https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=wE29TM_YtR0
Special privilege it is for me to welcome all of you to Finn’s first event, the Sidon’s Illusion, challenging the way we see marine sustainability. It’s also my great pleasure to welcome our two speakers this evening, Dr. Arthur Hansen and Dr. Jordan Peterson. I’ll be speaking a little bit more about each of these gentlemen later on in the program, but what I would like to say now is from my experience working with Dr. Peterson and from what I’ve seen and heard about Dr. Arthur Hansen, these are two true renaissance men and we are very excited to have them here this evening. So before I get to our speakers, I’m going to tell you a little bit about Finn. Finn is not your conventional environmental organization. All of our executive members have a background in psychology as opposed to engineering, environmental studies or biology. Now this leads to some special benefits that we have. I’m going to tell you about three different, well the special benefits are that we can use our knowledge of the brain, emotion and behavior to develop innovative angles on how to publicize the problem of marine life decimation. So I’m going to tell you about three different psychological concepts that we’ve tried to integrate into our advertising over the past couple months. So the first is that images of cute animals induce positive emotion and narrow attentional focus. That’s probably not what you were expecting to see. Fred the fish doesn’t quite do it for you, does he? So we had to be a little bit creative, we had to approach this problem that fish and their appearance don’t really draw that fuzzy emotion from you that you really want to help them out. That’s probably a lot better. So we took the approach that, I don’t know if any of you have pets, but you know that when their food bowl is full, they’re pretty happy. Now if you take that food away, like for example if fish were to suddenly be gone, which is one of their food sources, not so happy. Now you add a slogan to it and there you go, that’s one of our first advertisements. So the second concept that I’m going to go over is one that we’ve actually borrowed from social psychology research. And that’s something that’s called the door in the face technique. So the gist of this technique is that you initially make a large request from an individual that’s probably going to be shut down. That’s probably going to be the answer that you’re going to get. So then you follow up this request with a much smaller, more reasonable one. Of course they’re going to come. So the reasoning behind that is that an individual is more likely to agree to the second more reasonable request when it is preceded by an outlandish one, versus had it been asked on its own. So the final concept that I’m going to go over, it’s going to require a little bit of background knowledge, which I’m going to discuss. It’s an angle that we decide to take about the health benefits that you receive when you ingest fish or possibly fish oil. Now I imagine that many of you know who this is. This is Sai. He’s best known for his dancing Gangnam style. If you don’t know him, you can ask your students on Monday or potentially your children tonight. They’re very familiar with him. So Gangnam style is essentially, well it refers to a district in Seoul, South Korea. And the people who live there, they have a very affluent lifestyle. And they achieve this wealth pretty much overnight. They didn’t exactly have to work for it. So because of this, it’s often related to this aphorism. With great power comes great responsibility. Because of the fact that they didn’t have to work for their wealth and it came overnight, they don’t really have a sense of their social responsibility. So we decided to take this and relate it to fish. When it comes to eating fish, we’re all living Gangnam style. Basically what this means is that we were born into a world that has oceans that were full of this great resource. We were rich with fish. But because of this, we didn’t really develop at the same time that sense of responsibility that we have to maintain our oceans and maintain their sustainability. So now to the psychological concept. This aphorism that we decided to use, it wasn’t enough. We wanted to take it one step further. That’s what we’re always doing. We’re really, really pushing. So when you eat fish, it helps with early brain development and the prevention or treatment of brain related problems. So again referring to the food chain like we did before, how cats they eat fish, we had to think, who really wants a good healthy brain? Zombies. Zombies eat brains. And they want them to be good as opposed to unhealthy. And we’re lucky because in Toronto we have a lot of zombies. So you add that to the fact that people like to dance Gangnam style. And now just to summarize and make sure that you’re following me, we have zombies who need good brains and because of that they need fish. You add that to dancing Gangnam style. You add that to the aphorism that we developed about fish and how we’re all living Gangnam style. And the next logical progression that we were going to do, zombies dancing Gangnam style wearing fish shirts with the catchphrase at the end. Now you’d be surprised to know that we were actually beaten to the punch. There is already a zombie that dances Gangnam style and he does a pretty good Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley as well. So we had to pitch this idea. But on a serious note, this truly has been one of the most rewarding but challenging projects I have had the opportunity to work on. You soon learn that one tenth of the battle is pulling together the correct data. The rest is communication and finding ways to make people listen. Something that I quickly learned while growing up and trying to get my parents to see things my way is that everyone has a different perspective and way of communicating. Though we all may speak a particular language, when it comes to explaining a problem or inspiring action, different things make sense and push different people. For some it is art such as image or dance. For others it is an equation or a graph. For some it is comedy and even others reading and logic. It is Finn’s goal to use all of these mediums to raise public awareness about the decimation of marine life. Then, with the help of every believer, we want to inspire change in Canada’s ocean management policy. Now this is something that we do not plan to do by ourselves either. We hope to create links not only between departments within the University of Toronto but also between all forms of post-secondary institutions across Canada. The arts and design schools as well as science and research institutions. In this way we can reach out not only to communities geographically across Canada but also to the communities of like-minded reasoning. So on that note, I would like to introduce now our first speaker, Dr. Jordan Peterson. He earned his PhD in psychology at McGill University and following his post-doctoral fellowship at McGill’s Douglas Hospital served as a professor of psychology at Harvard. Four years later he came to the University of Toronto where he is a professor with two main areas of study, the psychology of belief and the assessment and improvement of personality. His work has been supported by all three of the main Canadian granting agencies as well as the Rotman Business School Centre for Integrative Thinking. He has authored and co-authored over 70 scientific articles including one book, Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief and soon to be a second, 42. Dr. Peterson holds multiple Order and Teaching Awards including a nomination for the Levinson Teaching Prize at Harvard in 1998 and nominations by TVO as one of Ontario’s best university lectures each year from 2005 to 2008. In addition to his clinical practice, Dr. Peterson serves as a business consultant, an executive coach for senior partners of large law firms in Toronto and is the vice president of a personality assessment and remediation company. He’s also a frequent guest panelist on TVO’s The Agenda and a popular source of information for other TV shows, radio programs and printed articles. Please welcome a man who through the years has inspired thousands of students to pursue their dreams and instilled the belief in the members of FIN that we can accomplish anything so why not immediately start trying. Thanks, Christine. So anyways, it looks to me like that’s what we’re facing over the next few decades. It’s kind of an evocative phrase. The sea seems empty anyways because of course you can’t see what’s beneath the surface but before the depredations of people it was an amazing resource. I started to learn about this and I’m going to walk you through what I learned because I think it’s a reasonable way of introducing everyone to the basic elements of familiarity that are necessary to understand what’s happening in the oceans. I guess sometimes I’ve noticed that it’s useful when you’re teaching people not to know a lot more than your audience does because if you start to develop great expertise in an area then you forget what people don’t know and it’s easy to speak about things that aren’t easy to follow and you shouldn’t have any problem with that tonight because as I said I’m a relative beginner in this area and a lot of the things I learned were really quite obvious things especially in retrospect but I didn’t know them. I got an opportunity to start familiarizing myself with this particular issue because I was fortunate enough to work with the Canadian subcommittee that the secretary general of the UN set up about three years ago and the secretary general was interested in producing a report and this is the final report, Resilient People, Resilient Planet and it was sort of a follow up to the 1992 Brundtland Commission which was the first real worldwide attempt to bring some order and intelligence to ecological issues with a certain degree of success. Now that was followed up in Brazil in 2012 with an ecological slash economic meeting that wasn’t precisely a raving success but this was the document that served as lead up to the 2012 20th anniversary of the Brundtland Commission and the reason I was asked to serve on this committee was because the people who ran it, it was headed by Jim Balsillie who ran Rim Corporation, the people who ran it didn’t think that the underlying narrative of the report was appropriate for the modern day and in some sense it sort of felt like it had been written in 1984 which is actually quite a long time ago now. There was a lot of north versus south ideology in it, an ideology that’s less relevant now that the less developed world is developing at an incredible rate and there was a lot of left versus right ideology in it when it seems more appropriate in the modern world to note that problems of this magnitude have to be solved by everyone regardless of their political orientation and there was a lot of underlying, the underlying implicit idea that the planet would be better off without people on it which is not a position that I hold and which I also think is a dangerous one to promote and so I had the opportunity to rephrase the underlying structure of the document to some degree, to the degree that that’s possible when you’re working with multiple committees but at least in part to stress some of the really great things that people have accomplished over the last two decades and I want to start with that because it’s necessary to put things in context, you know I mean we’re assaulted by apocalypses all the time, I mean I’m 50 years old now and I mean I’ve lived through at least five probable apocalypses, none of which thankfully occurred and the problem with that is that it’s easy to get apocalypse overdose in a sense and to feel that you’re assaulted by catastrophes from so many directions that the only logical thing to do is to ignore them. Now I don’t think that’s true because people have been getting their act together in multiple dimensions in quite remarkable ways and so I’ll detail some of those. In 1970 approximately 900 of the 3.5 billion people currently alive were hungry, the same number were hungry in 2008 however the population had doubled during that period so the proportion of hungry people have during the most rapid expansion of human population in history, that’s pretty remarkable and it’s not what people predicted because the most dire environmental estimates in the late 1960s were predicated on the idea that by the year 2000 with the 6 or 7 billion people that were likely to be around that there would be widespread starvation and quite the contrary, people are better fed than they ever have been in fact there are more obese people in the world now than there are hungry people which is really some kind of accomplishment even though it’s you know damning in a sense with fake praise. In 1981 about 52% of the world’s population, 2 billion of 4.5, lived under the new World Bank poverty cutoff estimates of a dollar and quarter a day. By 2005 that figure had decreased to 25% and current estimates indicate that this figure is moving downwards at 2% of the total world population per year. Assuming 1.5% which is conservative, that percentage below the poverty cutoff by now may have fallen to 15%. So that’s a staggering achievement. The proportion of people living in poverty in East Asia and the Pacific has decreased by more than 50% since 1990 and this after rates had already halved in the previous two decades. Lifespan has increased dramatically. We have this spectacle in Africa now where I read in The Economist a week and a half ago that there are enough cell phones in Africa now so that 3 out of 4 people have them and that’s brought tremendous economic advantages to the people of Africa. Contributing in part to the fact which is almost impossible to believe that the sub-Saharan African countries are now the fastest growing economies in the world. And so we’re actually in a position maybe for the first time in human history where the only reason for starvation and hunger is political. So there’s also been a staggering decrease in the number of anti-democratic or totalitarian states over the last 30 years. And it’s partly because in some sense the whole idea of totalitarianism, whether it’s on the left or the right, has lost its essential validity. Even the dictators themselves don’t believe in the justifications they put forward for their abuse of power. And so what we’ve seen happening is horrible governments toppling one after another at what’s really a miraculous rate. And that’s all on top of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demolition of the Iron Curtain and all these things that for someone my age seem absolutely miraculous. Not to mention of course the opening up of China. So three cheers for the human race. It’s pretty damn good that we’ve managed to put those sort of successes together. I mean the UN had a millennium goal in 2000 to cut poverty in the world by half by 2015. They figure they hit that by 2011. So these things are just, any person with any sense would regard that fundamentally as miraculous. It’s massive economic productivity increases combined with massive population increases. So it’s not all gloomy. And so the UN and the initial UN report had virtually none of that in there. I think that’s a real mistake because human beings, we’ve got waste management problems and there’s a lot of us and we eat a lot but we’re also trying as hard as we can to put things together as fast as we can. All things considered there’s always unreasonable people but for a bunch of creatures that only separated from chimpanzees seven million years ago we’re not doing that bad. We didn’t even understand oceanic ecology at all except into the last hundred years. So we are trying to learn things as fast as we can. So you know credit where credit’s due and there’s a lot of credit due. And it’s also really important not to make the case that everything’s terrible because it’s a low resolution thoughtless case. You know you have to concentrate on things and differentiate between them so you know the difference between things that are problems and things that aren’t. Because if everything’s a problem well you might as well just sit at home and drink gin because there’s nothing you can do about it. But you know the truth of the matter is that when we put our minds together we can actually fix things pretty fast and part of the necessity that precedes fixing things is to become informed enough so that you understand at least to some minimal degree what you’re talking about. So I’m hoping that to some minimal degree I know what I’m talking about and if I’m not I’m hoping that Arthur Hanson who’s a real expert on these matters will correct me. So well what’s still bad in the world? Well corruption’s still bad and it’s a cause of suffering that’s definitely under addressed I think often for political reasons and there’s no doubt that we have a pollution problem and I would say that’s basically a waste management problem. It’s the kind of problem that faces really any creature because all creatures have to deal with their waste and of course maybe we produce a bit more of it than we should because we’re pretty smart and we build lots of things. But you know it is part and parcel of living in a universe where the primary force is thermodynamic deterioration you know it’s a hell of a thing to fight. So it’s not because we’re innately evil that we produce byproducts it’s because life is very complex and difficult to sustain and we want to live longer and no wonder and we’d rather that everyone didn’t suffer any more than they had to and that’s probably a good thing too. So we’ve got our reasons. However when I was going through all of this you know there was a couple of things that really stuck out for me and one of them was the oceanic problem because well there was a bunch of reasons. The first was because I thought the data indicating that what we were doing was damaging was really incontrovertible as opposed to many of the issues that you hear about from time to time or maybe constantly. It’s very very clear that we’re overfishing and overfishing dramatically we’re doing other things to the oceanic environment that are definitely not in our medium or long term interest to say nothing about the creatures themselves. I also thought that the oceanic management problem was an appropriate problem to consider from a more practical perspective. I mean I thought a lot about global warming and I’m not going to talk much about global warming because that isn’t what I’m here to talk about but one of the things I did realize about global warming rapidly was that the error in the estimates of the likely warming of the planet over the next 60 years are so large even if they’re done by the best scientists they’re so large that even if we stopped using anything that produced carbon dioxide now we would never know if that actually helped. And when I looked at that I thought well how in the world are you going to sell something like that. Even if it works you can’t tell if it worked. Plus you know the time course of improvement is over multiple decades and everyone uses hydrocarbon energy so it’s a real killer to try to address. It seemed to me that it was more logical in some ways to focus on problems that had a shorter horizon and somewhat more immediate returns because that way you can tell if all the effort that you’re putting into solving the problem is actually having some sort of positive consequence and the oceanic management problem seemed to fit into that too. It wasn’t intractable. It wasn’t a problem that was rapidly disappearing on its own like world poverty seems to be. I don’t think you could speed that up. The disappearance of poverty any more than it’s been sped up. It sort of hit maximum improvement. So it sort of falls into the category of solvable problem with potentially proper interventions. The other thing is as far as I can tell there’s no losers to fixing this. You know the oceanic mismanagement problem is of such magnitude with the exception of certain species that if we keep up our rate of fishing for the next 20 years there’s not going to be an awful lot left and that’s not going to be very good for the large corporations that you know that make their economic living off the oceans and it’s going to be real hard on us if we want to eat. And then of course there’s the loss of the beauty and the diversity and also the potential to truly transform the nature of the ecosystems of the ocean in a way that really won’t be good. I mean our planet’s covered two thirds by oceans and that’s a lot and we’re messing with them in a really serious way and part of the reason for that is you know fish are fish and they’ve got scales and they’re not that brainy and we’re going after them with like 21st century technology. You know we use planes to spot them and sonar to find out where they are and like ultrasonic mapping to check out the structure of the bottom of the ocean and massive nets and like those bloody things don’t have a chance and that’s not so good. You know it’s inappropriate use of technology. Now there’s some real reasons for it. Now as I said I’m a lay person and I read a lot. I probably read about 40 books and a whole pile of papers on this topic and others and some of them were really helpful and these are some of them. The end of the line is a great book and these are very straightforward books to read. They’re very engaging. Unnatural history of the sea. I love that. The most important fish in the sea, that’s about this little herring like fish that lives off the Atlantic coast called the Manhattan which is kind of an inedible oily beast of a herring and it at least one time numbered in the hundreds of billions. It might have been the most plentiful animal on the surface of the planet. Maybe outnumbering all the other fish and it’s at the very bottom of the food chain and people can’t really eat it but everything else does and one of the things we’re doing with the Manhattan which seems you know really not all that great is vacuuming them up like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons and grinding them into fish fertilizer and spreading them all over the ground you know when we have all sorts of other ways of making fertilizer and so you know we’re stripping the whole bottom of the food chain out of the Atlantic coast and a lot of that seems to have to do with political corruption in the eastern US states. So it’s a remarkable book. Cod, I love that too. Mark Krulanski is a great author and you know reading about the devastation of the cod fishery in the east coast is just enough to make the bottom fall out of your heart because it was so damn dumb. You know everybody knew it was coming and people pretended that it wasn’t and we devastated a resource that was really the pride of the country and also a mainstay of the world economy for five, six hundred years you know. So it’s a great book and I’m showing you those books because that’s source material for a lot of what I’m going to tell you. Now the first thing I learned about the oceans was that the oceans aren’t that big. Not when you’re talking about what lives in them because the oceans actually have two kinds of structure and one structure they call the pelagic zone and it only extends fifty miles from the shore. So it’s like this little skinny you know offshoot of the continents essentially maybe you know it as the continental shelf and it’s only about five hundred feet deep. Now that’s important because it’s only that deep light can get to the bottom from the sun and so you need light for things to grow especially plants and if plants can’t grow then the animals can’t eat anything and then there aren’t any animals. So it turns out that all the life fundamentally you know with a bit of an exception is within fifty miles from shore and so and in these areas that are only you know five hundred feet deep or less. Now if you look at this map the light blue areas there are the pelagic zone and you know they look pretty big up in the Arctic. Remember this is all stretched out because it’s not a very intelligent projection but all the dark blue stuff man that’s deep. Two miles deep on average and it can be eleven thousand feet deep in places and the problem with that is it’s really dark. No light gets down there. It’s really cold. It’s not much above freezing. It’s really high pressure like higher pressure than the surface of Venus and so it’s not that hospitable for life. There’s not a lot around there and you know the problem with that at least in part is well A that’s most of the ocean and B it’s mostly empty but because it’s cold and dark the things that do live there well they’re not very well understood but they also don’t grow very fast. So if you do fish them and we are fishing them then you know you fish them and it’s like harvesting the trees that grow up in the Arctic you know. They take forever to grow back. So and as we fished out the pelagic zone which we’re doing at a fairly rapid rate we’ve increasingly turned to the neuritic zone with especially with trawlers that can now reach two thousand meters down to the bottom of the ocean and you know it’s not high quality food generally speaking but the problem too is we don’t understand it well and it seems quite easy to devastate. So anyway so that’s a useful thing to know is that there really isn’t that much food bearing ocean and that a lot of the planet is sort of covered by water that’s too dark deep and cold to be of a lot of use. Here’s the things that really broke my heart I think reading this because one of the things that these books taught me was just how much there was before we took it and like I said I’m not anti-human in any way but the way this struck me was that it was a catastrophic aesthetic and spiritual loss a loss of the absolute bounty of the planet and the sort of thing that evokes in the viewer or the experience or the same sort of thing that maybe is evoked when you look up at the sky and see the vast array of stars sort of spread out before you. It’s the magnificence of nature and we’re denying ourselves the privilege of experiencing that increasingly. So let me tell you what it was like when the Europeans first came to North America and you want to remember that this is even after the Native Americans had done a fair bit of fishing and also after the Europeans had already pretty much fished out their waters completely. Sturgeon, well sturgeon is a prehistoric fish it’s been around about 60 million years or so and they get really long and big they get so big you have to haul them out of rivers with oxen they can weigh 1200 pounds and there are hardly any on the Atlantic coast anymore I don’t know if there are any there’s some still in northwestern Canada they live in the Fraser River for example. This was the Potomac River in 1760 Potomac I guess. Sturgeon and Shad are in such prodigious numbers that in one day within the space of two miles only some gentleman in canoes caught about 600 of the former that was sturgeon with hooks which they let down to the bottom and drew up at a venture when they perceived them to rub against the fish and of the latter Shad about 5000 had been caught in one single haul of the net so it was possible to catch 600 sturgeon in one day I don’t imagine that 600 sturgeon are caught now in the whole world in a year. Alloway for herring in 1728 this is from William Bird when they spawn all streams and waters are completely filled with them and one might believe when he sees such terrible amounts of them that there was as great a supply of herring as there is water. In words it is unbelievable indeed indescribable as also incomprehensible what quantity is found there. One must behold oneself. There are medieval pictures of the herring run near the coast where people would put a haul bird which was a kind of double headed axe on a pole in the water and it would stand up because there was so many herring around that the herring themselves were packed in so tightly that the thing would stay up in the water. William Wood. The hellabit is not much unlike a place or turbot some being two yards long and one wide and a foot thick. The plenty of better fish so they had plenty of better fish than hellabit when the Europeans first came to North America. Make them little esteemed except the head and fins which stewed or baked is very good. These hellabits be little set by while basses in season. Thornback and skates is given to the dogs being not counted worth the dressing in many places. You should also know that when the Europeans first came to North America salmon and lobster fell in the same category. So there were laws in New England about how many lobster you could feed convicts or slaves in a week because it was like feeding them bugs as far as the New Englanders were concerned. When salmon was so plentiful it was basically a junk fish so these things that we now regard essentially as delicacies especially wild salmon were there in absolutely unbelievable numbers. So I lived in Boston for a little while and I used to go up to the coast. There was a place there called Cape Ann which was up where the whaling communities used to be because it was a big whaling area and we used to go to this beautiful beach that was like seven miles long and 300 yards wide and it was absolutely pristine gorgeous place. The history of the area recounts what happened to the beach after Nor’easters. Nor’easters like a hurricane except it’s the northern version of a hurricane. They said after a good Nor’easter which happened around Boston pretty often, the beach there would be covered with shellfish and other fish three feet deep and 100 yards wide and seven miles long. So that after there was a Nor’easter the whole area would reek for months because of all the rotting fish and shellfish. I went to Cape Ann to the beach one time after a Nor’easter and walked about three miles. I found one starfish, an empty lobster trap and a half-dead horseshoe crab and that was it. And normally walking on that beach there was nothing at all. So that’s the degree to which the area had been essentially devastated. Priest André Bernaldez with Christopher Columbus. Throughout that voyage they saw that there were many turtles and very large but in those 20 leagues they saw very many more for the sea was thick with them and they were of the largest, so numerous that it would seem that the ships would run aground on them and were as if bathing in them. The Indians valued them highly and regarded them as very good to eat and healthy and savory. I figure there were something on the neighborhood of two to four hundred million turtles in the Caribbean and they’re pretty much all gone. Sea otters from San Francisco to the Santa Clara estuary, the ground appeared covered with black sheets due to the great quantity of otters which were there. The disappearance of otters because they were almost completely wiped out eliminated kelp forests because the otters ate the urchins which grazed on the kelp and removing the kelp forests wiped out Steller’s sea cow which was a 30 foot marine animal similar to the manatee except much larger. It was wiped out along with hunting, along with habitat and hunting 28 years after its identification by Europeans. From California a late 1850s a thousand gray whales a day passed along the shore between December 15th and February 1st. So there are valid reports from all over the world before the whaling industry really kicked in of whales being about as common as porpoises are now when you see them swarming around the fronts of boats. So there were whales absolutely everywhere so you imagine that a thousand a day for basically a three month period. So Herring, 1776, when the main body has arrived its breadth and depth is such as to alter the very appearance of the ocean. It is divided into distinct columns of five or six miles in length and three or four broad while the water before them curls up as if forced out of its bed. Sometimes they sink for the space of 10 or 15 minutes then rising into the surface and in great weather reflect a variety of splendid colours like a field bespangled with purple, gold and azure. The whole water seems alive and is seen so black with them to a great distance that the number seems inexhaustible. There were so many turtles swimming towards the islands in the Caribbean’s that when the sailors used to get lost in the fog if they were close enough they could sail to land by hearing the turtle splash in the water. Along with the Herring schools of great magnitude there were immense number of predators because of course the Herring is a primary food for other fish and so there were massive schools of sharks and so on that would come along and feed on them. Haddock from Goldsmith in 1810. They annually visit the British coast in shoals that sometimes extend along the shore a hundred miles in length and three hundred miles in breadth. In 1855 43 fishing schooners from Beverly Massachusetts caught more cod south of Nova Scotia on the Scotian shelf so these are just sailing ships than the entire Canadian fleet caught there in 1999. Six years later 34 schooners landed more cod on the main coast between Penobscot Bay and Grand Bay and then were caught in the entire Gulf of Maine from Cape Cod to Canada in 1999. So well if you read those books that I showed you they’re just full of accounts of precisely that sort. Makes painful reading you know. There’s, Kurlansky also wrote a book called The Big Oyster which is about New York and he talked about what Chesapeake Bay used to be like and Kurlansky claims that the average sized oyster 300 years ago was as big as a dinner plate and had to be cut into four pieces before it could be watered. And so Chesapeake Bay was an absolutely staggering masterpiece of natural plenty and it’s pretty much been reduced to nothing as well. So it makes pretty painful reading and one of the things I also learned about this and I’ll talk about this a little bit later is you know when you hear estimates of fish stock depletion you hear things like 95% since the beginning of the 20th century but lots of these writers claim that the fish stocks had already been reduced by 95% or more by the beginning of the 20th century. So we’re looking at a 95% reduction in a 95% reduction. So you know that kind of hurts. Now there’s a lot of reasons for this. One of them is called the tragedy of the commons and the tragedy of the commons is well imagine that there’s a field on which anybody can graze their sheep. Well the logical thing to do is to get your sheep out there and let them eat all the grass before the next guy gets his sheep out there and eats all the grass right. And so the tragedy of commons is that when there’s no fixed ownership of a resource it makes sense economically for the person who gets first access to the resource to take as much of it as they can because anything they leave at least in principle is going to be taken by someone else. And historically until at least 1978 the open ocean was only seven miles offshore. That’s where the national jurisdiction ended and the rest of the sea was regarded as you know free territory in a sense so people could take whatever they wanted. You know you can see that as a legal and a structural problem. So that’s one of the main contributors. Another contributor right now to the continued decimation of the world’s fish stocks and one of the things that makes regulation difficult is what’s being described as technological creep. So you say you might say well you know maybe you can limit your boat to 40 the boats that are allowed to fish to 40 feet in length or something like that instead of these massive factory boats that go out and you know sit on the ocean for months and vacuum up everything in their trail. The problem with technological creep which sounds like a you know maybe some kind of computer programmer who’s lurking in the bushes is that even your 40 foot boat keeps getting outfitted with better and better technology right because as you know how fast our technology increases and so you can have the same size boat that you had ten years ago and the things like ten times as deadly as it was because you know you’re outfitted with the latest gear and you can understand why the fishermen are driven to that but and it’s another structural problem that adds to this general overall problem. The use of this sort of space age technology has had a pretty catastrophic consequence too so we’re doing something they call let’s see I’ve got a yeah fishing down the food chain and so the way the food chains are set up is there’s like you know plankton at the bottom and they whatever they can get their little hands on and they’re often you know they don’t actually have hands you know they also use photosynthesis and they’re at the bottom of the food chain there’s billions of the things mean whales eat them some whales and then you know little fish eat those and then bigger fish eat the little fish and bigger fish eat you know the medium sized fish and so on all the way up to things like sharks and swordfish and tuna and human beings. Now what we’re basically doing we tend to like the fish that are higher up on the food chain so we tend to like the taste of predatory fish because they’re hard and muscled and now the problem with that is that the higher you are up in the food chain the fewer there can be of you in part because you know your primary sources of food are limited by this pyramid phenomena. As we’ve got better and better from a technological perspective at catching fish what’s happened is we keep we are fishing down the food chain we go from the great big fish at the top like the sharks about 70 million a year of which right now are killed for shark fin soup and that’s a lot of sharks 70 million a year you know we’re going to run out of sharks at no time flat if we keep things up at that rate and so we fish down the food chain we take the big predators first and they’re the most valuable fish and then we go after what they go after and then we go after what that fish has gone after and we go out farther afield and we go out into the deep ocean and we find places that no one’s fished before but we’re so damn good at it now that the time to exhaustion of the new fish species from the time we discover it is about 15 years so we can discover a new species which is often given even if it’s half inedible it’s given a real marketable name we go after it with space age technology and wipe it down to less than 85 percent of its previous numbers within 15 years we’re really deadly and so you know as soon as we discover something plus there’s so many of us that the thing’s in serious trouble in pretty much no time flat there is there has been a global decline in the world’s catch ever since about 1998 if you control for red China’s data because the Chinese from what I’ve been able to determine tend to inflate their production numbers I mean that’s a standard trick in totalitarian states but there even though we swear switching to different species and you know we’re pretty damn good at that we haven’t been able to halt the decline in overall catch despite the fact that you know our technology has improved a lot we’re going after other species and that’s not a good thing and the other thing that’s really worth noting about fish and this is one of the things that convinced me that there really was a problem was you guys might know about the bet that was made by a Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich and an economist whose name I don’t remember in about 1968 and Paul Ehrlich had written this book called the population bomb where he predicted that you know we were all going to starve to death by the year 2000 and the economists always disagree with the biologist because economists think we’re real smart and can think our way out of everything and you know so far they’ve been you know reasonably right the biologists say well it’s just a time thing will mouth mouth us a win eventually and who knows but this economist bet Ehrlich that by the year 2000 commodity prices would have gone down instead of up because Ehrlich’s idea was everything’s getting scarce so from 1968 to the year 2000 all our commodities which are somewhat scarce are going to increase in price well Ehrlich got stomped the commodity prices plummeted between 1968 and 2000 so the economist had him you know had beat him in no uncertain terms but the one thing that didn’t work out that way is seafood I mean things like cod used to be cheap right seafood used to be cheap fish and chips that was the cheapest thing you could buy on the menu well it’s not like that anymore seafood is expensive and you know bloody well when something gets expensive that there actually isn’t that much of it anymore it’s a really good marker so you know we have global decline global catch declining figures allied with pretty hard economic data that fish is a lot more expensive than it used to be plus we’re harvesting we’re harvesting species that people wouldn’t have even considered edible a hundred years ago I mean 200 years ago they were complaining about halibut and feeding it to their dogs it’s like that’s a high quality fish by our standards so there’s no doubt that this is a real this is a real phenomenon and there’s other awful things that really are kind of difficult to tolerate when you read about them and trawling is one of them and here here’s a nice description of trawling basically what a trawl does is it’s a huge net that’s put behind a really big boat and the net is weighted down and has rollers there’s a bunch of different kinds of them it has rollers and you put it on the bottom of the ocean it sort of digs down to a depth of about eight inches and then you just drag the thing and you drag it till the net fills up and well what does it fill up with well whatever’s down there coral so especially now that they’re fishing out the deeper areas of the ocean all the corals coming up 300 pound chunks of it maybe they figure it takes 10,000 years to grow and you know that’s habitat for fish you run a trawler over an area there’s nothing left of it it takes everything you haul it up what happens you take your 10% of the damn fish that’s in there that you want to eat you throw 90% back because that’s what you have to do by law so the bycatch so to speak which is what you don’t want is 90% back it goes into the water now remember I showed you the continental shelf there’s not that much of it well we’ve trawled most of it so when that isn’t stopping and the trawlers are getting bigger there’s something they called a super trawler that was heading down to Australia despite a lot of you know public outcry because the Australians are fairly sensitive about this sort of thing you know they get bigger and bigger and bigger all the time and that’s partly because they’re you know because they can and partly because they’re chasing a diminishing resource so you imagine what would happen if you you know went through a you know a nice bit of grassland or a national park with a net 300 feet high and it was you know dragged through by tractors you just take everything trees deer moose birds insects everything pull out the things you can eat let everything else rot Jesus if it was happening on land people would be shorting out and and running around in circles screaming but it’s happening on the at the bottom of the ocean and no one can see it and it’s not just happening once there’s lots of places in the North Sea which used to be clear and is no longer clear it’s muddy because of the trawling at least in part because of the disturbance of the ocean floor that place has been trawled like three or four times so you know obviously that’s not going to work for very long so here’s a here’s a description picture a 2,000 horsepower trawler targeting place or soul pulling a beam trawl mounted with a rotating tickler with rotating tickler chains across the featureless fans and gravels of the southern North Sea the weighted trawl and its chains designed to beat flatfish out of the sheltering mud smashes up everything it does not catch particularly the burrowing animals in the sediment disturbing them at depths of up to six inches European Union scientists have calculated that up to 16 pounds of marine animals are killed by beam trawls to produce one pound of marketable soul sea urchins hermit crabs brittle stars and razor shells are killed or having part of their shells opened made vulnerable to predators starfish tend to be the survivors losing a leg or two but escaping the net the winner in heavily trawled areas are usually crabs which move in from other areas to eat damaged creatures and worms that take over from the easily damaged by valves the scientists have concluded that most parts of the southern North Sea have been disturbed by a beam trawl at least once a year the damage caused by fishing is estimated at 100,000 times greater than that of oil or gas exploration so it’s pretty much total devastation so you know that’s kind of distressing they estimate about 25% of the world’s total catch is hauled in by trawls so that just doesn’t seem like a particularly intelligent way of going about things now because the whole shelf is being trawled and there’s not a hell of a lot left there they’ve developed trawls that can go down to 2000 meters and 2000 meters you know that’s getting to be a mile and a half that’s that’s close to the average depth of the deepest part of the ocean now when you go way down in the ocean there’s not a lot there as I said but there are places in the ocean floor that are seamounts so they sort of poke up and when they poke up currents come up them and there’s a lot of food on the seamount areas and they can map those out really nicely now and with the deep sea trawls they just go over the seamounts and take everything that’s there so and purse seams are also pretty devastating especially when you combine them with spotting airplanes because the spotting airplanes go off the coast and they find a you know a school and then the scenes the saints come in and they take the whole school so you know that’s also not really particularly a promising thing to be happening so then the next problematic form of fishing seems to be maybe long line fishing and so long lines are pretty much exactly what they sound like they’re very long fishing lines and very long means up to 40 miles long and with 30 hooks per mile and so that’s 1200 hooks and so you you know they’re often catching the kind of fish that you’d like to eat but they catch a lot of other things too like tens of thousands of seabirds and tens of thousands of turtles and all sorts of things and sharks and all sorts of things that you know will eat anything that’s on a baited hook so the bycatch problem with long line fishing is also horrendous so that’s kind of that’s kind of you know miserable to apprehend as well and then you know there’s this thing I mentioned a little bit earlier about the that’s that that was a very distressing book to read because they’re the Manhattan because they’re at the bottom of the food chain down you know down down near where the little fish are there oh and Manhattan interestingly enough are vegetarian most fish aren’t vegetarian but these guys are vegetarian so that’s what puts them at the bottom of the food chain they also take a lot of garbage out of the water because they’re vegetarian and so if there’s algal blooms or something like that which there often is because of nitrogen runoff from fertilizers from the land and the Manhattan will go in there and clean it up and then all the other fish will eat them but they take the Manhattan out to turn them into fertilizer and as I said already you know that seems to be served at least in part by corruption in the East Coast states they do the same thing in Denmark with this thing called the sand eel and it’s another one of these ugly little things that you know people wouldn’t normally eat but everything else does and there’s a lot of them they’re sort of like the Manhattan they breed like mad but they’ve been catching them catching those up a storm too and often burning them for oil so well and then there’s us you know Canada Canada is by no means an ecological paradise like we like to pride ourselves on the idea that you know we’re the sort of great north with our massive forests and our care for the environment most that’s pretty much rubbish so for example we have a far smaller portion of our territory devoted to national parks than the Americans do despite the fact that what 95% of the country is basically uninhabited so that’s a pretty shocking statistic and the Americans have done a much better job at managing their fisheries than us and you know we should have been shocked into what embarrassed action in 1992 when this happened so you know the cod fishery off the Grand Banks had been there for 400 years and it was really one of the world’s remarkable treasures and around before I guess 1978 the the limit to national sovereignty I think was seven miles it’s four or seven miles I can’t remember exactly what and you know the Spanish Spaniards and the Portuguese and and lots of European fishing boats were in the Grand Banks fishing like mad which of course they’d been doing for really almost 600 years the Basques might have even got there before Christopher Columbus and not told anybody because they like to have all those fish you know in Basques they’re pretty sneaky people so anyways you know so the Canadian government made a big fuss about the fact that all these foreigners were out there taking out the cod and they were part of the the political force that got the national sovereignty zone extended to 200 miles offshore so the Canada could manage its own cod stocks and of course we do it responsibly well the first thing that happened was the federal government modernized the Newfoundland fishing fleet and equipped it with you know really outstanding boats and the second thing that happened was we took all the fish and so by net while you see what happened by basically by 1992 so two billion fish that’s the estimate that’s a lot of fish equal in weight to the entire Canadian population and these cod man they were magnificent animals they figured the ones that were there when the Europeans first came over to North America were something like five feet late in length more or less on average and thief three feet around these were big fish you know they’re about the size of a person and they came in massive massive schools and no one really knows why they haven’t come back there’s there’s a couple of hypotheses one is you know fish in schools are like zebras you don’t see zebras lone zebras re-roaming the Serengeti you know what you see is big clumps of zebras because they’re herd animals and they really are herd animals which means the herd is their environment and so they can’t live away from a herd more any less than people can and it looks like cod are sort of like that another fish that live in schools so for example one of the things that happens with cod schools is that first of all there’s a lot of subspecies of cod and we don’t know how old the schools are but some of the schools might be who knows a hundred and fifty thousand years old as super organisms and they seem to actually kind of know the ocean in which they swim as a collective unit and so they know where to go eat and they know where you know they they know their habitat and more importantly the cod arrange themselves in schools so that the big cod are in the middle and the little cod are sort of outside and then the predators pick off the little cod but they’re useless anyways because they’re too young to breed so the school is structured so that the big cod are protected second when the cod mate they actually use the school as a mating structure so they organize their mating routines on the outside of the school structure and so what that implies is that if you blow out the structure of the school then the cod don’t know what to do and that’s one potential reason they haven’t really managed to come back there’s others one being perhaps that if you really devastate a population then maybe you change the ecological conditions of the environment because it turns out that the way an ecosystem sets itself up is dependent to some degree on which creature gets there first sort of which creature gets there in what order and so if you wipe population like the cod out low enough then other animals move in to get the niche and that’s it the cod can’t come back now there’s other theories too you know some of which have to do with ocean warming but the point is we’ve left the cod alone kind of because people are still allowed to fish a lot more for cod than you’d think we’ve kind of left them alone for 20 years and the consequence has been pretty minimal especially for an animal that you know fish they lay a lot of eggs it’s not like they’re they’re not able to reproduce they certainly know how to do that so you know you think we might learn something from this but it doesn’t really appear that we did and the other thing that really struck me as mind-boggling when I was going through this material was exactly Canada’s record which was so embarrassing that it was again it was like a personal blow so in I’m going to pretty much fold up with this in 1992 which was about when the cod fishery collapsed Canada promised to protect 20% of its oceanic territory so the idea was to put aside chunks of oceanic territory sort of like national parks you know where the animals that live there and the ecosystems would be protected so that they could come back because you know fish come back pretty fast if you leave them alone I read something very amusing about this very fact you know how you heard and maybe this is wrong but I read it several places you know how you heard that the whole Gulf of Mexico oil spill was such a catastrophe for fish yeah well there were more fish the year after this field in the year before and the reason for that is no one fished so that’s you know that’s a pretty peculiar statistic but it shows you two things a how many fish we take and B how damn fast the fish can come back if you leave them alone the same thing happened in the North Sea in World War two was pretty much fished out before World War two but no one was fishing during World War two because of German U-boats and there was a lot of fish in the North Sea again after World War two so leave the things alone for a while they can come back Canada promised to protect at least 20% of its oceanic territory by 2012 in writing in a series of major international forums where Canada signed treaties in 1992 2002 2003 and 2005 so not only did we promise we promised frequently and in writing less than 1% is currently protected despite the fact that Canada has one of the longest international coastlines in the world and is also home to multiple you know how there are ecological zones because each little geographic area has its own peculiar characteristics and so really what you need is you need to set aside a protected area that are sort of representative of all these different ecological zones and we have plenty of those ecological zones zero action 1% of our oceanic territory is protected that’s it and you can fish in 95% of that so what we’ve done in the aftermath of the Great Cod catastrophe looks to me to be pretty much absolutely nothing and what’s weird about that and at least in part I mean Canada is a complicated place but the Australians have actually protected 20% of their oceanic area and have promised 20% more recently and they actually seem to mean it which is about a third as much territory as Australia actually has so it is actually possible to set aside what are essentially national parks in the in the ocean and let the damn fish come back and in principle at least that would also be good for the fishermen because they can hang around the edges of the parks and you know the fish don’t know where the boundaries are they can scoop them up once they breed again so it’s a rather cataclysmic and staggering saga of insane mismanagement and you know it’s not there’s not much point pointing the finger one place or another because you know it’s pretty much everybody’s fault but it sure seems to me to be one of those things that you got to think about as being oh it’s it’s it’s hauntingly foolish because all of that could be there and why wouldn’t that be a good thing and you know if there was the political will in Canada it could be done because other countries have done it and for some reason this is just not an on the even though it’s a real issue this is actually happening it’s really not good it’s happening a lot it’s going to get worse we’re not going to have a lot of fish to eat the oceans are going to be a pretty barren and dismal place and we could actually do something about it so so that’s why I decided to do this talk even though I don’t really know a lot about the oceans you know it seems to me that the situation it’s always dangerous talking about things when you sort of know something and mostly you don’t but it seems to me that the situation with the oceans is so obviously not good that you actually don’t have to be an expert to notice and so what can be done about it well you know the only I think the marine protected areas are a good idea and look you know that we have examples of countries doing it and it seems to work everyone’s already figured out that it’s a pretty good idea with regards to national parks on land no one seems to really dispute that although you know we could have some more national parks so what’s the big problem about having them out in the ocean you know and to preserve some of the coastline and to let the fish have a fighting chance unless we don’t want to have them around you know and what we’re facing in some ways well they’re starting to process jellyfish for food because as we get rid of the fish the the whole ecosystem starts to turn back to what it was like 400 million years ago before there were any fish and there were lots of invertebrates and you know we could have an ocean full of invertebrates and I hear they press up into hockey stick hockey puck sized discs pretty nicely they don’t have a lot of taste and I suppose you’d have to be a pretty good chef to make them edible but we probably won’t run out of jellyfish during our life so I don’t know maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to pen a note to your MP or the to the Minister of Fisheries or and just note that you know destroying a resource that we could actually enjoy aesthetically and practically that destroying that seems to be not in anybody’s best interest and that it’s actually happening at a pretty rapid rate so I guess that’s partly what Finn is aiming at and partly why I decided to do this talk and also to get involved and to invite Dr. Hanson who’s going to who really knows what he’s talking about who’s going to speak next so we should take a 10-minute break and then we’ll return and have Dr. Hanson speak there’ll be a question and answer period at the end of the at the end of Dr. Hanson’s talk thank you