We've already referred to that a little bit, NEPA, MMPA, ESA, Acronym Soup, but it's going to be interesting and Josh Eagle is going to be moderating this panel for us. I've gone over his bio before, but he comes from South Carolina up here. I was agreed to take this panel on. So to his left is Adana Christie, and again in reading people's bios and preparing for this. She's, if you don't know her casebook, it's on my shelf in many revisions, and her co-authors are here, and there's a lot of co-authors of casebooks here at this conference. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but we've been thinking a lot about this stuff and cranking out a lot of paper on it that we make law students read. So I guess that's a good thing. Professor Christie is the Elizabeth C. and Clyde W. Atkinson Professor of Law and Associate Dean for International Programs at the Florida State University College of Law, co-author of a leading casebook in the field as well as numerous articles and reports. She was also involved in the preparation of an appendix for the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy. She received her J.D. from the University of Georgia School of Law, attended the Hague Academy of International Law, and also spent a little time as a postdoc up at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution right around the corner. Steve Ouellette, to her left, has been practicing law out of Gloucester and trying cases in state and federal courts for over 25 years representing fishermen and small businesses. He's represented the City of Gloucester in the Northeast Seafood Coalition in the Amendment 13 litigation, and is currently representing Gloucester in New Bedford and other fishing interests along the mainland up to the state of Maine in litigating aspects of Amendment 16 to the Groundfish Amendment, the Groundfish Plan that we recently that we heard about earlier. To his left is Dana Wolfe. She's a staff attorney at Ocean Conservancy based in Washington, D.C. She advises them on ocean conservation and fisheries issues, particularly with respect to implementation of the Manx and Stevens Act. She's been with them for six years and has also worked in congressional relationships for that organization. Prior to that, she worked as legislative counsel for the Coast Alliance and also as legislative assistant to former representative Steve Gunderson from Wisconsin. Dana received her J.D. from the Dickinson School of Law and her LLM and environmental law from the George Washington University. And finally on the far left is our award winner, well, I don't know, I think, yeah, you're definitely from farther away than Phil Saunders. So from very cold climates, our travel award-miles winner is Kaia Bricks from Alaska, director of protected resources division of NOAA Fisheries Alaska region in Juneau. She's led this program for the past six years, has been with NOAA Fisheries for 15 years. You'll notice an evolution from, as our program progresses, from lots of exclusively lawyers in the early panels to throwing in a few PhD people, a few scientists, to tomorrow where we are going to really mix it up with some economists and some fishermen. Now that wasn't really deliberate when we put this program together, but that's turned out because those are the people who are most qualified to talk about this evolving area of law. And I think it's indicative that it's getting much more complex and interdisciplinary, all that. So Kaia is stepping into the fray as is Morgan amongst a lot of lawyers. So I give you panel two, and Donna, I think you're leading us off here. Well, thank you. I'm really happy to be here today. I hope you all have been doing what I've been doing for the last hour. I've been popping Hershey kisses trying to get my sugar up so that I wouldn't fall asleep during this panel. To look at some fisheries issues again for the last year or so, I've been kind of up to my ears in sand and oil, so fisheries haven't been my main focus for a little while here. So it's nice to be able to look back on some of these issues that I've been working on earlier. Now, I was first asked to kind of give you an overview since we were talking about the intersection of the Magnuson Act with other laws, and obviously the MSA doesn't exist in a vacuum, that there are other acts that are very integral as far as the fishery management plans and fishery planning. And it's also other kinds of things like the U.S. Constitution when somebody claims that they're taking up their property because of regulation, or international treaties like CITES or the International Failing Convention or regional fisheries organizations, these kinds of things also affect our management. But today I'm going to look at something I looked at earlier for the National Ocean Commission. They interplay of Endangered Species Act and Marine Mental Protection Act with Magnuson Stevens Act, and how that works out with the fact that you have one agency that's in charge of managing all of these different marine living resources, and no real guidance as to how to prioritize and deal with these things. So the Endangered Species Act, just very quickly, the prohibition on taking of endangered species, the incidental taking is somewhat allowed as long as there's a mitigation plan and the takings aren't going to appreciably reduce the likelihood of survival, also have desiccation of critical habitat for endangered species preparation of recovery plans, and in the case of federal actions that jeopardize the continued existence of an endangered species, biological opinions, and consideration of reasonable and prudent alternatives. Marine Mental Protection Act, moratorium on taking there, too, with a number of exceptions and exemptions, and the Act now provides for special taking incidental to commercial fishing to reduce mortality and serious injury. Now, when you look at the protected species that NOAA takes care of, there's quite a few marine species that they're talking about. On the other hand, although it seems like that's quite a number, you see that there are 72 ESA listed species that are currently, this is endangered or threatened, that's out of about almost 2,000 endangered and listed species. So we only have 72 listed marine species. You take out 30 or so anadromous species, salmon, trout, sturgeon, whatever, you get down to about 42, then you have our nice charismatic megafauna and marine sea turtles that make up then a large majority of the rest of those, and that doesn't leave much else that's covered by the Endangered Species Act as far as the marine environment. So it gives you an idea of how little we know about the marine environment and how little is going on to protect anything but kind of the most obvious impacts on species in the marine environment. There are 22 mammals as far as the marine mammal act overlapping with the Endangered Species Act, and those are mostly what we'd be concentrating on today. The kind of interactions that are dealt with in these cases, bycatch, long-long fisheries, trial nets, gear entanglements, usually with traps and pots, but also with gill nets and sains, and competition. We are both kind of the top of the food chain when we're looking for our prey and we're looking for the same things. Sometimes the competition leads to gear entanglement or bycatch, and sometimes the competition leads to basically starving out of species. Under the MMPA and the ESA, recovery plans have to be done in certain circumstances that are set out in the provisions here. In the case of these recovery plans, though, they're not specifically enforceable. Some critics say, well, the recovery plans don't mean much if they're not enforceable and they're not followed. These recovery plans haven't always been particularly useful in the recovery in the marine environment. The MMPA, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, to give you a little background on the issues around the protection of marine mammals and their incidental take in fisheries, it all of course started with the tuna dolphin controversy and it really highlighted the interaction between marine mammals and fisheries and great outcry response from the federal government. But in 1998, a case called Kokicic Fisherman's Association versus Secretary of Commerce really brought to the forefront that this is just kind of the tip of the iceberg when you're talking about the tuna dolphin controversy, that there was a huge number of interactions between marine mammals and fisheries just across the board. That hadn't been addressed at all and there was a lot of taking of marine mammals without permits and there was a situation where permits couldn't be issued for marine mammals because it wasn't known whether what the stocks were and what status was of those marine mammals. After 1988, which in this Kokicic case, which basically could have led to complete shutting down of fisheries, there was an interim exemption for fisheries for five years while there was management information gathered, scientific information, information about the fisheries that had significant impacts on marine mammals, observer programs being set up, stock assessments of marine mammals being made. At the end of that time, the 1994 amendments were passed to the MMPA that were an interesting legislation because it was kind of jointly proposed by fishermen and environmental groups. Not necessarily all fishermen got representation, but a significant number of fishermen were involved in development of this. The MMPA called for stock assessments and setting of what was called the potential biological removal level. Basically how many can you take from the environment without dropping the populations below what's called optimum sustainable population, which is basically the concept that marine mammals are managed for rather than maximum sustainable yield. There was also a comprehensive program created for minimizing interactions, establishing review groups, and regulating fisheries with significant interactions, take production teams to develop take production plans, short and long term goals for reducing incidental take. The goals for reducing were, in six months, they were supposed to reduce mortality and serious injury to below the PBR and within five years to insignificant levels approaching zero mortality, so that basically was going to be five years and everything was going to be okay. One of the first steps was identifying the fisheries, category one, two and three fisheries, ones with frequent, occasional, and category three with remote interactions and injuries with marine mammals. It was amazing how much we didn't know what we found out after the five years of studies and how much the interaction level or how high the interaction level was. These categories of category one and two fisheries are literally thousands of boats and fishermen, so it's not a small handful in particular places. It's a lot of people, a lot of vessels all around the country. The category one and two fisheries have to register with NIMPS. They have to report, well, all the fisheries have to report any incidental injuries and mortalities. They are required to take on board observers if NIMPS requests, and of course all of these, the purpose of all of this is to identify the threats and take measures to prevent by catch. The most innovative part of this was the development of the idea of take reduction teams. For every strategic stock that interacts with a category one or two fishery, a take reduction team is supposed to be established. I won't go through the definition of strategic stock there. You can look at that. These take reduction teams were quite unique. They're the antithesis of the fishery management councils because they are so inclusive. They involved fishermen. They didn't exclude the fishermen because this was a conservation program. Include fishermen, environmental groups, states, the federal government. They are academics, the scientific community, everybody, so very wide range of representation on these take reduction teams. They would develop their take reduction plans on a very swift schedule, shall we call it. And the take reduction plans were to include a number of things here, but usually it's things that are gear regulations, area closures at certain times, other kinds of things, steps that can be taken to deal with the kind of interactions that were coming from the fisheries and marine mammals. These plans were mostly developed by consensus. When consensus wasn't reached, then national marine fisheries would still have the obligation to publish a plan and would proceed from there. The plans were implemented through publication of regulations. This gives you an idea of the fisheries that are affected by these take reduction plans. There are still a couple of them that are in the process and the ones that have been developed have constantly been scrutinized and changed to deal with the interactions that are recognized as they're carried out. There have been nine take reduction teams that have been set up and they have made some progress. I guess if you go through the pros and cons of the take reduction team process, I guess the very first thing you always have to recognize is just the importance of having this kind of consensus building approach and the input of a range of interests, including everybody from the fishermen to the public interest groups and the regulators, the scientific community, academics, everyone that's involved. The fishermen, of course, adding really important insights and problem solving skills to the process and from the perspective of the NGOs and environmental groups, very important to actually put them in the problem solving process in this situation. In some cases, the take reduction plans have shown significant reductions in marine mammal mortality. You probably can't read all that, but you can at least see that things are going down, at least in a number of fisheries. Bycatch in certain fisheries has gone down a great deal in the western stock of the stellar sea lions. Not too many years ago, there were hundreds of thousands being taken in fisheries and now it's down to a few dozen a year. Southern sea otters and monk seals have also been reduced significantly. Unfortunately, there's a big list of cons, too, though. The data and information to be able to carry out this process is still very insufficient. Even with the data that they have, the studies have shown that there are at least 30 marine mammals that would qualify as strategic stocks now with the information we have, but there are still at least a dozen of those that aren't covered. Quite a number of reasons why they aren't. There are still a lot of stocks out there that there simply isn't enough information to know about whether they're strategic stocks or not. Many of the take reduction teams, no, nymphs were not exactly proactive about. There had to be lawsuits or threatened lawsuits before the teams were established, and most of the take reduction plans have not been developed on schedule by the teams. The best has been anywhere like from three months late to as much as five years late. There's also been criticism because there's been no good strategy for assessing the effectiveness of take reduction plans. There's also criticism that the approach is largely inefficient, that attacks on specific bycatch policy. In other words, species by species, stock by stock policy, disregards that there are many bycatch issues that overlap. A notable exception to that though has been the mid-Atlantic gill net fishery where the provisions for protection of bottlenose dolphins also works for protecting sea turtles as well. The Atlantic large whale take reduction team has been extremely ineffective as far as protection of the right whale. The Marine Mammal Commission recommends disbanding that take reduction team instead putting in a small scientific advisory body instead. Some commentators also suggest that the priorities are all wrong, that the species that have gotten the stocks that have gotten the most attention are the ones that interfere the most with human activity rather than prioritizing the stocks by the level of threat to those stocks. A few other critiques that the Marine Mammal Commission has pointed out, they think that stock assessments could be improved considerably and would like to see PBR incorporate risk factors other than just fisheries interaction. They say that ecosystem-based management is eventually going to need info about all of the threats to these species in order to balance the risk factors. They have also had specific concerns about the Gulf of Mexico, that the stock assessments for the dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico haven't been carried out and the classification of fisheries there hasn't been carried out significantly. The Marine Mammal Commission also asked for a more organized approach to the observer programs because the data concerning and the reliability of take estimates depends on a well-done program, how far over am I, I didn't see or hear you say five minutes. Okay, so there have been some success, not in five years, but there's still a long way to go as far as balancing the issues of protected species with the fisheries interactions and fisheries management. Because you're not doing a PowerPoint yet? I'm not. When the judges start letting me use PowerPoint, I'll use it all the time. Some of you are, as you heard earlier, unlike many you'll hear today, I am in private practice. I work primarily for the fishing industry. When I went to law school I said this is going to be wonderful, I'm going to go into maritime law, I'm going to be a proctor in admiralty, I took my admiralty courses, I learned maritime liens, I learned how to do vessel seizures, I learned some really great things, but apparently my law school textbook was missing a few chapters because as I came to represent the commercial fishing fleet, I discovered that there were actually a few simple little statutes and administrative rules and regulations that I was unaware of. So for those of you, just as a preface, for those of you who consider a career in maritime law and think about private practice, before you leave law school, I strongly urge you to take as many administrative law courses as you possibly can. And I'm serious, I'm serious, take them. They were terribly boring, I did have a great professor, I had a great professor, they were really boring at the time, but you get into those like Schecter-Poultry cases and learn administrative deference and suddenly you have a whole new appreciation for the practical implications of man's interaction with his own government. We're here really on MSA issues and my intention is to kind of give you the view from the industry side of the equation. MSA is in many respects a wonderful act, I've read it many times and kind of wondering why we have such kind of bizarre results. When the act really seems to be focused on restoring fisheries, encouraging a vital industry, ensuring the viability of fishing communities, and really most importantly of providing a high quality natural protein to feed both our nation and to the extent we choose to import at other nations. Often we see that as the result of the confluence of many of these other regulations and statutes, that goal is seldom achieved. The section that we're looking at today is really to look at environmental statutes and how they converge around Magnuson. And some of the statutes and some aren't strictly environmental that we see, obviously you know the Magnuson Act, NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, Endangered Species Act, we're now seeing implications of the Clean Water Act with regard to vessel discharges, the Lacey Act which really we see in its punitive aspects as applied to fisheries or other illegally obtained materials under MMPA and ESA. We also interact frequently with the Atlantic Tunis Convention Act, which is a kind of parallel act, tunas and swordfish, I'm sure you guys all know this, are managed under an international scheme known as the Atlantic Tunis Convention Act. The U.S. administers its domestic policies through the Act provisions but also in accordance with Magnuson principles. It's not done through a fishery management council, those rules are made by the fisheries service itself acting in conjunction with its highly migratory species panels. We also have to deal with transboundary stock agreements, particularly in the Northeast multi-species, we do share some stocks on the Haig line with our 51st state up there who got away from us at one point. And then for the average boat owner we're starting to see new, we have fishing vessel safety regulations, we're about to see a whole new set, in fact I think the legislation was recently signed and we've had all sorts of new regulations by FDA under HACCP requiring handling and storage of fish product as well as new rules governing their importation and export. So it really is an alphabet soup of new regulatory requirements, certainly in the last 30 years the fishing industry has undergone more rapid regulatory process than any other industry and although I'm not sure it's still true, four or five years ago I saw a study that said that actually the fishery service was second only to the IRS in promulgating new regulations and if you look at the number of regulations we see as previous speakers have commented they're considerable. I want to talk to you a little bit about the Magnuson Act and how it relates to the National Environmental Policy Act and at the end of it we'll get back to the issue of what NOAA is doing on that right now. And obviously it's an environmental act at its very basis, it's become more and more so as time has gone on. Included in Magnuson is a long series of regulatory requirements for rulemaking which set forth deadlines for public comment, they create the management councils, for those of you who don't know the management councils are both obligatory and appointed members, members of the government including NOAA, the Coast Guard and these councils, I have to stand up for the process a little bit because it kind of got misunderstood here. The council process, contrary to popular belief, is a very public process. There is a panel that makes a decision, issues are sent out for scoping before the council actually starts to draft fishery management plans or amendments or frameworks, not frameworks. But fishery management plans or amendments, the public is offered opportunities to sit on advisory councils, to attend advisory council meetings, most fishery management plans are governed by subcommittees of the council, a scallop committee, a ground fish committee, the public is welcome to attend those meetings, offer public comment. The results of those cumulative meetings are brought back to council where once again the public is offered opportunity to comment very often as the process proceeds and I'll go through quickly in a few minutes how the last scallop amendment proceeded. At various times the public is invited to public hearings, sometimes they're actually listened to, they're encouraged to submit written comments and ultimately the process results in a product that may not be accepted by all but as a practical matter it's really tough, everybody complains about the process particularly when they don't like the result but as a practical matter I can't imagine how we could fashion a process that would afford more public input. At the same time in the northeast, and I work mostly in the northeast in the mid-Atlantic, in the northeast particularly our fishery management council does in fact include one member of an environmental group, another member of a fisheries group that's closely tied to environmental groups. We have a pretty good swath of public, we don't have John Q. Public sitting on the council but then again the concept of a fishery management council is to provide that degree of experience to the agency at the council level that will benefit the agency and it really doesn't make sense to put somebody on there who has no idea about any issue that's currently in front of them. To talk about the commercial interests on the council, clearly when you're rule making you need to hear from those people who you are directly regulating as to how it is going to affect them. There's little expertise in NOAA as to the operation of fishing gear, different types of fishing gear, variations in fisheries among regions. So it's very important that that type of expertise come to the council process and be available for the agency throughout the process. The National Environmental Policy Act for those of you, obviously anybody who works for the government knows what NEPA is, it sounds a little more intimidating in some respects than it is and NEPA really is a rise from legislation 1960s as I understand it, following up on the Santa Barbara oil spill and really the intent was to force administrative agencies to fully review the effect of their actions on the human environment to determine what impact this, virtually any federal action was going to have. The act requires public input throughout the rule making process, requires that agencies consider a reasonable range of alternatives and so it kind of in some respects parallels many of the requirements in the Magnuson Act. The problem is that both sets of requirements currently apply and as you sit and go through a current Magnuson fishery management plan amendment for example we recently went through an amendment to deal with certain, with some of the 2006 requirements of the Magnuson Stevens Reauthorization Act to implement annual catch measures and accountability measures. That process which sounds pretty simple, we're going to put a cap on how much you can land and how much is it. That process actually ended up taking about three and a half years. So there is a distinct and perceived need to find some way to speed up the process. Now NEPA is actually a requirement of the promulgating agency which would be NOAA and of course under Magnuson we have this kind of hybrid where the fishery management councils are responsible really for developing the plan and submitting it to NOAA for kind of the, and I use NOAA and NEPA interchangeably, for the thumbs up or thumbs down. Because of the problems created by this kind of dual time schedule around the time of the Magnuson Reauthorization Act there was significant pressure put on Congress to find some way to reconcile this. And so in the Magnuson Reauthorization Act there is a requirement that NEPA or NOAA come up with a method to kind of streamline the process and see if we can actually implement things faster while still preserving the whole concept of reasonable alternatives, public involvement and really understanding how the government actions will affect the human environment. And so NEPA a few years ago I think it was in 2008 published some proposed rules. They went through a basic scoping process. Those proposed rules and maybe as a panelist I'll get to ask a question of NOAA as to when we expect something to happen on that front. And their proposed rules haven't I haven't fully analyzed them. I've reviewed them at times. And it certainly seems that there is an advantage to having the NEPA process which is a scoping public process incorporated fully into the fishery management council process and speeding it through. In the last round of the Scallop FMP we did as I indicated there was really a non-controversial measure which was to develop the annual catch limits specified in the 2006 re-authorization. But also kind of piggybacked on that was a very controversial measure to consolidate the Scallop Fishery. And the Scallop Fishery for those of you who watch fisheries has been a very successful fishery owners are kind of making record profits. One of the problems if it is a problem is that abundance of Scallops has risen to the point that they're actually catching them so quickly boats now catch in 90 days what they used to catch in 300 days. And so the question is do we want to consolidate and create a bunch of super boats that the numbers are something like the average Scallop boat owner makes a $300,000 a year profit on his boat.  And there are many social implications. The environmental impact statement which really the council puts together with the assistance of NOAA in this case really did evaluate the impact of that and how it was going to affect the social environment. The environmental and economic interests are part of the human environment. And the result was that it really there was a fairly strong indication that it was going to disrupt the traditional concept of small business fisheries. I'm not going to say small boat. The council in November of 2009 actually voted to proceed with the consolidation provisions and the EIS environmental impact statement or back then the draft environmental impact statement really became kind of a rallying point for the public who had been coming to meetings to come back to the council and coherently argue that the documents within the plan themselves indicated that this would run contrary to social interests and particular interests raised in the Magnuson national standards. Now again NEPA is not outcome determinative. It's a procedural statute which requires the agency go through certain hoops while rulemaking which normally would be fodder for attorneys but at this point as we see it there's very little NEPA litigation involving NOAA because they have NEPA teams, they have NEPA attorneys and they seem to move the process through. But as a practical matter through three and a half tortured years of rulemaking which required constant vigilance by the industry, the public, environmental groups at the end the NEPA process proved or the Magnuson combined NEPA process proved that the council process really does have an opportunity for individuals and the public to become involved in the process. So I don't want to belabor it too much but I take some umbrage to the concept that the council process is an exclusive process for people within the industry. It really isn't. Okay, just to touch on a couple other brief issues. And how some of these statutes do converge and I'm just going to jump to one issue which is the enforcement issue and some of you had heard recently mentioned here that recent investigation by the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Commerce harshly criticized the Office of NOAA law enforcement really because in many respects they blurred the lines between criminal and civil prosecutions. Magnuson Act has very distinct protections against criminal prosecution. It really favors civil prosecution, only allows criminal prosecution in one or two instances. That's contrary to the provisions in the Endangered Species Act as one fisherman in Massachusetts recently discovered after trying to free a right whale from his gill net, trying to free a right whale from the gill net is a federal misdemeanor and actually can be a felony. Similarly, MMPA also provides criminal sanctions as does the Lacey Act. And the difficulty that developed with the Office of Law Enforcement is that they brought in a lot of criminal investigators in part converting civil investigators to criminal investigators. The end result was that fishermen felt that they were kind of being lumped into the same group. Fines began to escalate. Logwood page being laid by a day was a $10,000 fine. So, and where I'm going with this is at the end of this, the question is going to be should we lump these all together under one statute? And my answer would be other than bringing NEPA and MSA together, I would strongly recommend against it. Thank you. I like it with the lights up and I don't know if I'm going to use this much, but I didn't do a whole lot of slides, but we'll keep them on just in case. Okay, great. Thank you. I'm going to talk about the National Environmental Policy Act as well. And I think I'm going to sort of focus in on that for my discussion today. When we had a call to talk about the panel beforehand and Susan had mentioned, well, it might be interesting and Stephen and Dana can do sort of a point counterpoint on NEPA since they're both going to talk about it a little bit and listening to Stephen talk. I don't think that we really do a point and counterpoint. I think we're both in really very similar, take very similar positions in that we see the real benefits that NEPA affords the process. I was really interested in that scallop story because, yes, it does show the success of the council process, but a lot of that success happened and the good decisions that come out are because of the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act that overlay the Magnuson process. So I think that's a good success story for NEPA. One of the big points I'm going to make here today is that NEPA, if applied correctly, can really be the best tool for effective and forward-thinking fisheries management, which leads to healthier ecosystems, which in turn can actually lead to more abundant and healthy fisheries. I don't think it's a separation of either we continue to fish and have productive fisheries or we protect the environment. In fact, I think we can do both and NEPA helps get us there.  Stephen talked about it a little bit, so I'll try not to be too repetitive. Then I'll give a picture of how it intersects with the Magnuson Act. I'm just going to make a couple quick suggestions for where there's room for improvement and a couple things we might do to fix it. Let's see my first slide. Can I use this one? Sorry, guys. It's really not that important, actually. I wasn't pointing it in the right place. Okay, so Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969 as the basic national charter for protection of the environment. It has two sort of overarching objectives and one is that federal agencies have to take a transparent and thoughtful look at the decisions that they make. They have to look at a number of alternatives and they need to give the public an opportunity to view those actions before they're taken. Very broadly, the law requires that federal agencies use, I think this is where I have a slide up here, use an interdisciplinary approach to decision making. For purposes of the Magnuson Act, the federal agency, it is the Department of Commerce through NOAA, through the National Marine Fisheries Service, that ultimately is on the legal hook for complying with NEPA. The law requires that for every major federal action significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.  Agencies must include a detailed statement of the environmental effects of the proposed action and of alternatives and the statement must be made available to the public. This is the EIS or the Environmental Impact Statement, which is really the main vehicle for achieving the congressional purposes of NEPA. Quickly, there are three key elements to an EIS. I don't think I did very many slides here. One is the Alternatives Analysis. This is really the heart of the EIS and what this means is that the agency cannot restrict its analysis to just one option. It can't sort of say, this is what we're going to do and then do a quick analysis of how to get there. They need to look at a range of alternatives in different ways to achieve the purpose of this data action. Next is the requirement to consider a range of environmental effects. This includes of all these actions and alternatives. This includes cumulative impact, so that means don't just look at what would happen from this action, but what are the effects from decisions we've made before and ongoing management schemes and what do we think could happen in the future? This is really the ecosystem-based management benefit of NEPA can come into play. Finally, there's the requirement to provide the public a meaningful opportunity to review the alternatives and its consequences and to have their views considered by the agency. Ideally, agencies can take advantage of this opportunity that NEPA provides to think broadly and to consider multiple approaches and innovative approaches to the issue at hand. For fisheries management, for instance, this would mean looking at different ways to get at fisheries management beyond looking at just one quota versus another or one total allowable catch or what we're now calling ACLs or annual catch limits under the law. Between the interdisciplinary approach required by NEPA, the alternatives analysis, the requirement to look at the cumulative effects of decisions, NEPA really provides fishery managers the opportunity to add ecosystem-based management principles to a regime that alone under the Magnuson Act really is geared toward just a single use which is fishing. NEPA and the MSA serve distinct but complementary purposes. There are some key benefits that NEPA adds on top of the Magnuson Act. The Magnuson does have obviously very strong conservation requirements and I could sit up here for an hour and talk about the great new benefits of science-based catch limits and accountability measures but NEPA does add benefits that are not necessarily included in the act and really these include the requirement to look at other alternatives besides just the one at hand. It includes the cumulative impact analysis and the requirement that agencies actually respond to comments from the public. I should probably get moving. I have a lot of material. I want to talk about the challenge then that NEPA provides in the Magnuson context. NEPA has made some good strides in improving this process because it has been criticized over the years for being, I think Steve used the word jumping through hoops and it's a paperwork burden and I think we'd have to concede that some litigation over the years has created some concerns and we've created what we sometimes call the thud factor, very giant EISs in this feeling like we need to jump through a lot of hoops in order to meet the requirements and they're making a lot of progress in addressing these problems but there are, we're still facing challenges. I'm going to talk about just sort of two broad contexts for the challenges in NEPA and MSA. First are these sort of procedural hoops or procedural inefficiencies and timing issues. Stephen mentioned under the Magnuson Act the councils are tasked with producing fishing management measures, fishery management recommendations and then they send it on to the agency. At that point the agency has the option to either approve it or disapprove it or partially approve it and for the most part as long as the recommendations are consistent with the act they approve it. Very rarely does an FMP, well FMPs are completed but very rarely do amendments get sent back down to the councils. But since NIMPS is the agency that is on the hook legally for NEPA compliance, the NEPA provisions and requirements technically do not kick in until they've received that proposal from the council. So therefore as a result the council has made a decision, it's sent on to the agency and then the NEPA process kicks in which essentially renders the requirements of NEPA meaningless. Again some steps have been made to try and address this issue. I put up here just some additional authorities for carrying out MSA and NEPA and within these authorities one is a NOAA administrative order that tells NOAA how to apply NEPA. The NIMPS operational guidelines for conducting the Magnuson Act also had some guidance for conducting NEPA and then at the council level the councils have their own procedures for carrying out fishing decisions. All these do provide some guidance for how to parallel these two systems so that the NEPA documentation and the MSA documentation can be done at the same time. And some councils have made some really good progress in fixing that up. NIMPS has made some progress in helping them along but it doesn't happen consistently all the time. Quickly I'd mentioned the Pacific Council for instance this summer they did a big amendment, the amendment 23 to their ground fish fishery which was intended to implement the new Magnuson requirements for catch limits and accountability measures and this is a big amendment. This is something that could change the way the ground fish fishery is managed and hopefully make improvements to the way it's managed. But they basically developed it, approved it, sent it on to NIMPS before there was any NEPA assessment done at all which again just sort of rendered the requirements of NEPA not quite so useful in that situation. So it's important that we improve the procedural inefficiencies and some of the loopholes that are inherent in this process but fishery managers also need to expand their thinking about how NEPA can facilitate a more holistic examination of the marine environment. This is the second challenge in implementing NEPA and really it's sort of a lost opportunity over the years. Overall the Magnuson Act doesn't provide a mechanism for considering the effects of fishery management decisions on the entire infected environment rather it's focused on the effects of the particular fishery management decision. Currently NEPA provides the only tool for doing that. Today we could have an entire, not today, I think over a couple of days we could we could do an entire symposium on what ecosystem-based management for fisheries means so I'm just going to give a brief description. What we mean when we say ecosystem-based manager, ecosystem-based management is that decisions should be made with a full understanding of the impacts of particular fishing strategies on all the components of the marine ecosystem. The goal is to maintain that ecosystem in a healthy and productive condition so that it can provide the services that humans want and need which includes commercial and recreational fisheries. We need to take these broad looks early on in the fisheries as well and periodically thereafter. The famous stellar sea lion case which is Greenpeace v. NIMPS paints a vivid portrait of the need for these sort of big broad programmatic looks early on in the fishery. I was going to talk about this case. See, I told you I just kind of forgot about my PowerPoint. Oh, no, okay. Well, quickly the stellar sea lion case. Actually, this has some ESA concerns but also from a NEPA standpoint, this was a groundbreaking case because it basically set the, sorry, the set of precedent for using these ecosystem-based management tools for making fisheries decisions. In this situation, the ground fish fisheries in Alaska had been based on an EIS that had been done about 20 years previously to the lawsuit. In that time, the fishery had changed in sort of breathtaking ways including the stellar sea lion was listed as in first threatened and then a Western population was listed as threatened. So Greenpeace challenged the ground fish fishery underneath among other claims with the claim that the EIS was too narrow. NIMPS had come back and done a supplemental impact statement but just focused in on fishery on catch levels and tax. And the court came back and said, you know, in fact, you can't just look at the tax. You need to do a programmatic look. You need to look at the cumulative effects. And this really set a great precedent for ecosystem-based management and fisheries. And unfortunately, it really hasn't taken off. This is not something that's trickled down to other regions. And I ran out of time. So that I'm just going to skip to some of the needed improvements. Stephen talked about the rulemaking. The stellar sea lion case was something that came up a lot during that reauthorization process. Trying to sync up NEPA with Magnuson Act became one of the really focal points of reauthorization. At one point, there was provisions in some of the iterations of legislation to basically exempt the Magnuson Act. And fortunately, in the end, that aspect of the legislation was replaced with this one to just tell the agency to streamline the process. Mr. Schwab is here. Unfortunately, the original rulemaking came out before he was at NIMPS so I can say that unfortunately, the original rule that came out was really kind of unacceptable from an environmental standpoint from really benefiting on NEPA. And also, I don't want to speak for the fishing industry, but wasn't really acceptable to folks who had been finding NEPA to be burdensome. It kind of took away the really important ecosystem aspects of NEPA and then also put in new procedural hurdles and made the process even more complicated. So I think what we need to do going forward, NIMPS is about three years past their deadline for doing this required rulemaking under the reauthorization. But if they do a rulemaking, and even if they don't, I think they can do this under current law and under current regulations, I think that we could use some more guidelines on how to take this programmatic idea, this idea of a programmatic EIS, an ecosystem-based management that was created in the Stellar Sea Lion case, and maybe we can get some more guidance on how we can carry that through at the regional level. The regulations do allow programmatic EISs with tiering, but I think that the regions are really struggling with how to do that. And then we do also, of course, need to address some of these procedural and timing issues so that, one, we don't have this feeling like they're jumping through hoops and doing a lot of paperwork just to meet the requirements of the law. And I think we'll instill a lot more confidence in management as well. And we want to make sure that the councils aren't making their decisions without the benefits of NEPA. I want to close real quickly by just saying, you know, I think we all want the same thing. I'll go back to that point, counterpoint, that people sometimes set up between the fishing industry and environmentalists. And really, we do all want the same thing, which are vibrant fisheries and the coastal and fishing communities that rely on them. And NEPA, if applied correctly and done to benefit the overall environment, I think will produce more vibrant fisheries for the future. Sorry for going over. All right. Good afternoon. Thank you, Susan. And thank you, Josh, for the invitation to come and talk to you this afternoon. Coming from Juneau, Alaska, where it rains all the time, I feel up front compelled to offer an apology for bringing our weather with me. So I hope you will forgive me from the start. I come from a background of ecology and science. And I am not a lawyer. But I wanted to talk to you a little bit today about some of the management aspects of implementing the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. And the latter two, the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, with one small exception for subsistence harvest by Alaska natives, are really acts of conservation for nonconsumptive value. So we are not looking at harvesting these species that are protected in the marine environment under these two acts. We are looking at the conservation for the value of conservation. So I wanted to talk just a little bit about the concept of ecosystem management that is something that has been around for a while and idea and perhaps implemented in varying degrees of success in practice. So I'm going to touch just a little bit on some of the premises of those acts and some specifics of the Endangered Species Act and then perhaps try to let you answer the question about how ecosystem management might actually work in practice. So I'm going to start with a couple of overarching policies and the recent issuance of President Obama's ocean policy. One of the overarching objectives is to adopt ecosystem-based management as a foundational principle for the comprehensive management of the ocean, our coasts, and the Great Lakes. So you can see this setting us on a path perhaps of implementing actually in practice ecosystem-based management. Two other reports, the Pew Commission report and the Ocean Commission report are also looking at that idea of institutionalizing ecosystem considerations in policy management. So looking specifically at the intersection of the Magnuson Stevens Act with the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Memo Protection Act, how do these laws currently address ecosystem consideration? Do the laws intersect? And are we actually in practice taking an ecosystem approach to the management of fisheries and apex predators? Now, with the caveat that I'm not a lawyer, I'm going to plunge boldly into talking about some of the aspects of these laws. You've heard a lot today already and you know from your own experiences with the Magnuson Stevens Act and the purposes of that stated there in general to conserve and manage the fishery resources off the coast of the United States by exercising seven rights for the purposes of exploring, exploiting, conserving, and managing all fish with an exclusive economic zone. One of the national standards, the primary national standard, looks at achieving optimum yield from the fish in the nation's waters. One of the discretionary provisions and the bolds are mine indicates that we may, I don't know if you can see the bottom of that so we'll just read it, but may include management measures in the plan to conserve target and non-target species and habitats and then hear from my own emphasis, considering the variety of ecological factors affecting fishery populations. So what does that mean when we're putting the practice of fisheries management into action? That practice is really one of maximum yield for single species stock management for fish populations. And there's a quote here that I won't read all of from Dan Goodman who is a population biologist well known for working in some of these population fields and he notes here that there are no quantitative standards or specific decision rules for these latter considerations of ecology except as imposed from outside by in some cases the Magnus and Stevens Act or by the Endangered Species Act or the Marine Amendment Protection Act. So how does the Magnus and Act consider the ecosystem? In my experience obviously draws mainly from Alaska but in, so I'm not that familiar with the other fishery management council arenas or processes but in Alaska the ecosystem committee of the council is fairly active. The process of developing stock assessment reports for the fisheries as stocks that are managed by the council includes an ecosystem chapter. That chapter deals in quite a large extent and hefty volumes of information about factors in the ecosystem that affect fish and the fish stocks that are managed. They are looking primarily at things that impact directly the stock that's of commercial value and harvestable and not necessarily the broad range of things that could be examined in the ecosystem but I'll touch on that a little bit later. One of the other considerations in the North Pacific Fishery Management Council is a prohibition on fishing for the forage fish complex or the small fishes of the ocean that the commercially viable species feed off of. Also in the Pacific there's the similar consideration for krill again another forage species for the commercially viable fisheries. There has been a new effort in the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to prohibit fishing in the Arctic, a new FMP that basically does not allow any fishing. In some regards it could be considered a bit as a preemptive strike until we see what happens as the Arctic starts to open up and exploration perhaps for fishing opportunities may occur in the northern reaches of US waters. So in general these actions are really non-specific actions focused at or below the trophic level of the fish species that are harvested for commercial value. So let's move to the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Just touch on that one briefly because I'd like to get a little bit more into the Endangered Species Act but in the Marine Mammal Protection Act you can see the concept of ecosystems and ecosystem management coming into play there too in the findings of Congress in authorizing this act. And under the Marine Mammal Protection Act there is a recognition that certain species of marine mammals and stocks may be depleted by man's activities and the desire to protect these species as significant functioning elements of the ecosystem, maintaining them at the optimum sustainable population. And as was mentioned earlier that's kind of a maximum sustainable yield concept though of course it's not for the exploitation purposes but again for the conservation value that these species bring to the environment. Moving in to look at the tenets of the Endangered Species Act again we see this concept of ecosystems and the value of ecosystems that are highlighted by the purpose of the Endangered Species Act to provide a means whereby the ecosystems upon which endangered and threatened species depend may be conserved. One other point of note in the authorization of the Endangered Species Act is that Congress charged federal agencies, federal departments with conserving endangered species utilizing all of their authorities to do so. In particular under section seven of the Endangered Species Act there are two primary parts there that we for example as a federal agency when we are charged with conserving and protecting endangered species under the ESA must consider on the management side of the agency responsible for those species but also on the action side of the agency for the prosecution of federal fisheries. So section 71 of the Endangered Species Act puts forth that agencies shall utilize their authorities in the furtherance of the purposes of this act by carrying out programs for the conservation of these species. So it's really a proactive element of the act that says that we need to get out there and do these things as federal agencies to promote this conservation value. Section 782 brings to bear that any agency that a federal agency that conducts an action that may affect a listed species is required to consult with the agency that has jurisdiction over those species in the marine environment for the most part that's no fisheries except for a few species overseen by the Fish and Wildlife Service. So under this provision of section seven of the Endangered Species Act, the National Marine Fisheries Service, NOAA Fisheries looks at consultations for federal fisheries actions. These actions are ongoing actions generally reauthorized on an annual basis. So they have been in place for some time obviously and they are continuing with whatever modifications that may be promulgated through regulations or through fishery management plan implementations. So the consultations happen on a periodic basis when new information indicates that there may be a new impact. So it's not every time that a new regulation is promulgated or a new FMP is put into place. And so the challenge under section seven A2 of the Endangered Species Act is to modify the fishery if that fishery jeopardizes the continued existence of the listed species or adversely modifies or destroys critical habitat. There's a slight nuance there but I'm not going to get into that too many of the details here. I just want to give you a picture of this requirement. So the Marine Environmental Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act both recognize the conservation value of these species. They have different standards and different mechanisms for addressing that aspect. So how well does ecosystem management work in practice? I would put forth that fisheries management has moved to include ecosystem management to the extent that is an improved single species models for fish but is not necessarily considered the apex predators who may feed on commercially viable species that it can also be considered nodal species or keystone species that transfer energy up and down the food chain. So can we do this in a different way and perhaps a better way by considering the upfront challenge that we have under section seven A1 to do what we can to ensure that these actions don't impact listed species. Maybe we can do this under the Marine Environmental Protection Act for looking at the standard of optimum sustainable populations. I won't go into that too much because that creates perhaps a clash between the maximum sustainable yield of a fishery and the so-called maximum sustainable population or yield of apex predators but that may be an option. I'd put forth that under the Endangered Species Act however the agencies can use their authorities furtherance of conservation activities by including upfront in our stock assessment models for example explicit requirements for consideration of these apex predators and think about the ways to do that in a proactive way rather than in a perhaps reactive way for fisheries that have ongoing management activity that have that may be continuing over some period of time. And I'll leave it there. Thank you. So just to paraphrase the question that I think it's worth thinking about it's sort of a broader version of the question that we faced after panel one. That question was could we have a different or better fisheries management law if we start from the beginning. Here I think the idea we brought it out to say really we're looking at a place or a set of places in the ocean. If we were going to start from scratch and say how are we going to manage human use of those spaces is there some simpler more effective way that we might do that. And I'll just leave it at that and let the panelists each give a short answer to that. Thought about that question and then we'll move on to some of your question. Well I'm on board with Kyah. I think that we have to be going towards an ecosystem based management approach. And if we were starting to scratch that that would be the way to go to deal with all the marine living resources. I mean an ecosystem based management approach. The way we are going at it now NEPA just is not an adequate surrogate for ecosystem based management. It's because it's primarily procedural and lacks the substantive requirements that we need for this. It's not enough and the MSA provisions requiring consideration of other stocks and bycatch in their provisions certainly aren't adequate surrogate for ecosystem based management either. And neither the MSA, the ESA or the MEPA adequately address balancing the factors that need to be considered in an ecosystem based management approach. They all narrowly look at the issues that are within their scope without pulling a big picture together. So I would say yes pull them together. Well in many respects industry is somewhat concerned about the whole concept of doing an ecosystem approach. One of the difficulties that we often have is that in trying to promulgate a fishery management plan or an amendment we find ourselves butting heads with ESA or MEPA or trying to resolve bycatch issues under the Atlantic Tunas Convention Act. And I do have to say that in my opinion we do need a better method of understanding the complex interrelationships of all of the marine species every time we take an action. And it doesn't mean that we need to do a complete ground up consideration but we certainly need better coordination so that we can understand the impact of a decision which affects one stock and how in turn it may affect others. So I have to say that we certainly need much better coordination and a much bigger picture of the environment. Yeah I mean I agree with Kaya and Donna and I think Steve sounds like we're all sort of in agreement. I think we do. I'm sort of a cheerleader for NEPA this ecosystem based management tool but I agree with Donna that in the long run it's it's not adequate. This is really absent and overarching ocean policy. So I know this is something we're working towards at Ocean Conservancy and there's different names. There's been different efforts years ago not years ago. Five years ago we worked on oceans 21. I mean there's been different efforts to do overarching policies and I think we're still sort of working out how that would work. But yes I think a bigger overarching law and policy is a good idea. I think this idea that you do sort of end up butting heads with the Endangered Species Act and Human Protection Act. It does happen and the Stellar She-Line case is a good example of why if you have a more programmatic look and you do it early on like fishery and you do it periodically you don't sort of have these train racks because you see them come before the train racks start to happen. So something that creates and requires not so required but it encourages and makes sure that these early big steps big steps back and programmatic examinations of fishery have to be on would be necessary. I think without a good funding stream a lot of the stuff won't work either so I'm just going to throw in a pitch for Senator Whitehouse and Senator Snow's bill, National Endowment for the Oceans because without some good funding streams a lot of any sort of thing we put in place might not be as effective. We're looking at trying to implement the new requirements of the Manusen Act, science-based catch limits and accountability measures and one of the challenges for that is getting good data. We have really good data in some places we have maybe not as good data in others and we definitely have an issue with stakeholders that don't have confidence in that data. So I think dedicated funding streams along with overarching policy is critical. I guess my answer to that would be question would be in the simple version yes that it would be better to have some kind of overarching or integrated component of these laws that look at responsibilities for management of different resources in the same environment. But I think obviously too the devil is in the details and I can think of some perhaps straight forward ways of doing the implementation of that in the science realm of as I suggested integrating a parameter into our stock assessment evaluations that includes these apex predators that is not just a function of the mortality component of the fisheries stock assessment but to actually go to the place of creating a statute perhaps that integrated these elements I think that needs some long careful thought in population genetics. There's the internal tension as Jean was talking about tensions this morning between the splitters and the lumpers. And there are two very distinct camps there of which way do you go if you're looking at a population. Is it a small isolated population or is it a metapopulation that has different components to it and which is the better way to manage. I think there's a parallel to be drawn there too perhaps with development of a new law that looks at the ocean environment. I'm not sure I have the answer to that. But I think in concept creating some integration at least among these laws that are managing in an ecosystem that is interdependent has to be part of the way we do it. Okay. Got some time for your question. Who has the first one? There we go. I'm sorry to make this a neat question. What do I know about today? I know a lot about NEPA. What I don't get when you guys are giving those samples is what is that federal agency action. Everyone has said that the only thing this can do is approve or disapprove your amendment to a plan. So there are a lot of alternatives to that. But that's when the new process occurs. I don't get the alternative analysis in order to be able to implement a similar piece of what that changes the action. Yeah. Usually the promulgating agency is the Fishery Service. The rule making, I mean the Councils Act and an advisory pass me, but they do actually assemble a document and they actually within their environmental impact statements because they do the EIS. They will normally have the range of alternatives. So that's where your alternatives would normally reside. The Fishery Service does not then take that and put it out. They do put it out for public comment, but they do not put it out with a range of alternatives for public comment. It's really locked in at that point. And that's kind of where the interplay between MSA and NEPA could create some problems. But as a practical matter, once the EIS is prepared by the Council as it moves on, it becomes the agency's EIS if it's accepted. I think to make it sort of straightforward that the action is the approval or the disapproval. Now an FMP, again I mentioned Seller-She-Lanke, but that actually was one that said FMPs are sort of by their nature a major action. So they pretty much always have to have an EIS. Whether something is a major action under the fisheries management scheme because there's all different things they do. The FMPs are basically done. That's not to say they're new ones. The Arctic FMP was a great new FMP. But for the most part for the major fisheries, the FMPs have been done. But they do now are amendments and those are the big kind of sweeping changes. Then there's framework actions and annual specifications where annually or every other year they'll set catch limits or they change measures. So there's a whole range and some are big and some are small and there's no bright lines to... Well there are bright lines in the law as to what warrants. But you know you can't say a framework gets an EIS and a spec doesn't. But so there's a range of different actions and case by case the agency really has to decide whether Niba applies. I won't say unfortunately but I think confusedly a lot of the burden is being put on the councils and I think there's a very pertinent question as to whether that's an appropriate place to put the burden under Niba. But then so the action is whenever the recommendation is whether it's an FMP amendment or a regulatory amendment it's when Nibbs takes that and says yes this is okay or no this isn't okay that that might be the action that triggers it. We end up an FMP on aquaculture in the Gulf. I might be remembering this wrong but that FMP went and that was a really broad look at like should we do aquaculture in the Gulf of Mexico. And that was challenged and the court can come back and say well this isn't an action because nothing's happening yet. We're not actually doing anything. So I kind of have to backtrack on the FMPs and need an EIS. It's not, well I'm talking I'm kind of mixing things up because it might not necessarily raise to something that we could lodge a claim against or at least successfully. So but that's the point when that the action occurs is when Nibbs takes that recommendation and makes a decision. Yeah. To respond to data and the usefulness of the programmatic supplemental EIS on ground fish, which really was in terms of forming fish. Well it used a lot of paper. 7,000 pages. Yeah. I guess I'm going to go back to that. I guess there's the perhaps politically correct answer to that. And there's, you know, another answer that may or may not be politically correct. I don't know. But I would say that realistically yes, I think that was helpful. I'm not sure that it needed 7,000 pages worth to make fisheries management better. But I think the exercise of going through an evaluation of what we do is and I probably can't really speak for this since I worked for our sustainable fisheries office. But the exercise of going through looking at how we do fisheries management gave us a lot more up close and personal view of that than maybe we would have as we sort of march through the things that we need to do to make fisheries work. But there's the interplay there of course too between the councils and the agency and as obviously as was pointed out earlier today, the agency has restricted authorities in approving, disapproving or partially approving or disapproving fisheries management policies that come from the council. So, you know, whether or not that document helped the councils is maybe a different question too. Okay, we have another one back. Okay, I'm going to repeat the question since I failed to do my duty for the last two. This is a question about the relationship between ecosystem based management and marine spatial planning, right? And it's for the panel. The president's announcement and the discussion of the discussion of the discussion of the discussion of the conversation between the president, the president's announcement and the recommendations from the interagency task force solve them as totally related that marine spatial planning has to be based on ecosystem management firm principles. The idea that you're going to plan and requirements, and as well as just human uses of the area, wouldn't be adequate. It's going to have to be a process that goes on together. Yeah, I don't know how you can divorce one from the other. Clearly, if you're talking about the lack of a better term, cutting the ocean up into developable lots, one would hope that you would have to take into account the effect it's going to have across the entire ecosystem. And whether it's oil drilling, or wind power, or fisheries, or marine transportation, I am not sure how you could possibly do it for one use without considering its impact on every other use and every other marine resource. I guess I'd just offer one thing there, that in concept, it seems to me that marine spatial planning might be an exercise in two dimensions. And I think the ecosystem management concept is something that occurs in three dimensions. And I don't know if that's been how we think about putting those two things together. I think in principle, yes, they should be integrated. And I don't know how I agree with Steven. I'm not sure how you could tease them apart. But the idea of drawing plots on an ocean is maybe not as comprehensive as the function of the ecosystem. And Morgan, it probably has much better. I must speak also in four dimensions sometimes if you take time to look out. Four dimensions of space. Wow, that's a lot to think about at this hour in the day. Good thing there's a reception soon. Before I let you all clap, and then you're going to want to bolt a couple of housekeeping announcements. So those of you who need shuttle transportation to the reception or back to the Bristol Harbor Inn, there's a shuttle leaving. As you exit the law school to the right, there's one at 445. They'll wait for us, don't worry. Going just to the Mount Hope Farm. Then there's another one at 5, which will go first to Mount Hope Farm and then down to the Bristol Harbor Inn. So that's for those of you attending tonight. Everybody should have one of these attractive bright yellow evaluation forms. Please keep track of what you think of the event as we're proceeding here and turn them in when you depart. Tomorrow morning we'll convene at 9 o'clock. Join me in thanking our panel and moderator.


I should be working on exam revision right now, but I'm not. I mean, I know I'll get it done later in the day or later in the week, but at the same time I know I don't always get things done within the time that I intended to get them done in. This means that I often end up shuffling around my to-do list and my tasks, and usually everything is fine. But as students, we're not always 100% productive as much as we'd like to think that we are. Sometimes we just don't want to study, sound familiar? What is up guys, KarmaMedic here, and welcome back to another dose. We've all been in the position of feeling unmotivated. Some of you might even characterize yourselves as typical unmotivated students, but I don't think that should be the case. What if you're having one of those days where the thought of doing work is just the worst thing that you can think of? And what if this happens to you on most days? Either way, I'm hoping that the tips in this video can help because they're realistically doable when you're just in a really unmotivated place. We've all heard it before, but it's honestly the most important tip that I can give for tackling the long-term issue of being unmotivated. It's all about reframing this idea of motivation being the key driving factor to us doing the work we know we need to do. It's actually about intrinsic motivation, motivation that comes from inside within yourself, and creating habits that are long-lasting regardless of how you're feeling on any specific day or time. How I like to think about it is that you need to study in the same way that you need to brush your teeth. We just brush our teeth. It's not something that we think about, it's just something that we know that we're going to do twice a day.  It's just a habit that you do. And studying is kind of the same in the sense that you can turn it into a habit like that. The idea that you need to be motivated in order to sit down and study, I don't think is true. If you have an upcoming exam and you know that you need to study, then there isn't two ways about it. You have an exam, so you need to study. How to create habits and the best way to create habits is for an entire other video, but the main things I want to touch on are the following. Commit to the habit initially, start simple and easy and then work your way up to longer studying times or more studying sessions per day. Two is forming triggers. So, you know, for example, that every time in the morning when you finish your cup of coffee, it's time to go study. And three is compounding habits together. Stacking a new habit onto an old one or an existing one is a great way of making sure that you get it done. The reason is most of us already have existing habits in our daily routine. And if we can just tag along a new habit onto that existing one, it's a lot easier to get started than you might think. If you guys would like me to talk more about forming habits and make an entire video about habits, then just let me know in the comments down below and I'll get to it ASAP. The next point that I want to make is about re-evaluating your frame of mind going into studying. The fact is that you don't have to study. Like you just don't have to go to uni, right? You don't have to do any of these things.   And no matter how much pressure you're under or how you feel about your studying, the truth is that you could just walk away at any time and you could just do something else. You could call a friend, you could play video games, you could scroll through TikTok, you know, go out to the city, go play sports, whatever. You're probably not going to do that for a number of reasons, but the truth is that you could. And I think that what you've got to think about is the reason why you're not doing that, why haven't you stopped trying? Why are you still here? And this might sound like a harsh question, but what I mean by this is that you need to think about and find your purpose or your reason for studying. You know, why did you apply to this university in the first place? Why did you apply to this course? What's the reason that you're doing this essay or studying for this exam? And even if the task itself isn't fun, you know, where is it going to get you? And what is it going to help you achieve? Not everyone loves every part of their course. And certainly I've been through that before in my life, but you kind of have to do what you need to do to get to where you want to go. Instead of thinking about how you're going to get through the next three hours of studying, it can sometimes help to think about why you're sitting here studying in the first place. I often try and run myself of the reason that I'm in medical school and the reason that I'm studying. And those reasons are not for my family. It's not for my friends. The reason that I'm studying and that I'm here is for me. I'm here because I want to be a doctor and I want to be a good one. This sort of shift from external motivation to intrinsic motivation I think is really important. Reframing the situation in this way can give you the boost that you need to just start doing your work. It's usually quite helpful to take a step back, you know, think about studying and this big picture thinking instead of worrying about the small stuff that can put you off from even getting started to begin with. I started medical school to be the best doctor that I can be to my future patients and to be approachable and to care for people within my own community and abroad. And I try to remember that at times when I'm feeling a little bit unmotivated and it just helps me to reframe the situation something that can drive me to keep me going instead of something that can hold me back. I think something that students don't realize especially when they first start university is that you need to be realistic about what university and what studying is. The truth is that we all go from high school where we feel supported by our teachers and everything is kind of handed to us in a way that it just isn't at university. At university, you need to be extremely proactive and actually seek out the help that you need.  And at medical school, for example, you don't always have a bunch of past papers or help with learning different exam techniques. And so in a way, you're kind of left to fend for yourself and actively try to reach out for help if you need it. It's such a big jump from school days where, you know, we're used to having all this support and it feels like 50% of a teacher's job is just to help you pass exams and get into university. If you're at university and you miss an assignment, no one's gonna call your parents and tell on you. Professors are there to teach and to give you information and pass on their expertise. And then after that, it's kind of up to you what you do from there. Unless you ask for it, the help isn't really going to reach you. I think that's the first thing that we need to be realistic about as students. We shouldn't expect to find everything as easy to understand as we did in school. And not finding it easy is totally okay. And that's the reality for most students. You'll likely need to read around the subject, use multiple resources or reach out to tutors and peers in order to get some help. A lot of the time, students feel that they don't need to do this. And I think it leads to the feeling of not wanting to continue to work if you're struggling with it. As soon as we kind of face a hurdle, it means we're not excited to do the work anymore, but this shouldn't really be the case. I think we should expect university level work to be harder and more challenging than what we did in high school. And that's something that's okay. It's something to take as a challenge as opposed to avoid it. The second thing to be realistic about when you go to university is to have a realistic understanding of the amount of work that's gonna be expected of you. Speaking to students in the years above you or your academic tutors about how much work is reasonable for you to be putting in for the subject you're studying or for the year that you're in can be really helpful. It's easy to watch YouTube and Instagram study tubers like myself and think that studying is as simple as sitting down, turning on the camera and having the time lapse. But you know, it's not really like that. A lot of studying is sitting at the desk and just doing the boring act of studying itself. And I think once you're realistic about the amount of studying that you need to do and the difficulty of that studying then you know what best to expect and it can help you better manage the mindset that you have around studying. A simple one that people forget really easily is to adapt your work environment in order to work in your favor. The goal is for you to study and you can make this easier by reducing as much friction in your way to get to studying as possible. One of the things that you can do is to make your study space work for you. Making sure that it's quiet and free of distraction is really easy to do and can have significant effects on your ability to focus and get work done. It's usually not a good idea to sit on your bed or on your couch and do work because these two physical locations are associated with relaxing and with sleep. I've never done a single piece of work on my couch or on my bed. I do all of that at my desk because when I'm in bed, I like to just sleep. Another thing is to look back on and reflect on the days where you wanted to study but you got little or nothing done and think about what stopped you from studying. What was in your way? What were the obstacles that you were facing?  It could also be that you sat down at your desk to get work done but there were just five people in the house and they were making too much noise or there was construction outside or your friend called you and distracted you. It can be a million things. These kinds of scenarios happen a lot but with a little bit of planning and adapting of your environment, I think that they can mostly be avoided and even just sitting down and thinking about these factors, identifying those factors that made it difficult for you to study in the first place means that you can work on eliminating or at least reducing them the next time you sit down to study. Reducing the number of decisions that you need to make in a day when it comes to studying can also be really helpful. Even meal prepping on the weekend or deciding what you're gonna have for breakfast the next morning or what chapter you're gonna study the next day can reduce the amount of decisions that you need to make and just make it so much easier and simpler to sit down and start studying. Of course for you, your situation is gonna be completely different than mine and than other people so find the ways in which you can make your studying as friction free as possible. This is something that I think about all the time and I'm constantly trying to refine and make better and genuinely I think it helps a lot. Something for those of you that might find it difficult studying silence and just can't bear the thought of it is to use multitasking to your favor. It's not always ideal but if you're making the decision between you studying with multitasking or not studying at all, then this is quite a good trick. It's good to use something that is already familiar to you so that it's known, it's recognizable, it's just there in the background as opposed to something that's new and fresh that might take up more of your attention. Something like simple music or background sounds, you know, classical music, lo-fi beats, rainforest sounds, fire, crackling, et cetera is quite ideal. I went into detail about this in my video about whether you should listen to music when studying and if so, what music should you listen to? I'll leave that link somewhere up over here if you wanna check it out. But if music isn't your thing and you just can't seem to get into the studying zone then maybe putting on something like a familiar TV show in the background might give you just enough of a boost of energy to keep you going and focus on your work. Now I obviously wouldn't recommend this for tasks that involve a high level of concentration but if you just really feel like it's one of those days where you can't get anything done and the alternative is doing nothing versus putting on an episode of Friends or something like that and then working while that's in the background then I think it's a pretty easy choice to make. Another great way to keep you focused and accountable when studying is having studying partners. If you've got friends at university that you can go to the library with then honestly that's ideal, it's such a vibe. But if you don't or like most of us nowadays we do a lot of working from home or studying from home then it's really helpful to hop on a Zoom call with a couple of friends and keep the community and the togetherness vibe going. Just as reminder that you're all in this together. Personally what I found invaluable recently while studying here at home is studying with you guys on Discord. If you join the Karma Club via my Patreon then you get access to the community live study with me is that I think are really motivating and it means that you have this group of people from all over the world studying with each other, motivating each other, chilling, chatting as well and just having a really good time. For my most recent exam, my medical school finals which I did a whole vlog about somewhere up over here this Discord study with me group was crucial for me and honestly I couldn't have done it without you and so a big thank you to everyone who's studying with me in that Discord server. I'll leave a link to my Patreon in the description down below and on screen over here if you guys wanna check it out and join the family. Sometimes the thought of having to do a huge pile of work means that students just end up not doing anything at all. It all becomes too much and the pressure gets the best of us.  So keeping your plans realistic but also making sure that you're not gonna give up if you can't stick to them either is a good way to go. Let's say you've planned to do three hours of studying but you're just really feeling drained and unmotivated and you don't wanna do three hours of studying. Okay, fine. Doing one hour out of those three hours of studying is still gonna be better than just doing nothing at all. Personally for myself I have this sort of unspoken rule that if I don't feel like studying then just doing something even if it's not the actual studying that I wanted to do but something else useful that I would otherwise have to do at another time is so much better than just doing nothing. I need to do something. Even if it's 20 minutes, it's worth it. And then oftentimes just getting started and doing those initial five to 10 minutes is gonna keep you going for the next hour. Half the battle is just getting started. No amount of chipping away at that work is useless. All of this adds up and it means that we're regularly interacting with and working with the material and the topics which means we're gonna help learn them better over time. Don't over complicate your work. Just start with the things that you know you can do that you might find easier to do that can get you started and motivated to then move on to those longer and bigger tasks.  Trying some of the things mentioned in this video might help, but I think it's also important for us to all balance this with knowing when to stop and recharge. Please don't push yourself beyond your limits. Spending a few hours or a few days off to rest and relax is a good investment into your future productivity. Taking a mental health break is totally okay and should always be an option. Without the restful time away from studying, you'll find that you're not working to the best of your ability and you'll feel awful doing the work. I just wanted to mention that in case anyone watching this is actually in need of a break instead of these tips on how to get going and get out of a productivity slump. If you found this video useful, then you'll probably find these two videos useful as well. Please do check them out and let me know what you think in the comments down below and I'll catch you in the next one. Peace. How to create habits and the best way to create habits is for an entire other. That's my email. What you're going to study the day before makes it email. Reduces a lot of the decisions. Okay. All right, buddy. You're getting muted right now. Right now, my guy. You're done.


Welcome to a new vlog. I have my friend Kyra here. You've seen her before and we're gonna go to REI to look at hoka shoes because I'm gonna spend a lot of money on hokas But I want to make sure that like they feel good and I know what size to order And then she might be coming to spend with me and a couple other of my friends. I don't know I think so right? Yeah, and we'll get you like books. I hope the class isn't full Because I had to change this at the girls bike. So I don't know so we're almost to Star bucks cuz we're gonna go Starbucks and then we're gonna go to REI like I already said and then Kyra's like you wanna go to Lululemon.  And Kyra goes. Oh, it's like a hundred and thirty dollars from Lululemon. I'm like The Starbucks where I study sometimes Merch I've studied here like once All right, so I had to get a cake pop because I wanted a snack because our class isn't until like 645 so I needed something to like hold me over until then I've teach Kyra the ropes. Oh my gosh Okay, wait the ropes of what I need to teach Kyra the ropes of blogging she said her drink down like we got a blog So we woke up the same thing the chai only I got an extra pump of chai and then I pump a vanilla You got just like the regular, right? Never been in the store, but it's a camping store, which is pretty cool so There's a first time for everything How fun Okay, mildly choking Here are the hokas Those are cute. Are those yours? Oh Servicing all the food Can you imagine? She wants to do a foot state. They're very light and airy I Can see why people like them Funny story. We just walk in. I'm like, oh my gosh. There's a color. I was just looking at and Kyra goes by it And I'm like, no I was hoping to get something cute. Oh, yeah, that's the same one. Yeah, you have one just like that She wants a white one. I've influenced her. Yeah, she either wants that or like a skirt All right, so Kyra got a lulam and defined jacket. She got this.  It's a little like off-white So I'm like, you better wear this tomorrow because we need a match and I was saying we had a real good I was saying we had a really good Shopping spree. I got hokas online and She got a defined jacket. So we're out here living our best lives We've now come into this like cool plant store Kyra show to me Look how cool it is. This is like right near Lulam and I've never even been in here. That's nice That's like a hotel. I can't believe Kyra just bought that but now we're gonna head to this other plant store We went into this one that I just showed you but anyway, I'm gonna get a little clip for her Instagram Hold on. All right. So Kyra took me to this really cute plant place. Look at how cute. This is already up my alley How cute is this called the heavy? Oh My god Where did you find this place? Like were you just out exploring? Okay, how cute is this little lounge area? Oh My gosh, is this where the photo shoot was? Okay, so we got Kyra's car and now we're going to Meet some of her friends apparently like some of them have parrots so Maybe I'll get a little clip of that on my phone. I don't know but yeah Going to meet the parrot who funny man. I love like little spontaneous things like this. It's so much fun That one doesn't like women Wow, okay, cool cool It's going potty My defense on to in this video. It was probably pretty short I don't doubt that but it was so much fun and I kind of want to just like start a new video So or tick tock I don't know I might do a tick tock because it's been a while since I've like done a little vlog tick tock But yeah, spontaneous things are just like the best I'm kind of like doing a semi spontaneous thing today Like later this evening. So that'll be fun But I don't know it's just like one of those things that some of the best memories and everything come from just like Winging it and having a good time. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this video Give it a thumbs up if you did don't forget to subscribe and I'll see you guys in my next video. Bye


This is stock number 8J195A, we are here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Your new and used car headquarters today, we are checking out this Super Clean 2013 Nissan Versa. This vehicle has the 1.6 liter four cylinder motor from this HD video. You will be able to tell that this car is extremely clean all the way around. Inside and out, no dents, dings, or cracks on the front bumper. Pretty nice condition. It's a nice bright silver metallic. Has the wheel simulators over the steel rims. In the front we have hand-cook optimal tires and they have probably about 50% of the tread left on that tire, maybe a little bit more. I didn't see any dents or dings on the hood. We take these HD videos so if you are far away or even if you're close by and just cannot make the trip down, you can still see the car, hear the car. A bit of confidence in the vehicle that you're looking at before you even get here. For the most part, this car is in really nice condition. For the age and miles down this side, really clean. I didn't see any major dents and the lower rockers are all in really nice shape. I didn't see any sort of corrosion. Back tires have a little bit more tread than the front tires. These are continental tires on the back here. That wheel simulator is in really nice shape. And as we go around to the rear bumper, no major dents, dings or cracks on that either. And the trunk lid is in nice shape as well. This is an SV package. You've got to open it from inside the car. We'll check out the back area in just a minute here. Down this side, pretty clean as well. There's one tiny little ding in the door but nothing major. Take a quick look at that trunk. Lots of space back here and it's very clean as well. It's in solidly.  There are no rips or tears on these seats. It does have side curtain airbags. Inside, 4,323 miles has a CD player and an automatic CVT transmission. Passenger seat is very clean as well. No rips or tears on that. And the headliner doesn't have any rips or tears either. Heater works really good in here. Has cruise control on the steering wheel. Steering wheel is in pretty nice condition as well. And we'll take a quick look at the back seats and then check out under the hood. Power windows, power locks, and power mirrors with the automatic driver side window. Back seats are just as clean as the front seats. No rips or tears back here. It does have the latch child safety system. Back rests are nice and clean as well. And we have some floor mats back here to protect that carpeting which is in really nice shape. Take a quick look under the hood. Under the hood we have the 1.6 liter, 1.6 liter four cylinder motor. Engine base very clean, runs very smooth. This car has been through our safety inspection process. Has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off to make sure that the car is 100% clean. Get it? And to see more pictures of this super clean car, one of our other 400 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, Wranglers, you name it. We got it.  Videos of every single used vehicle that we have all at summitauto.com. Thank you so much for checking out this car. If you want to make it yours, give us a call right now,<PHONE_NUMBER>. Ask for one of our sales associates standing by to take your call to make this car yours today. Once again, that number is<PHONE_NUMBER>. If you like the video and want to check out our entire inventory, go to youtube.com slash summitauto to check out all the videos there. Remember to like, subscribe and share on those videos and this one. In fact, in a second you'll see a link to subscribe to our YouTube channel on your left. A link to more used inventory vehicles like this one on your right. And if you haven't been to our website, on the bottom of the link to this car on our website, click those checks. That's all we really look forward to helping with this super clean 2013 Nissan Versa. Thanks again.