 sustainability series this is our annual keynote and we are very excited in the crowd and also to have you call me over here and thank you for your patience for those of you that we're going to be here in February for this it's the first time I've ever had to reschedule an event not once but twice and to those of you who are coming in the room you can grab a chair please don't sit on the tables as soon as we're done doing injuries I can come out and I'll help you find a chair so for those of you who have never attended a sustainability series this is a partnership between the library my name is Meg Graham the science librarian here at the library and we work with Southern Maine conservationist collaborative Jessica Burton is their executive director and we meet here the last Wednesday of the month to talk about a sustainability related topic in Maine and this I think is like our 19th which is incredible especially to have so many people in the room so thank you for being here and I should also note that tonight's lecture is part of is part sponsored by the cornerstones of science for the past three years the Portland Public Library has been a partner library and the cornerstones of science I am LS national leadership grant which is titled empowering public libraries to become science resource centers for their communities so thank you to cornerstones of science you all notice you're sitting or maybe not holding a piece of paper these are some program valuations and as much as libraries love a full house we also love data so please please be kind enough to fill it out there's a basket by the door that you can drop it in I really appreciate it and so with my funders and I also just one other housekeeping next or not next April 25th Susan Gallo the wildlife biologist and director of the Maine project will present what have we told us 25 years of being on the bonds we count so we're very very excited about that thank you for being here thanks Mike so yeah thank you for sticking with us through all of the reschedules and amazingly tonight if it were 20 to 20 degrees colder we would again have had no crazy it's supposed to be snowed yesterday it's snowed and yeah so who knows sorry and it might exactly we are here and we are glad to be here actually my friend Eric said that if he ever bought a ski mountain he would invite you to speak so I would like to begin tonight with the remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on this the 50th anniversary of his murder in fact it is almost exactly 50 years ago he was shot a little after sex and I would like to share with you a quote that I think is particularly relevant to everything moreover I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham in justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly this is from his letter from a Birmingham jail which was written on April 16th 1963 so we are all it is all everything is inextricably linked and our speaker tonight is one of the most compelling journalists helping us to understand this linkage and what it means for our planet now and into the future we are so so pleased to welcome Colin Woodard national affairs writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram where he won a 2012 George Polk Award was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for a series on climate change and the Gulf of Maine he covered environmental and science issues extensively from around the globe all foreign correspondents for the Christian Science Monitor the Chronicle of Higher Education in the San Francisco Chronicle and he reported for more than 50 foreign countries and seven continents he's the author of five books including the lobster coast rebels rusticators and the struggle for a forgotten frontier the cultural and environmental history of coastal Maine and oceans and travels through endangered seas a globetrotting account of the deterioration of the world's oceans you will find both of those books on a table here brought generously by long fellow thank you are he's currently a contributing editor at Politico and a trustee of the Bigelow laboratory for ocean sciences in booth bag so thank you again and Colin thank you all for coming and for bearing with the regular schedule changes and also thanks to the Portland Public Library for including me in the series and to the collaborative as well tonight I'm going to talk about the crisis in the world's oceans and in the Gulf of Maine this the former was the topic of the first book that I wrote back came out in 2000 oceans and travels through endangered seas and you know a lot of people when the book first came out would end up asking me oh you know how did you come to write about this topic why why did you go around the world looking at the damaged a large marine ecosystems are you a marine biologist in college are you major in oceanography and they would always be really confused when I would say no I majored in East European and Balkan history but funny enough and this is a you know perhaps a story about the strength of the liberal arts there actually was a direct connection to that I ended up getting involved in following down a path that led me to spend a lot of time writing about environmental issues in the oceans while I was living in landlocked Hungary immediately before during and for years after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the reason for that is that in Eastern Europe I mean if you you know that there were so many things going on there but the plurality of stories ended up writing about you know you had the collapse of essentially planned economies and the countries were trying to work towards moving away for authoritarianism adopting capitalism trying to build liberal democracies from scratch there were ethnic tensions that built out into the ethnic conflicts in places like Bosnia-Herzegovina and elsewhere there was the enormous corruption and difficulties as various carpet baggers came into the region to try to capture the spoils of a collapsing empire but the plurality of stories ended up writing despite all of that ended up being environmental in nature and the reason for that is because the environmental issues in the region were not tertiary or secondary issues they were front and center major problems that couldn't be ignored I mean if you want to know what what it would be like to live in a world where they'd never been a clean air or a clean water act go back and look at the media accounts of what things were like in Eastern Europe circa 1990 or so when everyone started doing stories about the about the situation there there were you know places since there were no clean air act and no clean water act pollution would be disposed of in the you know most convenient way possible if you've got a bunch of nasty toxic sludge you know go take the bulldozer out behind the factory and dig a hole and drop it there and don't keep any records if you've got some nasty effluent send it down the pipe into the nearest river if you've got something awful being generated that to send off in the air do it through the stacks without much in the way of scrubbing of any kind and the emphasis was on production right the Soviet system was about five year plans in managers of factories and agricultural enterprises and the like were all encouraged and rewarded and punished based on whether or not they met various production targets you must produce 40,000 brown shoes it does not matter if they're the same size and they're all left but you must produce them or else so the emphasis was always on making sure you hit the production targets and everything else ended up being secondary and that combination led to all kinds of atrocious problems you had things like the black town on the National Geographic cover there of Cops Amitia and these pictures here in Romania you could tell that you were approaching you know when you were getting near to the town on a train which was in the middle of Transylvania because the landscape would start turning dark because in the center of town was this great big smoke stack of the carbon black factory produces something kind of like a you know a carbon toner and again it came right out of the stacks without any scrubbing and the like and then fell out upon the surrounding landscape to the effect that you know the people the trees the buildings everything was stained black for miles and miles around as you approached it they would be you know remember one of my first trips to Cracow you know this beautiful royal city in Poland not unlike Prague but was located next to a large Stalinist steel mill built as a sort of showcase project of the triumphs of of metallurgy in the Soviet Union and it was dropping down all kinds of stuff onto the town at night to the effect that all the gargoyles and all the the stone statuary from the medieval period was all melting away you know like a candle when it's melting down and people had instructed me you know in my guest house you know make sure you don't use the water you know don't use it to wash your hands don't get your rings anyone here because it corrodes metal you know don't go outside at night in the gorgeous streets because that's when they unleash the worst of the of the pollutants in little town in Slovakia and in central Slovakia a cute little medieval town and I'd gone out to dinner on one end of the town and was returning over a little teeny medieval footbridge over the other and the stars were out and headed back to my guest house and we're walking down the down towards the little cute bridge and suddenly entering some kind of invisible cloud of some toxic substance that you couldn't breathe and you're sort of choking in your you know eyes starting to water and turning red and having this moment of not knowing whether or not I was going to be able to hold my breath and run to get back up high enough out of the hollow to get out of it before passing out I mean there were this was an everyday occurrence you'd run into problems like this and in Budapest the city that I lived in for most of the time that I was there most of the you know the Danube river runs right through the middle it's very dramatically and everything in Hungary is named after and keyed off the Danube you know the Hungarian airline Malev now defunct but in those times in days their frequent flyer program was the Danube program and you hear the blue Danube waltz and everything would be named after the Danube this and the Danube that and Danube radio and Danube television and so on and so forth but the Danube itself was no longer blue or pleasant because half of the sewage released from the city of two and a half million was was sent right into the river with only tertiary treatment meaning kind of they screamed the big bits out the rest of it went right into the river system and this was causing all sorts of problems and that's what's first started drawing my attention to this story because there were a lot of environmental problems recovering you know you had you know factories on one side of a border that were you know letting out effluent or letting out releasing things into the air that were coming over to the other side of the border and all those kind of stories but the Danube ended up being a really intriguing one because it seemed to start capturing all of the symbols of what was going on in the region at the time because Budapest was not alone in the way that it was treating its effluent the Danube was an enormous system it's 1800 miles long and goes through and drains the large parts of 11 countries starting from the Black Forest to Germany on the left there and running all the way down through Austria and Hungary and down through Serbia and Romania and forming the border with Bulgaria all the way down that area an enormous area and half of it you know was in the west and part of it was in the east and none of these countries actually got along and they were all depositing all kinds of pollution into the river system there'd be problems with these trans-border issues because as I said there were ethnic conflict and all kinds of problems that were starting to surface because the old tensions the old history of war and strife between many of these countries was coming on thought after being frozen out during the communist period and so you had historic enemies like Romania and Hungary and you know you'd be over in Romania and somebody would have a mine with a large sludge pool full of cyanide laced water and they didn't know exactly what to do with it and then one day they would just sort of you know release it all to flow down the nearest stream across the border into Hungary and down into the Tisa river where it would flow towards Solnok a big provincial city and set off alarms at the water treatment plant because that's where Solnok gets its drinking water haha taught those Hungarians right that kind of stuff would be going on and Hungarians of course could respond in their own way because they were rivers that's in tributaries that started in Hungary and came back into Romania they're all these sort of tit for tat things going on and nobody was cooperating if you send your your your um your sewerage into the river at Budapest it's going to be carried away conveniently down to the Serbs and Romanians and and onwards that is no longer a problem and there was a lot of that going on so the effect was that there were all kinds of all kinds of stresses entering the Danube River since once you left Austria and you went downstream into what had been the Soviet Empire there were almost no water treatment facilities of any kind in any of the cities. Budapest wasn't alone you had Bucharest the city of 2 million that was releasing all of its sewage in that fashion, Bratislava a city of 500,000 same thing Belgrade 2 million in fact every single community south of the Austrian border on that map in the watershed was releasing their sewerage without proper treatment into the river systems that eventually flowed in this watershed down into the Danube River and on top of that because they were there were all these incentives towards production throughout the farms of this bread basket of the eastern half of the continent many of the state farms all were encouraged to maximize production you needed to have you need to produce x amount of wheat or grain or corn and therefore since the fertilizer inputs from the Soviet Union were sold at highly subsidized rates they were essentially free chemical fertilizers brought in you had every incentive to well you know the instructions say you need to use one ton per hectare or whatever we better use 15 because hey you don't want to take any chances right so there's enormous overuse of fertilizers and you wanted to maximize production so you would cut down every last tree up to the border of every stream so you could plant that many more individual plants so you had terrible erosion coming into the river systems as well and so all of this was generating all kinds of massive problems um this all became a metaphor right for the problems of the region you had all of this uh you know countries not cooperating in enormous differences between east and west as the communist empire ended but um many of us started writing the stories and many of us clever journalists would say oh here's the big picture you know you got an entire river system and nobody's cooperating and here it's showing all of the problems that the region and Europe are going to face as they try to bond together again but it turns out that none of that was quite big picture enough we weren't thinking big enough about the issue even as we thought about this sort of half continent wide watershed because nobody was asking what really should have been a fairly basic question which was where does all of this go that set it up in the Danube river right it never never really crossed anybody's path and of course the answer is that all of this stuff goes into the black sea that whole watershed you see on the left is the Danube system and it all flows into the black sea all of that fertilizer and runoff and sewage runoff and every other imaginable pollutant that ends up draining eventually into your rivers was flowing into this landlocked sea the size of california with only one exit through the Straits of Bosporus you know there by Istanbul and it was causing all kinds of troubles unnoticed by anybody I'm not really alerted by anybody in the science community and that resulted in all of a sudden in the early 1990s the sudden precipitous and surprise collapse of the entire black sea ecosystem now remember this is a sea that had sustained you know humanity since the ancient Greeks right and the the Russians and the the granary of the Greek Empire and the Ottomans and the and the and Russian Ukraine had all been on these shores of the sea and people had been sustained themselves for these giant anchovy herds that would that would circle the black sea like clockwork it was a major component of life in that part of the world and in short order just a few years you had a collapse of almost every imaginable commercial fish species by 90 or more in fact it was worse than that ended up being reduced to a sea that was consisted of just slime and jelly and again it happened without any warning without anybody realizing that it was taking place and how did that happen well several reasons and this is an important thing to understand with the problems facing marine systems one of the reasons was the one i started describing of all of that fertilizer and sewage and stuff entering the Danube river system and that was all an agricultural problem right you had the effect of all of that stuff coming in the river but at the same time humans in different countries that again didn't get along didn't coordinate with one another were also changing the hydro the hydrography of the river systems because the river had all these sort of natural cleansing mechanisms in the form of internal wetlands where the river would slow down and meander and break into different paths and go through some slow moving area with all kinds of you know salt marsh like plants and stuff that would clean up the river and absorb a lot of the the fertilizers and the like but these are also impediments to navigation on what is an international waterway and was and this was increasingly relied upon to move heavy materials in and out of central europe through the black sea and then on to the world's oceans and so over the decades more and more of these wetlands were being filled in or canals dug through them in line so that ships could pass faster or entire dam systems being created and towards the end in the late 80s just before the black sea catastrophe started there'd been a couple major projects completed there was an enormous dam finish that bypassed a whole bunch of wetlands on the border between Serbia and Bulgaria but then up near me in Hungary a story that i'd been covering in those previous years it was an enormous project on the Hungarian Slovak border to move the Danube river away from a massive wetland and have it run through an artificial channel for several miles gaining height over the normal riverbed so it could be dropped through a hydroelectric dam a project that was ultimately completed and each one of these things slowly removed one after another of the various filters on the river system and then these of course is the late 80s right in the early 90s the late 80s were the end of the Ceausescu regime in Romania the mad dictator Nicolae Ceausescu who had many strange ideas but among them was the idea that the greatness of the Romanian people was tied very much to the number of Romanian people there were and that he wanted to increase that number as as quickly and thoroughly as possible through you know banning all forms of contraception and creating the crises that ended up with all those orphanages you may remember but to feed all of those people he also wanted to create and boost the food production particularly the rice industry and this was going to be done by bulldozing and destroying the biggest wetland of them all the ultimate sponge and cleansing device in the entire Danube system which is at the mouth of the river as it enters the black sea down there in Romania it's the Danube Delta it's not unlike the the the delta at the end of the Mississippi River an enormous wetland largest in Europe therefore you know a key place that all kinds of migratory birds go and so on and so forth but also a key filter at the end of the whole system and Ceausescu was sending in the bulldozers and dredges to turn them into a series of rice paddies to increase Romania's production and feed his advancing legions of people the problem of course was that once you actually did that the salt water would start reaching back into the system and kill all the rice but not before you remove many of the beneficial wetlands so the combination of all of those things seemed to have finally pushed the blacks into a tipping point it caused a dramatic increase between the 1950s and the 1980s of the key indices of fertilizers and nutrients going into the black sea a 30-fold increase in fact of of the the biomass of the animals that feed off that stuff why would that be a problem why would you mind if you had nutrients and a lot of marine algae taking advantage of them right nutrients don't even sound scary how can you get upset about nutrient pollution well i mean it's one of those things where a little bit is good but too much is a really really bad thing that's very much true in the oceans because in the oceans you know when you think about it you know the the the oceans basic ecosystem is very similar to that on land it all begins the the bases of the food chain are with plants you know using photosynthesis to to you know create organic matter from the sun except in the oceans the vast majority of this plant matter is invisible floating microscopic plants marine algae phytoplankton and fortunately for phytoplankton they have almost everything they need right in the ocean environment with one exception they don't have a lot of the nutrients the phosphorus and nitrogen that they need and so therefore those end up often being the limiting factor you add those nutrients to many places in the oceans and the phytoplankton will respond and you'll get a bloom of these algae which other things like to eat hey that's good but what if you get an enormous expansion what if you have a a doubling a quadrupling or a quintippling of your nutrient inputs into an area like the black sea shelf which is what was happening well the answer is that suddenly all of these phytoplankton started saying hey this is great and growing as they got more and more hits of these nutrients you started getting larger and larger algae blooms so many in fact that they started outstripping the ability of things that eat the algae to eat them down and you started ending up having these thick sheets of algae on the surface like a lake that's going through eutrophication right where there's too many people may be releasing releasing their summer home affluent into the lake and you have those kind of problems well this is happening over a vast expanse of the shelves of the black sea and as that happened and the and the and the algae of ores weren't able to eat them down you ended up having them generation after generation of these marine algae dying and falling down to the sea bottom and they were forming such thick amounts of of of algae at the surface that light was having difficulty penetrating down to the bottom therefore starving out the marine plants that lived on the bottom you know the seaweeds and kelps and stuff that would be down there and as this falling of generation after generation of algae started falling down to the sea floor again uneaten it was creating a new and more difficult problem because you know nature has a weight of getting rid of all of that uneaten stuff it has the decomposers move in marine bacteria down the soil started working and chomping it up breaking it back down into nutrients so that in a sense solves the problem except the process by which that happens the the marine bacteria need oxygen to do it and they strip it out of the surrounding seawater right because there's oxygen and seawater that's what fish are doing when they're moving their gills they were moving the dissolved oxygen well all of these bacteria were quickly working to eat down all of the layer upon layer of dead algae and were therefore stripping out oxygen in fact basically all of the oxygen over entire areas of the northwest shelf of the black sea where most of the life existed and anything that couldn't get away from these octogenless zones that needed to breathe would die right so all the plants were dying but anything that couldn't move away crabs and the like would suffocate and anything else that was trying to get where it was going was in trouble it was throwing the entire balance and minuet of the black sea ecosystem off because even if you were a mobile fish or something that could get away from that area it was throwing off the annual migration of the of the anchovies and the herring and other pelagic species that would move around this fish is supposed to come to this bay at this time of year to lay its eggs and this species knows that and comes there to eat the eggs or maybe eat the fish except they're not showing up because they can't get there and they can't get through this spot and then they you know the the calving grounds of this species are missing it threw everything up into the air into a completely confusing and difficult catastrophe so I've talked about how you brought in agriculture and then you brought in a lot of civil engineers busy and are completely working in different countries and sometimes for completely different government departments and ministries to to adjust the hydrology for shipping for shipping concerns but the problems facing the ocean are usually the interaction of many different silos of human behavior that we think of and manage completely separately and at the time when the black sea had suffered these stresses and that everything was kind of thrown off balance that's when another completely unrelated stress was introduced into the picture and that stress was carried via oceanic shipping because all the time every day around the world you have ships moving accidentally all kinds of hijackers from one place to the other not human hijackers but tiny tiny animal ones eggs and larvae and and and juveniles of all sorts of different species and the reason is that if you go out there at the south portland terminal when an oil tanker comes in and is offloading oil right and as it offloads you can see as the as the vessel gets lighter and lighter you can see it rise up and you can see on its boot top you know it draws 18 feet 17 16 15 they actually can measure it you can see it rise way way up as it becomes empty and hey when it leaves portland it's going to be way way way up above its normal water line its normal trim and if it crosses the ocean like that and hits a storm that would be an incredibly unsafe thing right and it's there's no oil to pick up in portland so it's going to be leaving the harbor empty so the shipping industry long ago found out a very ingenious and clever and efficient way to deal with that you pump ballast water into your tanks to weigh down the ship again so it's at the right trim and then you head off on your way safely even if your vessel is empty or if it's half full you can adjust it quite precisely and sail to the next port on the you know other side of the world or or in the tropical zone or wherever it is the problem is that some creatures that you end up pumping into your tanks manage to survive the pumping process into your ballast tanks and some smaller subset of those creatures manage to survive in those ballast tanks as they travel you know in their days or weeks to wherever they're going in their new destination and some of those some small set of those survive being pumped back out into the new environment they discover on a totally different part of the planet now almost always those interlopers be they eggs or juveniles or whatever it was don't survive very long in their new environment the environment's too different the salt water salt content is different the temperature the water is different predators wipe them out immediately they can't compete with the local species for food or whatever and they disappear but every once in a while some creature shows up in a part of the world where it's never been before and goes hog wild and that's especially likely if the place it's shown up in if the local ecosystem has been profoundly distressed right just like if you get run down you're more likely to get a cold if an ecosystem gets really really distressed it's much less likely to be able to be resilient in the face of something like an unexpected invader and this is precisely what happened to the Black Sea because while the Black Sea in the in the late 80s was experiencing all of this crisis a passing freighter from right here off the course of North America probably somewhere like Baltimore and Atlantic City in New Jersey arrived into the Black Sea did this procedure and released possibly one maybe a few maybe a handful of tiny sprout of a comb jelly a jellyfish like creature but ye long many neopsis which is native to the mid-atlantic coasts in North America and let it go into the sea loaded up its bowels tanks and headed on its way except this comb jelly discovered the conditions for whatever reason were exactly right in the Black Sea and that there was nobody there who wanted to eat comb jellies and it went absolutely wild in fact it had one of the biggest and largest expansions of biomass the biggest and largest explosion of a population of a creature that ecologists have ever recorded it went from something like one or two of these little teeny tiny jellyfish like creatures in the course of a few years to one billion metric tons one billion imagine Dr. Evil saying that what does that even mean one billion well to get an idea of that that is approximately 10 times the biomass or the weight of what all of the world's fishermen catch in an entire year that's how big the population explosion was of this particular creature and the problem was that unfortunately this comb jelly did not eat marine algae but rather ate the little tiny animals a zooplankton that would eat the marine algae so they actually made the algae problem worse and they went crazy all over the place to the point where the entire sea was suddenly just laid in with these jellyfish like creatures and the algae and not that much else an entire sea like i said that consists mostly of slimes and jellies well how could that be how could you have such a catastrophic event happen unnoticed and unexpected by humans in such a short period of time and that that covering that story really kind of had a profound effect on me that that could happen and catch us unawares and be such a big deal and involve a bunch of things that we don't seem all that dramatic and we don't even track nutrients right a comb jelly you know and and and modifying the a river system hundreds or even thousands of miles away from the black sea itself and then around that same time period i was coming home to main for a for a break in the summers and it came back in the you know early 90s and you had the situation where the grand banks of newfoundland the greatest fishery you know the ground fishery the world had ever known had just been closed for lack of fish and then a couple summers later i came back and the same thing was happening with the grant with the uh with the george's bank and many of the new england fishing banks in main although the situation hadn't been quite as profound and then back in europe the headlines were that the european union which was consolidating its fisheries instead of each member country having its own territorial waters for fishing they were now allowing all u vessels to do it and you had struggles over the remaining resources between say spanish fishermen and british fishermen off the united kingdom that were so profound they were having destroyers coming to guard the vessels and keep them from shooting at each other so the situation was seemed to be getting rather out of hand and that led me seeing all of those things and other headlines happening to wonder you know are these things all sort of connected could we actually as a species be managing to destabilize large marine ecosystems not just in the black sea but out there all over the world's oceans and while i was contemplating that over a course of a few years while in eastern europe um i ended up deciding when i came back to the u.s and was based here again to embark on a project on exactly that to explore it and that was with the travels that led to ocean's end and i was able to travel around the world trying to answer that question as to what was happening in large marine ecosystems and what we might uh want to want to be able to do about it and i mean the the short answer was yes we are in fact destabilizing them and uh the myriad of problems was quite large i mean you would see all sorts of difficulties you know the um i went to belize to go diving and in belize you had in that year when i went there off this barrier reef which is one of the more pristine reef systems in this hemisphere it was undergoing one of the biggest bleaching events that had ever been experienced it was a worldwide bleaching of corals that year and what did that even mean i mean i was expecting to go down to belize and write about how you know development uh you know like having a new fact a new um hotel and a golf course on a little teeny tiny uh island off the coast might cause a whole bunch of nutrients to be dumped into the reef and that therefore all kinds of plant life grow on the reef and overwhelm the reef system that was the story i thought i was going to write and it was there and happening but for comparison i decided to go out with a dive go out diving in some of the remote places that were far from any of it to kind of get a comparison feeling for what it should look like except when we arrived there was a surprise even of the scientists that i was traveling with that all of the reefs and these untouched places far from all those other stresses were turning white the corals are are both a a plant and an animal right the corals are anemone like little polyp creatures that grow their calcium shells around them but within the corals are a plant a special specialized plant that also gives them additional energy it's like a symbiotic relationship and these little plants are what gives the corals their unique colors but uh and the corals kind of need those to survive and stay healthy because the plants are giving them a bonus energy they're kind of like a hybrid engine in that sense but when the uh when there are certain stresses particularly too much warm water that can stress out the uh corals to for some reason the plants are released from the corals they all end up escaping en masse and you know dying off and the corals turn white as they lose all their color and then become stressed and sick and can fault all kinds of other things so that was happening there i went to newfound land where um they were suffering very very profound uh effects on fisheries the grand banks uh which had you know many of the early travelers wrote about how they would arrive and drop baskets over the ship's side and pull up you know entire basket full after basket full of cod as fast as you could and cod ravaging five and six feet long well it collapsed in uh in a 30 year period the biomass of spawning cod of the big cod had fallen by 98.9 percent not 98.9 percent since the early explorers in the 1600s but since 1965 you know a profound collapse that transformed an entire province which at that time was completely dependent on fisheries and had been founded for fisheries causing all kinds of stresses i ended up going to the Antarctic as well because it turned out that some of the early uh indications that climate change might also be a problem for the oceans were starting to happen there in the late 1990s this is in the girl ash straits of Antarctica um and indeed uh when i went to uh i went to the Antarctic Peninsula which is the banana belt of the Antarctic if you think the Antarctic is kind of like uh you know the male symbol the the the arrow going out is the Antarctic Peninsula leading off the circular land pass up towards South America and that's therefore the most northerly therefore the warmest and most temperate part of Antarctica it's still way down there you know 64 you know south so it's still glaciers and the like and no uh you know large plants living on it but this was the place where if climate change is going to happen you would expect to see it first in the Antarctic because it'd be the first area affected and indeed there just in in the past two or three years before my visit the scientists who are doing these long-term ecological surveys and projects were discovering major changes happening in the Antarctic region the scientists who were there to hang out at these big penguin rookries were seeing the penguins start disappearing because that there was suddenly too much uh too much or too little precipitation at certain times you had penguins um of that require there to be solid ice in the winter time for their strategies disappearing and being replaced by penguins who prefer open water same thing was happening with the seal so the whole species uh mix was changing and behind Palmer Station the U.S. research station that I visited was a 10,000 year old thousand foot tall glacier and this glacier had been falling back rather rapidly you could really tell because in the uh station they had a wall and they had photographs taken each year of the crew of scientists who over wintered in Antarctica that winter and it started in like you know 1971 or something and everyone's dressed like the dharma initiative and you could see you know the changing hairstyles and the changing you know social mores and fashions as you worked your way through the pictures up to the 1990s but they always took the the picture in the same spot behind the station and the eerie thing was when you started top left you went down to bottom right you could see the glacier was right behind them when they were taking the picture in 1972 but it was falling further and further back until the 1990s it was back there like a half mile back from them like watching it was this disorienting experience of watching this mountain of ice that had been around since the last ice age scroll back and disappear and I also ended up being able to go to uh the central Pacific to the Marshall Islands one of these all Atoll Pacific Island nations that's particularly vulnerable to sea level rise if indeed you were seeing a meltdown of polar ice caps these are the countries that already in the late 90s were worried that they could cease to exist because the average elevation of the Marshall Islands for the entire country is something like five feet and most of them are no wider than this picture you see here the capital of the Marshall Islands Atolls right are a sort of chain of islands a ring of islands it's actually when you have a volcano like in Hawaii and you know how the big island in Hawaii is the newest island and there's a hot spot under it and that's why the volcano is blowing up and it's been scrolling along so the next island's a little smaller and a little bit younger and you keep going out to a wahoo is about medium age and you know it's been worn down and you keep going out well if you keep wearing down eventually the island will disappear except that the corals on the edge of the island keep growing upwards right so they actually survive so the corals can outlive the island itself if you wait long enough and that's what coral Atolls are they're the cap of corals that keep growing towards the surface on top of an extinct volcano so and all the associated sand is all coral sand from the generations of corals that have broken up the people out there in the Marshall Islands are living on the top of an extinct volcano amidst these corals and the refuse that the corals are left behind so the capital of the Marshall Islands is you know about as wide as this room and about you know 60 miles long with islands breaking in it and there's on one side is the lagoon with the water crashing against it and the other side is the open pacific with the water crashing on you on either side of you and in between is all of the agriculture all of the residences and all the infrastructure of an entire nation and they know that you know when you have a flood surge there's nowhere to go or hide so those are all the difficulties they were encountering and I also ended up in places like Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico where at the mouth of the Mississippi they were already seeing the expansion of a large dead zone not unlike that one at the Black Sea so when writing oceans in it you know clearly the problems were multifaceted you were having all of those same sets of human interactions happening at once in in interactions where the stresses were often caused by entirely different countries by different ministries within a given country and by different sectors that we don't think about coordinating together and the sum total of the intersections of those things in the oceans could be rather profound and unexpected and lead to outcomes that nobody liked and so you know I was counseling an ocean's end that we need to start thinking about not just me but scientists and others were saying you need to start thinking about the oceans much more holistically and our interactions with the oceans and indeed the problems facing them many of the stresses that I saw on the end of the 90s while writing that book have gotten worse and I've been able to cover a lot of them at that time nobody was seeing any indication that the North Pole was melting down at all the Greenland ice sheet seemed stable and of course the reverses happened since you know I went up to Greenland and at one point and everybody sled dogs which is kind of the key thing that people in Greenland do to get around in the winter right Greenland all the communities are all little tiny communities with no roads connecting them because it looks like the Rocky Mountains you know there's glaciers and giant mountains between each tiny village you could never build a road there because it would cost you like you know two billion dollars per kilometer and would link two communities of 60 people and you would never be able to plow it in the winter right so there aren't any roads you actually have to get around by flying or by sea kayak neither of which one's really expensive and one's rather dangerous so it's not till the winter that everyone hangs out with each other because in the winter the sea would freeze smooth and you'd get out your sled dogs and your sled and cruise around it is the big deal as one Greenlander told me if you're the guy with the champion sleds you're that guy right everyone was selling off their sled dogs when I was there because the sea ice was no longer forming reliably was forming and then breaking up forming and breaking up and creating a landscape you couldn't sled on it had been going on for a decade so the Greenlanders were starting to give up on their sled dogs where in the southern part of the country some of the farmers were growing broccoli for the first time since leaf ericsson was there at the thaw before the little ice age so major transformations were taking place now you know all some of these you know many of these problems had gotten worse but some of them were new issues that have come up since oceans end that have arrived you know I remember I was diving down in a granada with a bunch of marine scientists types were working on a project and we were all signed some dive buddy and a lot of the people on this trip were luminaries we had buzz Aldrin was there there were various scientists and astronaut types and you never know who your dive buddy was but I was assigned one we went diving down looking around popped up we're talking afterwards during the dive interval on the boat is so you know how were those how do those corals seem and I was like you know I mean I've been kind of spoiled I've been out to Micronesia in places and you know everyone talks about grain to being so amazing but you know it didn't seem that amazing who's like agreeing yeah I was kind of you know all these various problems he started doc you know mentioning some of the problems that I documented in my book and I said yeah that's all true and now I keep hearing about this ocean acidification thing I mean who threw that into the picture who could see that coming and the guy gets a really odd look on his face and he says you don't know who I am do you I said no well it turned out this guy was um one of the uh you remember biosphere two out in Arizona yeah they're gonna like in order to get to Mars we need to practice how you could have an ecosystem you could bring with you so they put a bunch of guys in a dome in the desert and sealed them in with a you know a coral reef tank and agriculture and you had to somehow make whatever you had in there recirculate to keep you all alive and it didn't work why too much carbon dioxide they couldn't get rid of it right they had their own global warming in there but one of the first indications they had a problem was this guy was in charge of the coral reef tank and he'd started noticing as the co2 levels in their sealed off atmosphere got higher and higher because they couldn't they weren't in balance he started seeing the corals in the tank dissolve and he was one of the first people to see that well now we're starting to see that problem is happening all over the place because the co2 in biosphere one as we've added more and more to the atmosphere a lot of that co2 is ending up in the oceans which is nice and that it's keeping it away from the atmosphere and keeping co2 levels in the atmosphere lower but the problem is that all that dissolved co2 in the oceans is also making the oceans less base or more acidic which you know i'm not a ton more but enough more that it's starting to interfere with some shell making organisms ability to do the little chemical process they need to build their shells especially at first when they start as tiny sprat and they're building their first shells which brings us closer here to Maine and the Gulf of Maine because you know when i was writing oceans in you had to go to the ends of the earth to find some of these extremes you know you got to go to Greenland and Antarctica and the Marshall Islands to see the climate change impacts that might be happening but now you're starting to not have to go anywhere they're right here at our doorstep and that brought me more recently when i was working on mayday the series for the Portland Press Herald to look at the some of the issues that were happening in the Gulf of Maine which has turned out to be a place that is on the forefront of climate change in the oceans because strangely enough it is warming faster than any other part of the world ocean save a section of the Kyushu current and off northern Japan very very rapidly and our ecosystem is purged because it's a cold water system next to the Gulf Stream we're also kind of the southernmost part of uh southernmost range of boreal sort of species rather than warmer water loving species so we're kind of if things shift around we're vulnerable to larger changes than you would see elsewhere and so for scientists this is becoming a bit of a fascinating laboratory our own Gulf of Maine for understanding what kind of climate change impacts might be expected uh and in oceans and marine systems elsewhere which is really exciting for the scientists on one hand but is not so exciting for us in many respects because among those are say ocean acidification they're already being seen in the series i talked to Bill Mooc who runs the Moocs sea farms right they grow um oyster sprat which oyster farmers then use to grow out but they're the ones who actually supply the eggs you grow your chicks from so to speak but they have to get the sprat to grow out until they're little tiny oysters to ship off to their customers and they do that on the dammer scotter river and uh and they would pump in the water and that would all be fine but suddenly they were starting to have all these strange die-offs of juvenile oysters and Moocs people realized that it was kind of happening often right after a large rain event it took a while to work it out but the long and the short of it was that when you have big rain events and climate change is bringing more of them to this region more regularly you have a pulse of fresh water coming in from our forested landscape with a lot of nutrients in it and that triggers that whole process that i described where you end up having a lot of nutrients enter the system and when you have a lot of nutrients enter the system you're actually making the system when you when you run that all out you're and actually creating a situation that's like enhanced ocean acidification you'd have this pulse of nutrients coming in and then you'd have more acid water and it turns out that the Sprat weren't able to survive it well great Bill Mooc figured it out right and he's worked with people in Washington state and Oregon in the oyster industry who encountered the same things they've worked out fixes where they can treat the water and grow their Sprat but the question he has and many others are what about all the oysters that are just out there in the environment who can't fix their water and the what are the effects going to be for them so that and many other things are being visited upon the Gulf of Maine you're having in warm water years you're starting to see the explosion of the green crabs which were eating the eating up many of the muscle flats wiping out the muscle flats of Freeport and Brunswick and other places you're able to see those kind of major ecological changes happening here directly now so what do we do about all that you know open it up to questions after that but the lesson that i've been saying while writing the book that i came away with is that ultimately the problem is that we have been managing our interactions with the oceans in a piecemeal way when we do it all in individual sectors and countries and the like and you know each you know how many uh how much of x product can you dump into the ocean legally or how many of this species can you take out of the ocean today but it's all done divorced from the larger equation which is what's going on with this complicated community of life in the ocean and how do you sustain that community of life how could you make and understand the ecosystem hopefully well enough to figure out how to keep it happy because if it's happy hey you can take a lot more stuff you could have a lot more fish and a lot more products coming out of it that we might need but you need to keep it happy and figure out which things will really mess it up because there's usually a tipping point everything's fine everything's fine then crash it's not you know you you have an airplane with a lot of rivets in it which of the rivets you can't take out before the wings fall off is kind of the question and we haven't known enough because we didn't need to because the ocean seems so very big and we're so very small to know all those answers in past decades but now fortunately we're starting to try to answer those kind of questions and the technological revolutions and everything from multi beam and side scan to uh computer imaging and the like make it possible for us to explore and answer those questions in a way that wouldn't have been possible 30 or 40 years ago for sure so it's an intriguing time to learn those things and to learn those answers so that we can interact with ocean ecosystems in a way where we and they win right because otherwise nobody wins when you run the system down to be like the black sea there's nothing valuable to it it's not providing the ecosystem services and the like so it's not an us versus them it's a working together with it but we need a lot of answers so the first step is gathering those and funding the kind of science and uh and monitoring and stuff that lets us know the answers so that we can adapt them into the way we manage things and here in Maine I mean people ask with Mayday what do you do about these problems well some of them Maine by itself yes I mean would be good if you reduce the amount of carbon you're producing but Maine by itself can't do anything about the world's global warming problem because we're 0.05 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions if we stop emitting anything it's going to make no no effect by itself not that we shouldn't be part of the solution but we can't stop that but what we do have the ability to do is things like ocean acidification where we actually can work towards making systems more resilient if we understand where is the ocean acidification bad when we don't have the answers but you need the monitoring and stuff to figure those those questions out so you know how to intervene to help things would it be possible and scientists are working on this to take a a muscle farm out there in Tasco Bay and put it next to a seaweed farm growing seaweed for the Asian market edible seaweeds if you had the seaweed close enough since it's a plant and it's drawing in the carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen and the and the shellfish are doing the opposite could it create a halo of of of less acid water that would protect both right those kind of questions how well would that work how big is the halo what are the kind of things you can do so it's those kind of questions that we need to be looking at and those are the first steps towards work our way into having a genuinely symbiotic relationship with the oceans which we're going to need as the planet heads towards a population of 10 billion and final note because all of this has been sort of a downer is the good news is that you that when you remove the stresses on ocean systems they can sometimes amaze you how fast they respond in rebound and one is the black sea because by a historical twist of fate the black sea's disaster happened at the same time that communism collapsed and one of the things that happened afterwards is that all of those countries in the black sea basin say uh yeah all of them essentially have joined the european union and when they did that the european union knew for almost a decade that was going to happen and that they would have to meet dutch water quality standards they ended up being this enormous investment by the EU and with EU pressure by the world bank in building all of that missing infrastructure in changing farming practices and building buffer zones and also the agricultural system of eastern europe collapsed afterwards because the french farmers in the EU didn't want to compete with those large hungarian farms on fertile soil so they made sure the EU didn't subsidize those farms and many of them ended up collapsing for a number of years bad for the farmers but the phosphorus and nitrogen loading the nutrient loading into the black sea also collapsed as agriculture collapsed in the region and by the time it restarted many of these infrastructure improvements had been made so the stresses were suddenly taken off the black sea with the disappearance the economic collapse the disappearance of those things and then the introduction of the missing infrastructure and then you wouldn't think you know what would happen there was less nutrients for the algae and that might be good but the whole ecosystem has been ruined right except that one day a passing freighter pumped out another species of comb jelly the barrow and this particular comb jelly like nothing better than to eat manyopsis and it went around eating them until they were basically none of them left and then it starved to death for lack of food and suddenly the jellies are apparently out of the way and there's been a slow rebuilding that monitors are seeing of a surprising rebound of the black sea's ecosystem so if you remove the stresses the system can respond and sometimes surprise you which is exactly what we need to be doing to increase the resiliency of ocean systems on things like ocean of acidification main that we can control so that they're more able to rebound from things that at least here we in Maine are not able to uh to deal with so that's my broad lesson i'm going to stop there and open it for questions and thank you all for your patience thank you when it's to sort of 50 minutes so anyone needs to get out of here can if you really need to get out of here you can as well nice people at Longfellow's will also try to sell you a book for their benefit yes sir what do you think of the recent lobster between us and Sweden right i'm not a scientist who's knows the details of it or have reported on it but my feeling is that i find it extremely unlikely that Maine lobster are a threat to the lobstering communities in the benthic bottom dwelling communities of Scandinavia um so yeah yes i haven't reported on it but i am skeptical of the swedish position anyone else yes sir yeah why would it be why would the Gulf of Maine be the fastest uh warming body of water on earth well uh any person at Gulf of Maine Research Institute is the scientist who discovered this and could probably answer it more adequately than i can but um i think we don't know for sure why that is we know it's true from the measurements but the best guess would be that because the Gulf of Maine is located so you have cold water currents that are originating up by Greenland that come down for Atlantic Canada down through Nova Scotia and enter around um the nub of Nova Scotia let's see let's have a proper map enter around that nub of Nova Scotia into the gyre of the Gulf of Maine that it's a Labrador current incredibly cold water current which is why the water here is so damn cold right so numbingly cold the ocean water and and that's true pretty much north of Cape Cod in the Gulf of Maine system if you go on the south beach is a Cape Cod the water's surprisingly warm right that's because when you're over there you're on the other side of a great big sort of oceanographic borderline because down there everything's influenced by the Gulf Stream coming up from the Caribbean through the Straits of Florida up the east coast and kind of turning and bouncing off Cape Cod and heading out further out to see and eventually ending up passing Iceland where if you go to Iceland in January or February it's surprising even though it's up at the Arctic Circle it's it feels warmer and milder than it is in Maine at the same time right and goes on to England even further north remember Maine is at the same latitude in Europe as Spain right and it's so cold here and and places that are way up should be by the Canadian Shield like England have a milder climate than we do because of the warm water Gulf Stream crossing the Atlantic now because we're on that border zone between those two oceanographic forces my guess is the reason that this is warming so fast is that as that's that you're having a major front that shifts and because the the difference between the warm water ecosystem and the cold one or right on the border a small shift can bring warm water in or less cold water out through our big oceanographic faucets and transform very rapidly what's circulating in the gyre and the Gulf of Maine. I kind of think of it as a as a cold water and hot water spigot and as you're messing around you're kind of letting more of the hot water spigot in and less of the cold is my guess. Now Andy Pershing you should all call him up and see if that was a total nonsense because I kind of made that up from what I know but I suspect it has to be something like that for us to be warming so fast and to be located in that particular location that we're on. Don't quote me on that. Yes sir. I don't know exactly I know that there's concern that nutrient loading I mean nutrient loading in some places has gotten worse and in some places has gotten better when you look at a harbor by harbor basis but I don't have the answer off the top of my head as to what's the total budget of nutrient loading into the Gulf and what are the trends now and generally speaking as you develop more and cities grow and you pave over more stuff you have more runoff you know from pavement than you would from natural you know ground and that that increases nutrient loading but at the same time we're improving our you know people are paying attention to nutrients and trying to reduce nutrient loading and do things better and use you know have a computer on your giant combine you know tractor knowing which particular centimeter and what soil type is under that from your GPS so you enter the you know so there's there's two forces that work there and I don't know who's winning but it's a good question yes please right the giant plastic patch in the Pacific Ocean so there's like a because of the way oceanography in the Pacific works a lot of the plastic bags debris toys bottles whatever you have in the entire pacific basin including all of asia and the west coast of north america seems to get eventually funneled and end up in this giant patch that I don't know what's the size of the moon or something texas or two texas yeah it's it's enormously large and it's been discovered to be even bigger than previously thought I mean to be honest well it's kind of a horrifying you know sort of symbol and depiction of our sort of dysfunctional you know supply chains and the fact that we're producing all this plastic that's used once and dumped into the system you know the stuff that's floating on the top concerns me less than whatever sort of dissolving into the ecosystem being eaten by other creatures and the like so if it's if it's in a dead zone oceanographically and if there's not a lot of currents I'm just running a guess that there's not as much ocean life there that it's picked a place to park that is probably less damaging than if it had all been thrown into shallow shelf areas maybe it's being if we're going to dump all that stuff in the ocean maybe it's being contained in a less damaging place than otherwise that's my guess which is why I haven't panicked as much but the thing is we should stop dumping all that plastic in the ocean right because it's it's bad stuff the animals will eat it it'll dissolve into the oceans and work its way up through the fish we eat and end up in our our bodies as well so we don't want that to happen the fact that it's all being parked in one spot far away from most ecological activity might be a better outcome than others but maybe you can clean it up easier if you ever figured out a way to clean up the area the size of texas yes please eventually collapsed and it was rescued behind a political system of the China collapsing what do you think picture what are your key points for what I mean a civilizational class is probably worse for the environment than anything because then we'd really be bad at waste management we'd be going out trying to survive by cutting down trees for all energy sources and all the rest so we don't want that to happen we want to get better at the way we do things both technologically and process wise and you know use our resources more efficiently and all that stuff which ultimately is good for the economy it's just getting there right so there needs to be one way or another it's happening the question is is happening fast enough to stave off some of the worse and more unpleasant likely results of destabilizing the climate and the ocean atmosphere interactions right we should be a leader on it in this country because the United States has often led the world in those things and also because in a competitive relationship I mean China knows they have a problem right they've got pollution so bad in cities that you know people are dying on the streets and can't go out and everything turns black and you got to cancel the Olympics or you know what have you so they've invested enormously in solar power and they're you know changing over into other kinds of energy plants and stuff because they realize it's in their self interest and they're going to capture all those new industries that we could be at the head of instead so in somebody is going to do it and make a buck off it whether or not it saves the planet depends on whether they're all of us do it at the same time so yeah I think there's lots of we could outsmart this problem we just start need to start making it a priority I think it would be an economic win in addition to an environmental and social one but unfortunately we're still at the phase of denying the problems there or denying that anything should be done about it and that's a difficult position to be in especially if you're the world's you know most influential country historically speaking so we might want to stop that for our own self interest in addition to the worlds uh blue hat in the back and then i'll come over to you going down yeah right the question is a juvenile population of lobsters and the Gulf of Maine is going down I believe I read that too I've been distracted by other things so I think that's the case and that lobster landings were down a little and it started to make people a bit nervous as to what's happening but I don't know the details firsthand any better than any of you have been reading it because I've been distracted with other things so and yes in the blue right well I mean I find that in general having breaking down and reverse engineering what the problem actually is and why is often helpful to people you can break it back down into its parts step back and show how the parts fit together and end up with your rather obvious fact at the end is often the most helpful way to do it but you have to be in a context where people want to hear that you know are able to hear about it so it doesn't always work you're not going to do it in a twitter conversation with somebody who's dead set against to begin with but you might in an actual conversation with somebody you know over coffee in the dinner table so context matters and so you know I think that that's generally a good way of going about it because especially with oceans issues and the kind of issues we're talking about you know it doesn't there's no logical argument to not try to solve these problems because you know there's no winner in not solving them really right it doesn't make any sense except in a you know a few interests very narrow short-term plan so ultimately if you just can break down the facts and bring them forward it kind of speak for themselves without having too much argumentation but you have to be in a context where you can do that and often people aren't listening because there's so many other things to worry about right this book came out in you know 2000 I was researching it at the end you know the end of the 90s 20 years ago and almost everything that I was talking about then is still talking about now I see the New York Times run a story you know about the Marshall Islands it could be the same story I did 20 years ago or about Antarctica the numbers change a little bit but it's like we haven't made a lot of progress in the general you know public conversation on these issues you've been kind of standing still so we need to stop standing still on it but I don't I can't say that I've found the key that's caused everything to change maybe reverse engineering's not the way to go we'll do two more questions you all been very patient then you will be able to get on with your days we'll start I'll come back to you or we'll start with you why not right I guess you could I don't know I mean I don't work in the shipping industry I see what you're saying and I know that there's also been efforts well there's there's an answer and and also I will say that I know you know that's the general problem and certainly was a problem at the in the end of the 80s but the shipping industry has also been working to mitigate those problems and have filters so that this doesn't happen with the ballast water it's not like there hasn't been any motion to try to solve it in some quarters but the problem still exists because talk about Wild West the international shipping industry can be a Wild West there are good actors and bad actors and the bad actors can have a flag of convenience from a country that doesn't exist there's in a civil war right Liberia biggest flag nation you know for international shipping Liberia is the middle of a civil war had no functional government to collapse into a failed state and all kinds of atrocities but that was no problem for the shipping industry because their office of ship registrations is in Arlington Virginia run by a lobbyist it cruised on without the state right you can continue registrations without the country existing at all quite successfully and Liberia make sure that you know you don't have to have any particular rules and stuff and then you control the company through an LLC that's owned by another LLC and that LLC is and you know the some jurisdiction where you can't know anything about who owns the LLC and so on so I mean for bad actors there's almost no way to chase them down but for good actors they're starting to do some stuff so anyway that's some there is motion there and I don't know if your solution would be the way to go but I know they're working on things to just you know put off sort of filters that filter out to tiny particles and I think they do that with the good actors one more question then we'll call it yes please they just need a lot more pressure from us so that's I think it's it's certainly dismal right now but we need to keep pushing on them but you think that these economic situations are going to be tied specifically to marine resources or just in general I mean generally speaking the lobbying power and political capital held by fish harvesters is quite small compared to the capital held by whatever entity the energy industry right or whoever it is that you would have to confront about say carbon going down so I mean they're they may be big in the oceans front but they're tiny in the bigger political calculus so I'm sure it helps but I it's not it's not a game-changing force to you know have on one side because it's so tiny compared to some of the other economic forces in the in the political landscape so yeah it helps but on the margins I'd say thank you all very much for coming and for your patience I appreciate it