 Good morning everybody, thank you for being here today. Welcome to the 10th Marine Law Symposium at the Roger Williams University School of Law. I am Julia Wyman, the director of the Marine Affairs Institute at Roger Williams University School of Law and the Rhode Island Sea Grant legal program. It's a great pleasure to have you here today for this wonderful program that we have planned. The Marine Affairs Institute is a partnership of the Roger Williams University School of Law, Rhode Island Sea Grant, and University of Rhode Island. We are based here at the law school right down the hall if you're interested in checking out our office. And through a partnership with Rhode Island Sea Grant, we are home of the Rhode Island Sea Grant legal program. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, funds the Sea Grant program, Sea Grant National Program, and every coastal state has a Sea Grant program. Of the 33 programs, there are four programs that have dedicated legal programs. We are the only one in the Northeast. That means for us, the Rhode Island Sea Grant legal program and Marine Affairs Institute, that we have the privilege of providing legal and policy research to Sea Grant programs throughout the Northeast. Our partnership with Rhode Island Sea Grant also enables us to have the Sea Grant Law Fellow program. The Law Fellow program matches second and third year law students with outside organizations that have a question of marine law or policy. The organizations get the research assistance that they need, and the students get valuable hands-on learning experience while they're here at the school. If you're interested in learning a little bit more about the Law Fellow program, please feel free to find me or our staff attorney, Reed Porter, who is the director of the Law Fellow program throughout the day. We also have some materials about the program outside on the tables near the stairs. Through our partnership with the University of Rhode Island, our students earn a JD and a master of marine affairs in just three and a half years. This broadens the students' education beyond just the world of law and exposes the students to more diverse ways of looking at marine affairs, incorporating more policy, science, and economics into their work. The joint degree creates well-rounded graduates that become practitioners that examine issues in a holistic manner. If you're interested in learning more about that program, please feel free to find me throughout the day or check out some of our materials outside. This is a big year for us at the Marine Affairs Institute this year. It's our 20th anniversary of the Institute, and this marks the 10th Marine Law Symposium. We are proud to have partnered this year on the symposium with the Roger Williams Law Review to bring you this program. Following the symposium, there will be a special edition of the Law Review that will be published with articles from several of the speakers here today, as well as other practitioners and students. If you're interested in ordering a copy of that, there is a sign-up sheet outside on the table. While we're talking about locations, a few housekeeping items. Out of these doors and to your left, you will find the restrooms. You will also find water fountains and water bubblers in an effort to reduce waste for today's event. We have not printed out a full program for you today. Rather, we have printed out an agenda. At the top of the agenda, you will find a link to find more materials about the program, including our speaker biographies. There is information on how to access Wi-Fi at the top of that agenda. We are recording today's program, so I ask that all speakers, as well as members from the audience asking questions, speak into the microphones. And while we're at it, please take a moment to silence your cell phones for the day. So in addition to our great law review partners, I'd like to thank a few folks and organizations that have made today a success. I would like to thank Dean Yolnowski and the School of Law for supporting the Institute and this program. Thank you to President Farish and the University for being so supportive of our Institute. Thank you to our partners, Rhode Island Sea Grant, particularly Dennis Nixon, and the University of Rhode Island. Thank you to our program committee. It's a large one. We definitely take our partnerships seriously. Michelle Carnivale, Tara Bolling, Dennis Nixon, Monica Allard Cox, Michael Daley, Jonathan Guttoff, Brett Hargedon, Jennifer McCann, Christopher McNally, Patrick O'Connor, Austin Carolyn, Reed Porter, Charlotte Ferris, Casey Charkowick, and Dennis Esposito. I'd like to say a special thank you for Dennis Esposito for not only serving on our program committee, but for conceiving of the idea of this symposium and combining it with the law review during his time as interim director of the Institute. Big thank you to the staff of Marina Ferris, Reed Porter and Charlotte Ferris, and also to the staff of program and events who really made this day possible, Chelsea Horn, Charlotte Ferris, and Alexa Giovannis. Finally, thank you to all of our wonderful speakers. We have a really great day today for everybody here in the audience. A particular thank you to Senator Whitehouse and Dr. Whitehouse for coming and keynoting this symposium. We're very lucky to have them here today. So this year, we decided to focus our symposium on a problem that poses a great threat to coastlines around the world, marine debris. Every year, derelict fishing gear, plastic bottles, plastic bags, cigarette butts, abandoned vessels, and other debris washes ashore throughout the world. The debris causes negative social, environmental, and economic impacts, such as decreased aesthetic value, harm to coastal ecosystem health, and damage to vessels. The challenges create complex management problems for coastal managers and attorneys. The challenges who work to create the creation of new debris as well as mitigate the problem of existing debris. We have focused today's program on New England to address this complex problem. Today, you will hear from national and local experts about how serious the threat of marine debris is. Some ways that we can innovatively as attorneys, practitioners, and educators work to address this problem. We will begin the morning with a look at the problem from a large national and international scale, and then we will hear some novel regional ideas and work on how to address this problem. It is our hope today that you not only learn from our wonderful speakers, but that we also learn from you. We have a very diverse audience that includes many nonprofit folks, many four-business individuals, government attorneys on the federal, state, and local level, as well as students from nine universities throughout the Northeast. I am particularly encouraged to see so many students sign up and come to this event, because this is a problem that truly is going to be yours to work with when you enter the workforce. So with that, I want to thank you once again for joining us here today. And I would like to introduce Michael Jolnowski, the dean of Roger Williams University School of Law. I also want to just welcome you all to Roger Williams University School of Law, where the sun always shines. I love all of our programs, but the Marine Affairs Institute has a special place in my heart for several reasons. First, it's a shining example of the good work that can be done when we collaborate with partners outside the law school and the university by leveraging the assets of these three entities that Julia talked about, Rhode Island Sea Grant, URI, and the law school and university. We can just do a lot more than we could ever do alone. The Institute also has a special place in my heart because it helps us attract some of our strongest students. And in fact, Aaron Bryant is here today, an alum of the law school who will be speaking this afternoon, and it makes my heart warm. It's great to see her back here. It has a special place in my heart because it's a great example of the power of experiential education, which is a hallmark of the Roger Williams University Law experience through the Sea Grant Law Fellow Program. As Julia mentioned, our students do real work for real clients involving real problems. And last night at the prequel dinner, several of those students presented the findings of their research to the group. And there are posters representing their work that are outside in the atrium. I hope you get a chance to look at them. So I would like to congratulate all of those who are involved in the Institute and their predecessors on the 20th anniversary of the Marine Affairs Institute. And I would be remiss if I didn't also give a special thanks to Dennis Nixon, who for some reason I can't see at the moment. There he is because he's right in front of me, who was there at the birth of this remarkable program and has been with us, supporting us, and leading us for 20 years. So thank you, Dennis. So thank you all so much for coming. We have, as you have heard, many things to celebrate. But what brings us here today is more sobering. This is another, as Julia mentioned, for those who follow, this is a problem that we're going to need you to solve. This is another part of our generation. You have a lot of things to do because we screwed them up. Good luck. You're prepared for it, though. I learned last night just how big and real this marine debris problem is. In fact, I think scientists are just starting to get a grip on how big it is. So I'm delighted that Julia and the law review and the planning committee decided and Dennis Esposito to focus on this very important issue. And I also want to give special thanks to Senator and Dr. Whitehouse for keynoting the program today. None of this would be possible without the support of the university and its great president, Dr. Donald Farrish. President Farrish is a driver and a supporter of innovation in undergraduate and graduate education. He has a special appreciation, I think, for the benefits of interdisciplinarity. He has a PhD in biology and a law degree, so he knows the kind of value that the Marine Affairs Institute brings to this problem. And it's my pleasure now to introduce Dr. Farrish. Thank you very much, Dean. It's truly a pleasure to have you here today. And I was thinking, as Julie and Michael were speaking, it's really worth standing back from this just a little bit because I recall when I was in grad school and doing a lot of basic research in the library, how common it was to read papers from the middle of the 19th century that were written by English clerics on their Wednesday afternoon off. They went tromping around the English countryside finding new species and writing it all up. And it was amateur science in those days. And what's happened in the last 150 to 200 years is we've become increasingly specialized. And in some senses, we needed to do that because in order to have a deep knowledge of anything, you have to spend a great deal of time focusing on it. But the problem is human understanding then becomes increasingly granular. And unless there's a way of tying those pieces back together again, it's a classic case of not seeing the forest for the trees. We all know, we're all individual tree specialists, but we have to get together to talk about how the trees fit together and make a forest. And this is an example of that kind of work being done. When I went to law school, it was motivated by the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency was in the process of being formed. This was back in the late 60s, early 70s. And I was keenly aware of the fact in some of the testimony going on because I knew some of the people that were testifying in Congress how disparate was the knowledge base? At the risk of over-generalizing, Congress was full of lawyers and the lawyers were full of political scientists and none of them knew much about science. And the willingness to engage in great work was not in question. It was the knowledge base. Similarly, the scientists knew a lot about what they were doing, but they couldn't speak legally to save their life. And so what was happening was, it was Greeks and Romans talking to each other and there was no common translator. So we've come a long way since those days. And this program that we have here at this university that combines marine affairs and the law school is a great example of how we connect legal education to something else. And I think what we're seeing increasingly is that the something else always becomes important because more and more of the problems that we're addressing in society need to be addressed by multiple experts at the same time who are finding some kind of common language. And that necessarily means that people are being cross-trained at some level. Rhode Island is singularly well positioned to do this. We're very proud, of course, of having the state's only law school. Therefore, by definition, the state's best law school. Or maybe it's the other way around. But anyway, we're very proud of that fact, but Rhode Island has the advantage of size. Size matters. In this case, small size matters because it allows us to bring together people quite easily. We're not separated geographically. Although in Rhode Island, people still think when you travel from Moonsocket to Newport, it requires an overnight bag and at least one meal. But the rest of the world thinks the state's pretty small. So this is great to be able to gather people and share information. We learn from each other. We strengthen our own position by listening to each other. It's just a wonderful thing to do. And I think Rhode Island in so many ways can be a national leader because it has the capacity to bring together the experts that are here in various fields and have them talk with each other and develop a more common understanding. So it's great to be here with you and I look forward to the talks today. I can stay just for the morning sessions, but I wish you well for the rest of the day. It is my pleasure, however, to introduce Sheldon Whitehouse. Senator Whitehouse is a great friend of this university. We see him on campus commonly. That's another great advantage of having a small state. When I lived in California, I understand there were two U.S. Senators. I never actually saw one of them, but here in Rhode Island, you know, we... Yeah, well, I heard that, Sheldon. That's just not true. We're always, you're always welcome on campus. So Senator Whitehouse is a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and that's a pretty important committee because it's where a great deal of the policy work and legislation addressing environmental protection and climate change is coming from. I don't think there's anyone, I think we all know this, there's no one in the U.S. Senate that is a more outspoken advocate on the issues of climate change than Senator Whitehouse. And at a time when there still are a lot of people in this country denying the existence of climate change, it's nice to know that Rhode Island has a full-throated advocate for what the rest of the world seems to take as a given, but somehow in this country, some people are still dubious about it. There are signs of life in Washington, D.C. I mean, it's not despite rumors to the contrary and so Senator Whitehouse has worked with both Republicans and Democrats to create what's called the Senate Oceans Caucus and this, fortunately, is something that a lot of people can agree on, that the problems of the ocean's pollution are things that do need to be addressed and policies can be developed with people finding some common cause, which is a scarce commodity in D.C. Senator Whitehouse is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Virginia Law School. He was prior to his current role, he was U.S. Attorney here in Rhode Island and then the state's Attorney General. He's here today along with his wife, Dr. Sandra Whitehouse and both of them are keynoting today and so the dueling Whitehouses will be up here shortly and we thank both of them for being here and we thank all of you for being here as well, so Senator Whitehouse. Moving all the electronics back where I can't touch them and wreck everything. Good morning. Thank you all so much for being here. This is a terrific discussion. I'm honored by the presence of President Farrish. Don, thank you so much. I love being here at Roger Williams University. It wasn't a round when I went to college, I didn't have the chance to go here but for those of you who do, it is a wonderful, wonderful gem of an institution and D.N. Yalmofsky, my particular favorite organization within this great university is the Law School and I applaud your leadership but thank you. Director Wyman used to work for me and now she's come back to Roger Williams University so that shows you how I stand in her priorities against Roger Williams but my loss was Roger Williams' gain and of course Dennis Nixon who runs our Sea Grant program is a wonderfully enthusiastic advocate for oceans issues and Ann Livingston who chairs our Coastal Resources Management Council has led that organization to truly national leadership on oceans planning issues and I'm just here to warm up the crowd for Sandra who is the real, the real star. I don't think I need to tell anybody here that our oceans and coasts need all the help they can get as Michael said, your generation of ocean champions is going to inherit a marine environment in crisis. Oceans have absorbed about a third of all of the excess carbon dioxide produced by humans since the Industrial Revolution, around 600 gigatons. When that carbon dioxide hits the ocean it reacts chemically and it acidifies the seawater. A recent article in Nature Geoscience found that the rate of change in ocean acidity is faster now than any other time in the past 50 million years. By way of context, Homo sapiens has been on the planet about 200,000 years so this is a big anomaly that we are seeing. By the end of the century, NOAA predicts the world's oceans and estuaries could become 150% more acidic than they are now. In addition to the carbon dioxide the oceans have absorbed they've also soaked up more than 90% of the excess heat that we have trapped in the atmosphere through our greenhouse gases. That is a lot of heat. A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change found that the oceans have absorbed as much energy since 1997, 20 years as to use the colorful analogy and description by the Associated Press a Hiroshima style bomb exploded every second in the oceans for 75 straight years. Like I said, that's a lot of heat and that excess energy is warming our oceans at alarming rates and by the law of thermal expansion coupled with the melting of ice sheets as the earth warms is causing sea levels to rise. New England is being hit particularly hard on both of those fronts. The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than almost any other part of the ocean throughout the world. Narragansett Bay has already seen a nearly four degree Fahrenheit increase in winter water temperatures since the 1960s and since our notable hurricane of 1938 sea level is up nearly 10 inches at Naval Station Newport. So when the next big one comes it's gonna do considerably more damage than the hurricane of 1938 did. Ocean acidification, warming seas and sea level rise portend real consequences for our fishermen, our coastal communities and our saltwater ecosystem. But unfortunately they are not the only impact of the hand of mankind on the oceans. Marine plastic debris has merged as one of the most troubling issues of the 21st century. Though some of my colleagues as President Farage pointed out may deny in DC that man has any hand in causing climate change or even that climate change exists there is no denying our role in the startling amount of plastic trash that now swirls in our oceans and litters our coasts. Newport last year hosted a stop of one of the most dangerous and demanding sporting events on the planet the Volvo Ocean Race. The sailing racers had traveled the world, they reported an ocean so strewn with debris that they had to do regular checks for garbage fouled on their keels slowing down the performance of their high speed boats. Even in the far away South Atlantic thousands of miles from shore. Man overboard drills are a long standing routine for sailors, keel clearing drills are a novelty. This new sad symptom of our despoliation of the seas was highlighted in an ocean summit on marine debris during the Volvo Ocean Race visit led by Rhode Island Sea Grant director Dennis Nixon. A 2015 paper in science found that each year eight million metric tons of plastic waste enters the oceans. Dr. Jenna Jambeck of the University of Georgia the lead author of that study equates that to five grocery bags of plastic for every foot of coastline every year. A report released earlier this year by the World Economic Forum predicts that unless our habits change the mass of plastic waste in the oceans will outweigh the biomass of living fish in the oceans by 2050. And plastic waste is not benign as it floats about. A study across 80 species of seabirds found that in 2014 90% of individual birds had plastic in their bellies. The sad story of albatross is an isolated midway at all. Slowly starving their chicks by feeding them discarded lighters and other plastic junk they picked up mistaken for food. And the ghastly photos of dead birds with stomachs packed full of bottle caps and plastic fragments have traveled far from midway at all and lent poignant imagery to the consequences of marine debris. This week in Newport a film called A Plastic Ocean was shown by Newport Film which has even more horrifying imagery of sheer water chicks that are unable to fly because their bellies are so filled with plastic that they're beyond their lift capacity and they die of starvation with their bellies bulging with waste plastic. Birds aren't the only victims. Thirteen sperm whales beached themselves on the German coast in January and plastic was in their stomachs. A 43 foot long shrimp fishing net and a large piece of a plastic car engine cover included. Leatherback turtles have stomachs full of plastic bags which are easily mistaken for the jellyfish on which they feed. These animals suffered digestive blockage and slow death. Scientists have documented harmful plastic interactions in nearly 700 marine species. Turtles, porpoises and manatees drown or starve in entanglements with derelict fishing gear and other debris. Sharks are common victims as most shark species must move in order to breathe and once they're entangled there's no more moving. In September the New England Aquarium reported an increasing number of right whales dying each year due to entanglements and that very month two endangered right whales were found dead off the coast of Maine entangled in fishing gear. There are only 500 right whales left. Plastics really only came into widespread use around 70 years ago. Plastic is now 70 years later in every corner of the marine environment from sandy beaches on far away islands to arctic ice cores to ocean gyres in the far away Pacific. There's one more thing. Through wave action and UV exposure under the sun plastics in the ocean continually break down. They don't biodegrade. They break down into smaller and smaller pieces some so small that they are consumed by the microscopic creatures at the bottom of the ocean food chain. Scientists are working hard to understand what this means for the marine food web and for the humans who rely on the oceans for their protein. We have learned where much of the plastic waste enters our oceans. A report from Ocean Conservancy and its partners showed that upland waste collection failures mostly in Asia put much of this plastic waste out to sea. Our international laws are not yet focused on the land-based pollution of our oceans. We have international treaties to address ship-based dumping of garbage and pollutants but none to require the proper handling of waste on land to prevent the inevitable flow to the sea. The Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement was a missed opportunity in this regard. Our trade strategy in those negotiations focused on strengthening some existing environmental treaties. Without an environmental treaty already in place on marine debris, marine debris was completely overlooked. Although the United States is not a top contributor of plastic to the oceans directly, our companies make a lot of it. And as the world's economic powerhouse, our trade practices and treaties can make a big difference. So we will be fighting hard to make sure this issue gets raised before any TPP can go into effect. In the Senate, Environment and Public Works Committee, there's a Fisheries, Water and Wildlife Subcommittee. And this year, we held a hearing on marine debris. Now, Republicans and Democrats on the Environment and Public Works Committee rarely see eye-to-eye on much. But our marine debris hearing was a truly bipartisan undertaking. People not even on the subcommittee from the committee came to participate and every senator was positive about moving forward and getting something done, including, believe it or not, the legendary Jim Inhofe of Snowball fame. I've never seen on my side of an environmental issue, but who spoke rhapsodically about guarding the Texas coast as a young man from hooligans driving along in jeeps that would crush the little turtles as they tried to make their way to the sea. Who knew? So, there's a sign of hope. Note that the testimony there, perhaps the ameliorating effect was that of the testimony of Rhode Island's own Jonathan Stone, who is here. The Senate also has a bipartisan oceans caucus, now up to 30 members, committed to solving some of the biggest issues facing our oceans. The first issue we chose to take on was pirate fishing and we achieved every single one of our goals, including clearing four treaties in an afternoon. At the pace the Senate works to go back through the previous four treaties that were cleared, you'd have to spend nine years of Senate activity. So it was a good afternoon in the Senate and a sign that the oceans caucus is working. Our next issue is marine plastic debris. We are looking at ways to improve waste disposal infrastructure in developing countries, at research and development of innovative materials that actually biodegrade in the sea, at facilitating beach cleanups. We heard from, in Rhode Island, we think of beach cleanups as people walking along the beach with trash bags, picking up cigarette butts and bits of plastic that have washed ashore. In Alaska, which reaches up into the Pacific like a strainer and catches enormous amounts of waste that come from the Pacific, they see as much as three tons of waste per mile of coastline. So for them, it's quite an enterprise to go about a beach cleanup. It's a, how do you get bulldozers in their operation? So that's the topic we are looking at. We are looking at programs for disposing of gear and collecting derelict nets and traps. We do not expect there is a single solution that will be the answer to the marine debris problem, and we're looking to build an all of the above approach that can do our best to curtail the flow of plastic garbage into the sea. Let me close my remarks with two ideas that I think the oceans community should get behind. One is an advanced research projects agency for the oceans. There is an ARPA-E, Research Projects Agency for Energy that has been enormously successful. ARPA-E was itself modeled on DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has also been spectacularly successful. And ARPA-O could be an important focus for developing advanced oceans technologies. I envision an agency that could develop accurate and cost effective sensors that can be used by scientists and fishermen in cooperative research, drones, gliders, and other autonomous vehicles to help us enforce fishing regulations on the high seas, plastic alternatives that would actually biodegrade in the oceans, and of course, I envision an agency that could accomplish things that I can't even envision. The second idea is a national permanent fund for coasts and oceans. The United States has more territory under salt water than it has on dry land. Yet, efforts to protect oceans and coasts by comparison to upland funding are severely underfunded. I'll give you an example. Just one grant program received 132 qualified applications, requesting a total of $105 million, and the program had $4.5 million to give out. 4% of the need. And that's just for that one grant. NOAA's Marine Debris Program, Keith is here who runs that program. NOAA's Marine Debris Program currently operates on a budget of only $6 million. With this project in front of us, NOAA has $6 million to work on this issue. Our understanding of the ocean has advanced greatly in the past century, but as anyone who has lived on or worked on the ocean knows, the rate of change in multiple areas is accelerating and research struggles to keep pace. There's been some progress. In December, I was successful in passing the National Oceans and Coastal Security Act, which authorized for the first time a dedicated fund for oceans research, restoration, and education grants. But now we need to fund it. And I'd like to see it funded on par with the Land and Water Conservation Fund to ensure that our oceans and coasts are receiving the same attention and investment as our upland and freshwater resources. Momentum is building around the globe to take real action to protect and preserve our oceans. At the Our Ocean Conference, hosted by Secretary of State John Kerry, representatives from more than 90 countries came together in Washington, D.C. to pledge well over $5 billion in new commitments to conserve ocean and coastal resources and more than 50 new marine protected areas. Over a billion dollars of those pledges were focused on combating marine debris. So the resources will be getting better, which is good because we must act now if we have any hope of beating back the flood of plastics entering our oceans each year. I promise to continue working hard in Washington for our oceans and coasts, and I'm grateful for your work in supporting these endeavors as well. And now, am I doing Q&A or am I moving on? Okay, I can take a couple of questions or comments. This is Rhode Island. Welcome to those of you who are not from Rhode Island. We do questions, comments, rudermarks, all of it. As President Farrish said, you gotta beat the senators away like flies in a small state like Rhode Island or everywhere. So I'm happy to take a question or two and then I'll yield the podium to the brains of the operation. My wife, Sandra Carly. Julie, you're keeping the clock. Thank you very much, Sheldon. Especially a thank you for the work that you've been doing in Washington to see that sort of collaboration is extraordinary, as you pointed out, and given the political climate right now, it's extremely refreshing. Can you elaborate a little bit more about the million dollar resource allocation from marine debris and what mechanisms are being explored to obtain it and distribute it, and what are some of the goals attached to it? The Our Oceans Conference is a forum for, among other things, pursuing and acknowledging can be made. So it's not just exchange of information, but there's a deliverable at the end of it. From the participating nations, the most desired deliverable was new marine protected areas, and they announced, like I said, I think about 50 of them at the Our Oceans Conference. From the NGO community that was present, they were asking for what money commitments can you make to invest in oceans research and oceans protection and so forth. And that is the context in which the $5 billion was raised. I think the biggest was Julie Packard of the Packard Foundation with $500 million, but they spacked up many, many, many, many such pledges to that point where it hit $5 billion. It's not clear yet how to apply for it. There's no single point of entrance. I hope that as the different programs that made the pledges make their pledges good, they'll announce how to get access to those funds. And with any luck, I'm hoping that Our Oceans will take responsibility for having a gateway, internet gateway that gets you through to be able to apply for those pledges and keeps everybody up to date on which ones have basically gone live and been funded and are now suitable for application and which ones are still sorting out the RFP or RFQ type thing. So that's a work in progress. But I do believe that through the Our Oceans conference would be the best way to try to network into that. And then, of course, some of the major groups that play in this space, like Ocean Conservancy and Oceana and so forth, they'll be watching this very closely all the time. And yours. Senator, great to see you again. I'm really intrigued with ARPA. Oh, as I understand it now, DARPA's budget is funded through the Department of Defense and ARPA-E is through the Department of Energy. Are you envisioning the ARPA-O would be a new line or a plus up in the NOAA budget? Is that where you envision this agency would sit? That's one option. We are exploring a variety of options to see what is the most satisfactory way to go about it. We're also considering those options in light of what I think is a administrative, baked in structural underappreciation of the oceans in the way that the federal government has organized. The story is that years ago, President Nixon wanted to have a Department of Ocean. We had oceans, it was Earth Day, and they started the EPA and the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, it was kind of the environmental surge of the 70s, and because of the trouble that the President was in, his cabinet was under pressure as to whether to stand by him or throw him under the bus. And the Secretary of Interior had evidently done things that he considered have been throwing him under the bus. And so when it came in that there would, whether it's gonna be Department of Interior or the oceans or whatever they're gonna call it, he said to hell with that, we're not giving that SOB any new turf or jurisdiction at all, stuff it someplace else. And supposedly that's the backstory for how NOAA ended up in commerce. Why there's a Department of Interior that focuses entirely, virtually entirely on uplands and is customarily run by Western senators and Western appointees, and so little for oceans. We're buried as a smaller subset than the space program of NOAA within NOAA is something that I think we need to kind of figure out how to structurally balance. So it's not clear where our PO would go. It could well stand as a semi-independent agency with Office of Naval Research, NOAA and other groups working together. One thing we've talked to the Secretary of Energy about is to have it incubate in DARPA or in ARPA-E for a while until it kind of found its legs and then you pop it out into a different oversight mode. But the challenge of figuring out where to locate it is the challenge of bad governance in the United States government structure for oceans. It is preposterous that when oceans and coasts are so important to our economy and more and more people are moving to the coast and more and more of our economy is from the coast and climate change is a quadruple threat on the coast. You get all the terrestrial stuff, plus you get ocean warming, plus you get sea level rise, plus you get acidification. The idea that oceans is buried down in the Department of Commerce and upland and freshwater gets its own full-blown cabinet department, doesn't make sense any longer and we've got to figure out how to fix that. Thank you all very much and now having warmed you up suitably, you will have the brains of the operation, as I said. Thank you, Senator. Thank you very much, Senator Whitehouse. It was a wonderful introduction to our day and I think it will make many of our students in this room understand just how lucky they are to be here today. I now have the pleasure of introducing the other half of Team Whitehouse, Dr. Sandra Whitehouse, who's a Senior Policy Advisor for Ocean Conservancy. Dr. Whitehouse is a consultant who served for over 20 years as the Ocean Policy Advisor to multiple organizations and institutions using her marine science expertise to advise clients on a variety of issues, including how to advance ocean health and sustainably develop coastal and offshore projects. She has served on the boards of Save the Bay, the Nature Conservancy's Rhode Island Chapter, the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting, the Equinic Land Trust, Grow Smart Rhode Island, and the Consortium for Ocean Leadership and presently sits on the advisory board for the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island and the National Center for Science Education. Dr. Whitehouse holds a BS from Yale University and a PhD in Biological Oceanography from the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. It's my great pleasure to introduce Dr. Whitehouse. So thank you. First of all, just a quick disclaimer. I did not know Sheldon at Yale. I was hanging out in the science library and he was hanging out, well, let's say, in other places, so there may have been beer. And also, too, Sheldon has already acknowledged our hosts and a number of the people that both of us have worked with over the years on ocean issues, so I can just say ditto to that, thank you. And before I begin, I'd also like to just do a shout out for 11th Hour Racing that has funded some of our work at the Ocean Conservancy on solving the ocean plastic problem. So, I'm just, okay, that particular button isn't working, so I'll try this one. Okay, so we know that there's been a dramatic increase in worldwide plastic production since it was first developed in the 1950s. I don't know if any of you have seen the movie The Graduate, but the young Dustin Hoffman is advised by his career mentor that the future is in plastics. And certainly, there has been a dramatic increase in plastic production since then. Part of the reason for that is that plastic has some utility, and I think, you know, while we certainly don't want plastic to end up in the ocean, we have to recognize that it does have some usefulness. If we look at agricultural film, it's being used in a lot of developing countries. It actually makes the, I don't know why this is jumping around. It actually makes the water efficiency increased by 30%. It helps countries where they're having a difficult time growing enough food for their population to meet that demand. There's also plastic that's used for in like in these little water sachets where villages and children who'd never had access to clean water before now have access. So I don't think that we can forget that there is some utility for human health and agricultural purposes as we think about solving the problem. The issue that we have is when plastic gets in the ocean. And as Sheldon said, you know, we know that plastic persists for hundreds of years. We also know that it fragments into these smaller and smaller pieces. We also know now that 80% of that plastic is actually coming from land and not from sea-based sources. But if we just look at that 20% that is coming from the sea, some of it's coming from direct dumping. This is worldwide. This is, you know, less in the United States. We know that there's fishing gear loss that we would like to try to prevent. And there's also quite a bit of plastic that comes from containers that fall over at sea and then plastic is put in the ocean. What we really wanna talk about today is this concept of leakage or ocean or plastic coming off of the land because that's really a full 80% of the problem. And some of that is where it's just dumped directly into waterways. Some of it are illegal dumps on where it's being taken just dumped on the beach. Sometimes it's from uncovered landfills where rain is washing the plastic into the waterways. I'm sorry, this is advancing without my touching anything, but I think I'll just go ahead and make do unless you can fix it. Okay, it's all right. And then some of it is coming from natural disasters like the horrible tsunami in Japan. And Asheldon also said, we know now from Jan O'Jambeck's paper that eight million metric tons are getting into the ocean on an annual basis. If further information in that paper actually allows us to dig deeper into, there were about 50 countries that were analyzed. And what we can see is country by country, how that problem originates. So in Sweden, and I was there two summers ago visiting friends in somebody's kitchen, there's like five different bins for different types of waste, whether it's plastic or glass or cardboard or organic. They're really culturally used to addressing their waste management issues. But there, even though about 1.6 kilograms are generated per day per person, first of all, only about 3% of that is plastic. They're not, things aren't packaged as much as they are here. The important thing is that of the waste that's generated, almost a full 99% is properly managed. It gets to a landfill, it gets recycled. So a tiny portion per capita per year is actually getting into the ocean. In the Philippines, it's a very different scenario. While they're producing only about a third as much waste per day, only about 19% of it is properly managed, and therefore a lot more of it is actually sort of leaking into the ocean. So we can do this on a country by country basis, which is why we now know that the plastic leakage is very geographically concentrated, to echo what Sheldon said in these Asian countries. And we don't wanna be pointing the finger at these countries. We really have to recognize this is an unintended consequence of rapid economic development. People are buying more products. They are, a lot more of these products are plastic. It's just that the waste management infrastructure hasn't kept up with the pace of economic growth and people having access to these products. So Sheldon used the number that by 2050, there'd be one ton of plastic for every ton of finfish. A lot sooner than that by 2025, that number will be one ton of plastic for every three tons of finfish, which is still a frightening prospect. So where is this plastic ending up? Well, we know it ends up on our beaches. We see that even here in New England. If you travel to places like Indonesia where I was last year, it's even more dramatic. I'm not gonna, I won't worry about it. We also know that some plastic is found floating in the ocean and especially a year ago, there was sort of a lot of talk about these specific garbage patches. And if you go out there and take a water sample, you can actually see that there are places where there is a lot of plastic floating there. However, worldwide, less than 3% of the plastic that's in our oceans is actually in any of these garbage patches. This is a picture from the middle of the Pacific Garbage Patch. There is not a floating island the size of Texas of plastic that people have described, no offense, in the media. If that were the case, we'd be able to just go and it would be great, we could tow it to shore and properly dispose of it, but that is not the case. We also know that plastic is found in Arctic sea ice as the ice freezes. It incorporates whatever plastic particles are in the water. We also know that because Arctic ice is melting at a much more rapid pace, a lot of the plastic that's been incorporated over the last 50 years is now being released back into the ocean. And then we see plastic really on the sea floor of the ocean throughout the world in shallow estuaries down to the deepest sea trenches. So what are the impacts of this plastic? Well, we've already heard about the impacts on birds, which are really just heartbreaking. We also know that fish are ingesting plastic and a study actually just came out that Ocean Conservancy helped facilitate where we went into fish markets in both Indonesia and the United States and actually took fish or in the market and analyzed their stomachs for plastic. A full 25% of those fish had plastic particles in their stomach. What we're just starting to learn though is what the impacts of that plastic in the fish bellies might be. We know now that some fish will incorporate the pollutants that are either adhered to or part of the plastic into their flesh. We don't know whether people who eat that fish will also be subjected to having those pollutants stay in their bodies. We had mercury when I was younger as sort of a bioaccumulation scare. We're just starting to learn what, if any, bioaccumulation might be associated with plastic and the food that we eat. We also know that, sorry, the tiniest creatures in the ocean, this is a little zooplankton just barely visible to the naked eye are eating their filter feeders. They're eating these smallest pieces of plastic unwittingly. And then of course, we're all aware of the tragic consequences of entanglement and certainly losing two of the right whales is really a sad tale. We also know that there's human health impacts. We haven't really quantified them yet but clearly this is not a healthy situation. We know that there's human safety impacts. A river like this in a developing part of the world is not gonna flush when there's a large rain. There'll be a little exasperate flooding. And then of course there's all kinds of disease as associated with that, cholera and other things. We also know that there are economic impacts. Derelict fishing gear, which we call ghost fishing gear is still fishing and those fish will never come to market. We know that there's dollars being lost to tourism when a beach is too polluted for someone to wanna go there and then there's damage to vessels from entanglement of the props. So what are the solutions? Well, we know that we need to focus on these top five countries because a full 60% of the leakage from land is coming from these countries. So again, that's why Ocean Conservancy has done really a deep dive into these countries to look at the waste cycle. And this is just a depiction of the waste cycle. Ideally you want a piece of plastic garbage to be collected in the home, taken within a garbage truck, not sent to an open dump, but go to a properly managed and sanitary landfill. But there's all these different pathways for leakage. In some places, especially in China, a lot of the path is just direct littering. And again, littering sort of has a bad connotation in our society. You have to understand that people, the elderly woman who's living in a village in China, she's always thrown her trash into the stream. In the past, the trash was the leaf that she ate her, her bowl of her rice in the morning on. Now it's plastic. So we really need to look at every single possible leakage pathway, which is shown in the yellow arrows. So we've done this, and I'm just gonna show you one example of the Philippines. In the Philippines, what we found is that the plastic was actually being collected. It was getting into the garbage truck. The problem is that there's a lot of illegal dumping because the tipping fees are quite high. And then a lot of waste is actually just going to an open dump, which is, and then it's either flowing into or blowing into the ocean. We also have done some work this year to look at the money trail and where development finance investment is going. This is just a quick overview, but basically only a less than 1% of all of the finance from the World Bank, the African Development Bank, all of these big financial institutions, less than 1% is going to solid waste management worldwide. When we look at it in terms of a dollar basis, it's about a quarter per person per year. And that is really a place where we are working with the G7. We're working with the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Group to try to get more investment to go towards waste management infrastructure. And just to sort of go back in time, I'd like to make the point that we can do this. This is a picture from a drawing from colonial times when people were basically just dumping their storage out the window. That was how it started until people started getting a little gnarly. Then they started spreading it on the fields. That worked for a while as populations started to grow. Then they started building collection and the storage infrastructure that we have in places like Providence from over 100 years ago. Now we're building tertiary treatment plants that are much more high-tech, but we've really invested in this because storage into our waterways was a big problem. And Save the Bay was really instrumental in helping fix this in Narragansett Bay not that long ago. I mean, I was working on it, I guess it was a while ago. But anyway, my point is that if we as a society recognize a problem, we can be the action that drives the decision makers to invest in fixing the problem. And I think we already have good waste management here in the United States, but we really need to also help our other developing countries to get some resources to solve the problem. And the solution, we know that reducing leakage is one of the sort of the biggest levers that we can push in terms of solving this. This, the picture on the left is actually an open dump in the Philippines, right on the beach. Ideally, we'd like really properly managed landfills to be built, but in some cases, a really cheap, quick fix is just to build a fence around it so that it's not directly washing into the ocean. We also wanna make sure that we can develop markets for what we call low value plastics. In much of the developing world, there's already a pretty good market for recycling high value, mostly the PET water bottles. And part of that is because the informal sector are collecting them and they can make a day's living by bringing those bottles to a recycling facility. It's this thin film plastic like the agricultural films and a lot of food packaging that there is no market for yet. So trying to find a market and develop markets for that low value plastic is also gonna be very important. You know, we also don't want to forget that increasing recycling, we can still do more of that. We can still do more composting. We know that there's solutions. The facial scrub that has microbeads in it. We shouldn't be buying that. We won't be soon. This apple package, I actually took this picture at a supermarket and really we need to package apples with plastic on a styrofoam tray. I mean, that's just, it doesn't make any sense. And then of course you can all bring your reusable bag to the market and not have to use a plastic bag. Here in the United States, just this past year, we did pass a piece of legislation to ban microbeads, which is a great step forward. Microbeads are not an enormous part of the problem, but it was a very important educational tool to get people's attention about plastic. And certainly, it's really impossible to justify why we need to have plastic on our, you know, in our facial scrubs. And just in conclusion, what we're doing at the Ocean Conservancy, we really are involved in two major efforts. One is we've created this group called the Trash Rease Alliance, where we have not only environmental partners, we also have major corporations. We are also working very closely with organizations like Dow Chemical, one of the largest producers of plastic. We have been criticized by some of our colleagues for that. You know, our philosophy is that a corporation that wants to be part of the solution and is a big part of the problem, we should definitely be working with them. And then we have our signature program, the International Coastal Cleanup, which I know some of you have either supervised or participated in. This is a worldwide program. We've had it for 30 years. This past September, we had over 850,000 people worldwide on a single day do a beach cleanup. I was in Havana, which is where this picture was taken. This was the first cleanup that we had done as part of the International Coastal Cleanup in Cuba. So it was really a great start to working with the Cuban government to address. They're talking about the tourist tsunami that's coming that they're expecting from the American tourists. And with that is gonna come a lot more plastic waste. So this was an important, very early step to get at how we can get out in front of the plastic problem in a developing country. Because really, ultimately, none of us wanna see this kind of image. We wanna see this. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Whitehouse. We have a couple of moments, just a couple, if there are some questions from the audience. I think we have a runner this time. So we need to get this to Judge Miller. Dr. Whitehouse, besides the discussion of policy makers addressing the sourcing of the debris, are policy makers talking about how to solve the problem besides the international cleanup? What policy decision makers are talking about? What are they saying regarding the existing mess that's in the oceans and how we address that enormous problem? Well, I will tell you that, I mean, there are some organizations that are out there trying to pick up or clean up what's already in the ocean. Really, part of the problem is that, one, we don't really know where it all is. And two, a lot of it is probably already on the sea floor. And that, we're not gonna be able to pick that up. I mean, we are really addressing more, we wanna reduce plastic going into the ocean. We don't wanna be picking it up after it's already in the ocean. We wanna prevent it from getting into the ocean. And that's why we've really been working on the international level with APEC, with the G7, with the G20, with the World Bank. We, you know, Ocean Conservancy's gone about this in sort of, in a very thoughtful way to figure out where the problem's coming from. We know it's land leakage. Where, particularly, which countries do we need to start with? And what are their biggest challenges? And quite frankly, their biggest challenges are money. And because this is a worldwide problem, if we can get some of these big financial institutions to be willing to make loans to these countries for improving the waste management infrastructure, we think that that's a really important way to affect change. You know, we're also, we continue to advocate for having plastics be re-engineered so they are truly biodegradable to have more recycling. But when you look at the rapid increase in plastic, and we've seen country by country how this has happened, we know that we need to address the waste management. And right now, that picture shows that the biggest leakage is coming from the Asian countries. We know, just looking at economic development worldwide, that the next big pulse is gonna be from Western Africa because those countries are also starting to rapidly develop. So if we can try to work with African banks to make sure that they have money available for waste management, we hope we can get out a little bit further ahead of the problem in those countries. Thank you for coming. My question has to do with extended producer and manufacturer responsibility. We've worked on this issue a lot, and in our view that's kind of the holy grail of plastic pollution reduction and prevention. So can you talk a little bit about the challenges that you've seen with those issues? Okay, well, I'm not a lawyer. So I might not be, I'm a mooting violator, so I might not be the best person to answer that. I mean, I think there are some efforts in that space. I think this sort of gets at, can something be made mandatory or can it be done voluntarily? At Ocean Conservancy, our approach has been to try to get as many of these companies to be part of our working group and really work on the solutions, which for many of those companies means greater corporate responsibility towards solving this problem, not only sitting around the table and trying to figure out what research needs to be done, but how they're going to change their individual practices. We've also worked very hard to get ocean plastic into the whole debate of corporate social responsibility. Really a lot of corporations, rightly so, are focusing a lot of their energy on carbon reduction, but we are also trying to say, look, ocean plastic is a worldwide problem. It needs to be part of your CSR package. And also one more shout out to Roger Williams for not using plastic bottles today. Well, let's thank our two keynotes, Senator Whitehouse and Dr. Whitehouse one more time. Thank you.