 Good evening everyone. Good evening. Welcome. My name is Steve Minalen, the director of the College of Sustainability, and the college is everyone's host for tonight. This is our regular Thursday evening lecture series that also forms part of classes in first and second year and fourth year in the environment sustainability and society major here at Dalhousie. The lecture series is an open classroom that's devoted to bringing in the world's leading thinkers and questions of the future of our planet, the future of our society, and the ways in which we might go about making change in society together for a better future. And in doing that, we are really pleased to partner with a lot of organizations to host other lectures and to host different groups coming together. And tonight is one of those occasions. This is the second year that we've hosted the Douglas M. Johnston lecture, which is put on by the Marine and Environmental Law Institute here at Dalhousie. And it's my pleasure to introduce Meinhard Duell, who is the director of the Marine and Environmental Law Institute, who will introduce us to first the lecture and then to our speaker, Meinhard. Thank you. So thank you, Steve. Before I tell you a bit about the lecture and our speaker tonight, I just wanted to let you know that the institute has been working for a couple of years on a way of offsetting our greenhouse gas emissions. And we finally, thanks to our Environmental Law Student Society, have come up with a good way of doing that. And I just wanted to let you know that the Environmental Law Student Society has calculated the emissions from our speaker's travel and the use of this room. And we have made a donation to a solar photovoltaic project at Dal legal aid to offset those emissions. I'm sorry to say your own emissions from, in terms of getting here, are still on your own shoulders. Hopefully you walked or biked here, so won't be an issue. So now to the lecture. This lecture is named in the honor of Douglas Johnson, a former faculty member at the law school, who became one of the leading international law academics of his time. Before I introduce today's speaker, I want to tell you a bit more about Douglas. He was born in Dundee, Scotland in 1931. He left Scotland after receiving his undergraduate law degree and came to Canada where he completed the Masters of Law degree at McGill. He then went on to do a doctorate in the signs of law at Yale University. Spent a bit of time in the United States, came back to Canada in 1969 to teach at the University of Toronto. And then a few years later in 1972, he came to Halifax where he took up the position at the law school at Dalhousie. And what he did over the 15 years that he spent at Dalhousie transformed our university and our program. And I'll just tell you a few things about what he accomplished while he was here. He launched the law school's doctoral program and expanded our master's program. He initiated the law school's Marina and Obama Law program, which then turned into the institute that I'm currently the director of. We just celebrated our 40th anniversary, the oldest and most established program in the country. He produced a tour of articles, book chapters, books and other publications. He was a trusted advisor and consultant to the government of Canada and to international organizations such as the IUCN. And I can go on. These initiatives established Dalhousie as an international reputation, particularly in the areas of international law and marine and environmental law. In 1987, Dalhous went to the University of Victoria where he took up a chair. He spent the next eight years at the University of Victoria, officially retired but then spent another four years at the University of Singapore. And then when he returned to Victoria, he continued to write, he continued to supervise and advise graduate students, and I had the fortune of being, I think, his last graduate student. He supervised me until his death in 2006 at the age of 75. So that's the person in whose honor we have started this lecture. Now to our speaker tonight, Dr. Elliot Norse, founder and chief scientist at the Marine Conservation Institute. Dr. Norse has worked at the conservation science policy interface for his entire career. After earning a bachelor's degree in biology from Brooklyn College, he studied the ecology of blue crabs in the Caribbean and the tropical East Pacific as part of his doctorate and then did a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Iowa. After graduating with his doctorate, he served in a number of high profile capacities including at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, White House Council on Environmental Quality, the Ecological Society of America, the Wilderness Society at Ocean Conservancy before founding the Marine Conservation Institute in 1996 where he still affiliated. He has 150 publications to his credit. He's a Pew Fellow, has won the Nancy Foster Award for Habitation Conservation. He was named the Brooklyn College 2008 Distinguished Aluminous and the 2012 Chairman's Medal from the Seattle Accordion. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Elliot Norse. The beauty of the day has you intoxicated with good spirit and I hope that what we talk about will encourage you along the way. There may be some discouraging things and so what I'm going to ask you to do is wait until the end, okay? Wait until the end. Now, what's the best way to put this? I have known about this university since I was a graduate student. The first person here I met was Aldo Chircup in 1992 and the person I probably worked with most frequently was Ransom Myers who was a brilliant mathematician and fisheries biologist who was here until he died eight years ago and I've never properly said thank you to him for all of the good he did. So RAN and the Marine Environmental Law Institute in college sustainability and my colleagues at Marine Conservation Institute and finally the people who are helping with the Global Ocean Refuge System helping to make it happen. I thank all of you. So let's get started. I want to talk with you. I want this talk to be in three parts, okay? One is how did I get here? Because we haven't met each other except for Tony and a few other people. We haven't met each other. I see a lot of faces that are new to me and so since most of you are trying to figure out what you want to be I want to tell you a little bit about what got me here and the adventures and things along the way. I want to point out that there's a reason we're all here that there are big challenges for our planet and I want to talk with you about a solution, an institutional solution that I think is going to make a real difference if we can get it up and running, funded, staffed, and all that. So let's start. So I had hair once just so you know, okay? I lived on an estuary 969 kilometers southwest of here. I was born there and I have to say I fell in love very early in my life. Now there's nothing wrong with finding your purpose when you're 70 or 60 or 50 but there are real advantages to finding out what you want to do in life earlier and that's what I suspect an awful lot of you are here for. I got lucky. I decided that I was going to be a nucleologist. I didn't know any other words for it at age five and my parents took me to the library and I found out right away as a five-year-old that there were living things on this earth that are no longer here. And you know, it's funny because when you're a kid you think, well I've always known it this way. And for three, four or five years the world has been pretty much as it is now and as it turns out the world changes and those changes happen for all sorts of reasons having nothing to do with people and now they change for reasons that are overwhelmingly due to people. As it turns out, she's my mother. My father is a man named Aldo Leopold. I met either of them by the way. But Rachel Carson said something really, really important long before almost anybody in this room was born but actually when I was 15 she said that the way we live our lives has consequences. The way our commerce works and our government works really has big consequences and this book, Silent Spring, is more than any other that I know the origins of the modern environmental movement and so she's really somebody I revere. And I also learned in the 60s if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem. I like the idea of being part of the solution. So anyway, I studied the animals that lived in my backyard and I studied them in a much broader bi-geographic setting in the Caribbean and the tropical east Pacific and I was absolutely immersed in these things for 10 years and loved it and learned everything I could and wrote all the papers I could and learned the game in university. But at the universities I attended for graduate school and undergraduate and graduate school and postdoc and things most people weren't thinking about the earth as a whole and I found myself really really interested in the bigger picture. I had I guess and I still have what I call my atlas complex it's the feeling that I need to hold up as much as I can of this world because a lot of other people aren't doing their responsibility and taking part in it. And so it would be good if there were a lot more people holding this but I'm going to tell you that it's been a good life in many ways holding my piece of it. So I did this for a while and I left university life and I did it so that I could learn the game, the policy game outside of the university setting. And I was the staff ecologist for the White House for a year and a half at the end of the administration of Jimmy Carter he was the US president and the week I got to my job I was asked to do something that I think was extraordinary it was the most challenging thing that I could have been asked and it was perfect for me. I was asked to examine the status of life on earth and that's a big topic. That's a heavy lift. And that led to something. It led to my calling it what I was most concerned with biological diversity and defining it. And I thought that this would change the world. We began with the story of this animal. Anybody know what it is? Hands? Anybody? Yes. Close relative of one. Yeah. Yeah. Stellar's sea cow. The reason you may not know it is because it was driven to extinction in 1768. It was driven to extinction because the Chinese loved to wear the fur of sea otters and Russians, Germans, Brits and others wanted to provide sea otter pelts to the Chinese and when they found these animals living around a tiny group of islands called the Commandorskis in the North Pacific they ate them and they ate them and they ate them. These things were the size of a whale. But they provided really good food for the sea otter hunters until 27 years after they were discovered by Western society they were all gone. So conservation really had three separate streams when I got into the bids. One is there were people who were really interested in preserving the genetic diversity of crops. The germplasm of crops. There were other people who were really interested in species conservation. They didn't talk with one another of course. And then there were people who were interested in conserving places. And they didn't talk with anybody else. These movements were very largely separate. And to me that meant that biological diversity had to bring them together intellectually and politically because we were really looking at diversity of genes within species, of species and of ecosystems. All of these are levels of biological organization on which there are lots of different kinds of things. And so I hoped that this would bring together these scientists and other people interested in pieces of the picture and help them to see that they were really working on very much the same thing. And so when I met, although for the first time, I was working on this book called Global Marine Biological Diversity. And it was produced for a worldwide meeting called the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. And the reason I did it is because I was told that World Resources Institute was putting together a global biodiversity strategy. And they needed something in there about the 99% of the habitat on Earth that happens to be marine. Now for those of you who live in the other 1%, don't feel bad about it. It's perfectly okay to be terrestrial. Some of my best friends are terrestrial. But I think it's really important to talk about the ocean if we're talking about life on Earth because, as I said, it's 99% of the habitat for multicellular life on the planet. And it became clear to me when I put this book together that, one, the world's oceans are in real trouble. Real trouble. And nobody was talking about that at that time. I mean, the United Nations, it seems, was blissfully unaware and thought that maybe there were some problems around the edges. You know, there were some dirty harbors and things like that. There were oil spills here and there, but they didn't see the bigger picture. And the second thing is, a thing that came out of doing this is that they needed to be a new interdisciplinary science, something that would bring together different kinds of biologists, bring them together with oceanographers and bring them together with social scientists to create a science of marine conservation biology. And that seemed to be an important thing to me. So here's what I learned. In going around the world and talking with a lot of really smart people, I learned that there were five proximate driving things that are eliminating biological diversity in this thing. Okay? We kill more things than nature can replenish. We overexploit them. We physically damage the places where they live. We put things in the ocean that shouldn't be there, chemicals and nutrients and stuff like that. We move species from one place to another, and that causes some real problems, and we are changing the atmosphere in many ways that has profound effects on the ocean. But those were only the proximate causes, because really they were being driven by the fact that there are too many people, and there were a lot less people when I wrote this than now, we consume too much. We don't know enough. We don't care a whole lot. And our institutions are just not well designed for dealing with a problem this big and this vitally important. So I hate to say this, and my generation has done some really, really dumb things that I'm not particularly proud of, and I have a lot of hope when I look at the bright young faces in front of me, but I'm going to challenge you to do two things, okay, before we go any further. One of them is turn your phone off, okay? I see in Halifax, just as I see in Seattle, where I live, in Washington, D.C., in the other places I go, I see people walking along like this, and you need to look at the bigger picture. You need to look beyond your cell phones. And the other thing I would challenge you to do is October 19th is a special, special day in Canadian history. Now, you may not know that yet, but if all of you go to the polls and vote, preferably as many times as you can get away with it, good things are going to happen for Canada, okay? And I would love to see that happen. So, in any event, in hopes of doing good things, I founded Marine Conservation Biology Institute in the 90s, and we've changed the name and changed the logo a little bit, but the purpose was twofold. One is we wanted to help create this new science of marine conservation biology, and the other is we wanted to apply that science to protecting life in the sea. And so, I held two parties, one in the University of Victoria on the other side of this country, the other at San Francisco State University, and we invited all sorts of people to come, and a lot of people who weren't invited came to, which you know it's a good party you know people want to come when you haven't reached them. And this was one of the people I met at that party, and all I could say is I loved them right away, and we became friends, and we were up until the time that we lost them. So, very quickly I started holding scientific workshops, dealing with what I thought were some of the biggest problems in marine conservation, and Ram participated in two of those. It was great to have him. We also wanted to know things like how much of the earth is being trolled each year. Bottom trolling is the human activity that probably has the most direct impact on marine species and ecosystems, and yet nobody had ever really done the calculation. Just how extensive is it? And so, we did that. We also wanted to know about extinction in the sea, and so I got together with some friends, and we put together the first look at modern extinctions in the oceans. We knew much more about extinctions of life millions of years ago than we knew about extinctions today. We wanted to see whether some commercial fishing gears were a bit easier on the environment than others, and so we pulled together this paper, and the chief author of this paper is now the president of Marine Conservation Institute. He was my postdoctoral fellow, and he's risen in the ranks, as I have descended in the ranks in our organization, and he does great stuff. Okay, so I wanted to think smaller than normal, and so we wanted to look at continental scale conservation as opposed to global scale, and so we put together the first priority listing of places to protect along the west coast of the Americas from Alaska to Mexico. We put together the first textbook on marine conservation biology to help shape the mindscape of the field. We looked at ocean acidification long before people in general realized that this is a major threat to the oceans, and we asked ourselves the question, we know we're fishing in the deep sea, we're fishing in the deep sea because the shallow waters no longer have enough fish because we ate them, and we also made their habitats uninhabitable for them, so can deep sea fisheries work? So these are all examples of things that this little organization of, oh, five to 20 people has done, and we realized that where we are now is just a tiny slice of the history of life on Earth. There have been multicellular things living on this planet that have left pretty good records of their life for more than a half billion years, and five times in that half billion years, something really bad has happened, really bad. The last time it happened, a mountain sized, I mean, Mount Everest sized asteroid or comet slammed into the Earth and had profound effects, and if you don't see dinosaurs anymore, actually you still do, they're called birds, but if you don't see any other dinosaurs and a lot of different things in the oceans, that's why, because they were wiped out in a very short time by that impact. Each time in each of these mass extinctions well over half of the living things was eliminated. So my buddy Stuart Pym has done calculations. He's a much more sophisticated, mathematically than I am, and he's come up with the idea, not with the idea, he's come up with the result that extinction rates now are about a thousand times greater than they were 400 years ago. That's a big change. I mean, if you can think of what you earn on a day when you're working, think of what would happen if you earned a thousand times more than that. A thousand fold difference is a big difference, and that's what's happening now, and that has consequences. So a consequence that my buddy Ram and his then colleague Boris Worm, who's here at Dalhousie, wrote about was how quickly living things in the ocean, especially large predatory fish, were being eliminated. And here's what they found in waters around the world. They found that everywhere we look the abundance of these large predatory fish has declined extremely sharply in the last 50, 40, 30 years. So that is not just something that was true then, it's true now. And so in getting up to, you know, put the last finishing touches on this talk today, I saw this headline in the Washington Post. There's a worldwide coral bleaching event underway. You can see an unbleached coral reef, and then two months later, a bleached coral reef, which means that there's a good chance that most or all the corals in that picture on the right will die. They will not recover. And there's a really good chance, according to the person we saw today, that this event that's happening in the Pacific Ocean right now will take out 10 to 20% of the world's coral reefs. Did you know this? It's important for a lot of reasons, and one of them is because marine life is essential to maintaining the stability of the Earth's climate. Our climate depends on it. And here's a reason. The abundant fishes that live in mid-water, and they're little tiny things, nobody would want to eat them, and so nobody really cares about them very much, but they have an inordinately large control over the content of our atmosphere. They remove carbon dioxide from our atmosphere because they take things from the upper part of the ocean, and then they go where they eat them, and they go down to the deeper waters, and they poop, okay, thereby transporting huge amounts of carbon into the deep sea. So my basic point is that these living things maintain the habitability of the Earth for things like them and us. We need them. They don't need us, but we need them. This is just a guess on my part. But you probably wouldn't want to be here for what is coming. And that's sad, because you're young people, and the chances of it happening in not my lifetime, I'm old, but your lifetimes or my grandchildren's lifetimes is high enough so that it keeps me up at night. And so we have an existential question. Can we survive? Can we make it if there is a sixth mass extinction? Can we stop it from happening? Now, I don't know what a college of sustainability is about if it's not answering this question. It seems to me this is the one thing that's even more important than who wins the Country Music Awards or the Stanley Cup. This is the big question. Well, as it turns out, interestingly enough, in the past, the species that survived seemed to do it in certain locations. We call them refuges or refugia. And there have been a lot of papers about these refuges for different groups of organisms, from trees to bison to corals to whatever. But I think it would be a really fantastic opportunity for a group of, say, young people to put together the literature on refuges and how they worked in the past and how we can figure out where they should be in the world that is coming. And that's important. For people who think on a global scale about human survival, mostly they think about things like rocks. Have you ever heard of the Global Seed Vault? Can I see hands? Oh, wow! Great! The Global Seed Vault seems that building dug into a mountain in Svalbard, part of Norway, in the Arctic Ocean. That Seed Vault has hundreds of thousands of samples of seeds of our food crops. And the idea is, if something really bad happens and we need the safest possible place for the foods that help us survive, this is the place to put it. And I think that's a really good idea. And similarly, I read in today's newspaper that the University of Georgia has started an institute for preserving the genetic material of species that are endangered, that are in trouble. So they've already started, they've got samples from clouded leopards, which is really, really good. The only thing is that clouded leopards are one of only millions of species that are in peril. And further, there's a little complication that also affects the Global Seed Vault, and that is, what if the electricity gets turned off for some reason? Okay? So that's something to think about. How can you save things get nasty? For life in the oceans, you need to do it in situ, which means in their habitats. It's a humpback whale, and those are sooty shear waters, and I can't tell you the other species in this picture because they're all little tiny things, or they're under the water surface, but the important thing I can tell you is that we don't know how to keep and breed and maintain generation after generation. These living things, we can't do it. So if we're going to keep them alive, we have to keep them alive where they live, in their habitats. And as it turns out, there are places where people are doing this, marine protected areas, they're called. And the reason marine protected areas work is that there are really important things that only happen in certain places. Remember, I'm a geographical ecologist, okay? They happen in certain places and not other places. And the other thing is, it's really a lot cheaper this way, because they maintain themselves, they don't need us to feed them and breed them and do all the things that we do in intensive conservation programs. And nobody can turn the electricity off and kill these things, okay? They take care of themselves. So as it turns out, some really smart people have looked at this, and one is my old friend and colleague, Jane Luceko, and she wanted to look at protected areas that are not really strongly protected as opposed to ones that don't allow killing anything. And here is what one of her students found out. That there's more of everything in strongly protected places. Now, that may sound like a duh, but on the other hand, the United States and Canada and the UK and Germany and a lot of other countries still haven't fully appreciated this lesson. And they need to if we're going to save life in the oceans. Now, there are scientists who say that protected areas don't work. I guess they've never been to a place like this, okay? They think they don't work because people, well, they're not always... Well, I'll explain. Here's why they don't work. Here's one reason. Most of them are in the wrong places, okay? We put them in the places where it's politically easiest to get them created as opposed to the places that are most likely to be refugees in the future. And the reason is because governments... Some governments more than others, I might point out, but governments are afraid to upset commercial interests that benefit from... Well, look at that picture at the bottom left and you can see what I say. That's in Korea. But you can see more or less similar scenes in a lot of ports around the world. Here's another dismaying truth, okay? Most marine protected areas aren't really very protective at all. They're mostly about celebrating marine life. They're not about actually protecting them from the things that harm them, like bottom trolling. Here's another one. People, you've probably learned this. I'm looking at the age here. Most everybody seems to be above five. People are a rather disorderly species. We don't necessarily think that the rules are for us. We think that the rules are for other people. And unfortunately, there's a lot of IUU fishing going on in the world now. That's a real problem. Here's another thing that affects thinking about marine protected areas. There are things that marine protected area boundaries can stop. And there are things that they can't stop. So we have to understand this is a powerful tool, but it's far from a perfect tool. And so here's the big thing. I think that's the general principles. If you want to find things that people eat, the best place to find them are ones that are strongly protected for long enough, are big, and isolated from places where if they go out, they get killed. And even tiny ones, and I haven't been to Cabo Cuomo, but I've been to the Metis Islands in the Mediterranean off the coast of Catalonia in Spain. And I have seen that the Mediterranean looks like an empty ocean in many places, in almost every place, but in the Metis Islands, there are lots of big fish. So the people in that area figured out a way to do it. Let me give you the numbers. There are 11,000 plus marine protected areas in the world. They make up a little bit more than 2% of the ocean, but the no-take areas, the ones that really work, are less than 1%. We have a lot of improvement to do. So what's really wrong? Well, I would say it's something like this. They're not, in a lot of cases, in the right places. They don't have enough protection in law. Even if they do have protection in law, they're not managed well or not enforced well, and there aren't enough of them. So we've got to do something about that. Can we? And I think the answer is yes, we can. Yes, we must. We have to get governments to accelerate the process. And Canada, I love Canada. Canada is behind many of the countries of the world when it comes to doing this. I'd love to see that change. That's why I mentioned October 19th. I would love to see Canada catch up. And I know what some other countries have been doing because I've been a part of that. See, because everybody was saying marine protected areas can either be big or they can be strong, but they can't be big and strong. Didn't feel comfortable with that. And so I took advantage of some connections and had conversations with the Bush administration. And we persuaded President Bush to designate three of the biggest highly protected areas in the world, land or sea, in 2006 and 2009. And they were together when they were created, more than 10 times the size of Nova Scotia. So those are pretty decent sized pieces of ocean. We then last year went back to the Obama administration and were able to persuade President Obama to expand by a factor of six one of these places. And now it's 491,000 square miles. Again, it's 20 plus times the size of Nova Scotia, just one of these areas. So these are big places that are protected very strongly. Okay, so if you want to bring about change, you can nibble at the edges and it feels good when you do that because you can see the results of what you do. Or you can try to create a new model. And I think creating a new model is the way to go. It's a pretty radical thing to say, but I think it makes a whole lot of sense. You go big, that's what you do. If you really want to change the game, go big. And so our big idea was the global ocean refuge system or glories. And you can read what glories is or will be. Yeah, we already have the logo. All we need is the money and the people and things to make it happen. Okay? And let me tell you about glories. What we want to do is we want to see the world's nations protect at least 20% of every marine ecosystem type in every region of the world. See, it's not good enough if you protect one place that's gigantic and leave all the others to go to hell because marine species differ in their geography. You've got to do it where they are. And it's not the answer to all problems people face. It's not. It's not the solution to all problems. It's just a really, really big contribution to solving the problem that we are otherwise facing. What it aims to do is create resilience for life in the sea. The ability to bounce back when bad things happen cause bad things are happening and it's not going to get better unless we change the game. So what we want to do is reduce the risk of extinction for marine organisms from the things that are the biggest threats to them. In effect, it's an insurance policy. We're talking about the In situ Noah's Ark for marine life. We want to tip the balance in favor of marine conservation which is not true in most places in the world right now. We want to do it by appealing to something that's very, very human not our big thinking, not our love for ourselves down the line or our kids or our grandkids. We have to appeal to people's self-interest now. And we also want, we also note that glories will create lots and lots of jobs for marine scientists. And there are two major pillars. There are two things holding glories up. One is an understanding of the geography of marine life and the other is an understanding of people and how they do things. So the geography of marine life is really important as I said because different ecosystems have different species and different places even when their ecosystems are superficially similar have different species and so you have to understand that geography. So have you gotten all the ecosystem types? Are they big enough to have viable populations? Do you have enough replicates of them so that you have a diversified portfolio? Are they dispersed enough so that you haven't put all your eggs in one basket? Because if you put them all right near each other and something bad happens in that area as is happening now in the Central Pacific with warming waters and coral bleaching you're going to lose an awful lot of what you've worked to save. And finally, have you put them as best you can out of harm's way? That's not an easy thing to do in a world that's dominated by humans. And you need to know that the geography and the ecological processes of the sea are really, really different than the ones on land. So protected areas have to work a little differently for species that live on the sea floor as opposed to in the water column. That's just something we know. But if we have them, this is what we see happening. If you have networks of these places if you have enough examples of each kind then when something really bad happens to a population like this one let's say these guys disappear because the water has become acidic or because they are hit by a disease or who knows what it is. These guys, 50 or 100 or 200 kilometers away can help repopulate this place with the same species. Again, if they're connected, if things are allowed to move back and forth you have a more resilient system. And that's even true with very highly migratory species because we are learning that even highly migratory species are predictable in their behaviors and we know where they like to hang out during the summer and we know where they like to chow down in the winter and knowing these can help you figure out where to put your protected areas. So the most important pillar of human behavior is this one. This guy was a president in the United States when I was a kid and he said leadership is the art of getting someone else to do what you want done because he wants to do it. Not because you want it to happen, why should he do it for you? But because he wants it to happen. And it worked, I might point out, with two U.S. presidents where we figured out what they want. Now, one of the things that people really, really like is to be admired. And countries are very much the same as people except they mostly act like three-year-olds. And I know because I have grandchildren and I watch their evolution, okay? As it turns out, honoring people, giving them prestige and money are really, really powerful incentives to affect their behavior. And nonprofits give awards to movie stars and athletes and musicians and builders that they really compete for. And so what Gloria's is about is creating incentives for governments to do what we want them to do because they want to do it, right? Because they want to do it because it's in their interest to do it. So what we want to do is award global ocean refuge status to the marine protected areas that have all of the characteristics I talked about before. They're well located, they're big enough, they're permanent, they're out of harm's way as much as we can make them. And if we do, if we give those awards to the governments that have these areas, they will benefit in all sorts of ways. And they'll like that. So the idea is marine scientists determine the criteria. Governments come to Gloria's partners and say, hey, we have a marine protected area that is world class. We want it up for consideration. And then the Gloria's partners decide which places get the title Global Ocean Refuge. By the way, that title, we own that title on purpose because we don't want anybody to use it just as we wouldn't want anybody to say, hey, I won the Stanley Cup when they haven't actually won. And so what are the most important places to protect? Well, they're the places, either the ecosystems or the habitats for particular species of concern that will be most likely to survive when things go bad. They have to be governed adequately. There has to be real governance. And as much as possible, it has to help local people. Because that's much more sustainable than the alternative. So these are ecosystems that may be unlike any other or they may be really rich in species. They may be essential for breeding or feeding or something like that. And they may have key roles in providing a source of repopulation for other places. Now, this is scary as hell for a lot of people because nobody's ever done this before. It is an absolutely global level solution to a problem and we don't usually look at global level solutions that work. But this woman who lived in my building when I lived in the Washington, D.C. metro area, it turns out she was the chief computer person for the U.S. Navy. She got computers into the U.S. Navy and Gray said, most dangerous thing is saying we've always done it this way. We can't do something new because we've always done it in a certain way. Gray said, think bigger. Think outside the box. Be bold. Lance Morgan was bold when he announced glories in 2013 when we say France. Margaret Mead urged us to be bold. She said it right when she said, don't let the fact that you're little and weak in your own head stop you from accomplishing great things. You can make great things happen. And I think we should do it whatever our reason is. Do we do it for them? Do we do it for them? Do we do it for people like Ram? I think the answer is all of the above. Because if we don't speak for the Earth, who will? And I worked with Carl. He also came from Brooklyn and we got to know each other a little bit and I helped him on a book called The Cold and the Dark, The World After Nuclear War. And he believed in seeing the big picture. So Mama Rachel said it right. She said it's our choice. Nobody else can tell us to do this or not to do this. It's our choice. We're the ones to make it. And there isn't a lot of time for us to do it. But I want to know, will you be part of this? Who in this room is going to be the key player in helping make this happen? I'd be willing to... Yes, I suspect a lot of you are thinking me or the person next to me. Yeah, it could be somebody who's here right now. And if you want to find out more, here's where I would send you, okay? And what I want to say is thank you for inviting me here. Thank you for putting up with somebody who urges you to get off your cell phone and see the bigger picture and make things happen. Thank you. So do we have time? We do have time for questions. As much as you want. And our usual customers will give the first few questions to students in the audience as you get the most time to actually work on these challenges and opportunities. So who's got a question? Yeah, so the question is these newly created and enlarged refuges in the Pacific that the Americans have created. Are they working? Are the regulations being enforced? They are being enforced, but we have a lot of improvement to do. And I am in a position to know that something is happening right now that will use a new kind of information and integrate it in a way that will dramatically improve the prospects for enforcement of marine protected area boundaries in the Pacific and all around the world, okay? And what's the old expression? Watch this space. Actually, the space to watch is from an organization called Sky Truth. On whose board I serve, okay? Good things are happening. Yeah. What's the response internationally to Glorious so far? Well, we have people who seem to be intrigued. But on the other hand, it's going to push them to do things that they haven't been doing. And so they're also probably a little nervous about this. And we haven't gotten any big checks yet to make it happen. And that's the thing that's holding us up at this point. Marine Conservation Institute is ready to go if we get the support we need. And we assume that will come from the individuals and foundations and companies more than governments are going to be competing for the honor of having the marine protected areas designated as global ocean refuges. So we may have to decide not to take money from countries. Yeah. Just following on that. Has anything been designated at this point? Or are we still... Oh, no, no. We are in the situation where we are drafting the Constitution and recruiting the people for the Constitutional Congress. But we need checks to pay for their dinners and their lodging and things like that. We need the prizes. Okay. Great. Other questions? So you're speaking personally. It's coming from a place that has a lot of ocean and not a lot of money to protect it. And what provisions might there be for countries that might want to but not be able to afford to do this work? Well, this is just a guess. But many countries would love to have more people coming to their countries as tourists. Many of them would like to have more help from the World Bank or other international development institutions. If your country decides to do this as some small countries as well as larger countries have, they're going to benefit from this in some very tangible ways. So that's part of the key consideration in glories. There's got to be something in it for them if they're going to do the right thing. So a follow-up to that. Not so much in glories, but in the marine protected areas experienced so far, are these areas generally compatible with tourism? Is tourism problematic? Is tourism going to be essential to making them work? Tourism is a real incentive for countries. Tourism can be problematic. We can love things to death. And so we have to do it right. We have to have tourism that is sustainable. And there are also some places that are far from land or in the DC that will never have any tourist visits except from people like Richard Branson. But that's okay because international institutions should find its to their benefit as well to get places designated as global ocean refugees. We can figure out. I know in this room are some very smart people who know how institutions work. We can figure out how to do this. Where do you live? On land. Well, most of us pay most attention to what's in our immediate environment and we pay most attention to stuff that's going to affect us within minutes, hours, or if we really, really have unusual vision the end of the quarter of the year. Most people don't see the bigger picture in space or time. That's why I think we are in the mess we're in. And I don't want to see it happen. I've given my entire 37 plus year career to seeing that it doesn't happen. But we're pushing against the human tendency to say my problem isn't what's going to happen a year from now or a decade from now. My problem is what I'm going to do for lunch today. And that's very understandable. But on the other hand, with more and more people consuming more and more of the world's resources that kind of thinking is going to come back. The question is about kind of global issues and animal agribusiness and its effect on the world. How does this play into your thinking? Well, I'm no expert on agribusiness. But what I do know is that businesses in general tend to maximize their profits to their owners or shareholders and they will do whatever they can get away with to do that. So if that means that the beef you eat is full of antibiotics so that the cattle grow faster and don't have upset stomachs, they will give them antibiotics, even if that means that you are at much greater risk for not having antibiotics work when you get bacterial infections. And that's just one example of a lot of them that is a ramification of the agriculture industry. It's not easy to take on something very big. Rachel Carson found that out. When she took on the chemical industry that served the agricultural industry, they called her hysterical woman, which is about the worst insult you can think of. I think hysterical, I mean, it was implied that to be hysterical you had to be a woman. They said she wasn't an expert because she wasn't a chemist. She was a marine biologist. They tried to put her down in every way possible. I would expect nothing less. But that doesn't mean we won't win. Do you see aquaculture as a challenge for marine protection? Aquaculture is a challenge and an opportunity. Aquaculture has some really substantial environmental consequences, but on the other hand, it can under the right circumstances, if you do it the right way, be part of the solution. Glories ain't the solution. It's part of the solution. So the question is creating more marine protected areas. How will that relate to damage already done, areas already lost? That's a really smart question. And the human footprint is everywhere. One of my favorite places in the world is Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the Appalachian Mountains of the United States. And I love it despite the fact that most of Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the 1930s had been logged, had been farmed and had been abandoned because it wasn't growing enough crops anymore. It was during the Great Depression. And so the Rockefeller family, rich people in the United States that had made their money from oil, bought huge amounts of land and gave it to the United States government to make it a national park. And when I was younger, I can't anymore, I'm too old and I'm not strong enough, I would go backpacking in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and see trees that recruited in the years after it was made a national park because a handful of people had the vision and had the means to make it happen. So protecting the places that are still pretty okay is a really smart thing to do. But there are lots of kinds of ecosystems that have been hit so hard that they're already dramatically impacted by humans and it means what we have to do is let them come back, take the pressure off of them. So you're right. Can't just do it with pristine places because there aren't pristine places anymore. So the observation is that some of those exclusion zones and protected areas coincide with military areas, missile testing sites and the like. How did you deal with that in convincing Bush that this was in his interest, that he wanted to do this? Well, Mrs. Bush loves seabirds. That's part of the answer. And President Bush, I'll be a little indirect here, but didn't have the best record on the environment. And we guessed that President Bush would like to have a really dramatic achievement on the environment. And when he has spoken about this, since he left the presidency, he has said that this is the best thing he did for the environment while he was president. He's very proud of this. So therein I think lies a part of the answer. So that would suggest that it's important not to presume you know someone from their past behaviors. Absolutely right, absolutely right. Figure out what people want and why they want it and work that into what you are doing and you can accomplish amazing things. There's a question about the sovereignty of the US over the areas in the Pacific and then the consequent question is if the US decides something about an area that may be disputed, how well is that recognized by others? Well, the areas that President Bush designated are within the exclusive economic zone of the United States. If you have jurisdiction over those areas, we get to say who does what economic activities? However, 64% of the world's oceans are not under the jurisdiction of any country. They are international waters and that is a real challenge because the United Nations and many other international institutions are less effective than they could be. And so we have to find a way to encourage those international institutions. But I think what the general principle is is if leaders lead then people will follow and the United States and now Chile and Great Britain and we heard some mumblings from France and there are other countries who are taking the lead on protecting places in the ocean within their waters. The principle of extrapolating that beyond your boundaries to international waters is the next step and very important for the reasons you said. So, Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I bet you it's not a good thing or bad thing question. Well, the garbage patch is there and it's real, but on the other hand garbage isn't the biggest problem we face in the ocean. It is a problem, but on the other hand compared with overfishing or climate change I think we can figure out how to reduce the stream of garbage being thrown into the marine environment and we can figure out what to do with the garbage that's already there. And happily marine organisms have coexisted with hard things in their environment for a long time and ultimately those things can get broken down and covered over, but it is a real problem and we have to find a workable solution for that one too. Yes, yes. Let me add one thing. I grew up in an America where every single day I would see people eat something or smoke something or whatever and then throw it on the street. Littering was a completely normal acceptable behavior and in my lifetime it's gone from being something that almost everybody did to something that is really, really frowned upon. That's social change on a massive scale. I think it can happen in the oceans too. I think when I was a student you might have had four cigarettes while you were talking and you would have let your dog poop on the sidewalk and not cleaned it up. Yeah, things have changed. There was a question here. So the question is, has there been effort made to show the value of oceans and ocean protected areas to governments other than through this kind of public relations reward system? What do you think, even like an ecosystem's goods and services model, sort of quantifying the benefit? And has that been done and I guess I would add to that. What do you think are the pitfalls and the strengths of doing things that way? Well, there are a number of people who are looking at ecosystem goods and services and how valuable they are in terms of dollars or yen or rubles or whatever and they are persuasive to people who see the bigger picture. But if somebody says to you right now, I will give you a reward today that's worth only a hundredth of the benefit you could get at some point in the future. Most people will say, hmm, gee. Have you ever go to the marshmallow experiment? Yeah? You know, you give a four-year-old one marshmallow now or give the kid the choice. One marshmallow now or two marshmallows in 15 minutes. Most four-year-olds will take the one marshmallow now. So we need to find ways to articulate the present value of something to people who are used to thinking over very short time scales. Do you know if any of the political parties in Canada have commented on glories? I do not and I don't know Canada's politics very well. I don't know the game. I don't know how things get done. I only see what people see from the outside and there are reasons for hope and there are reasons for a lot of concern. That's why I said remember October 19th. Okay, yes. The comment is that there are lots of labels and certifications and awards. How will glories stand out? Well, nobody's ever done it for marine protected areas before. A, and B, if you get there with the right thing at the right time, like lead certification, you can change the game. You can get architects and construction companies competing really hard to get lead platinum or lead gold on their buildings. So it can be done. Somebody's got to do it. Yes. So the question is observing that most of the protected areas are in the Pacific that were being discussed and is that to do with the capacity of the Pacific to regenerate or is it circumstance? It's circumstance. Similar things are happening in other places as well. The Pacific is the biggest ocean. The Pacific is bigger than all the world's continents, even if they were in extra Australia. That's how big it is. So it's really a matter of happenstance that we took the Pacific to make something happen that was bigger than anything else. But there are lots of opportunities in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and Arctic Oceans and the Southern Ocean. Oh, the Southern Ocean is a great place to do this because it's nearly all international waters. So this is doable. It's not just because the Pacific is the good place. They're all good. Do we have boats there? Is there monitoring? Is there patrol? That's expensive. And that's traditionally not being done very much. Only done by countries that have strong coast guards and navies. And not everybody is in that situation. But technology can be very useful. And there are things you can do that can change that situation. And I'll give you some examples. One is that satellites can see an awful lot of things that you can't see from shore. And another is that every commercial aircraft I suspect in the world has a little device on it called a transponder that says where they are at any given time. Trucks in the United States have to have these devices as well so that their employers know where they are. Well, if they know where they are, that's very useful information because they're either in places where it's okay to be or in places where it's not okay to be. Is there been any effort to crowd source some of the monitoring at the way that people are having thousands of people look at radio, telegraph imagery to look for intelligent life in outer space? Or other places have had maps of cities made by crowd source, GPS work on area photos? Okay, get back on your cell phones because if you think about what a powerful tool it is to be able to take a picture that has geolocation and time stamps on it, you begin to see where the future lies in enforcement in the marine environment. Okay? Yeah? Citizen science. Absolutely. John, so the question is in dealing with diverse and complex groups of interest holders, stakeholders, shareholders, what kinds of inertia resistance challenges do you see people joining in this group? Yeah. Well, there are people who have a strong economic state in maintaining the status quo. That human beings learn new things and change what we do. We don't change human nature, but we change how we interpret our willingness to do things or not do things on understanding new things. I've seen changes in my lifetime that I didn't imagine were possible in areas other than the environment. I think it can happen for our environment as well. And just as with these other changes, it's about time. So in the course of your talk, Elliott, you showed a number of figures, Martin B. Dwight Eisenhower, Buckminster Fuller, Ram Myers, Rachel Carson. And these are individuals, and through the course of what we often talk about in our introductory class, we try and talk not just about the problems that face the world, but about those individuals who stood, who were diligent, who were persistent, and who stood for their values and stood in a belief that their action would make a difference in the world. I've been lucky enough in my life to meet a couple of those people or to hear a couple of them talk. And I have to say that for all of you in this audience, remember the fact that you were here and you heard Elliott speak. Because he is a figure like those others, someone who not only has seen great change in his life, but who has been an instrument and an agent of that change. And we're very honored to have had you present with us. Thank you so much. What can I say? Good things. Okay? Thank you.