Good morning everybody, thank you for being here today. Welcome to the 10th Marine Law Symposium at the Roger Williams University School of Law. I am Julia Wyman, the director of the Marine Affairs Institute at Roger Williams University School of Law and the Rhode Island Sea Grant legal program. It's a great pleasure to have you here today for this wonderful program that we have planned. The Marine Affairs Institute is a partnership of the Roger Williams University School of Law, Rhode Island Sea Grant, and University of Rhode Island. We are based here at the law school right down the hall if you're interested in checking out our office. And through a partnership with Rhode Island Sea Grant, we are home of the Rhode Island Sea Grant legal program. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, funds the Sea Grant program, Sea Grant National Program, and every coastal state has a Sea Grant program. Of the 33 programs, there are four programs that have dedicated legal programs. We are the only one in the Northeast. That means for us, the Rhode Island Sea Grant legal program and Marine Affairs Institute, that we have the privilege of providing legal and policy research to Sea Grant programs throughout the Northeast. Our partnership with Rhode Island Sea Grant also enables us to have the Sea Grant Law Fellow program. The Law Fellow program matches second and third year law students with outside organizations that have a question of marine law or policy. The organizations get the research assistance that they need, and the students get valuable hands-on learning experience while they're here at the school. If you're interested in learning a little bit more about the Law Fellow program, please feel free to find me or our staff attorney, Reed Porter, who is the director of the Law Fellow program throughout the day. We also have some materials about the program outside on the tables near the stairs. Through our partnership with the University of Rhode Island, our students earn a JD and a master of marine affairs in just three and a half years. This broadens the students' education beyond just the world of law and exposes the students to more diverse ways of looking at marine affairs, incorporating more policy, science, and economics into their work. The joint degree creates well-rounded graduates that become practitioners that examine issues in a holistic manner. If you're interested in learning more about that program, please feel free to find me throughout the day or check out some of our materials outside. This is a big year for us at the Marine Affairs Institute this year. It's our 20th anniversary of the Institute, and this marks the 10th Marine Law Symposium. We are proud to have partnered this year on the symposium with the Roger Williams Law Review to bring you this program. Following the symposium, there will be a special edition of the Law Review that will be published with articles from several of the speakers here today, as well as other practitioners and students. If you're interested in ordering a copy of that, there is a sign-up sheet outside on the table. While we're talking about locations, a few housekeeping items. Out of these doors and to your left, you will find the restrooms. You will also find water fountains and water bubblers in an effort to reduce waste for today's event. We have not printed out a full program for you today. Rather, we have printed out an agenda. At the top of the agenda, you will find a link to find more materials about the program, including our speaker biographies. There is information on how to access Wi-Fi at the top of that agenda. We are recording today's program, so I ask that all speakers, as well as members from the audience asking questions, speak into the microphones. And while we're at it, please take a moment to silence your cell phones for the day. So in addition to our great law review partners, I'd like to thank a few folks and organizations that have made today a success. I would like to thank Dean Yolnowski and the School of Law for supporting the Institute and this program. Thank you to President Farish and the University for being so supportive of our Institute. Thank you to our partners, Rhode Island Sea Grant, particularly Dennis Nixon, and the University of Rhode Island. Thank you to our program committee. It's a large one. We definitely take our partnerships seriously. Michelle Carnivale, Tara Bolling, Dennis Nixon, Monica Allard Cox, Michael Daley, Jonathan Guttoff, Brett Hargedon, Jennifer McCann, Christopher McNally, Patrick O'Connor, Austin Carolyn, Reed Porter, Charlotte Ferris, Casey Charkowick, and Dennis Esposito. I'd like to say a special thank you for Dennis Esposito for not only serving on our program committee, but for conceiving of the idea of this symposium and combining it with the law review during his time as interim director of the Institute. Big thank you to the staff of Marina Ferris, Reed Porter and Charlotte Ferris, and also to the staff of program and events who really made this day possible, Chelsea Horn, Charlotte Ferris, and Alexa Giovannis. Finally, thank you to all of our wonderful speakers. We have a really great day today for everybody here in the audience. A particular thank you to Senator Whitehouse and Dr. Whitehouse for coming and keynoting this symposium. We're very lucky to have them here today. So this year, we decided to focus our symposium on a problem that poses a great threat to coastlines around the world, marine debris. Every year, derelict fishing gear, plastic bottles, plastic bags, cigarette butts, abandoned vessels, and other debris washes ashore throughout the world. The debris causes negative social, environmental, and economic impacts, such as decreased aesthetic value, harm to coastal ecosystem health, and damage to vessels. The challenges create complex management problems for coastal managers and attorneys. The challenges who work to create the creation of new debris as well as mitigate the problem of existing debris. We have focused today's program on New England to address this complex problem. Today, you will hear from national and local experts about how serious the threat of marine debris is. Some ways that we can innovatively as attorneys, practitioners, and educators work to address this problem. We will begin the morning with a look at the problem from a large national and international scale, and then we will hear some novel regional ideas and work on how to address this problem. It is our hope today that you not only learn from our wonderful speakers, but that we also learn from you. We have a very diverse audience that includes many nonprofit folks, many four-business individuals, government attorneys on the federal, state, and local level, as well as students from nine universities throughout the Northeast. I am particularly encouraged to see so many students sign up and come to this event, because this is a problem that truly is going to be yours to work with when you enter the workforce. So with that, I want to thank you once again for joining us here today. And I would like to introduce Michael Jolnowski, the dean of Roger Williams University School of Law. I also want to just welcome you all to Roger Williams University School of Law, where the sun always shines. I love all of our programs, but the Marine Affairs Institute has a special place in my heart for several reasons. First, it's a shining example of the good work that can be done when we collaborate with partners outside the law school and the university by leveraging the assets of these three entities that Julia talked about, Rhode Island Sea Grant, URI, and the law school and university. We can just do a lot more than we could ever do alone. The Institute also has a special place in my heart because it helps us attract some of our strongest students. And in fact, Aaron Bryant is here today, an alum of the law school who will be speaking this afternoon, and it makes my heart warm. It's great to see her back here. It has a special place in my heart because it's a great example of the power of experiential education, which is a hallmark of the Roger Williams University Law experience through the Sea Grant Law Fellow Program. As Julia mentioned, our students do real work for real clients involving real problems. And last night at the prequel dinner, several of those students presented the findings of their research to the group. And there are posters representing their work that are outside in the atrium. I hope you get a chance to look at them. So I would like to congratulate all of those who are involved in the Institute and their predecessors on the 20th anniversary of the Marine Affairs Institute. And I would be remiss if I didn't also give a special thanks to Dennis Nixon, who for some reason I can't see at the moment. There he is because he's right in front of me, who was there at the birth of this remarkable program and has been with us, supporting us, and leading us for 20 years. So thank you, Dennis. So thank you all so much for coming. We have, as you have heard, many things to celebrate. But what brings us here today is more sobering. This is another, as Julia mentioned, for those who follow, this is a problem that we're going to need you to solve. This is another part of our generation. You have a lot of things to do because we screwed them up. Good luck. You're prepared for it, though. I learned last night just how big and real this marine debris problem is. In fact, I think scientists are just starting to get a grip on how big it is. So I'm delighted that Julia and the law review and the planning committee decided and Dennis Esposito to focus on this very important issue. And I also want to give special thanks to Senator and Dr. Whitehouse for keynoting the program today. None of this would be possible without the support of the university and its great president, Dr. Donald Farrish. President Farrish is a driver and a supporter of innovation in undergraduate and graduate education. He has a special appreciation, I think, for the benefits of interdisciplinarity. He has a PhD in biology and a law degree, so he knows the kind of value that the Marine Affairs Institute brings to this problem. And it's my pleasure now to introduce Dr. Farrish. Thank you very much, Dean. It's truly a pleasure to have you here today. And I was thinking, as Julie and Michael were speaking, it's really worth standing back from this just a little bit because I recall when I was in grad school and doing a lot of basic research in the library, how common it was to read papers from the middle of the 19th century that were written by English clerics on their Wednesday afternoon off. They went tromping around the English countryside finding new species and writing it all up. And it was amateur science in those days. And what's happened in the last 150 to 200 years is we've become increasingly specialized. And in some senses, we needed to do that because in order to have a deep knowledge of anything, you have to spend a great deal of time focusing on it. But the problem is human understanding then becomes increasingly granular. And unless there's a way of tying those pieces back together again, it's a classic case of not seeing the forest for the trees. We all know, we're all individual tree specialists, but we have to get together to talk about how the trees fit together and make a forest. And this is an example of that kind of work being done. When I went to law school, it was motivated by the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency was in the process of being formed. This was back in the late 60s, early 70s. And I was keenly aware of the fact in some of the testimony going on because I knew some of the people that were testifying in Congress how disparate was the knowledge base? At the risk of over-generalizing, Congress was full of lawyers and the lawyers were full of political scientists and none of them knew much about science. And the willingness to engage in great work was not in question. It was the knowledge base. Similarly, the scientists knew a lot about what they were doing, but they couldn't speak legally to save their life. And so what was happening was, it was Greeks and Romans talking to each other and there was no common translator. So we've come a long way since those days. And this program that we have here at this university that combines marine affairs and the law school is a great example of how we connect legal education to something else. And I think what we're seeing increasingly is that the something else always becomes important because more and more of the problems that we're addressing in society need to be addressed by multiple experts at the same time who are finding some kind of common language. And that necessarily means that people are being cross-trained at some level. Rhode Island is singularly well positioned to do this. We're very proud, of course, of having the state's only law school. Therefore, by definition, the state's best law school. Or maybe it's the other way around. But anyway, we're very proud of that fact, but Rhode Island has the advantage of size. Size matters. In this case, small size matters because it allows us to bring together people quite easily. We're not separated geographically. Although in Rhode Island, people still think when you travel from Moonsocket to Newport, it requires an overnight bag and at least one meal. But the rest of the world thinks the state's pretty small. So this is great to be able to gather people and share information. We learn from each other. We strengthen our own position by listening to each other. It's just a wonderful thing to do. And I think Rhode Island in so many ways can be a national leader because it has the capacity to bring together the experts that are here in various fields and have them talk with each other and develop a more common understanding. So it's great to be here with you and I look forward to the talks today. I can stay just for the morning sessions, but I wish you well for the rest of the day. It is my pleasure, however, to introduce Sheldon Whitehouse. Senator Whitehouse is a great friend of this university. We see him on campus commonly. That's another great advantage of having a small state. When I lived in California, I understand there were two U.S. Senators. I never actually saw one of them, but here in Rhode Island, you know, we... Yeah, well, I heard that, Sheldon. That's just not true. We're always, you're always welcome on campus. So Senator Whitehouse is a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and that's a pretty important committee because it's where a great deal of the policy work and legislation addressing environmental protection and climate change is coming from. I don't think there's anyone, I think we all know this, there's no one in the U.S. Senate that is a more outspoken advocate on the issues of climate change than Senator Whitehouse. And at a time when there still are a lot of people in this country denying the existence of climate change, it's nice to know that Rhode Island has a full-throated advocate for what the rest of the world seems to take as a given, but somehow in this country, some people are still dubious about it. There are signs of life in Washington, D.C. I mean, it's not despite rumors to the contrary and so Senator Whitehouse has worked with both Republicans and Democrats to create what's called the Senate Oceans Caucus and this, fortunately, is something that a lot of people can agree on, that the problems of the ocean's pollution are things that do need to be addressed and policies can be developed with people finding some common cause, which is a scarce commodity in D.C. Senator Whitehouse is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Virginia Law School. He was prior to his current role, he was U.S. Attorney here in Rhode Island and then the state's Attorney General. He's here today along with his wife, Dr. Sandra Whitehouse and both of them are keynoting today and so the dueling Whitehouses will be up here shortly and we thank both of them for being here and we thank all of you for being here as well, so Senator Whitehouse. Moving all the electronics back where I can't touch them and wreck everything. Good morning. Thank you all so much for being here. This is a terrific discussion. I'm honored by the presence of President Farrish. Don, thank you so much. I love being here at Roger Williams University. It wasn't a round when I went to college, I didn't have the chance to go here but for those of you who do, it is a wonderful, wonderful gem of an institution and D.N. Yalmofsky, my particular favorite organization within this great university is the Law School and I applaud your leadership but thank you. Director Wyman used to work for me and now she's come back to Roger Williams University so that shows you how I stand in her priorities against Roger Williams but my loss was Roger Williams' gain and of course Dennis Nixon who runs our Sea Grant program is a wonderfully enthusiastic advocate for oceans issues and Ann Livingston who chairs our Coastal Resources Management Council has led that organization to truly national leadership on oceans planning issues and I'm just here to warm up the crowd for Sandra who is the real, the real star. I don't think I need to tell anybody here that our oceans and coasts need all the help they can get as Michael said, your generation of ocean champions is going to inherit a marine environment in crisis. Oceans have absorbed about a third of all of the excess carbon dioxide produced by humans since the Industrial Revolution, around 600 gigatons. When that carbon dioxide hits the ocean it reacts chemically and it acidifies the seawater. A recent article in Nature Geoscience found that the rate of change in ocean acidity is faster now than any other time in the past 50 million years. By way of context, Homo sapiens has been on the planet about 200,000 years so this is a big anomaly that we are seeing. By the end of the century, NOAA predicts the world's oceans and estuaries could become 150% more acidic than they are now. In addition to the carbon dioxide the oceans have absorbed they've also soaked up more than 90% of the excess heat that we have trapped in the atmosphere through our greenhouse gases. That is a lot of heat. A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change found that the oceans have absorbed as much energy since 1997, 20 years as to use the colorful analogy and description by the Associated Press a Hiroshima style bomb exploded every second in the oceans for 75 straight years. Like I said, that's a lot of heat and that excess energy is warming our oceans at alarming rates and by the law of thermal expansion coupled with the melting of ice sheets as the earth warms is causing sea levels to rise. New England is being hit particularly hard on both of those fronts. The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than almost any other part of the ocean throughout the world. Narragansett Bay has already seen a nearly four degree Fahrenheit increase in winter water temperatures since the 1960s and since our notable hurricane of 1938 sea level is up nearly 10 inches at Naval Station Newport. So when the next big one comes it's gonna do considerably more damage than the hurricane of 1938 did. Ocean acidification, warming seas and sea level rise portend real consequences for our fishermen, our coastal communities and our saltwater ecosystem. But unfortunately they are not the only impact of the hand of mankind on the oceans. Marine plastic debris has merged as one of the most troubling issues of the 21st century. Though some of my colleagues as President Farage pointed out may deny in DC that man has any hand in causing climate change or even that climate change exists there is no denying our role in the startling amount of plastic trash that now swirls in our oceans and litters our coasts. Newport last year hosted a stop of one of the most dangerous and demanding sporting events on the planet the Volvo Ocean Race. The sailing racers had traveled the world, they reported an ocean so strewn with debris that they had to do regular checks for garbage fouled on their keels slowing down the performance of their high speed boats. Even in the far away South Atlantic thousands of miles from shore.  This new sad symptom of our despoliation of the seas was highlighted in an ocean summit on marine debris during the Volvo Ocean Race visit led by Rhode Island Sea Grant director Dennis Nixon. A 2015 paper in science found that each year eight million metric tons of plastic waste enters the oceans. Dr. Jenna Jambeck of the University of Georgia the lead author of that study equates that to five grocery bags of plastic for every foot of coastline every year. A report released earlier this year by the World Economic Forum predicts that unless our habits change the mass of plastic waste in the oceans will outweigh the biomass of living fish in the oceans by 2050. And plastic waste is not benign as it floats about. A study across 80 species of seabirds found that in 2014 90% of individual birds had plastic in their bellies. The sad story of albatross is an isolated midway at all. Slowly starving their chicks by feeding them discarded lighters and other plastic junk they picked up mistaken for food. And the ghastly photos of dead birds with stomachs packed full of bottle caps and plastic fragments have traveled far from midway at all and lent poignant imagery to the consequences of marine debris. This week in Newport a film called A Plastic Ocean was shown by Newport Film which has even more horrifying imagery of sheer water chicks that are unable to fly because their bellies are so filled with plastic that they're beyond their lift capacity and they die of starvation with their bellies bulging with waste plastic. Birds aren't the only victims. Thirteen sperm whales beached themselves on the German coast in January and plastic was in their stomachs.  Leatherback turtles have stomachs full of plastic bags which are easily mistaken for the jellyfish on which they feed. These animals suffered digestive blockage and slow death. Scientists have documented harmful plastic interactions in nearly 700 marine species. Turtles, porpoises and manatees drown or starve in entanglements with derelict fishing gear and other debris. Sharks are common victims as most shark species must move in order to breathe and once they're entangled there's no more moving. In September the New England Aquarium reported an increasing number of right whales dying each year due to entanglements and that very month two endangered right whales were found dead off the coast of Maine entangled in fishing gear. There are only 500 right whales left. Plastics really only came into widespread use around 70 years ago. Plastic is now 70 years later in every corner of the marine environment from sandy beaches on far away islands to arctic ice cores to ocean gyres in the far away Pacific. There's one more thing. Through wave action and UV exposure under the sun plastics in the ocean continually break down. They don't biodegrade. They break down into smaller and smaller pieces some so small that they are consumed by the microscopic creatures at the bottom of the ocean food chain. Scientists are working hard to understand what this means for the marine food web and for the humans who rely on the oceans for their protein. We have learned where much of the plastic waste enters our oceans. A report from Ocean Conservancy and its partners showed that upland waste collection failures mostly in Asia put much of this plastic waste out to sea. Our international laws are not yet focused on the land-based pollution of our oceans. We have international treaties to address ship-based dumping of garbage and pollutants but none to require the proper handling of waste on land to prevent the inevitable flow to the sea. The Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement was a missed opportunity in this regard. Our trade strategy in those negotiations focused on strengthening some existing environmental treaties. Without an environmental treaty already in place on marine debris, marine debris was completely overlooked. Although the United States is not a top contributor of plastic to the oceans directly, our companies make a lot of it. And as the world's economic powerhouse, our trade practices and treaties can make a big difference. So we will be fighting hard to make sure this issue gets raised before any TPP can go into effect. In the Senate, Environment and Public Works Committee, there's a Fisheries, Water and Wildlife Subcommittee. And this year, we held a hearing on marine debris. Now, Republicans and Democrats on the Environment and Public Works Committee rarely see eye-to-eye on much. But our marine debris hearing was a truly bipartisan undertaking. People not even on the subcommittee from the committee came to participate and every senator was positive about moving forward and getting something done, including, believe it or not, the legendary Jim Inhofe of Snowball fame. I've never seen on my side of an environmental issue, but who spoke rhapsodically about guarding the Texas coast as a young man from hooligans driving along in jeeps that would crush the little turtles as they tried to make their way to the sea. Who knew? So, there's a sign of hope. Note that the testimony there, perhaps the ameliorating effect was that of the testimony of Rhode Island's own Jonathan Stone, who is here. The Senate also has a bipartisan oceans caucus, now up to 30 members, committed to solving some of the biggest issues facing our oceans. The first issue we chose to take on was pirate fishing and we achieved every single one of our goals, including clearing four treaties in an afternoon. At the pace the Senate works to go back through the previous four treaties that were cleared, you'd have to spend nine years of Senate activity. So it was a good afternoon in the Senate and a sign that the oceans caucus is working. Our next issue is marine plastic debris. We are looking at ways to improve waste disposal infrastructure in developing countries, at research and development of innovative materials that actually biodegrade in the sea, at facilitating beach cleanups. We heard from, in Rhode Island, we think of beach cleanups as people walking along the beach with trash bags, picking up cigarette butts and bits of plastic that have washed ashore. In Alaska, which reaches up into the Pacific like a strainer and catches enormous amounts of waste that come from the Pacific, they see as much as three tons of waste per mile of coastline. So for them, it's quite an enterprise to go about a beach cleanup. It's a, how do you get bulldozers in their operation? So that's the topic we are looking at. We are looking at programs for disposing of gear and collecting derelict nets and traps. We do not expect there is a single solution that will be the answer to the marine debris problem, and we're looking to build an all of the above approach that can do our best to curtail the flow of plastic garbage into the sea. Let me close my remarks with two ideas that I think the oceans community should get behind. One is an advanced research projects agency for the oceans. There is an ARPA-E, Research Projects Agency for Energy that has been enormously successful. ARPA-E was itself modeled on DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has also been spectacularly successful. And ARPA-O could be an important focus for developing advanced oceans technologies. I envision an agency that could develop accurate and cost effective sensors that can be used by scientists and fishermen in cooperative research, drones, gliders, and other autonomous vehicles to help us enforce fishing regulations on the high seas, plastic alternatives that would actually biodegrade in the oceans, and of course, I envision an agency that could accomplish things that I can't even envision. The second idea is a national permanent fund for coasts and oceans. The United States has more territory under salt water than it has on dry land. Yet, efforts to protect oceans and coasts by comparison to upland funding are severely underfunded. I'll give you an example. Just one grant program received 132 qualified applications, requesting a total of $105 million, and the program had $4.5 million to give out. 4% of the need. And that's just for that one grant. NOAA's Marine Debris Program, Keith is here who runs that program. NOAA's Marine Debris Program currently operates on a budget of only $6 million. With this project in front of us, NOAA has $6 million to work on this issue. Our understanding of the ocean has advanced greatly in the past century, but as anyone who has lived on or worked on the ocean knows, the rate of change in multiple areas is accelerating and research struggles to keep pace. There's been some progress. In December, I was successful in passing the National Oceans and Coastal Security Act, which authorized for the first time a dedicated fund for oceans research, restoration, and education grants. But now we need to fund it. And I'd like to see it funded on par with the Land and Water Conservation Fund to ensure that our oceans and coasts are receiving the same attention and investment as our upland and freshwater resources. Momentum is building around the globe to take real action to protect and preserve our oceans. At the Our Ocean Conference, hosted by Secretary of State John Kerry, representatives from more than 90 countries came together in Washington, D.C. to pledge well over $5 billion in new commitments to conserve ocean and coastal resources and more than 50 new marine protected areas. Over a billion dollars of those pledges were focused on combating marine debris. So the resources will be getting better, which is good because we must act now if we have any hope of beating back the flood of plastics entering our oceans each year. I promise to continue working hard in Washington for our oceans and coasts, and I'm grateful for your work in supporting these endeavors as well. And now, am I doing Q&A or am I moving on? Okay, I can take a couple of questions or comments. This is Rhode Island. Welcome to those of you who are not from Rhode Island. We do questions, comments, rudermarks, all of it. As President Farrish said, you gotta beat the senators away like flies in a small state like Rhode Island or everywhere. So I'm happy to take a question or two and then I'll yield the podium to the brains of the operation. My wife, Sandra Carly. Julie, you're keeping the clock. Thank you very much, Sheldon. Especially a thank you for the work that you've been doing in Washington to see that sort of collaboration is extraordinary, as you pointed out, and given the political climate right now, it's extremely refreshing. Can you elaborate a little bit more about the million dollar resource allocation from marine debris and what mechanisms are being explored to obtain it and distribute it, and what are some of the goals attached to it? The Our Oceans Conference is a forum for, among other things, pursuing and acknowledging can be made. So it's not just exchange of information, but there's a deliverable at the end of it. From the participating nations, the most desired deliverable was new marine protected areas, and they announced, like I said, I think about 50 of them at the Our Oceans Conference. From the NGO community that was present, they were asking for what money commitments can you make to invest in oceans research and oceans protection and so forth. And that is the context in which the $5 billion was raised. I think the biggest was Julie Packard of the Packard Foundation with $500 million, but they spacked up many, many, many, many such pledges to that point where it hit $5 billion. It's not clear yet how to apply for it. There's no single point of entrance. I hope that as the different programs that made the pledges make their pledges good, they'll announce how to get access to those funds. And with any luck, I'm hoping that Our Oceans will take responsibility for having a gateway, internet gateway that gets you through to be able to apply for those pledges and keeps everybody up to date on which ones have basically gone live and been funded and are now suitable for application and which ones are still sorting out the RFP or RFQ type thing. So that's a work in progress. But I do believe that through the Our Oceans conference would be the best way to try to network into that. And then, of course, some of the major groups that play in this space, like Ocean Conservancy and Oceana and so forth, they'll be watching this very closely all the time. And yours. Senator, great to see you again. I'm really intrigued with ARPA. Oh, as I understand it now, DARPA's budget is funded through the Department of Defense and ARPA-E is through the Department of Energy. Are you envisioning the ARPA-O would be a new line or a plus up in the NOAA budget? Is that where you envision this agency would sit? That's one option. We are exploring a variety of options to see what is the most satisfactory way to go about it. We're also considering those options in light of what I think is a administrative, baked in structural underappreciation of the oceans in the way that the federal government has organized. The story is that years ago, President Nixon wanted to have a Department of Ocean. We had oceans, it was Earth Day, and they started the EPA and the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, it was kind of the environmental surge of the 70s, and because of the trouble that the President was in, his cabinet was under pressure as to whether to stand by him or throw him under the bus. And the Secretary of Interior had evidently done things that he considered have been throwing him under the bus. And so when it came in that there would, whether it's gonna be Department of Interior or the oceans or whatever they're gonna call it, he said to hell with that, we're not giving that SOB any new turf or jurisdiction at all, stuff it someplace else. And supposedly that's the backstory for how NOAA ended up in commerce. Why there's a Department of Interior that focuses entirely, virtually entirely on uplands and is customarily run by Western senators and Western appointees, and so little for oceans. We're buried as a smaller subset than the space program of NOAA within NOAA is something that I think we need to kind of figure out how to structurally balance. So it's not clear where our PO would go. It could well stand as a semi-independent agency with Office of Naval Research, NOAA and other groups working together. One thing we've talked to the Secretary of Energy about is to have it incubate in DARPA or in ARPA-E for a while until it kind of found its legs and then you pop it out into a different oversight mode. But the challenge of figuring out where to locate it is the challenge of bad governance in the United States government structure for oceans. It is preposterous that when oceans and coasts are so important to our economy and more and more people are moving to the coast and more and more of our economy is from the coast and climate change is a quadruple threat on the coast.  The idea that oceans is buried down in the Department of Commerce and upland and freshwater gets its own full-blown cabinet department, doesn't make sense any longer and we've got to figure out how to fix that. Thank you all very much and now having warmed you up suitably, you will have the brains of the operation, as I said. Thank you, Senator. Thank you very much, Senator Whitehouse. It was a wonderful introduction to our day and I think it will make many of our students in this room understand just how lucky they are to be here today. I now have the pleasure of introducing the other half of Team Whitehouse, Dr. Sandra Whitehouse, who's a Senior Policy Advisor for Ocean Conservancy. Dr. Whitehouse is a consultant who served for over 20 years as the Ocean Policy Advisor to multiple organizations and institutions using her marine science expertise to advise clients on a variety of issues, including how to advance ocean health and sustainably develop coastal and offshore projects. She has served on the boards of Save the Bay, the Nature Conservancy's Rhode Island Chapter, the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting, the Equinic Land Trust, Grow Smart Rhode Island, and the Consortium for Ocean Leadership and presently sits on the advisory board for the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island and the National Center for Science Education. Dr. Whitehouse holds a BS from Yale University and a PhD in Biological Oceanography from the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. It's my great pleasure to introduce Dr. Whitehouse. So thank you. First of all, just a quick disclaimer. I did not know Sheldon at Yale. I was hanging out in the science library and he was hanging out, well, let's say, in other places, so there may have been beer. And also, too, Sheldon has already acknowledged our hosts and a number of the people that both of us have worked with over the years on ocean issues, so I can just say ditto to that, thank you. And before I begin, I'd also like to just do a shout out for 11th Hour Racing that has funded some of our work at the Ocean Conservancy on solving the ocean plastic problem. So, I'm just, okay, that particular button isn't working, so I'll try this one. Okay, so we know that there's been a dramatic increase in worldwide plastic production since it was first developed in the 1950s. I don't know if any of you have seen the movie The Graduate, but the young Dustin Hoffman is advised by his career mentor that the future is in plastics. And certainly, there has been a dramatic increase in plastic production since then. Part of the reason for that is that plastic has some utility, and I think, you know, while we certainly don't want plastic to end up in the ocean, we have to recognize that it does have some usefulness. If we look at agricultural film, it's being used in a lot of developing countries. It actually makes the, I don't know why this is jumping around. It actually makes the water efficiency increased by 30%. It helps countries where they're having a difficult time growing enough food for their population to meet that demand. There's also plastic that's used for in like in these little water sachets where villages and children who'd never had access to clean water before now have access. So I don't think that we can forget that there is some utility for human health and agricultural purposes as we think about solving the problem. The issue that we have is when plastic gets in the ocean. And as Sheldon said, you know, we know that plastic persists for hundreds of years. We also know that it fragments into these smaller and smaller pieces. We also know now that 80% of that plastic is actually coming from land and not from sea-based sources. But if we just look at that 20% that is coming from the sea, some of it's coming from direct dumping. This is worldwide. This is, you know, less in the United States. We know that there's fishing gear loss that we would like to try to prevent. And there's also quite a bit of plastic that comes from containers that fall over at sea and then plastic is put in the ocean. What we really wanna talk about today is this concept of leakage or ocean or plastic coming off of the land because that's really a full 80% of the problem. And some of that is where it's just dumped directly into waterways. Some of it are illegal dumps on where it's being taken just dumped on the beach. Sometimes it's from uncovered landfills where rain is washing the plastic into the waterways. I'm sorry, this is advancing without my touching anything, but I think I'll just go ahead and make do unless you can fix it. Okay, it's all right. And then some of it is coming from natural disasters like the horrible tsunami in Japan. And Asheldon also said, we know now from Jan O'Jambeck's paper that eight million metric tons are getting into the ocean on an annual basis. If further information in that paper actually allows us to dig deeper into, there were about 50 countries that were analyzed. And what we can see is country by country, how that problem originates. So in Sweden, and I was there two summers ago visiting friends in somebody's kitchen, there's like five different bins for different types of waste, whether it's plastic or glass or cardboard or organic. They're really culturally used to addressing their waste management issues. But there, even though about 1.6 kilograms are generated per day per person, first of all, only about 3% of that is plastic. They're not, things aren't packaged as much as they are here. The important thing is that of the waste that's generated, almost a full 99% is properly managed. It gets to a landfill, it gets recycled. So a tiny portion per capita per year is actually getting into the ocean. In the Philippines, it's a very different scenario. While they're producing only about a third as much waste per day, only about 19% of it is properly managed, and therefore a lot more of it is actually sort of leaking into the ocean. So we can do this on a country by country basis, which is why we now know that the plastic leakage is very geographically concentrated, to echo what Sheldon said in these Asian countries. And we don't wanna be pointing the finger at these countries. We really have to recognize this is an unintended consequence of rapid economic development. People are buying more products. They are, a lot more of these products are plastic. It's just that the waste management infrastructure hasn't kept up with the pace of economic growth and people having access to these products. So Sheldon used the number that by 2050, there'd be one ton of plastic for every ton of finfish. A lot sooner than that by 2025, that number will be one ton of plastic for every three tons of finfish, which is still a frightening prospect. So where is this plastic ending up? Well, we know it ends up on our beaches. We see that even here in New England. If you travel to places like Indonesia where I was last year, it's even more dramatic. I'm not gonna, I won't worry about it. We also know that some plastic is found floating in the ocean and especially a year ago, there was sort of a lot of talk about these specific garbage patches. And if you go out there and take a water sample, you can actually see that there are places where there is a lot of plastic floating there. However, worldwide, less than 3% of the plastic that's in our oceans is actually in any of these garbage patches. This is a picture from the middle of the Pacific Garbage Patch. There is not a floating island the size of Texas of plastic that people have described, no offense, in the media. If that were the case, we'd be able to just go and it would be great, we could tow it to shore and properly dispose of it, but that is not the case. We also know that plastic is found in Arctic sea ice as the ice freezes. It incorporates whatever plastic particles are in the water. We also know that because Arctic ice is melting at a much more rapid pace, a lot of the plastic that's been incorporated over the last 50 years is now being released back into the ocean. And then we see plastic really on the sea floor of the ocean throughout the world in shallow estuaries down to the deepest sea trenches. So what are the impacts of this plastic? Well, we've already heard about the impacts on birds, which are really just heartbreaking. We also know that fish are ingesting plastic and a study actually just came out that Ocean Conservancy helped facilitate where we went into fish markets in both Indonesia and the United States and actually took fish or in the market and analyzed their stomachs for plastic. A full 25% of those fish had plastic particles in their stomach. What we're just starting to learn though is what the impacts of that plastic in the fish bellies might be. We know now that some fish will incorporate the pollutants that are either adhered to or part of the plastic into their flesh. We don't know whether people who eat that fish will also be subjected to having those pollutants stay in their bodies. We had mercury when I was younger as sort of a bioaccumulation scare. We're just starting to learn what, if any, bioaccumulation might be associated with plastic and the food that we eat. We also know that, sorry, the tiniest creatures in the ocean, this is a little zooplankton just barely visible to the naked eye are eating their filter feeders. They're eating these smallest pieces of plastic unwittingly. And then of course, we're all aware of the tragic consequences of entanglement and certainly losing two of the right whales is really a sad tale. We also know that there's human health impacts. We haven't really quantified them yet but clearly this is not a healthy situation. We know that there's human safety impacts.  There'll be a little exasperate flooding. And then of course there's all kinds of disease as associated with that, cholera and other things. We also know that there are economic impacts. Derelict fishing gear, which we call ghost fishing gear is still fishing and those fish will never come to market. We know that there's dollars being lost to tourism when a beach is too polluted for someone to wanna go there and then there's damage to vessels from entanglement of the props. So what are the solutions? Well, we know that we need to focus on these top five countries because a full 60% of the leakage from land is coming from these countries. So again, that's why Ocean Conservancy has done really a deep dive into these countries to look at the waste cycle. And this is just a depiction of the waste cycle.  But there's all these different pathways for leakage. In some places, especially in China, a lot of the path is just direct littering. And again, littering sort of has a bad connotation in our society. You have to understand that people, the elderly woman who's living in a village in China, she's always thrown her trash into the stream. In the past, the trash was the leaf that she ate her, her bowl of her rice in the morning on. Now it's plastic. So we really need to look at every single possible leakage pathway, which is shown in the yellow arrows. So we've done this, and I'm just gonna show you one example of the Philippines. In the Philippines, what we found is that the plastic was actually being collected. It was getting into the garbage truck. The problem is that there's a lot of illegal dumping because the tipping fees are quite high. And then a lot of waste is actually just going to an open dump, which is, and then it's either flowing into or blowing into the ocean. We also have done some work this year to look at the money trail and where development finance investment is going. This is just a quick overview, but basically only a less than 1% of all of the finance from the World Bank, the African Development Bank, all of these big financial institutions, less than 1% is going to solid waste management worldwide. When we look at it in terms of a dollar basis, it's about a quarter per person per year. And that is really a place where we are working with the G7. We're working with the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Group to try to get more investment to go towards waste management infrastructure. And just to sort of go back in time, I'd like to make the point that we can do this. This is a picture from a drawing from colonial times when people were basically just dumping their storage out the window. That was how it started until people started getting a little gnarly. Then they started spreading it on the fields. That worked for a while as populations started to grow. Then they started building collection and the storage infrastructure that we have in places like Providence from over 100 years ago. Now we're building tertiary treatment plants that are much more high-tech, but we've really invested in this because storage into our waterways was a big problem. And Save the Bay was really instrumental in helping fix this in Narragansett Bay not that long ago. I mean, I was working on it, I guess it was a while ago. But anyway, my point is that if we as a society recognize a problem, we can be the action that drives the decision makers to invest in fixing the problem. And I think we already have good waste management here in the United States, but we really need to also help our other developing countries to get some resources to solve the problem. And the solution, we know that reducing leakage is one of the sort of the biggest levers that we can push in terms of solving this. This, the picture on the left is actually an open dump in the Philippines, right on the beach. Ideally, we'd like really properly managed landfills to be built, but in some cases, a really cheap, quick fix is just to build a fence around it so that it's not directly washing into the ocean. We also wanna make sure that we can develop markets for what we call low value plastics. In much of the developing world, there's already a pretty good market for recycling high value, mostly the PET water bottles. And part of that is because the informal sector are collecting them and they can make a day's living by bringing those bottles to a recycling facility. It's this thin film plastic like the agricultural films and a lot of food packaging that there is no market for yet. So trying to find a market and develop markets for that low value plastic is also gonna be very important. You know, we also don't want to forget that increasing recycling, we can still do more of that. We can still do more composting. We know that there's solutions. The facial scrub that has microbeads in it. We shouldn't be buying that. We won't be soon. This apple package, I actually took this picture at a supermarket and really we need to package apples with plastic on a styrofoam tray. I mean, that's just, it doesn't make any sense.  Here in the United States, just this past year, we did pass a piece of legislation to ban microbeads, which is a great step forward. Microbeads are not an enormous part of the problem, but it was a very important educational tool to get people's attention about plastic. And certainly, it's really impossible to justify why we need to have plastic on our, you know, in our facial scrubs. And just in conclusion, what we're doing at the Ocean Conservancy, we really are involved in two major efforts. One is we've created this group called the Trash Rease Alliance, where we have not only environmental partners, we also have major corporations. We are also working very closely with organizations like Dow Chemical, one of the largest producers of plastic. We have been criticized by some of our colleagues for that. You know, our philosophy is that a corporation that wants to be part of the solution and is a big part of the problem, we should definitely be working with them. And then we have our signature program, the International Coastal Cleanup, which I know some of you have either supervised or participated in. This is a worldwide program. We've had it for 30 years. This past September, we had over 850,000 people worldwide on a single day do a beach cleanup. I was in Havana, which is where this picture was taken. This was the first cleanup that we had done as part of the International Coastal Cleanup in Cuba. So it was really a great start to working with the Cuban government to address. They're talking about the tourist tsunami that's coming that they're expecting from the American tourists. And with that is gonna come a lot more plastic waste. So this was an important, very early step to get at how we can get out in front of the plastic problem in a developing country. Because really, ultimately, none of us wanna see this kind of image. We wanna see this. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Whitehouse. We have a couple of moments, just a couple, if there are some questions from the audience. I think we have a runner this time. So we need to get this to Judge Miller. Dr. Whitehouse, besides the discussion of policy makers addressing the sourcing of the debris, are policy makers talking about how to solve the problem besides the international cleanup? What policy decision makers are talking about? What are they saying regarding the existing mess that's in the oceans and how we address that enormous problem? Well, I will tell you that, I mean, there are some organizations that are out there trying to pick up or clean up what's already in the ocean. Really, part of the problem is that, one, we don't really know where it all is. And two, a lot of it is probably already on the sea floor. And that, we're not gonna be able to pick that up. I mean, we are really addressing more, we wanna reduce plastic going into the ocean. We don't wanna be picking it up after it's already in the ocean. We wanna prevent it from getting into the ocean. And that's why we've really been working on the international level with APEC, with the G7, with the G20, with the World Bank. We, you know, Ocean Conservancy's gone about this in sort of, in a very thoughtful way to figure out where the problem's coming from. We know it's land leakage. Where, particularly, which countries do we need to start with? And what are their biggest challenges? And quite frankly, their biggest challenges are money. And because this is a worldwide problem, if we can get some of these big financial institutions to be willing to make loans to these countries for improving the waste management infrastructure, we think that that's a really important way to affect change. You know, we're also, we continue to advocate for having plastics be re-engineered so they are truly biodegradable to have more recycling. But when you look at the rapid increase in plastic, and we've seen country by country how this has happened, we know that we need to address the waste management. And right now, that picture shows that the biggest leakage is coming from the Asian countries. We know, just looking at economic development worldwide, that the next big pulse is gonna be from Western Africa because those countries are also starting to rapidly develop. So if we can try to work with African banks to make sure that they have money available for waste management, we hope we can get out a little bit further ahead of the problem in those countries. Thank you for coming. My question has to do with extended producer and manufacturer responsibility. We've worked on this issue a lot, and in our view that's kind of the holy grail of plastic pollution reduction and prevention. So can you talk a little bit about the challenges that you've seen with those issues? Okay, well, I'm not a lawyer. So I might not be, I'm a mooting violator, so I might not be the best person to answer that. I mean, I think there are some efforts in that space. I think this sort of gets at, can something be made mandatory or can it be done voluntarily? At Ocean Conservancy, our approach has been to try to get as many of these companies to be part of our working group and really work on the solutions, which for many of those companies means greater corporate responsibility towards solving this problem, not only sitting around the table and trying to figure out what research needs to be done, but how they're going to change their individual practices. We've also worked very hard to get ocean plastic into the whole debate of corporate social responsibility. Really a lot of corporations, rightly so, are focusing a lot of their energy on carbon reduction, but we are also trying to say, look, ocean plastic is a worldwide problem. It needs to be part of your CSR package. And also one more shout out to Roger Williams for not using plastic bottles today. Well, let's thank our two keynotes, Senator Whitehouse and Dr. Whitehouse one more time. Thank you.


It went from when I had just gone full time into my business. I think I had released my first or my second book and I was feeling a little bit listless and wanted something I was more passionate about and something I was more interested in. Now what happened was I just tried YouTube for 21 days as an experiment. I did this 21 day tiny habit challenge or daily habit challenge and realized that I love video way more than writing at this stage in my life. And now I'm doing a four year doctorate in Chinese medicine so I go from having to produce content and still run my business because that's how I feed myself and then go see patients for four hours or being classed 12 hours a day. And now something has changed because I spend so much time producing video which is what I love but the problem is YouTube only makes up 6% of my income which is basically nothing but it takes 30% of my day. So today I want to invite you to go sage mode with me and let me explain what that means. So I believe that one of the problems with society today is that the younger generation Gen Y and below spend too much time mindlessly consuming BS rather than content that can improve their life.  And it's cool because the people that see me in person and come up and say hey they always say I know I watched one of these personal development videos on how to improve my life and that's what I love that's what I'm super passionate about and that's why here I preach the gospel of habits and personal development whether or not you're trying to just get fit or you want to get your family out of debt and just live an awesome life. I also know from having lived it that habits are the way a person can reinvent themselves. It is the same way that a person gets rich or gets happy or gets fit or finds their dream girl or their dream guy.  So starting today I want you invite you to go sage mode with me. First of all click go sage mode dot com in the description and now I want to explain a little bit about what it means for you because yes it is my patreon that I'm launching because what I want to do is the stuff that helps you the most which is video but I cannot financially afford to do that while I'm in medical school while I have to run my entire business because 90 percent of my day is not doing video because that's what I have to do to feed myself. So what does this mean for you? The very first thing is I want to start doing live Q&A's. I was in a mastermind recently and the host a YouTuber did a live Q&A and it was super useful, it was interesting, it was cool to connect with her and it was even more awesome to get all my questions answered, right? So you can ask me things about improving your life or fitness or if you want to be a YouTuber ask me about your YouTube channel. You can ask me that or how to start your channel or if there's something going on in your life related to this channel you can ask me about that in either maybe bi-weekly or monthly live Q&A's we'll probably do them through Facebook or through YouTube. It also means starting a custom merch line that you get the first access to and maybe we'll find a way to create a perk where like every month you can get a shirt or a mug or something cool related to this kind of go sage mode brand. Also events, I live in Portland, I'm gonna be moving to LA when I finish my doctorate but I want to start hosting events in both cities now because I love meeting you, I love hanging out and I think it'd be something cool and maybe we'll do subscriber only events maybe I'll just let you have the first access and also a lot of your input on what content do you want me to create like specifically you yes you what video do you want me to make for you that would be really fun and I think really rewarding as well but also it would give me the possibility to create a lot more content while still maintaining that sense of quality maybe even doubling my amount of content I make more related to some of the things that you want to learn so I'm very excited for this I'm excited to go sage mode I hope you're ready and willing and excited to go sage mode with me so you can punch in go sage mode dot com or write in the description there below or there that'll redirect you to the patreon and it'll share a lot of the stuff that I'm working on that I hope will be perks worth your time and worth something that you want to invest in and I think this is just the next stage of evolution here ways that I can help you more answer your questions build more live community and I just think it'll be a heck of a lot more fun so check out go sage mode calm I'll catch you guys soon


Hey Raphael from Hardware Sugar here and today we are going to test out the director's view of the S21 Ultra And I figured the best way to test it is with a real-life vlog So I'm here now in my car. I'm gonna go drive to BGC as you can see in directors view. You can actually show both cameras You can also do this actually you can switch it around and The PIP version can also move around as well So the front facing camera is on me and the rear facing camera is obviously in the rear and you can have both cameras Simultaneously play it in the background So actually parking in BGC is supposed to be a real nightmare problem But because of COVID it is actually quite easy, you know by this time at 10 a.m Will be like you're a bit like yuck 55 car stretch here Okay, so we're here now in Home Depot I'm gonna go look for some lights All right, so I just paid for my lights that I have to come back and pick it up tomorrow So I guess all my personal chores are done. I have some time before lunch So, let me show you guys what BGC looks like right now during COVID Starbucks drive-through Popular as always originally BGC was actually supposed to have a lot more trees and Well the buildings ate up the tree space Honestly, I haven't been here Since easily February of 2020 A little bottle of alcohol with me 70% You never know any attempt that you think that you could you touch something dirty or hell if I even touch anything other than myself I immediately place and I just fill it up Before I leave So we got the pizza it's nice and hot actually This is tight 21 ultra it overheats All right, so we're uh We're here to onion. We're here to drop off some Supplies to cans cast Just check that out So thank you for joining me on my trip to get pizza and some errands done Uh, usually what I always do is I I'll call my phone. So yes, I am alcohol in 21 ultra So this is the pizza after it's come out of the oven a second time Be honest, let me let me see if I can do a taste test First ah, okay. Never mind. We're not gonna do a taste test on video. Okay. This is great pizza. Bye. Bye So here are my insights on using the S21 ultra as a vlogging device The first problem you'll encounter is overheating after an hour of Turning director's view on or off or even just the regular video camera on or off or like maybe Three minutes at a time. You're going to have the you're gonna have this screen show up My biggest problem hybrid directors view is that it does not have optical image stabilization So if you watch the video again, you'll notice that it's a bit jittery as I'm walking especially I Can see regular people not just vloggers using directors view because you could really get to capture the initial expression that the taker is having at the time that they shoot whatever they're filming another thing about directors view, which I really like is The interface really makes things so easy to use So if you want to make the bigger part of the video the front-facing camera You just flip it over or if you want to move the pip you just switch it around any place you want You're not forced into a specific area where you can only place the pip No, if for instance for whatever reason you need to adapt by removing the pip because something you want to shoot Is there in the pip you could just move it around just toss it around like a piece of paper and that fluidity is really Pretty cool to be honest So in order for it to be a vlogging device You need to take into consideration that you cannot leave it on for extended periods of time So it's going to be a on-off thing. You should limit usage of video mode to Under an hour to be on the safe side and that might be problematic to hardcore vloggers But for the rest of us who aren't vloggers That actually might be enough the s21 ultra model I have is using the Exynos chip So I don't know if people using the snapdragon would have the same problem of overheating Because my understanding is that the Exynos chip is prone to Higher heat levels which would therefore lead to the camera app being forced to shut down because of the higher heat We will be releasing an Exhaustive s21 ultra review next week. So please watch out for that. Thanks, and stay safe everyone And I want to give a special shout out to our top fans IPX addict the price soon John Oh, yeah, Christian Espinosa Mark Palania and Azure anima. Thanks guys. We really appreciate it


Welcome to the show, the state of the state of Hawaii. I'm your host, Stephanie Stull Dalton. Today's topic is about big islands, Hawaii's world renowned mountain K a mountain is the likely installation of a 30 meter telescope, and always known as the TM to T as well. So our expert guests here for this conversation about that, that placement of that important resource for not only Earth, the universe is here and he is Sam King. So welcome and Mahalo Sam. Thank you for having me. The pleasure. So why don't you begin by telling us what is the TMT. Okay. The 30 meter telescope is a astronomical facility ground based telescope that has a meter that is 30 meters wide. And so the consortium that wants to build it is an international consortium it. These, the people that got together were University of California system Caltech, the, and then the lead scientific agencies in India, Japan, China, and Canada. And so the project is multi billion dollars and they want to build this telescope on top of my decay on the veil.  So I asked the scientists guys for all the details but from what I learned, you know, it's all just about collecting the light, right. So the bigger the telescope the bigger the mirror, the more light you collect, fast you collect it, and the sharper images you can get so these next generation telescopes are way bigger than anything else they've ever built. And the Europeans are building some there's another American consortium out of Texas that's going to build one and that's looking to build one in Chile which we could talk about a second thing. And so they're all these really, really large 30 meters or more telescopes, and they can, they're so powerful they look back close to the beginning of the known universe. So Sam this telescope the TMT is about has been about will be about looking right scanning the universe and looking into the universe, versus the other work that's listening that's something else correct. So TMT is about the, can you clarify that. Yeah I mean again I'm not the scientist guy but yeah that's all, you know, nobody when they do astronomy and space sciences they're not really physically directly looking at things they do. But a lot of times it's spectrum of light right or they're they're collecting some other data that you wouldn't normally see the human eye or human senses. So TMT, though will be collecting physical will be collecting photons the light will be hitting the instruments they're not listening for sound waves or anything like that, but it's probably not too different from what you when you get down to it. There's actually a group, which I'm also involved in the executive director of all on a kilo Hoku, and I'll honey kilo Hoku has these sessions where we've teamed up with some people from university California system, where Santa Cruz, and we are able to watch astronomers use the telescopes on Mount okay. So we posted the videos on all on a kilo Hoku dot orgs website, and you can see what these guys do and it's very interesting because they're not looking directly at one little star right there. They're, they're looking at it but it's not like you're zooming in like it's Star Trek or something right where you're watching it it's they're collecting light beams and then they're cutting those beams into a rainbow spectra. So, that's the kind of TMT we do. That's fascinating but is that publicly accessible, or do you have to have something from the UC to get you in. So the videos we have online for a hundred kilo Hoku are publicly accessible they're on there on our website. And then we have a registration link you can sign up, and you can go and we'll send you an email as we, we work on the program right now we don't have on deck but we're working on having some more videos, some more partnerships online, and then when you register at the current system will send you an email, and then that email have the zoom link and you can jump in and watch the show. That's nice opportunity for those who have interest so take a look at this website. It's, it's going to stream across the bottom of the screen and this is a different one so that that's emuotmt.org I'll just clarify for your viewers emuotmt.org is a separate group, not to confuse anybody, but ohana kilo Hoku.org is a is another group that's just an example of, of what this, what this provides. It already confuses death. Well that's well if somebody goes on your website can they ask that question and get the link to the next one to the other. Absolutely I mean they can email me for sure. At gmail.com, we can definitely send people any information about ohana kilo Hoku on a kilo Hoku is a separate group that is native Hawaiian supporting astronomy and space sciences in Hawaii. And so it's a yeah it's fabulous group it's it's a ton of fun. Actually, it would team T is much more focused on TMT and whereas on a kilo Hoku is more about supporting the astronomy industry as a whole. And so it's, it's a great, it's a great network is a great group, and those videos are are great stuff and you go to the ohana kilo Hoku.org. And you check out the videos tab and you can, you can see those videos and then you can, you register at our opportunities page as a section about shadow the scientists. Shadow the astronomer astronomy nights that's that's what it's called. Okay well just say it one more time maybe Michael can pick it up. Michael's got an ohana kilo Hoku.org. Think tech tech, aren't they okay um well tell us a little bit how did you get involved with this since you said you're an attorney and so now this is a lot less. Yeah, so speaking of TMT specifically right and which is which is a very different thing. Industry as a whole. TMT started. I've been watching the TMT issue for a while. For a couple years while I was in law school especially because it just brings up a lot of interesting topics. You know, native wine rice native wine history land use law which I specialized in when I was in law school and I and I worked on that after law school. So, while I was watching it. There was protest in 2015 that prevented the construction start, and then the Supreme Court overturned the permit, because TMT went and got a, they got a decision by the Board of Land and Natural Resources before the contest case hearing happened, which is a process that the BLNR had followed previously. To the criticism of many people, where they were voting on things before they had these contest case hearings and BLNR's logic was well we can't have a contest case hearing if we don't do anything. So we have to vote first and then have it so Supreme Court said no no no you can't do like that you got to do contest case hearing first so in 2015 TMT got a rule because of that. Then they went back they did another contest case hearing. And then in 2019 TMT tried to build again. And so this is, I mean we can go over a little bit of this history again, just to explain. And maybe it's worth mentioning that the steeple chase that TMT has gone through to get approval. I mean that the things I just described are just two minor things I mean this doesn't even talk about all the community outreach TMT did right. In the DIS process they went through two different contest case hearings getting a conservation district use permit to Supreme Court cases. It's the, the amount of vetting this most vetted project, I think in the history of the state of Hawaii. And so I got involved in 2019. I saw the protest happening, and I just, I couldn't believe that the state of Hawaii was not enforced in the law and arresting the people blocking the road physically blocking the road despite the fact that TMT had been approved by the Supreme Court that permits were finalized. And it just upset me I was just like that's it's not acceptable that that this is happening in my state. And also the fact that the narrative that was being told was that native wines were opposed to the project. Whereas the polls that were coming out at the time said that 70% of native wine supported the project right and the polls were not great for that demographic, but they showed that they, they support them and I you know I've talked to many native wines and they all tell me oh yeah we support and I, and there's plenty that oppose it, and plenty of people that oppose it but not as many as was painted. And so it just drove me up a wall and so I had to get involved. You said they did an IES, an EIS, which is an environmental impact statement and so, were they also doing a statement about the cultural issues. So as these EIS involves that. With those getting documented to critically documented or validly documented to. Absolutely. So the environment and that was one of the reasons I got involved so one of the things I wrote. In my op-ed, what triggered my involvement was I wrote an op-ed about the protest and I with Malia Martin, who was the co-founder of Imua TMT, the group. She, the lady in Malia Martin had started a Facebook page a few years earlier. And so we teamed up to create the group. And so that op-ed we called for everyone to come to a rally at the Capitol. And one of the things that you realize is when you read the EIS you read about how good it is right. And so how good the project is. And one of the things in the EIS is a cultural impact section by Keppa Mali who's one of the greatest experts around. And there's actually some stuff in there I don't fully agree with that's more slanted towards the sacredness discussion which we can cover to. We did document all of that I mean it's been extensively discussed, and the University of Hawaii has done a tremendous job documenting it. It's actually funny that UH gets so criticized now for their management about a cab because they got one bad audit 22 years ago even three years ago now. And they moved dramatically. Now one of the things they do so well is they document all the cultural sites all the ancient, you know, and traditional customary practices of native Hawaiians, including the ads query. Right, I mean I don't know if many people know that the native Hawaiians the ancient Hawaiians use Mauna Kea as an industrial site right shaving rock at the level that we had back in the day. These were kahuna priests doing this because they want to keep the monopoly on the rock is my theory. And so because the rock at top of Mauna Kea is really hard lava rock so it's the best rock in the islands. Very dense and so they use an area that's about 960 times the size of the TMT site to to mine Mauna Kea and it was all these shavings all around and we know a lot of this because you know UH is going around doing all these studies and they're looking at all these things. When did the TMT first go in. What was the beginning. Oh, that is a good question I think TMT started looking at Hawaii is a location in like 2005 around them. And so they I think they officially started coming in around 2010. What is it they were already 10 or 12 telescopes up there. There was already a site. Yeah, there's something like 13 telescopes up there already right now. You happen to know when all that began. The telescope started going up in about the 70s so back in the late 60s. There were a couple things going on. One of them was that the big guy got hit by a tsunami. So the economy was devastated so the business community was looking for new ways to expand new new new ways to generate growth on the big island. And one of the things they looked at was astronomy. And so they went to Mount again they UH did a study and said this is one of the greatest places in the world to do astronomy and so then in the 70s they started looking into it there's actually a report on a Mua TMT website. There is a report that was an audit that was recently done. And that audit has a timeline of it and basically in the 1970s that built the first telescopes and there's nobody protested at first. Nobody said anything everybody thought it was great. And I'm there's people that we've worked with there's one attorney that's been on Mua TMT's panels chemo stone who's you know he lived on the big out he's you know said like I remember living there people thought it was fantastic that the telescope is going on I know other people from the big island they they love driving up to Mount Ikea to play in the snow and the road was only built for the telescopes right you couldn't get up there, except if you were riding a horse. You know, people thought it was great and then there was some concerns over time about the construction there was stuff left behind construction materials that were cleaned up trash wasn't cleaned up and that that started happening a little bit after the development and then it started becoming a political issue you know people that lived on the big island didn't like the telescopes obstructing their beautiful view of the mountains right they're like oh they look like pimples right they want to live in their idealistic view of what Hawaii was supposed to be whenever they bought the brochure, or there are people that started coming up with more political reasons to object to astronomy I'm out of camp. Well, is this the point at which the sacred issue came up. Yeah, that's about that most of the sacred issues started coming up. Well, I think there have been some discussions about it, but one of the things documented by the EIS and by more teams discussions also is that a lot of the religious practices on people claim our religious practice Hawaiian religious practices didn't start until after the TMT contested case hearings. Right and during the contested case hearings they interview people that are claiming that the protesters that are claiming these religious practices and they admit that they haven't they didn't start practicing these things until after the TMT protest, and it makes total sense and this is an important thing to know. The uniqueness of Mauna Kea, from a native Hawaiian perspective is based on the Kapu religion, right the Kapu religion was the dominant Polynesian religion of Hawaii, right that all throughout Polynesia there was a Kapu or taboo religion that existed and it was kind of a system it wasn't fixed there were no set priests right there was a lot of different people and different beliefs different gods everybody had their own gods. And that's like kind of the dominant religion of Hawaii. So, when Kamehameha conquered the islands, he started trying to standardize the religion, right because before Kamehameha conquered remember Hawaii wasn't all called Hawaii, right the first documented name of these islands is not is the sandwich aisles right that was when Kamehameha arrived he's like I'm going to call these islands the sandwich aisles right but but the actual natives he spoke to called it a Tui, right because they were talking about Kauai it was the first place he showed up was Kauai. And so that he asked him what the name is they said a Tui but they didn't say these are the Hawaiian islands, because Kamehameha conquered all the islands from Hawaii. So, prior to that conquering there was no Hawaiian religion, because there was no Hawaii. Kamehameha tried to create a Hawaiian religion by imposing his idea of what the Kapu system should be, and how people should act. But then after he died, his favorite wife Queen Kahumanu became the queen region, and the mother of Kamehameha the second Queen Keopuala Keopualani Keopualani sorry. They overthrew the Kapu system. Keopualani and Kahumanu didn't like the Kapu system because men and women couldn't eat together. And Kahumanu especially was chafing under the system because she was the region and there were certain political decisions made and hey how that she couldn't attend she couldn't eat with the men.  And then she ended in the abolition of the Kapu system which they called Ainoa, which means free eating. And after that happened, there was actually a civil war in Hawaii, where the nephew of Kamehameha the first, to whom Kamehameha the first had given his war god idol, objected to destruction of the Kapu system because his power was based on the religion, the old religion that Kamehameha was trying to establish right. And he said no we're going to keep it and Kamehameha the second and his prime minister and his forces, after declaring that the Kapu system was gone and ordering the desecration of all the hey, the destruction of all that's why nobody can, you know, all the archaeologists now upset they all all the hey are destroyed is because maybe the second destroyed them all. And after the second, Kamehameha the first nephew objected, Kamehameha the second forces when killed him, and they killed them all and Kamehameha the, you know, this, this guys, there's a main man the first nephew's wife name but no no was executed on the battlefield there's a whole article about it and the point is that the, the religion was obliterated right so there's no. There was not a lot of people practicing it and to the extent there were they were practicing it secret and privately, which is fine but when you fast forward to today. The reality is that from the time of the kingdom. And Kamehameha has had freedom of religion, right, there's been debates and fights about imposing moral laws and ironically, the moral laws that the elite you're trying to oppose for Christian laws right the elite converted to Christianity, and started trying to impose Christian morals on Hawaii and Kamehameha the third was one of the guys that objected to that, but land and all of this that gets us into the sacred land problem. The thing is that in, in the Kapu religion, I mean it was a, it was a theocracy right so they used religion to govern land use. It wasn't. But the fundamental point of it all was that all land was sacred, right the entire state is sacred all the land is sacred right wiki key is sacred wiki key had some of the best water on Taro land in the whole state, and it's owned by the elite and now it's hotels, right and the elite trust are making bank off tourists right and because, because Hawaiians are adapted and innovative and entrepreneurial right we're we're out there making money and people want to come here and enjoy the beach. So do we, and we're happy to put you up for the night, if you will pay us for your services that's perfectly fine that's a great thing. In fact, I think it's one of the greatest things because exporting love and fun and aloha how could that is the best thing you could possibly produce next to really cool astronomy pictures. Great memories of a trip to Hawaii, I have literally traveled to over 40 countries. I went to Syria, and I thought umbrella. Syria, there's an umbrella with Hawaii with one eye and a palm tree on it right. That was the image people had of what was a happy place right I went to Zambia, and I was eating a Hawaiian pizza I didn't even like Hawaiian pizza that much now like pineapple, but they had an idea of it right and that that is awesome. That's a great thing. And you've just carved out that the whole that that that maybe maybe you've indicated that then the whole sacred and constrain or issue or controversy is a cherry picking kind of issue and they decide that that Malake had special activities, whether they were religious or what cultural or what have you, but it's not, it's not coming down through the religion which is what seems to be the message that this is, you know, established established view of that. And I think the key thing for viewers to know for the people Hawaii to know for the world to know is that we have freedom of religion in Hawaii. We do not. The state does not establish religions in this state. And we never did even from the beginning the first constitution under commandment of the third. It's still it actually mentioned Jehovah and said you know you should respect Jehovah but it said no one will be punished for ignoring Jehovah right and the second constitution they said there is freedom of religion that's that's from the kingdom. Well, it seems that then there are that that usually is considered one of the strands of the controversy I mean the cultural issues the religious issues. You know that that involved the sacredness and then there's the competition with other places that might have mountains comparable to Malakea that this could move away from Hawaii and away from the US and be somewhere But it seems like the cultural issues in this religious issue have have are they playing out their role or are they subsiding as I mean because they've been so strong with all the demonstrations is that or is that might be You know, it cannot be resolved see that the objections to TMT are based on movement politics right the protesters are using a tactical known as movement politics and movement politics is about winning. Every day that TMT is not built the protesters consider a victory. So they will never stop making up claims about whatever is going on every single claim the protesters have ever come up with has been debunked. That's not sacred as a native line matter as I've already explained. The TMT is not going to harm the aquifer the protesters are still claiming that TMT and I explained the steeple chase right TMT went through an environmental impact statement. They went through all the vetting from the press they went through the Supreme Court. There is no reason to believe the protesters are ever going to stop. That being said, there are an efforts now in the legislature to try and come up with a way to have dialogue. And you know that's a good thing to have dialogue in Hawaii it's a way we resolve conflict and that's that's a good idea. It's just, I always cautioned people to to acknowledge that dialogue in and of itself is not useful if the people aren't coming to the table and good faith right we already had the good faith dialogue that's what the contested case hearing is that's why you had to sit on the stand and answer questions right. But now the dialogue just being used as a delaying tactic. And that being said, I'll just wrap with this, the federal government has said through the National Academy of Sciences that the TMT is the most important project for ground based astronomy in America, and they should team up with the giant Magellan telescope, which is the Texas consortium they're going to build one down in Chile. And that's the most important thing to fund. You have to go through another EIS process that will involve another cultural impact component, and that'll bring in a lot more money to mitigate the cultural impacts, and that if that gets funded, that will push TMT forward again and there'll be so there'll be more conversations about these. Okay, and what about the funding? I mean, speaking of topics to come together on I know that one of the critics of the work is saying that they're in the decision making process it's about TMT, the activities surrounding it, that there hasn't been community input that that somehow these these have all been decided decisions are top down decisions by the managers and talk to that just a little bit about how that works and if he's right, or we could do better The protesters have been listened to they just haven't long. That's why they're upset there has been community input they just haven't they just not we're not doing what they want and therefore they're claiming you're not listening to them. TMT is listening to people like me, I'm saying go build that's excellent and they should do that. And the community in Hawaii in general has consistently been in favor of the 30 meter telescope so there's been tons of community input and like I said I just explained. There was a contested case hearing media coverage. I mean, that is the process. What about this bill house bill 2024. What is that bringing to the discussion. I don't have it all by fingertips but I believe this is the one where the mountain care working group that was convened by the House of Representatives for the state of Hawaii is looking at a new managing entity for the mountain care. So right now, the Department of Land and Natural Resources runs out of care, they released the summit. University of Hawaii, and you each manage it to day to day. Now they're talking about creating a new entity to manage it, which is interesting to me. If they told me they were going to promise that TMT was going to get built, I'd listen to them. The reality is my concern that they're just using this as a delaying tactic right you come up with this new process, and then you say oh we got to do this new thing it's going to be great. But in the meantime all it does is create uncertainty for the telescopes and they don't want to invest if they don't think there's going to be a lease for them to build telescopes on so there's ways to do it and you could change the structure and that's an interesting idea it's okay I mean you age is not the be all end all, but you just done a really good job the criticisms of them is are not well founded. One step in up aren't they to write more reports about and they just got a master plan approved by the regions and they, they've just restructured I mean they've been doing an incredible job. What they failed on was preventing the protests, and that's not that shouldn't have been their job anyway because it's a self fulfilling prophecy where the protesters have worked themselves into this anger. And there's things that were worth objecting to right the fact that no other telescopes paid rent. That's an interesting thing to discuss and TMT is now paying a million dollars in rent a year, plus a million dollars in scholarships plus another million dollars in training right so and that's great and that's something that was objected to during the contested case hearing process that was discussed that was worked out. That's when those things should happen.  Well tell us now what what do you think are the next steps for TNT we're getting down to just about 45 seconds left so what are next steps for TNT and what what do you see the future. The next step is go to a mua TMT.org and sign up for our email list and I'll send you out emails, you got to testify, that's the big thing so we got to keep the momentum moving we got to make sure you H gets its loose renewed, so that there is astronomy on TNT needs to go apply to the federal government for a billion dollars so that they can get national science foundation to come in and fund them. That's going to be the next big step. Tell me about the billion that's the only thing it'll track NSF National Science Foundation what does that mean for them. I mean unless Elon Musk decides to just give us a billion dollars we're going to need the National Science Foundation to come in and and give funding so the. That's, that's where the, the CATL survey came in to this big survey that the federal government puts on looks at all the ground based astronomy says what's the most important thing to do, and all these scientists and specialists professors say what it is and they said it's TMT. And so they're looking at Mounted K or Spain but right now TMT is committed to Mounted K and Mounted K is clearly the better site, and I want it here we want it here. And so identifying our economy is what we're all about isn't it and certainly to take this away is going to get in the way of that. And it's, and it's also about the perpetuation of Hawaiian culture through contribution. It's really, you know, our ancestors sailed here by the stars and that's, that's what we do we're navigating space by using the telescopes to navigate the stars and that's awesome that's a great story and it'll create tons of job opportunities right here at home for our kids for my kids. And I can celebrate and I do celebrate. I think it's going to, I think it's going to work out. It's going to be great but it does require people to stay engaged. Well, I think that's beautiful that you said that Sam because the, the, the stars the story of the stars is especially Hawaii's of the of for our nation to represent that that heritage that's a huge cultural heritage it's very important and that's made it really important to understand where the protestors was coming from since that's been important to the Hawaiians, moving around. Everybody's trying to claim to be the native Hawaiians but the reality is native ones are not required to agree about everything. And we're all members of this democracy and we all have equal rights. And so we're not required to be one voice right nobody asked the Japanese or the Koreans all agree on stuff right or the howlies right like we're all, we're all different people we don't have to agree and so, but everybody wants to capture it so that you can claim the mantle, but in the end the truth is that there's a story to tell that's positive from this whole thing. It's all a negative story and the protesters are and I choose not to do that I choose to tell a positive story. And that story is that we can perpetuate the greatest aspects of our navigational heritage through contribution to modern astronomy with these fantastic instruments it's it's so cool I mean I can't wait to see what the universe was like back when it was born our panel in a canoe or see life on other planets. Pardon me. They're going to look for life on other planets. It's so amazing that Hawaii could be at Mount okay and not only for the earth, but only for the country USA having this tremendous work but also having the first universal connection made through through that point in time which would be just phenomenal. But I thank you so much. This has been a fascinating conversation I'm kind of stumbling here because I got another bunch of questions to ask. We'll have to do another talk together, especially as our questions come in and more news is generated. But thank you very much for participating in think technology and being on this show the state of state of Hawaii. And I'm your host Stephanie stole Dalton. And thank you viewers. We really appreciate your attention and Aloha everybody.