 Susan Faraday, for those of you who don't know me, I'm the director of the Marine Affairs Institute and your hostess for this little gathering. I'm struck by a piece of conventional wisdom that I've heard before about putting all the key members of a company on the same company jet, you know, the CEO, the CFO, the members of the Board of Trustees, because we've got critical mass in fisheries law in this room today and for the next two days. I'm struck at leaders in this field over the last several years who've certainly inspired me in my professional career, and I am doubly inspired by the leaders of tomorrow that sit in this classroom and in classrooms across the way at the University of Rhode Island, who are here to learn from those in the trenches as it were. So a few housekeeping things. And I'm going to be the first one to mute my cell phone. Excellent. There is wireless connectivity in the building. It's pretty good. There's a hospitality room down the hall if you need to use that for any connection during your stay. Bathrooms and always an important thing. Across the hall, to the left as you go out of here. Can't think of any other housekeeping things right away. Charlotte in my office, who was part of our greeting table there, is the resource that keeps me together on a daily basis, and she will keep all of us together. So any questions, issues you have while you're staying here, please just let us know, and we'll do our best to make you comfortable. An event like this doesn't happen automatically, and it doesn't happen in isolation. I started coming up with the idea for this almost a year ago, and it's really been a work in progress. And so just a few thank yous. I had a wonderful planning committee. Many members are here. Many of them are doing double and triple duty as moderators and speakers. And anything else I could convey, coerce, or otherwise convince them to do, they're all listed in your program. So thank you to all of them. I have an excellent advisory board, some of them who are also on the planning committee, and they help me on a regular basis in charting our course, such as it were. And we have tremendous support from the staff at the law school, at the university communications, catering, takes a lot of pieces to make an event like this go off well. And I'm very appreciative of everybody's role in that. Let me tell you a little bit about the Marine Affairs Institute. This is our eighth marine law symposium. We've convened gatherings like this every other year on topics ranging fisheries management, to renewable energy, to ecosystem based management. So this is the kind of thing that we do on a regular basis. It's part of our mission to act as a clearing house for marine and maritime law and policy to gather experts in the field and to also help get the next generation of marine professionals ready. And several of them are here rubbing elbows with the established professionals today. And I encourage you all to take up an advantage of the opportunity to network. We do a few things here that I just want to put out a brief commercial for you about. We have a unique partnership with colleagues at the University of Rhode Island and Rhode Island Sea Grant. We are one of only four Sea Grant legal programs in the country. We're the only one in the Northeast. What that means is our students have an opportunity as Sea Grant law fellows to be matched up with an outside organization that has a research request. So they do actual legal live research as opposed to classroom room work and outside organizations get the benefit of supervised excellent students. We convene events like this. We also offer students who are really good and maybe a little bit masochistic an opportunity to get two degrees within three and a half years, a law degree from here and master's in marine affairs from the fabulous program of our URI. We have several alums here from that program who've gone on to do great things. We have several students here in that program who are wending their way through it. It's really unique and again, I think is very important to our purpose of developing that next generation of marine professionals. So let me just tell you a little bit about today's program and how we're going to proceed. We're going to be welcomed and here's some interesting remarks. First off, this morning from my colleagues at the university and at school of law, we also have Senator Whitehouse offering some remarks and let me tell you how things are going to go after that and sort of the design of the program. The title, Megs and Stevens Acts were visited. So we're going to start with how the act was originated, how it came to be, what people thought about it, some differing views on how it's functioned and how it might function in the future. Our panels the rest of the day are going to look at some details of the law and how the law interacts with other laws, how it functions as a natural resource scheme. Tomorrow we're going to be looking at more timely topical issues, which are pretty much almost on the front page in the news, especially here in New England, renewable energy issues and catch shares or sectors, whichever terminology you like to hear about. So that's kind of the way that we're going to go through this. And I'll talk more about the panels once we move into that part of the program after our coffee break this morning. So at this point I'm going to turn the program over to Dean David Logan. He's been a Dean of Law School here for six years, yes? Seven? Eight? Oh my goodness. And he's a terrific supporter of my program, tremendous asset to the law school and I invite him to come welcome you now, Dean David Logan. I'm low tech so I won't be doing any of this stuff but I will raise the microphone. One of the things that comes with being 6'9". I want to join Susan and welcome in you to the School of Law. Before I introduce President Champagne, I want to share with some of you here who are maybe unfamiliar with this institution, a little bit of the background that led us to where we are today. In the early 90s, Rhode Island was one of only three states that had no law school and the problem that wasn't, there weren't enough lawyers around but there was certainly a need, many lawyers felt, sort of raising the level of discourse in Rhode Island surrounding legal issues. And starting in the early 90s, we had been at our first class and we now will be graduating our 17th class this coming year. Our students do remarkably well on what are objective measures of outputs, the bar exams. They are making their way in the profession now. We're glad to report that our Peter Kilmartin class of 97 is the new Attorney General who is the first statewide officer we've had from our ranks and we have a number of members of the Senate and the House and other luminaries but never a statewide official so we're looking forward to Peter becoming the Attorney General. But one of the ways in which the law school has made its mark was to identify an area of the intersection of law and policy that was absolutely critical to New England and made perfect sense for the ocean state in Rhode Island. And so beginning in the mid 90s we began a wonderful relationship with the University of Rhode Island and Rhode Island Sea Grant as Susan mentioned one of the four national programs that provides legal services as part of a Sea Grant program. And that relationship has blossomed and been wonderful in a number of respects. One is it gives some of our top students a chance to also learn from one of the top sets of marine policy people in the country. I believe it's the oldest Dennis or the oldest program in the country to do this. And so our graduates not only get grounded in basic law and also environmental law, marine law, advertising the like but they get to hear about cutting edge issues from scientists and policy makers across the Bay. And our graduates in that program are making their way now in the profession as well. And there's a number of objective ways in which their success has been plotted and we're really proud of them. A number of them are here today both as some graduates and also some current students. I also want to just do a quick shout out to Susan Faraday and her staff, Julia Wyman, Charlotte Ferris. This is a big undertaking as the note said people from Hawaii to Nova Scotia from many, many different professional positions all coming to this little town in Bristol and some perfectly maritime weather I must say to talk about really, really a fundamental issue that has both local, regional, national and indeed international ramifications and Senator Whitehouse will speak to those I'm sure in his time with us and I'll be introducing him in a few minutes. Also want to say that the university and the law school in particular has benefited from some wonderful leadership and since August, Dr. Ronald Lowe Champagne has been my boss, the law school's part of the university and Dr. Champagne came to us with a PhD background in mathematics and a real interest in quickly learning the strengths of this remarkable university and in particular this remarkable part of it, the law school. Dr. Champagne has served in a number of important administrative capacities both in education and in non-governmental areas and what he really brings to the table though is a lot of passion and you'll see it I'm sure in his comments he really has hit the ground running at Roger Williams, has mastered the complexities of a university that includes a professional school which is something many universities don't have and also as you'll see today embraces this multidisciplinary multi-school approach that is represented not just by the Sea Grant URI Roger Williams program but by bringing people all over the country in all sorts of different areas here to Bristol to talk about a really, really important issue. So with that I give you Dr. Ronald Lowe Champagne, president of Roger Williams University. You can tell that David Logan last spoke at this podium. Thank you very much, David. As president of Roger Williams University it is really my honor and my privilege to welcome you all here to this very, very exciting and very interesting conference. I was once asked what is a university? What's the mission of a university? And I came up with this thing real fast. I said well it's a safe place that you can consider civilly and rationally. Ideas of any kind, controversial, radical, but it's a place where you come and you think. When you think about the role of a university in a society such as ours, a democratic society, how important a place like this is to our society where we can gather together people like yourselves to debate, to discuss, and hopefully to leave enlightened and perhaps more engaged. The program I'm very impressed with I can't say enough about the leadership that David Logan has given to this law school at Roger Williams. Where we are today is a testimony to his good work and I wanna recognize that, David, it's extraordinary. The law school is unique, yes, but it's also a center of excellence. It doesn't sit back because it's the only one in town. It takes its role very seriously. The Marine Affairs Institute is one of the law school centers of excellence that has modeled, really, for academic excellence in leveraging of complementary skill sets. The gist of this eighth symposium is pretty much contained in my welcome letter so I'm not gonna repeat it, about the compelling nature of fishery management law issues, particularly now, particularly in New England. Law is about life. And in this case, it's about life in the ocean. We have another spectacular center of excellence in our marine biology program. I had the opportunity to visit there yesterday and I would welcome you to go see it. Extraordinary. One of the few that are doing work at this level. And we just added on an entire new section which we're gonna dedicate with Senator Whitehouse's participation. And I went down and I saw all these students working away and I saw huge vats. It reminded me of a brewery. And I said, what are you doing down here? Cause it was all brown, you know, and I thought, that's an interesting room. And they said, well, we're making algae because that's where life begins in the ocean. That's where life begins. And they said, well, we really do it well. We turn out the greatest algae in the world. And I said, well, this is like a McDonald's of the ocean, isn't it? And then they came over and said, now this is what it's all about. And they handed me this handful of clams, oysters. And I kind of got to know what it meant, happy as a clam. Cause these were well attended clams and oysters. And the whole idea was our research is going to help put back what has been destroyed by recklessness. And recklessness is when life, human life, takes for granted and simply ravages the environment. Law is there to protect that. But it is all about life that I saw in that laboratory to protect our oceans and to use it. Human beings have to use oceans, has to use oil and so on, but we have to do it lawfully. We have a fabulous who's who of ocean experts gathered here. We have Senator Whitehouse who will soon be here, hopefully who leads the federal fisheries regulation committee. We have academics from Hawaii, South Carolina and Nova Scotia. I'm sure they're from Hawaii. They're wishing they were back there. We have expert practitioners who are on the ground of the law schools, of the law's passage and litigation that you're going to be discussing. We have managers, economists. We have fishermen and others grappling with current issues surrounding what it means to share the ocean. So I welcome you to this safe place in order to have a debate and to consider any and all ideas. And I really commend the Roger Williams School of Law for what it does, for what it contributes to society in Rhode Island, across the nation. So I really thank you for coming and I do wish you well with this conference. While we're waiting for Senator Whitehouse to brave the water and the traffic, which usually ties up the East Bay for those of us in Rhode Island, we know what that means. I'm gonna just walk through a bit with you how we're gonna proceed and the things we're gonna be thinking about. These panelists are earning their keep. They aren't just coming to present on their pet topic because I'm making them actually answer some key questions that I think are of interest when talking about fisheries management and fisheries law. When I thought about sort of the theme and putting together this conference, I was really struck by the fact that fishing has probably been the cornerstone of human beings' interactions with the ocean for an awfully long time. And even now, when we're in a much more technologically advanced state than we were thousands of years ago when we first threw a line into the water, when you first start talking to people about the oceans and I don't think it matters much whether it's students in my classroom or my mom across the dinner table. One of the first things they say, if you say, oh, well, I'm interested in ocean law other than they're like, what? They always say, what about the fish? What about the fishermen? That tends to be the way that people think about oceans. Now those of us that have been studying this area of law for a while know that it's much more complicated than just fisheries management law. There's a lot of other laws. There's a lot of other issues. There are a lot of other stakeholders. But even now, when we're in very interesting debates about the future of offshore renewable energy, LNG siting, offshore aquaculture, changes in maritime transportation, marine spatial planning, whatever the heck that's going to mean for the whole thing. One of the first questions is, what about fishing? So that's what we're gonna focus on today is this and tomorrow is this law, how it's developed into the state that it is. Cause it is a very fully developed law. It's been on the books for almost 35 years now. Those students in the room know there's lots of cases and we have a lot of folks that have been involved in the litigation of those cases in one way or another in the next couple of days. It's a well-developed area of law. Sometimes it's a good fit in thinking about new uses and new ways of managing the oceans. Sometimes it's not. So we're gonna tease out some of those questions and let me just give you a preview of that. How's this for some things to chew on? So the first three panels are who we are gonna be hearing from today and panels four and five will be tomorrow. So panel one, I've asked each of them within a very compressed amount of time and within their vast expertise to give us their thoughts on if they had a chance to rewrite this law today and they didn't have to worry about any of the politics, interesting conversation to have today after the election, what thing, what one thing would you most want to change? And if you take a look at the bios, I'll be introducing that panel in more detail when we get to that at 1045 after the coffee break. But you'll see this panel has some very different backgrounds and experiences and I think they're gonna offer some interesting interpretations and answers to this question. In the afternoon we're gonna look at the interaction of Magnets and Stevens with all these other laws. Some marine related, some not at all. Panel two is gonna discuss this law in relationship to other natural resources. We regulate a lot of natural resources. We regulate grazing rights and timber rights and mineral rights and oil and gas. And Magnets and Stevens is sort of a quirky law in some respects. So we've asked this panel to give us one tidbit, one bite. What's the one thing from another natural resource scheme that you would like to incorporate into US Fisheries Management and why? At the end of the day we're gonna talk about something which again students and practitioners of this area of law know is frequently litigated and that's the intersection between the Magnets and Stevens Act and other laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act. I mean that's what you call ecosystem based management. Fisheries Management has been grappling with that. The court's been grappling with the law folks in this room have been grappling with that for years. So we've asked this panel if they think we could do better if we had one law. This is not a new idea. Lots of commissions have come up with this before. There's been various versions that get reintroduced in Congress on a regular basis. I'm not optimistic this new Congress is gonna seize ocean reform any more readily than others. I'm still hoping but. So we've asked this panel to give us their thoughts on that and again I anticipate some divergent and different views on that. The second day as I mentioned in my opening remarks we're really going to sort of the heart of the debate right now, the issues that are occupying a lot of energy and deservedly so in New England and around the country. The issues of moving from an open access type of resource management scheme to a much more tightly controlled allocated out type of scheme. Cat shares, ITQs, sectors, whatever the phrase is you wanna call it. But that's what we're gonna spend tomorrow morning talking about after we hear remarks from Eric Schwab. And we've asked them to give us their thoughts on what they think the single most important issue is to address in implementing these schemes. Cause they're here. They're another tool in the toolbox that fishery managers and fishermen need to use to govern themselves. It isn't always easy to figure out the right way, the fair way, a sustainable way to utilize these schemes. Finally, we're gonna wrap up the day with what I think is the most timely sort of issue which is occupying a lot of our minds these days. And that's a combination of energy issues, old energy like oil and gas, which we've seen the impacts of in the Gulf of Mexico. New energy specifically offshore renewable and this whole brave new world, marine spatial planning, what does it all mean? So we've asked this panel to give us their thoughts on how to facilitate the relationship between fisheries and these other uses, these other ways of managing and planning access to ocean uses. So that's a preview of the work that we're all gonna be engaging in today and tomorrow. Couple of other things just in case you're tempted to get yourself a cramp in the hand from taking notes. We're gonna be posting presentations from our presenters on our website. I've also asked a number of fabulous students and alums and attendees to act as my repertoires for each panel to note the answers to these questions. And I will be pulling those together in a proceedings type of document. And I'm trying to enter into the social networking world and we'll be posting those on our Facebook page. So friend us. I'm trying to go there, I'm trying to go there. I'm just gonna check on the status of Senator Whitehouse. I don't know. Can you chat for a minute so it would be delight. You're good at that. It's a great pause. I decided initially not to mention this when I first got up here because I was all business, but since we've got a minute or two, if you've been in a cave in the last month or two, you might not have heard that one of our graduates' life stories is now a major Hollywood picture. Betty Ann Waters graduate from here in 1998 with only one reason to go to law school, indeed to go to college before law school was to free her brother Kenny who had been wrongfully convicted of murder in Massachusetts. And when Kenny was released in the early, I guess 2001 or 2002, a bunch of people that were on the lookout for a compelling story contacted Betty Ann and it took some years to get made but now it's had its national release over this last week and the movie's called Conviction. And it stars Hillary Swank, Melissa Leo, Juliette Lewis, Sam Rockwell plays Kenny and just, I mean, if he doesn't get an Academy Award, I'm not very schooled in this stuff but it really is a compelling presentation. But anyway, it's a great movie. Bring your hankies, it's a sad movie and happy in many respects as well. And there's at least one scene where Hillary Swank's in a Roger Williams university sweatshirt, so. We got our 20 seconds of fame out of that. It's a biopic, it's not a particularly specific factual story. But I also want to just refer a minute or two on something that Susan mentioned as you grow over here and Wendy's and other folks that we've worked closely with. One of the great things about being in Rhode Island and being in law school in Rhode Island is you can sort of get everybody around the table to deal with stuff. And you're never more than two steps away from the person in the state government that's got this responsibility or the person who's in the legislative branch. And so starting, I guess, a couple years ago, one of Governor Carchieri's initiatives was trying to figure out a way to move Rhode Island to the front of offshore renewable energy production in the country. And one of the things they decided to do was set up what's called the OSAMP, which is Marine Spatial Planning that Susan referred to. And the product came out, I guess, about a month ago. It's still in a sort of a semi-final draft form. But it's really quite a revolutionary way of thinking about, and this is from a very inexperienced person, sort of taking concepts that are familiar on firm land about how you might want to put businesses in one place and houses another place and schools in another place, basic idea of zoning, and applying it to the water, playing to the ocean, which is something to my knowledge that never has been done at least at this level. And one of the things that was great about it was a part of the program was carved off through Sea Grant so that some of our law students under the direction of Dennis Esposito, a very important member of our adjunct faculty, could start to roll up their sleeves and start to work with some very sophisticated materials involved in federal and state and within federal government, let's say battles, concerns about where authority will ultimately lie. And it's really one example of how a young law school can identify a place where they can make a difference and then have the people at the table say, yeah, we want to have you involved and then to see it actually come to fruition in a period of a year or two, which is really quite remarkable. And we don't know how many there will be when turbines will be offshore in Rhode Island, but Attorney General Kilmartin announced that he's not gonna pursue the litigation that Attorney General Lynch had decided to pursue against the project. That doesn't mean it's necessarily gonna happen, but it certainly makes it somewhat more likely that we're gonna see the projects approved and approved in a sensible way, approved within the context of a plan, not just let's just drop them here, but we drop them here because it has the right mix of minimal impact on fisheries, minimal impact on shipping, minimal impact on the aesthetics of the area and the maximum likelihood that it'll actually generate reasonably priced clean electricity. So OSAMP really is a wonderful little model of how the law school, URI, the CRMC, the state government can work together to solve a problem that no one else has really even taken a whack at. So I can riff some more, but I'm getting sort of tired of my own self here and knowing what the traffic is, I'll just sit down for a minute or two. I hate to sort of stall like this, but you probably don't wanna hear me just talking about, oh, I want to say one more thing. One more thing. One more thing is that I saw Michael Berger sitting out there. One of the things you'll have to see while you're here for those of you that are not part of our community is to the top members of our faculty, both sort of interestingly junior in a sense, one Michael Berger who just joined us in August from Columbia Law School and already written interesting pieces on climate change and the role of state and local government in tackling climate change. Michael's gonna be moderating one of the panels and welcome to Michael. And Jared Goldstein, who was just recently tenured as moderating another panel. And Jared's done some really interesting work, including an article fairly recently in the Virginia Law Review that looked at the Supreme Court case that involved the secretary of the Navy saying that we have to have national security discretion that Trump's concerned about sea life in order to do our, I forget it was undersea sonar or something like that. What Jared did was just great and sort of typical of Jared to sort of think outside the box, he didn't look at it as just as an environmental law question. He looked at it as a question of sort of jurisprudence. So my time is just about up. I just saw another wahoo walk in. There he is. Let me introduce you to you, the keynote speaker for today, a wonderful friend of the law school and really a terrific leader in Washington. And it's not just because he's good at Washington, it's because Senator Whitehouse has a remarkable series of experience and accomplishments before he arrived in Washington. To be the US Attorney, a federal, the chief prosecutor, to be the Attorney General of the state. To be on the governor's staff to head the small business office and do a practice law at one of the top firms in Rhode Island, it would be enough for it to be a resume and him to be an empty suit, but he's not. He's gone to Washington and made a huge impact in a very short time. I know his work for the Senate Judiciary Committee and how within his first term in Senate, he's shown a light on some really unsavory practices in the Department of Justice that occurred in the 2003 to 2006 time period. Andy also has a significant portfolio in Marine Affairs. I know he's gonna speak to you that in a minute, but when I first heard him speak, I have to say he was in this room a couple years ago, and I've been around people who have been in politics, I won't call him politician, but it's the first one that cited a book called The Tragedy of the Commons. And then I said, boy, this guy's really well read as well as deeply experienced. And so it's my great honor and pleasure to introduce to you Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. Well, thank you, David. I think I have to do something with this microphone, don't I? It's not often that at six foot two, I've got to lower a microphone after introduction. But I'm delighted to be here. It's good to be back. I can very distinctly remember preparing for a Supreme Court argument. And one of the moot courts that was held, the National Association of Attorneys General held one, a group at the Georgetown Law Center held one and Roger Williams held one. And I was grilled mercilessly by professors pretending to be Supreme Court justices. And you'll be proud to know that they were rougher on me here at Roger Williams than anywhere else. But it's a great pleasure to be here and to have the new president of Roger Williams here and my dear friend, David, the Dean of the Law School here. And this murderous row of folks in the front row here, Grover Fugate, Dennis Nixon. And I understand that there'll be a good turnout here from NOAA later on, including my former colleague from Department of Justice, Lois Schiffer, who's now the counsel, but was the head of ENR Department of Justice when I was the U.S. Attorney. And I'm told that Peter Shelley, there he is, is here somewhere, who we go back to setting the first conservation rates for electricity way back in the day at the Public Utilities Commission. So Peter, thank you for being here and for your constant great work in these issues. And as Mike Conathon here also, I wanna recognize him. Where, where, where, where? There he is, hiding behind Peter. Mike is to me the most important person in the room. I'm sorry, Mr. President, I'm sorry, Dean. I'm sorry, Grover and Dennis. Mike represents Olympia Snow. And as you will hear in my remarks, she and I are the co-sponsors of the National Endowment for the Oceans. And her support for this has been critical and I'm delighted that Mike is here. The topic that we have for today, Magnus and Stephens, is a timely one as the New England ground fishery rounds out its first season under new catch limits and its first sector management plan. It appears that despite the lower catch limits overall, the fishery has earned marginally more money than during the same period last year, which is a promising number, but it is premature to draw any conclusions. And frankly, no matter what that number ends up being, we have to face the fact that our fishermen face tremendous economic troubles. Adjusting to new fishing regulations adds additional challenges to their already very difficult situation. That is why fisheries management concerns that I've heard from Rhode Island fishermen are so important. I'd like to highlight a few possible ways to address some of those concerns because our efforts to protect our fisheries simply must have the full participation and the confidence and the knowledge and expertise of our fishermen. Before we get into that though, let's just step back a minute and put this into the larger context of what is happening in our oceans. As many of you know, this is a personal as well as political issue for me. My wife Sandra is a doctorate of marine biology. I'm a sailor and a kayaker and a diver. Indeed, I got my cred with my wife when she asked me to come out sampling with her, which meant diving to the bottom of Narragansett Bay in February. I think at that point she took me seriously. But I know particularly as a senator from Rhode Island that the ocean and the coast are key economic drivers providing for us jobs and fishing and shipbuilding and tourism. It's also part of our identity as Rhode Islanders from the old Block Island double-ender to the burning of the British ship, the Gaspi. Don't let anybody tell you that Boston Tea Party mattered a hoot. We were burning British boats in Rhode Island more than a year earlier and we don't get enough credit for it. To the America's Cup, two frankly, lobster rolls and co-hogs. We identify with the sea and we are part of it. Oceans cover three quarters of the globe. They represent 90% of the earth's water. They produce more than two thirds of the world's oxygen supply. They contain more than half of its biological production and we are polluting them with catastrophic consequences. And it is showing up wherever you look. The bells of alarm are ringing from the northernmost seas where the sheets of ice that have long been essential to the environment up there are retreating. Captain Watts of the Naval War College was quoted recently in press reports saying that Arctic ice is melting faster than US military planners can prepare for northern ocean defense. And you can go from there to the south where you see coral bleaching taking place, ruining these nurseries of so many of our species, the Andaman Sea is in the middle of a coral but beaching crash right now, and it looks like 2010's record temperatures will outpace 1988 when 16% of shallow reefs worldwide died. From far away where there is an enormous garbage gyre out in the remote center of the Pacific Ocean whose size and nature we're only beginning to comprehend, to in near close for an arrogance at bay winter, water temperatures have gone up three or four degrees. Stupidly to Perry Jeffries years ago, I said, well, that doesn't sound like much. I jump in the water and I can't tell it in between 62 and 65 degrees. And Professor Jeffries said, you don't understand my son. This is an ecosystem shift. And we are living through that ecosystem shift right now with winter flounder out and scup in and many other changes. From the top of our food chain where 80% of our major pelagic species, 80% crashes have taken place in the population of most of our major pelagic species and our big marine mammals are now so poisoned according to the research of Dr. Roger Payne that if one were to wash ashore as they often do in the summers in Rhode Island and you towed it back out to sea or you hoisted into a truck and you took it to the town dump, you would likely be violating the Clean Water Act or the hazardous waste disposal laws because the concentration in the fat of marine mammals of heavy metals, of flame retardants and of other chemicals has turned them into swimming toxic waste. So, and then from the top, that's the top of the food chain. You go to the bottom and you see phytoplankton populations that have declined a percent a year for 40 years, 40% decrease in phytoplankton overall. That's the food chain on which the rest of the ocean depends. We don't know what happens when the floor falls out of an oceanic food chain but it's not good and we're getting close and ocean acidification has an enormous amount to do with it. So, real peril is facing our oceans. The danger of climate change is possibly gonna be made manifest against mankind more seriously through our oceans than through our climate and we have to prepare for that. We have to build an ocean constituency for starters. A critical mass of scientists, fishermen, young people, elected officials, coastal protection organizations and marine industries to move the human race away from being just takers to being caretakers of our seas and oceans. For that we'll have to have adequate research to improve catch assessments, analyze the life cycles of marine species, monitor trends in water temperature and chemistry and so forth. We have to expand our coastal and marine spatial planning efforts like those undertaken by the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council to cite use as appropriately where they'll produce the greatest benefit with the least amount of environmental harm and reduce the conflict between uses. Just this month, the National Journal reported that Rhode Island has played a pioneering role in exploring and mapping its waters and I'm proud of the work that Grover Fugate and the Rhode Island CRMC have done and I'm glad that you'll have a chance to hear from him about that path breaking work. It is being looked at around the country. We are known in Rhode Island for this work nationally. To support these research programs and planning efforts and to protect our ocean and coastal resources, I've introduced legislation with Senator Olympia Snow of Maine to create the National Endowment for the Oceans that I mentioned when I recognized Mike. We have some fortunate co-sponsors early on. We have not reached out broadly because we don't want to get the partisan balance wrong too early, but a few sponsors were irresistible. They are Senator Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee to which the bill was referred, Senator Inouye, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which will have to sign off on the funding streams for it, and Senator Stabenow of Michigan to highlight for our colleagues the eligibility of the Great Lakes to participate in this effort. We are at a very promising stage, but it is an early stage and I hope very much that we can succeed quickly in creating this National Endowment for the Oceans. We must also, a little estuarine pun here, shore up existing programs and funding for the protection of our estuaries. About 75% of America's commercial fisheries rely on estuaries and coastal wetlands to provide nursery grounds and critical habitat. Coastal development, runoff, acid rain, pollution, sewage, all threaten these core ecosystems. For 25 years, EPA's National Estuary Program has brought together stakeholders to forge solutions to coastal pollution problems. That's why I've introduced legislation with Senator Vitter of Louisiana to reauthorize this program, to increase its authorized budget, and to better fund programs like the Narragansett Bay estuary program here in Rhode Island. These three priorities, creating an oceans constituency, fully funding oceans research and marine spatial planning programs and protecting our oceans, coasts and estuaries are absolutely necessary in a comprehensive all hands on deck approach to protecting our fisheries. However, while we work to achieve those broader goals and in that context, we have to bear down on the problem of our fisheries and our fishermen and their very real economic distress today. The US commercial fishing industry is valued in the tens of billions of dollars and our region represents a huge portion of that value. In 2009, New England commercial fisheries landed $783 million worth of fish, second as a region only to the Pacific Northwest, which includes Alaska. Men and now women have fished the Western Atlantic for over 400 years, enriching our culture, our economy and our history. Many families passed the vocation down through generations, others joined the fleet in recent years. All are facing very real economic hardship made worse by the general downturn in our economy. When you consider what is at stake, the value of this industry both economically and culturally, it comes as no surprise that tempers run high around fisheries, regulation and management. Having spoken with many Rhode Island fishermen over the past several years, I see two fundamental and longstanding problems underlying most disagreements over the limits prescribed by Magnus and Stevens. First, there is a credibility gap between scientists and fishermen on catch assessments. Fishermen express little confidence in scientist ability to perform stock assessments, saying things like they don't know how to fish, they don't see what we see when we are out on the boat. Research tells scientists one thing, experience tells fishermen another, and this conflict must be addressed head on. We may need to reconsider the data we are relying on to inform our fisheries management decisions, the methods we are using to collect data, and where data is missing, what assumptions we make in place of that data. This problem is compounded by a long history of distrust between the fishing industry and government fisheries managers. Cries of foul play from fishermen long went unheard until a 2010 report by the Department of Commerce and Inspector General revealed that New England fishermen have in fact been fined more heavily and more often than other fishermen in other regions of the country for similar or less behavior. More generally, some fishermen complain that catch limits required by Magnus and were set arbitrarily and do not respond to new information. There are several ways to overcome this tension and rebuild trust. One way to bridge the credibility gap would be to require rapid, common sense, reevaluation of stock assessments when they are challenged. Sometimes the agency itself engages in reassessments. For instance, earlier this year when the National Marine Fisheries Service exercised its emergency authorities under Magnuson and increased the Pollock catch limit based on new data. It is understandably intensely frustrating for a fisherman who thinks a stock assessment is just wrong and is the product of bad sampling rather than good science to have no means of relief as the season slips away. Without this rapid response, you cement a view in the fishing industry that catch limits are numbers made up by bureaucrats and frozen in stone long after the situation in the ocean demands a change. We also need to get scientists and fishermen speaking the same language and embracing the same data collection methods. Each group has something to teach the other so working together can only improve fisheries management science. Cooperative fisheries research can help bridge the research versus experience conflict. Early results from cooperative research are encouraging. Fishermen and scientists are gathering fisheries data together on working fishing boats using the same gear as NOAA research boats. The premises that research and experience working together makes for more solid and plausible outcomes and it does seem to be working. Just last month I spent a day on the Dorana R with Captain Jimmy Rule. Captain Rule fishes with his son and a crewman for scallops and ground fish up and down the Atlantic. His family is very well regarded in the Atlantic ground fishing community. For a month each spring and fall he's been taking scientists out on his boat to gather juvenile and adult samples of species along the North Atlantic coast. The data is then fed into the Northeast area monitoring and assessment program or NEAMAP. Jim Garland of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science where my wife did some of her graduate work was the lead scientist on board. He was impressed by Captain Rule and his experience with the gear and with the collection methods. Captain Rule in return was impressed by the hard work and earnestness of what he called his young scientists. It was a good partnership. This doesn't mean that collection gear and methods will never be questioned in the future but it is more likely that the nature of the questioning will become are we doing this the right way rather than what are those crazy scientists up to? My final point on the perception gap issue is generally that we just need more and better data. We will never have the perfect data set and we cannot wait to act until we do acting on imperfect information is the stuff of governance. However, we can certainly do a better job of gathering information, gathering it more rapidly, using the latest technology and planning tools. Coastal and marine spatial planning can map important fishing grounds and protect them from conflicting uses. CMSP can also identify critical habitats for commercial species of fish at all their different stages of life. There is interesting catch assessment work just underway using GPS positioning technology. I recently met Steve Arnold, a Rhode Island commercial fisherman who was participating in just such a study with the Northeast Fisheries Science Center. Steve and other participants use an electronic log integrated with GPS, depth sounders and temperature sensors mounted on the troll doors to log each trawl as it is made. In addition, the boat logs, the bycatch and landings of each voyage. Onboard observers compare this data to estimates made by the captain. These programs marry the latest technology with centuries old fishing wisdom to get accurate industry relevant data to inform stock assessments. The long history of mistrust between fishermen and fisheries managers is a tough problem, but it is not insurmountable. One reason for the mistrust, I believe, is that the National Marine Fisheries Service has been tasked with two somewhat contradictory missions, fostering conservation of the fisheries on the one hand and promoting the optimum extraction of the resource on the other. This dual role may be what helps create the impression that the agency generates inconsistent policies, which fishermen then must struggle to follow. We have to ensure that fisheries enforcement is even-handed and transparent. As I mentioned earlier, for years, we ignored complaints by New England fishermen that penalties were swifter and larger here than elsewhere and that they were conflicts of interest. This year, the Commerce Inspector General agreed. The Inspector General reported that the fisheries enforcement program had spent much of the recovered penalties on office vehicles. In fact, the program now had more cars than personnel. At a time when New England fishing families are struggling to make ends meet, hearing that excessive NOAA penalties were used to buy extra company cars was a bitter pill to swallow. Commerce is drafting a new penalty policy which can be commented on until December 20th. I hope this policy will rebuild confidence in the program. In addition, one-third of the fisheries office of law enforcement credit cards have been canceled to control extravagant purchasing and management of the asset forfeiture fund has been moved to the comptroller's office where it will be subject to more transparent accounting. These are critical first steps along the path to rebuilding trust. As I said at the outset, we're entering a new era in the New England fisheries. The post-2006 Magnuson era of catch limits. And to make sure catch limits don't deepen the divide between fishermen and fisheries managers, we must make sure regulators can nimbly respond to new catch assessments or other data. The advent of new technology like GPS permits a standard that can eliminate bycatch. Scientists and fishermen working together can rebuild confidence. Speeding up the bureaucracy can keep catch data current. There are grounds for optimism, but the weight of the past is a real burden and it will require a lot of hard work to find our way to that happy future. Thank you very much. Dennis! The situation with the melting of the ice and the fact that we're doing the research, the Healy spent some room doing the kind of research and support of 20% of jurisdiction. You think there can be enough of a discussion, a civil discussion in the Senate that would allow the parties to come together and actually let the United States get out of the club and include North Korea, Liberia, Somalia that have not yet adopted the convention? I think and I hope so. There is considerable pressure within the Senate to get the law of the C Treaty done. Chairman Kerry is very keen to get it done and has been pressing us in the caucus and with the majority leader to get it done. The problem has been that time is a very precious commodity in the Senate. To take a step back and explain that, everybody is familiar with what a filibuster is in the Senate. There's a way to close off a filibuster but it takes really six full days of Senate time to do so because you can filibuster the motion to proceed to the bill and you filibuster the bill again once you've proceeded to it so you get double filibuster on this stuff. So you burn six days of Senate time. And the transformation that has taken place in the Senate in very recent years has been the filibusters no longer used as a strategy to oppose a particular piece of legislation. It is used against every piece of legislation including legislation that the minority party supports because forcing the majority party to burn all those days shrinks our capability to do things and limits our reach and provides additional incentive to negotiate more with the minority party. So in that environment, to take up a treaty that is gonna burn potentially a lot of floor time has been the problem. I don't think there's ever been a concern that the votes aren't there at the end of the day but there is a small group of people who still believe that this is the end of civilized life as we know it and black helicopters delivering fluoridated water are going to propagate if we join the law of the sea, the Navy won't be able to leave its bases without the permission of the French and there's a whole kind of internet frenzy about the law of the sea and that leaves us with Somalia, North Korea and these other nations. An interesting transformation has taken place as a result of the unfortunate climate change consequences we are seeing and that is that the oil and extractive industries are starting to see promise up in the North where before those resources were unreachable and they're sensing competitive pressure from the Russians who might come up and begin to claim and drill and so the oil industry, which is a backer of some of the members who are most opposed to the law of the sea treaty is now in a position to I think put pressure on them to try to get it done because it's now industry backed as well, it's not just a national security and trade phenomenon, it's a national security trade and energy phenomenon and the energy industry is interested and all we need is for these people to say, look, we'll get up on the center floor, we'll give our speeches about how this is another sign of the end of time but we're not gonna burn enormous amounts of time on this, we will allow a vote, we'll move forward and I think that the oil industry ought to be able to deliver that from some of these members who are so closely affiliated with their interests, shall we say. So fingers crossed, we will get it done. The other thing is in the, with the Republican Congress, it's not clear that we'll get any legislation passed through both houses anyway, we'll have to see what their tone is. We're getting one set of tone which is no compromise, no surrender, we're not gonna let anything go through unless it's Tea Party approved, in which case it's not gonna happen but there are other people saying we gotta get to work and there are things that need to be done and maybe now there's room for compromise. Which way that shakes out, in any event be considerably less legislating done in the coming two years than in the past two years and that allows more of a window for start for law of the sea and for other things that have been held back by the pressure of legislative deeds. Peter. Senator, can you, Peter Schell from Conservation Law Foundation, can you speak at the next level down around the national endowment for the oceans which we think is a very important idea if you just elaborate a little bit on the value proposition for this endowment. The, it has very good support from the environmental union. There is beginning to be the beginnings of a pushback from extractive industries that are concerned that things like marine and coastal spatial planning will eliminate their unfettered ability to seek to drill wherever they please. I think that a calm discussion of that will lead, and particularly they become familiar with how very transparent the process is and how open the process is from making those marine spatial planning determinations. Frankly, a lot of it is determinations, just assessing information that you can draw conclusions from that information. Extractive industries might actually be better off with comprehensive coastal marine spatial planning. But they will know very quickly where good places are to locate rigs and drills versus places that are going to get in there. There's a lot of trouble with the fishing community or the shipping community with others and you've been sort of pre-sorted for them rather than having to have that fought out in every single sighting dispute. So that discussion is, I hope, one that we can calm people down on so that this wide support that we're getting is not met with opposition. It's sort of a distinctive opposition of some kind of theory. You support something until people have a look at it from a certain aspect of the business community. The value of proposition is that there is no real constituency for the ocean and if we're gonna take seriously the threats that are coming out of the ocean which have real effects on a whole wide variety of states that are beginning to come over roots to set up something so that this is done in an orderly fashion, makes a lot of sense and is in our national interest. And the dedicated funding stream, which is the core of the financial development, means that it's not a huge amount of money by federal standards for sure, but it becomes consistent, it becomes reliable. It means it can start to support long-term scientific studies as everybody knows, it was legal science. You start collecting your data set, you corrupt it, you compromise the whole data set. You wanna be able to develop it over time and have it stay meaningful. So, it's partially an appeal to senators and representatives who have significant industries that work will be adversely affected by the changes that are happening in the oceans. It's partly just, you know, the L.A. Mossner desire to do the right thing and I think to certain standards, it's a justifiable concern that we are at very grave risk of something going terribly wrong in our oceans. I mean, in geologic time, we have had oceanic die-offs that have just wiped out the entire biota of the oceans and they've had to kinda start to scratch and a whole new set of features grew. We sure don't want that to happen while we've got six plus billion of us on the planet getting a huge portion of our protein out of the oceans and we're playing pretty dangerously right now, particularly with ocean acidification effects. Ocean acidification creates an environment in which the many of the plant that are the base of the food chain are now asked to grow and succeed and multiply in an ocean that is a solvent of their shells and I don't care how big and strong, clever or phytoplankton you are, if the ocean is dissolving your shell, you have a very serious problem and we're already starting to see in various areas people are collecting these things and looking at these misshapen, undersized, degraded creatures and it's no big deal even though these things are until you realize that that's where everything else lives off of and it might crash and so we're gonna have a very, very significant perhaps Catholic problem right now. Yeah. I'm low on shit for a thank you to the email. What about judges, building judges? I'm sorry, those, I didn't see you right away. Yes, I did. Nice to see you again. It's a pleasure. I'm starting out the judges now as you know. What about judges? Are we gonna get any more through? I don't know, it's gonna be, there's a lot of recrimination on the issue of judges. We recriminate the Republicans from instructing judges. They recriminate us where the aluminum white house is not teamed up, a whole lot of judges and that we're behind for both of those reasons. The point that I mentioned earlier that the filibusters don't over-attacked for opposing a specific piece of legislation, but just for generally disabling the Senate as a body by burning up its ability to act by four weeks more time, also applies to judges. We over and over and over again are taking votes on certain court judges that we've had to go vote on and have them burn four time on and then the vote is 98 to zero. So clearly that was not a controversial judge and yet we had to go through the process associated with controversy to get to that option we voted 98 to zero on this judge. So in fact, the general desire to burn four time has affected the fact that maybe the fact will calm down a little bit and have the Republicans have to stop up in the house, and see what we might do and feel they need to stop everything that's going on in the Senate. We're also at a potential tipping point. The Supreme Court has always been a political battle over who gets on it. I mean, all the way back to slavery days when the South wanted to make sure who was on Supreme Court. That's really never changed. Recently, that's dribbled down to the circuit courts of the evil and it's now become SOP, that a circuit court nominee gives political fair game and if you think they're not politically that associated with your views, then you can do what you can do and if there's a fight and there's Bill Bustering and all that stuff. Or threats of Bill Bustering and all that stuff. That is where the point of really deciding on the amount of practice that's going to dribble into district court judges as well. And that position is probably going to be made during the lame duck when some judges including the local one come up and decide whether they will actually fill the state of the state district judge supported by both home state senators and it's clear to the background check and passed in a bipartisan fashion out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. If those three characteristics are in place and they're still willing to fill us on the floor, all deaths are off and at that point you have a complete scrum on even district judges. And it will come for a title for a while which makes it even worse. In my, okay, forget yours. Something that otherwise would be fine is then all jammed up. Yes. City of Magnus and Steven Zack question. As you know, in the last several years the guy father of Magnus and Steven Zack is no longer in the Senate about rest of these. And my question is, which members of the Senate do you see interested in, would like you to step into that vacuum which is an enormous one and play a leadership role in future changes to the act and what do you see their interest as? The powerhouses on this in the Senate are two women, Patty Murray and Olivia Sun. Oh, I'm sorry, Andrea Campbell. I'm afraid. Patty's a leadership in our process and has a very strong voice there and represents Washington. Berea is the chair of the Congress Committee Subcommittee on Fisheries. And Senator Snow is, I believe, a ranking member, is a very ranking member and is also a very strong voice on this in her own right, giving importance to many of its fishing industries. So, good guys, I think we're very, very capable because now together we've got a powerhouse crack. And I'm sort of kicking out the door and seeing if I can get my head in that club because I feel very strongly about this from the Brown Islands Ocean State point of view. And I also feel that there is an imbalance between what needs to be done and where powerful constituencies are just part of life. And if you go to the place where the imbalance is greatest between what needs to be done and where there's a constituency argue for it, boom, it's our oceans. And so I think it's kind of important that people respond to the alarms that we're seeing and try to end that off. So I guess we're going to be really, really good. You've got tons of them online. And you're out. It's kind of a fast game. It's a slightly off topic, but you brought it up twice. I don't have a second year here. Can I visualize? Congratulations. Thanks. That's right, first of all. I'm just curious if you support the Western Report or if you can see it as a practical thing without it having to see the Senate give me a punch. Yes. I think we do need to do something about the filibuster related that has been applied. There has been a complete sea change in the last few years. Not in the use of filibusters always been there, but in the one that's always been there long after that we said it's always been there. But in its application to noncontroversial measures and force, delay, time, burden. If I had to guess what the lightliest measure was, that we would change when we got back in January, it would be to change the rule so that a motion to proceed is automatic. And the majority of the year can't take the Senate to the bill. And if you then want filibuster it, okay. Because everybody has an interest on Monday, all of you in the minority, if I'm lucky enough, you don't have any time to go back and forth. And the logic of the Senate is that it's a place where the Congress has involved coffee with two cocktails in this all sort of voice. Pour it out, it's a damn thing mechanism for against the popular actions of the moment in the constitutional scheme of government. So it's frustrating when you're on the wrong end of that, but it's also a meritorious piece of the governmental architecture. The problem is that you don't need to filibuster a bill twice, once, slowly enough. So the motion to proceed, I think, is an area where even the people of the old garlic that have had to live through being in the minority would feel it is important to protect the minority. The institutionalists would view this as a part of the great structure of American governance. We'll say, okay, that may be a way to sort of dial it back so that they're more inclined to filibuster things if we're really objective of a bill rather than to say to bring some time in a general way. And on that note, thank you for watching.