sometimes some secrets stay, like the Manhattan Project. That stayed a secret. Now, the Russians supposedly knew about it at Yalta, but they were behind us, so this decision is enormous, and I'm very, I'm angry, of course, but I'm also saddened that the Republican Party has politicized the court to the way it has, and that we seem to have a litmus test here on certain issues, and we saw that President Trump's legacy is not as incredible as perfect. I'm trying to think of the right word here. I need to be cautious, and I need to be respectful. His vast array of misdeeds, and including January 6th, where people were encouraged and provoked to attack the United States Capitol, to enter the Capitol illegally, to assault, intimidate, sometimes literally pull the eyes out, trying to rip someone's face off, literally, of Capitol Police, and that's nothing short of treason, and those people are traitors. So when the history is written, and it's being written now, this was a litmus test where you stand. Now, we see the President was impeached, it didn't go through again, but we see, my God, what President is impeached twice in his term, never, ever again. Now, there is a thought that President Trump is gonna run again. I think for the long-term future of the Democratic Party, I'm sorry, of the Republican Party, that would be a terrible mistake. I think the Trump balloon is slowly leaking air, and I think when people realize really what this person was about, okay? He hardly espouses the conservative views of the Republican Party, okay? And I, on this program, this'll be the third time I've talked about it. There he is. Okay, well, he was a former President, so I have to be respectful to him, but I disagree with him on virtually every subject, and I think his attitudes are polarizing and are pulling apart America. I see that when I travel in rural, upstate New York and rural Vermont and rural New Hampshire, I'm starting to see a divide. We don't wanna stick with that picture Donald Trump too long, Kevin, okay, I gotta move on to something a little cooler than that guy on my birthday here. Okay, so this is the third time I've been on this show since March, and that was a town meeting, actually, I was town meeting day, and that was also State of the Union day. And President Biden gave a great State of the Union that day, I know I've talked about it a couple of times, but he's very comfortable at, he's very comfortable at home, at the Capitol, and he gave a great speech. Also, I think he's been doing a great job on the Ukrainian war.  Russia, we'll see what happens. It looks like President Putin's health is a bit spotty. It looks like they're getting literally no support from the rest of the world. China seems to be hedging its bets. We're pretty much all in, except for actual troops on the ground. But I think our management of the war, we're trying to get some supplies over there, primarily humanitarian. So we do not have ground troops there, but let's make no mistake about it, please, that we are supplying weapons. We are supplying technology. We are supplying intelligence. We are maybe not at war, but we are in a very tough situation. We have never wanted to fight the Russians. The famous Elbe River, that's ELBE in 1945, where the Russians and the Americans met, and that was where the line stood, and that's where the line became. For, let's see, 1945 till 1989, that was East Germany, and that was the Communist bloc. We saw communism fell. We see that a lot of Russian or Soviet, excuse me, satellite states have become independent republics, like Belarus, like Ukraine, like Georgia, and it's incredible to me that Russia has really no allies in this. Maybe some former Soviet satellites, but in terms of the West and South America, Africa, they're getting absolutely no support, and you see the good work that the UN is able to do. We're putting a lot of pressure on Putin. These sanctions really work. We are grabbing the material riches of the oligarchs, for example, the Central Park, 57th Street, they call that Billionaires Row, and we are grabbing that stuff. We are grabbing, for example, one of those Putin's henchmen, he owns Chelsea Football Club, the soccer team, the very, very popular soccer team in the UK, kind of like the New York Yankees of soccer, like Manu or something. So these sanctions are starting to hurt. We see that the fighting is fierce, and as usual, it's young men fighting, fighting wars of corruption and danger and horror, and my heart bleeds for the Ukrainian people. We attended a rally with Congressman Welch at the State Capitol in March, and I remember that because it was pretty cold, and it was holding the Ukraine flag with my friend David Zuckerman, former Lieutenant Governor, and speaker after speaker. There's, it's not a large community, but the Ukraine community in Vermont is very vibrant, and just the utter illegality of this. It would be like us invading Canada or something, and I think President Biden has provided very responsible leadership on this, because as we know, we just got out of a 20-year, 20-year, very rough, very, very rough slog in Afghanistan and about a 17-year slog in Iraq, and those wars were very crippling to us, to our economy. We lost so many amazing young people. So many young people were hurt emotionally with wounds. They were exposed to so many different chemicals. For example, President Biden in his State of the Union talked about that how his late son, Beau Biden, maybe he, the poor man died of a brain tumor, and he probably received that because he was near those terrible burn pits that we had over there. So we've just gotten out of these two rough, rough wars. Sometimes the fighting in Iraq, the temperature was 125 to 128 degrees. Afghanistan, it could be bitter cold, bitter hot. So I'm not sure that the support is there for us to put land troops into Ukraine, but President Biden has stated with all seriousness that if they go into an inch of NATO territory that we will respond. And it's easy to say, hey, is that World War III? We certainly hope not, but we see how World War I started from a conflict in would be President Bosnia, Yugoslavia was part of the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and we've seen World War II started with the invasion of Poland by the Nazis and basically our appeasement in Czechoslovakia. But we see how these can turn into very, I'm trying to think of the right correct word, they can turn into worldwide conflicts.  President Biden has been an excellent commander in chief. He has the full support of the Pentagon unlike President Trump where they did not trust him and there was absolute revolving door of Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, joint chiefs and they frankly had no trust in his military vision. I think President Biden, he came into office in 1973, he was in January, 73, there he is and Vietnam War was still going, it ended right around that time. So he's seen a lot of conflicts and that's obviously the toughest job of being President of the United States. So we also see with this Roe versus Wade decision how this in a terrible way has kind of energized the Democrats. We realize the Republicans and the Republican-led court they really do not have a respect for a woman's body, their right to choose and as so many senators and congressmen have said, my granddaughter has less rights than my daughter and I think of the long history of woman's suffrage, inequality in America. It wasn't until 1920 that women had the vote so my grandmother when she was 21 was not able to vote, she was born in 1897. So it goes back just to my grandmother's times and all the, what we've had improvements in social causes for rights for everyone, for women, for LGBTQT, for non-binary and it seems like the Republicans are using these shock issues to frighten and that's what Fox News is doing. For example, I refer you to the New York Times Sunday, May 1st and Monday, May 2nd for a very, very long article about Tucker Carlson and his, he's just flaming of racial tensions on Fox News. He has the lead spot at seven o'clock. He and I went to the same college down in Connecticut, Trinity College and Tucker, this article, it's very painful to read. He just found these hot button topics and is just flaming the fires of racial tension and it's frightening, it's dangerous, it's scary, it's nutty and they're so well produced and he's very articulate that it's easy to be taken in by this. So I refer to anyone who wants to take a serious look at what Fox News is doing to the fantastic, the best of the best, the New York Times. On Sunday, May 1st, 2022 and Monday, May 2nd, 2022, front page and for the times it's unusual, it goes on for several pages and it shows the premeditation of the Murdoch family to just for ratings for money. I don't know how they look at themselves. I don't know how they can meet their maker. Love not hate, love Trump's hate. But anyway, the president has been obviously right out front on this Roe versus Wade leak. Now, the president can't be happy the leak occurred. It's not like national intelligence but it's such an important national matter that the leaking's a big deal. We can talk about that on another show but the opinion is what counts. The opinion is gonna try to strike down Roe versus Wade which has been, quote, law of the land since 1973. And you know, that was a Republican court too but those Republicans are not like the Republicans of today, they were fiscal conservatives but they were for social justice. A lot of Republicans were on the front lines of the civil rights movement. A lot of people forget that. Richard Nixon, you know, talking about the most idiosyncratic president of them all. And you know why we're talking about Richard Nixon, I should thank Burlington resident, Mr. Garrett M. Graff. He's got a best seller on his hands here. His one volume history of Watergate is exceptional. It is at the Burlington Public Library. I believe there are two copies. And Garrett, Garrett lives up in the Hill section. He's a fantastic reporter, historian and so great at putting together information but I just finished reading that. It's gotta be the highlight of, it's one of the best books I've read this year. Again, thanks to Mr. Garrett M. Graff. Best seller, New York Times, awesome. Thank you, Garrett. Maybe sometime I'd like to have you on the show and we can talk about Mr. Nixon. All the different Mr. Nixon's, he was quite a man. So anyway, Mr. Biden has shown a lot of leadership. And also I mentioned her on every show but and maybe we can get her picture up for next time. I think she's the greatest. Dr. Jill Biden, the first lady in the United States. Still teaching community college and as first lady living in the White House. She has been forceful in her condemnation of this. The fact that it's an invasion of privacy, that it's a health issue. There, hey, there she is. She will be on the road and I have a prediction that she will be coming to Vermont to hopefully stump for the candidates up here. And Dr. Biden, thanks for your good work as a teacher, educator, mother, crusader, and just friend to every Democrat and just an awesome person. I see that she was on the Poland-Ukraine border meeting with Ukrainian officials. So Dr. Jill, thank you. I hope I see you in Burlington. If anyone's ever seen her speak, she is so dynamic and passionate and she really believes in this mission. She and Joe are a team and she's one of the top first ladies. She's really great and a stunning contrast to our last first lady who had really little interest in the job or in people or helping anyone, it seemed like, except her wearing her designer clothes and helping her rich friends. Dr. Jill Biden's been a teacher for 45 years and she's a real force. So thanks, Dr. Jill. And we also talking about Dr. Jill and Joe, the White House Correspondence Dinner was exceptional for the first time in six years. President attended the dinner. Now, President Obama went, a few times, I don't think he went his last year, President Trump could not take the music. He never came once because I believe in 2013, Seth Meyers said him straight and President Obama said him straight about when President Trump had that phony story about President Obama being born outside of the United States. When we all know President Obama was born in Hawaii, which is a state which is part of America. Boy, was that racist, you know, just thinking about that almost 10 years ago really makes me angry. But so, Mr. Biden, President Biden, Uncle Joe, President Biden, he went, he was great. He was funny, he made fun of himself, but then in the end as he always does, he got serious and talked about America and he was a good sport. He was in a room full of people that were so glad that he was there. And then also, I must commend Trevor Noah, who's a South African comic wit humorist. And he was the emcee and he was great with Mr. Biden. He obviously likes the President, but of course, hey, we need him a little bit. I guess he talked about Hunter Biden a little bit and had a few laughs. And you know what? President Biden sat there and laughed and took it like a good sport that he is, okay?  Gentle with some love and it was a great performance by him and I'm really proud of President Biden.  President Joe Biden will announce in the early 24 that he's a candidate for reelection and his running weight will be our excellent Vice President Kamala Harris. Let me see where I am here. I'm gotta be about, I'm 10 minutes away. So I've gotta go into, I usually start the show with it. I had a little problem with my Peter Welch button here getting it on, the pin is broken. So I got thrown off. But we've gotta talk about COVID, okay? I am quadruple-vaxxed. I've got several of my shots right downstairs in this building on the corner of Archibald and North Winooski Avenue. I'd like to thank the Hinsdale family, Jacob Hinsdale. They provided the rooms for that. I'm really glad I got my second booster. I'm over 50, I'm 59 today. So I feel great. If you're having problems with COVID, if you were scared and you didn't wanna get the shot or you saw some disturbing stuff, please, as I talk to everyone, and this goes out to all of Chittenden County, mostly in Burlington, though, the number that you can call is 211 to get help with COVID and all sorts of social services. 10 minutes I have. Thank you, Kevin. As we know, COVID has taken, it's not just the physical ailments, it's the mental, it's the post-traumatic stress. It was very, very frightening. It's perhaps it affecting other conditions, pre-existing conditions, autoimmune, respiratory. It's also the lack of, it's impossible to find a good apartment in Burlington anymore, the lack of secure housing. We also, anyone who's walking around Chittenden County knows and this is no, this is the truth. We have a terrible, terrible opiate problem. It's not heroin, it's fentanyl or Suboxone or something mixed in, sometimes legal depressants mixed in with basically designer drugs. The days of heroin, I'm told, are gone. People could live for years and years. Doing heroin every day and, but there's fentanyl and there's stuff that's even stronger than fentanyl out there. So this stuff, this stuff is really, really, really rough on our populace and we really need, what we really need is people to get, as my friend, Attorney General TJ Donovan said once, if I was homeless, I had no money, I had no friends. I was alone, I was in the winter. Hey, I'd be getting high, I'd be getting wasted too, okay? And you know what? I thought that was an amazingly truthful statement. I'm gonna get back to TJ because he's announced he's not gonna run. I wanna thank him and Beth Pierce and Jim Condos and Molly Gray. They've all done a great job in their positions. They're leaving, some to retire from the sector, some to run for other office. But as TJ said, when you're alone, when it's cold out, the winter, boy, it gets dark so early. Hopefully we keep with the daylight savings forever. You know, a respite might be getting intoxicated. So what can we do to get some people some good housing? Not crummy, banged up, crummy or beat up hotel, something that can maybe be a home because home's where the heart is and a hotel is not a home. And try to get some people eating nutritionally and see a doctor and maybe get their glasses, prescription done, or maybe get some dental work, or maybe talk to a therapist or a psychologist and maybe wean off some medications and get some nice new clothes and a nice winter jacket. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. My friend, if you're homeless, that doesn't work. So we see with the stimulus plan, just yesterday I listened on the radio and read in the New York Times today that President Biden signed part of it that will provide free internet service for low income Americans. We're talking millions and millions of Americans, okay? Now, I don't know, again, hey, there's my buddy, TJ Donovan, let me talk about him for a minute. Good friend of mine, he and his mother representative Joey Donovan. He was a 10-term Burlington Democrat. I saw her at the Curtis Awards. Joey done a lot for Burlington in the state. So is the whole Donovan family from TJ's dad to his sisters to the whole crew. He is a three-term attorney general and he's stepping back. He's taken a break from politics. COVID has been hard. It's hard to do all these meetings on Zoom. I miss seeing people in person. I am not a computer person or a Zoom person, but let's talk about what TJ did, an amazing thing he did. I think three years ago, if you had some tickets, driving tickets and your license was suspended, there was a way to, there was one day where you could come and pay $10 each ticket and get your license back. And a good friend of mine was able to do that. He hasn't had a ticket sense. He's got his license. He's driving legit. He's working hard. So we see some of the things that TJ has done with judicial reform. He's taken a break. I think he'll be back in democratic politics. I hope so. He's a good buddy of mine. He cares about people and I'd like to thank him. Also, I need to thank two other people. I don't know if we have pictures, but maybe next time is State Treasurer Beth Pierce. Beth is stepping back. I read in the newspaper she has some health problems and I'm praying for her. She, five minutes left. So I'm gonna wrap this up, but I've got to do a tribute to her. She's a wonderful, wonderful woman. Lives in Berry City, really cares about people. Has been Treasurer for I think six years now or maybe seven. I wish you the best. She cares about people. Walking around, talking to people with Beth, that keeps it real. Also, State Attorney General Jim Condos is retiring. That's my main man. He calls me the voting man. So helpful with me. We have the best voting laws in all 50 states. As someone who's registered a lot of voters, I've looked over all 50 states as kind of a project and we really have the best. Now let's talk about the primary on August 9th. Little different than the last two elections. We are having, we are not sending out ballots to everyone. You have to request an absentee ballot. In Burlington, you can call 865-7000 and press extension one. Or you can go on the web to Burlington City Clerk's office or stop by in person. 149 Church Street, Church in Maine. They're closed for lunch from 1230 to 130 but they're open eight to 430, Monday through Friday. My great friends down there will help you. They are the best. If you're watching this in another town, Winooski, Essex, God knows where. On the worldwide web, you can call your town hall, email them, write them and get an absentee. Okay, so the ways to vote on this August 9th primary, which are gonna be huge because it's gonna be Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, Treasurer, Attorney General, State House, State Senate. Also, Chinden County Prosecutor. So anyone, if you're interested enough to watch this show, I need you to vote on the ninth. You can do it by one of three ways. Requesting an absentee ballot in the way I just mentioned. One, we're also gonna have about a month of early voting. It will start right after July 4th. Takes time to get all the petitions in and get the ballot set and the election is Tuesday, August 9th from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Any grateful deadhead will know that's the day Jerry Garcia died. So that's a sad day for me but it's a happy day because it's democracy. Tuesday, August 9th. In the next couple shows before this, we are gonna talk, we're gonna talk about the down ballot races. I have an endorsement to make, obviously, full disclosure. I am working on Congressman Peter Welch's U.S. Senate campaign. I'd like to say hi to my friends on the staff, Ryan McLaren, Theo Wurtzberg, Meredith Woodside. I'd like to thank Congressman Welch himself, his wife, Margaret Cheney. Ms. Cheney, you are doing a great job on Public Utilities Board. We did that great event with Senator Markey. And if you wanna, you can meet Congressman Welch. Sorry, I can't call him Senator yet. He's gonna be traveling all 14 counties of this state. So Addison, Bennington, Caldonia, Chittenden, Essex, Franklin, Grand Isle, Orleans, Rutland, LeMoyle, Windsor, Washington, and Wyndham, that's the 14 counties. He's gonna be traveling them. So I believe I have two minutes left. So okay, we're gonna get back to the COVID. If you need some help, if you need some help maybe with some food money, what they call food stamps now called three squares, if you need access to insurance, Medicaid is unbelievably great insurance and low income Vermonters can apply for that. It's a very simple application. Please, can you dial 211? Hopefully we can get that up on the upfront before we go off in about 90 seconds. But COVID again is raging in Chittenden County and in Burlington. I have some friends who have it. I wanna wish them the best. Stay safe, when in doubt, wear a mask. Please, if you have any questions, dial 211, please. If you need some assistance on voting or getting an absentee ballot, you can just call me at home. I work best off phone. My telephone number is<PHONE_NUMBER>. That's<PHONE_NUMBER>. We're down to about a minute left. So I must thank town meeting television. They are doing splendid work here in the heart of the Old North End. Kevin Harms is doing double duty today as he's doing the photography. He's doing the stills. He's doing the production work. The teen sympathy. He's always so kind to me. So I'd like to thank him and also all the people here. We are getting down, I think, to about 30 seconds left. And so let's just talk about the election, August 9th. Okay, if you need an absentee ballot, call your town hall, email them, send them a postcard. Early voting will start about July 4th. The election is Tuesday, August 9th. And that's 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. This is a very important election. The ballot's gonna be long. There's a lot of good candidates. So take your time, do your research. I will, and thank you so much.


Welcome to the BC Library's Core Skills Tutorial, Citation 2, How to Cite, the second in a two-part series. Citation can look complicated and arbitrary. But in spite of formatting differences, citation styles all require the same basic types of information. Each time you access a new source, take note of who wrote it, what its title is, and where and when it was published. Keep track of this information as you go, recording it on index cards, in a document or spreadsheet, or with a citation management tool like EasyBib, Sotero, or RefWorks. If you note down this information as you find sources, adding citations later as you write your paper will be quick and easy. Where you find source information depends on the type of publication and its format. Here are a few possible publication types. For a book, the title page and copyright page should provide the information you need. All of this information is also in the library catalog. Sometimes, a book is composed of individual chapters, by different authors. If this is the case, you'll need the chapter title and author, in addition to the book title and editors. For a journal article in a database, everything is right in the database main entry itself. In most databases, you can also export directly to a citation manager. Keep in mind that many journal articles have multiple authors. Make sure you record all of them. Also, you might be used to recording publication dates from magazines or newspapers, but when, for academic journals, is usually noted as volume and issue. Volume is often numbered by year, from the first year of publication, and issue is often numbered in sequence within a volume. For a print journal article, this information is usually available on the article's first page. You may also need to check the journal's table of contents for the volume and issue numbers. Websites are less standard. The title of a page, name of the site, and author are often found near the top of the page. Keep in mind that an author might be an organization, not a person. The publisher might be on an about page. A publication date might be below the title, or you might find a last updated date at the bottom of a page. Copyright dates are often updated annually, even if pages aren't updated. If a copyright date is all that's available, many citation styles would have you use nd for no date. A rule of thumb about websites. If this information isn't clear, it might not be a good source. There are other kinds of sources where who, what, when, and where might not be altogether clear, such as online reports, advertisements from old newspapers or magazines, or a video stream of a news broadcast from the late 1960s. The important thing is to record as much information about this source as you can find. Consult your professor or a style guide if you have any doubts. It can be confusing when the information you want to cite credits another source. And this happens, try to find the original source of information because the source in front of you might be representing the original idea inaccurately or incompletely. If you cannot find the original, record all of the information of the source you have and the who and when of the original source. Once you have recorded the information, putting it in the right format is usually straightforward, even if it's a little tedious. Start by consulting the right resource for the citation style. The three most common styles are APA, Chicago, and MLA. Your professor will likely tell you which to use. Be aware that there are two versions of Chicago. Chicago Notes, which uses footnotes, and Chicago Author Date. A full citation has two parts. The citation itself and a bibliographic entry. The citation is brief and located in the text. Its purpose is to point to the full bibliographic entry. Some, like footnote numbers, just point to the entry. Others, like an author and date in parentheses, give additional information about authorship and currency. The second part, the bibliographic entry, may be located either in the footnote or at the end of a book or article, depending on citation style. It includes just enough information to help a reader find the actual original item or to help a scholar quickly assess the authority of a publication. You can find reliable information about each citation style on the Citing Sources Guide on the library website. You can also find print or e-book manuals for the major styles linked on the Citing Sources Guide or by searching the catalog. Don't forget that librarians are always available to help. They cannot ensure your formatting is 100% correct, but they are happy to help you find the right citation resources to guide you.