The Death of the Oceans (2) (IrtEH5BYpmE)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=IrtEH5BYpmE

Can everyone please take their seat again? Can everyone please take their seat? Alright, so I would now like to introduce our second speaker, Dr. Arthur Hansen. Now, when I was reading through the accomplishments of Dr. Hansen, I have to admit that I was a little intimidated. One of the first questions that came to my mind was, what was he doing at my age? Well, the answer is, selling 75,000 pins with the slogan on them that he came up with, give Earth a chance. Dr. Arthur Hansen is an Officer of the Order of Canada and Distinguished Fellow with the International Institute for Sustainable Development, following his term as President and CEO from 1991 to 1998. He has worked with a number of organizations around the world, providing initial guidance, conducting research, and advising on innovation for sustainable development, environment, and economy, relationships, biodiversity, oceans, and international development. Dr. Hansen has a strong interest in linking science to public policy and works closely with government bodies in Canada, the United States, and Asia on specific problems related to environmental management and mechanisms of accountability and governance for sustainable development. In recent years, much of his professional time has been spent working with China. He initiated some of the largest environmental capacity building efforts currently underway in Indonesia, simultaneously working with the government, NGOs, universities, and the private sector. Much of this effort has involved establishing graduate degree programs such as environmental law and environmental studies. He served two terms on Canada’s National Roundtable on the Environment and Economy and was Canada’s Ministerial Ocean Ambassador with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans for four years. Dr. Hansen served for 10 years as a member of the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and as a mentor in the Trudeau Foundation. He has provided advice to the Office of the Auditor General of Canada since 1990 and has chaired various national and international initiatives. From 1978 to 1991, he was Professor and Director of the School for Resource and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University. Dr. Hansen holds a PhD from the University of Michigan in the field of fisheries, ecology, and natural resources, and a Master’s degree in zoology or fisheries from the University of British Columbia. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Arthur Hansen. Applause Thank you very much. When you were speaking earlier about how much it should cost to come to the lecture or whether you mortgage your house, I have known people that have mortgaged their houses for the oceans. But I just want to tell you one little story about this teaching on the environment at the University of Michigan. The opening session of it attracted 18,000 people to an auditorium and we had to turn people away. We had a special secret deal with the president of the university because nobody got this place for free. I was the fundraiser for all of this. It was a big week-long event that I won’t go into details on. But the funny thing about it was one night at home I get this phone call from a guy who I didn’t know at all. He introduced himself and he said, you know, I think it is how he had read our perspectives, which had been published in some books and that. And he said, I think it is outrageous that the university wants to charge you $5,000foronenigh{t}^{\prime }suse.AndIexplainedtohim,welltheuniversitysaid,nobodybutnobodygetsthisforfree.Andyouarenoexception.OurgroupwascalledEnAct,EnvironmentalActionNow.Andsowewerepreparedtoraisethemoney.Andhesaid,well,Ireallylikewhatyouaredoing.Iampreparedtogiveyou$5,000 to support it. But I want you to go to the university president and say my name and then say he would give $10,000iftheuniversityagreednottochargeus$5,000 for the audit period. So I phoned up the head of the university development fund, the vice president for that. And he immediately said, oh, he phoned you? Yes, please come and see the president tomorrow. And so I go and the president of the University of Michigan was a labour negotiator and lawyer, I guess. A very nice man. But I walked into his office and I hear this kind of sheepish grin on his face that I knew before he opened his mouth that we had won. And it turned out this was one of the biggest benefactors to the university. And in fact his family owned, his wife’s family owned a newspaper chain running out of Chicago. And apparently her mother didn’t want to give any money away. Her father wanted to give money away. So instead they gave it to the kids who gave it to good causes like the University of Michigan. And so we got our money. But the funny thing about all those pins and that and also the not this pin, but those pins, the funny thing about that was that the university put a condition that we could charge no more than 50 cents admission to this event. So between selling the pins and the 50 cent admissions, I was the finances chairman. So every day I would go around campus and we had this great network of people that were selling pins and selling tickets for the event. And I had a suitcase, which I think we still have around, a little silver suitcase. It was a normal little suitcase. It wasn’t too big because it was filled with coins. So every afternoon I would try and casually walk across for fear of getting robbed because it was fairly close to a rough city in Detroit. And I’d be trying to be casual and my arm would be getting lower and lower and lower. But there was a, I just gave a talk last night at Pearson College on the West Coast to PhD students from Railroad University and these very, very bright and competent young people that go into the baccalaureate program and have the privilege of attending Pearson College. And so I tried to give them a talk on leaders, laggards and the rest of us. And I’ve been thinking about that already in what you’re saying, Jordan, because in the oceans area we deal with leaders and there’s lots of them. And we deal with lots of laggards who see the world in very narrow sorts of ways. And we also see the rest of us who are the people in this room. It’s you and me because we can’t all be experts in the oceans. And I’m not expert on all sorts of things. I go out for frequent kayak rides and talks with a guy who’s a physical oceanographer, one of the best in the field, who lives in Victoria. And he gets into discussions with me that I have no idea what he’s talking about. I try and, you know, like, what, you know, 200 foot waves and things like this, you know, that I just don’t understand because it’s all mathematical and it’s all in his head. So we’re all learners. We’re all people who want to do good. But we have to deal with some people who really have a very strong vested interest as well and who would be happy to take the last fish out of the sea if they could put it into the money from that into their pocket. So I’m going to I thought first of all, I think we should give Jordan an honorary something in ocean studies, not necessarily ocean sciences, but ocean studies is different. And we do need psychologists and people with human behavior, understandings to bring the message out about the oceans. It’s been one of the problems. Scientists don’t do a very good job, even though they’re very good scientists. And some of them do, fortunately. And then there’s people like Jack Cousteau and so forth, many others like that and organizations that really try hard. Many of the big foundations, Conservation International, a whole range of ocean oriented bodies and so forth. But it’s still not enough. And it won’t be enough, I think, until people who actually have a lot of interest in oceans, but still lack feel they lack the knowledge that they need. They lack the means to do things about it. And I would include not the MPs in that. Our members of parliament tend not to understand the oceans. And some people say to me, they turn people, some people in some places in Canada, turn their backs in the oceans. They’re more interested in agriculture and the things that happen on land. And that’s a strong feeling that people have that our parliamentarians have not risen to the challenge, even though the government has signed those things. And one of the things that differentiates us from Australia is that the Australians generally, they all live on the coast, is one thing. Surf on it, fish from it, do everything near the water. And they actually have the strong political will. There’s politicians there who have taken the oceans as a cause and who are very powerful politicians. That’s helped a lot. And I’ll come to that later in the talk. But I want to start off, and I’ve got a lot to say, I’m going to try and say it as concisely as I can and watch the clock so we’ll have some time for discussion. And I want to start generally looking at the global situation. And then I want to home in on Canada because we as Canadians sitting here and maybe some students who are not from Canada here, this is a country where you’re trying to understand right now how we do things. And that’s very, very important. I think we’re going to learn a lot from other countries, some of the Asian countries, good and bad we’ll learn, that I’ve worked with, have some very interesting models for fisheries management. China, for example, they laugh at our fisheries models, let me tell you. And then the LLC, for example, and they say, we haven’t got the money or the time to be able to debate the finer points of the models that you have. What we do is we just stop all fishing during the spawning season for about two or three or four months. I forget exactly what it is in the summertime. Oh, and it isn’t that they’re doing it perfectly. But a lot of elements of that simple mechanism work for them. Maybe sometimes we need simpler things rather than the very involved debate that goes on between the scientists, the fisheries scientists who tend to be all concerned about fishing and population dynamics, people like myself that deal with ecosystems and think about food chains and think about habitat destruction and so forth. And then others who take yet another point of view, which is the fisheries economists who say, get the price right, individually transferable quotas and all sorts of exotica that I think are often useful, but there is no simple answer. So I’m going to be filling in the blanks here that Jordan has left me plenty to fill in. And I’m going to be focusing a lot on habitat, a lot on the ecosystem, because it’s my belief that in addition to worrying about fishing, you have to worry about what’s happening to where fish live, which is in the water, feeding on things in that marvelous food chain that was described there. And indeed, if we don’t take that into account in our decision making about fisheries, then we only know about a quarter of what’s really happening out there. So I just want to remind us first of all that it’s fair to say that our planet is about water, and that water is salt water. Seventy percent of the earth’s surface is covered by it. We depend on it. Every single person in this planet, whether or not they live in Afghanistan, whether they live in British Columbia, Canada, or Indonesia or any of the other places, we depend on a variety of ecological services from the oceans. I won’t go into that right now, but it’s very important to recognize that. Secondly, it is a history book of the earth. We look at the sediments. We know, understand where we get our oxygen from and so forth. And it’s complex, but we can understand that. And we also depend on that as we look for the resources we exploit. Where do we find out about how anchovies go up and down because of El Niño and La Niña? From the ocean sediments. We look for the scales of the… sometimes there’s anchovies there, sometimes there’s a nut there. And in our use, sediments and so forth, well, all that oil we use is basically from phytoplankton from the sea and other sea creatures. So we have to do understand that. It’s a basis of natural wealth and of our prosperity. Half the people on the planet live close to the ocean. And that is always going to be the case. Their prosperity through trade, through fishing, through all sorts of different things, we know about. So the oceans governs trade, settlement, patterns, and we now know and understand rather clearly it also governs climate and therefore climate change. But it’s also the source of conflict, calamity and crises. And I don’t like to talk about crises, but I have to. And particularly in this talk, people say the ocean is in crisis. And I think it’s true, frankly, despite all what was said at the beginning of your talk, Jordan. And I would like to think that things are nice out there on the environment. Globally, they’re in a downhill turn for sure. But there’s a way of looking at crisis that I think is very important. And again, I go back to some of the experiences I spent a lot of time in China. China doesn’t like to talk about barriers, about not being able to do things and so forth. What they caution me and say, look, talk about crisis, yes, if you wish. We understand we face crisis. For a long time we’ve faced crises. How do you turn crisis into opportunity? And that’s very important. Chinese do that all the time, crisis to opportunity. And they actually do it often. They’re able to solve their crises and they’re better off, open new opportunities. I talk about what I call C2S, crisis to sustainability. How do we turn these things into a sustainable development pattern? Not easy, but not impossible. And particularly when I’m talking with an audience that includes people of the next generation who are going to have to solve all the messes and problems and open the new opportunities that come with new technologies, et cetera. I don’t want to leave you with a message of failure and a message of impossibility. It has to be a message of opportunity, a message of hope and so forth. And I think we can apply that to the ocean. So some of the examples that I’m going to present are things that seem to be going better now than they were, say, 10 years or 20 years ago. So please keep that in mind. If it gets too gruesome, just remember, I’m basically an optimist and want to see hope for the future and hope that the people who carry the burden forward and the institutions that I hope Finn can become, as one of those, can make real contributions to that. And you, Finn-like person over there, and some of the others that I met earlier this afternoon. I really am honoured that I can be here to kick off what I hope will be a successful effort on the part, not just of U of T students, but students across the country, because we need this kind of support and understanding and real action to come out of the vigor of people who carry challenges forward into the next generation. The reason I was speaking in Pearson and happy to do so, Pearson College, is that I’m going further and further down the food chain. I feel that we have to be working in a very intelligent way and communicating with people that are still in high schools, junior high schools and elementary schools, so that they come into the university world with an attitude of responsibility to some extent, but understanding particularly of things where they can make a difference in the years ahead. So those are some preliminary points. Okay, so now we get into the nasty stuff. Ocean health and decline. You’re going to hear these things, and there’s a new index, and I’ve given, there’s a lot of words in some of these slides, don’t even try and read them all, listen to me. But I’m just, we’re trying to take a videotape of this, and we’re going to intersperse some of the slides. So I want a little bit more detail, that’s why I put it in here, and also ways that you can find this information easier. So there’s this new thing that people have been trying for some time, to get an integrated overview of ocean health. And you can see it’s not very good. Overall in the world, 60 out of 100. And if you go on the website, you can find what each country, where it’s good and not good. Interestingly, Canada gets 70 out of 100. So maybe we can trumpet success in some areas, but I would say that certainly I don’t see things in great shape right now in Canada, in the same way that Jordan announced as well. And so let’s talk about health for just a second. Two quick examples, beautiful place, Broughton Archipelago. Broughton Archipelago is where Alexandra Morton and others feel that the caged salmon that are aquacultured there, are carrying an excessive parasite load, that the wild salmon coming down, the pink salmon from very remote rivers on the B.C. coast, are picking up the parasite load and dying off. This is a big tussle between science and citizen science. And I must say, it’s not a resolved issue. I’m kind of on Alexandra Morton’s side, I think, on this. But in general, the health of the oceans, the health of ecosystems, and what it means to us, brings it back right into economic terms. Now, this is another big puzzle. This man who I spent a day with several years ago, took this picture, is Dr. Peter Ross, who’s just lost his job, because the whole group of people in toxicology that deal with ocean toxicological issues, paid for often by people from other countries, like the United States, and give us data that’s absolutely essential from monitoring different, mainly seals, but up and down the coast. You can see where pollutants are coming across from Asia, because they hit the northern stocks. You can find out the effects of drugs and diseases that come out in their sewage from cities like Vancouver, and then if you go down towards the southern part of what’s now called the Salish Sea, Puget Sound, where they’ve been building naval ships, and you can find all the heavy metal issues and so forth. See, I get a feeling for things. So there was a network that he was involved with, and they’ve all lost their job. We don’t seem to want that information anymore. So are we getting the right kind of information on the health of the oceans? And I would submit, if we don’t have people like Peter Ross, then it’s quite difficult to get that information. I should also add, it’s hilarious working with him. He goes out wearing a hockey helmet, because there’s two ways that you get the seals. You don’t really want to be the seal. The seal’s going to live, but it’s going to have a few scars after he’s been visited, or she, from Peter Ross. So the one way he likes to do it is you quietly go up in your boat, and you put on your hockey helmet, and then you run like hell into the water and onto the shore and grab the seal. They have to be of a certain size, so they’re standardized. If you’re lucky, you don’t bash your head on the rocks. There’s slippery rocks with lots of algae. The other way, which he doesn’t want to do, but also works, is that the seals go in the water, and then he’s got a thin nylon net set out, and the seals go into the net. They’re startled. He tries to get one or two seals and make sure that no others are in there. You get about five minutes before the seals start struggling and maybe would drown. But he’s a very, very good scientist, and it pains me greatly. He’ll do fine. Whether that network can continue its work properly is beyond me. I don’t see how it can. Health is also about people and communities. If you live on the West Coast or on the East Coast, this is a prime thing, that people feel the loss. They feel the loss of livelihood, the loss of integrity of work that they’ve felt important over the years as fishermen or various other ocean-related activities. Whether it’s in Prince Rupert in northern British Columbia or whether it’s in communities in the south shore of Newfoundland or Nova Scotia, this is a very serious issue, and it’s one that we don’t seem to do as good a job in Canada as places like Norway and maybe Australia in handling. We can come back to that point. New livelihoods emerge. Lunenberg, a sailing school with a beautiful schooner. Sea Kayaking, a summer thing. Whale watching. And interestingly, if you’re into music, folk festivals. The folk festival part of it is held right on the seashore, and boats come and go like this beautiful big one in the background in the lower picture. But there’s also calamity in the oceans, and calamity takes many forms. The cyclone Nargis, for example, in Burma where over almost 140,000 people were killed by a terrible maldives. This is a prime spokes country for climate change. Maldives basically disappear with sea level rise in a given amount of time. And then there’s the insidious kinds of things like ocean acidification. And I won’t go through this slide, but just to say that oceans and climate change are intimately related, but don’t get nearly as much attention as the atmospheric side of things. I really happen to think that on both the mitigation side and just the general scientific knowledge base, that the oceans are basically still largely ignored compared to their significance. Then we go on to things, and this is an area that I’m very familiar with, and this brings me to tears sometimes. There’s an area of the world called the Coral Triangle. Indonesia, Philippines, parts of Malaysia, and parts of Papua New Guinea area. And this is the leading center for ocean biodiversity in the world. It’s the thing that drove me first to live in Indonesia was the fact that I was working in the Caribbean on something for my master’s thesis. And I realized that for every species of this little crab that I was looking at, there was six or seven species in the Coral Triangle area. If you go to that area, the reefs are being destroyed at an incredible rate. Partly it’s stupidity, it’s greed, it’s market demand for certain things. I could go on. Fish are poisoned, so you can get maybe a tenth of them for aquarium fish, saltwater aquarium fish. That’s coming under control a bit. People go off and risk their lives to have in the last decades, risk their lives to go into old munitions dumps in West Papua and Papua New Guinea, to take the explosives, to take them out of the shells, and then go back and blow up reefs with them. And I’ve seen these reefs, in some cases small islands, for example in South Sulawesi, where the very lives of people depend on the integrity of the reef, because they protect the small islands around where people live. And still people will come in from outside and blow up the reefs just to get the fish, stun the fish, take the fish, goodbye, go to another reef. And the damage that’s wreaked in that process is quite incredible. I’ll come back to the Coral Triangle because the countries now recognize that it’s urgent, that it’s a crisis situation, and they’re trying their best to do a number of things. One of the important points is that they talk about a blue carbon budget. In other words, the reefs, if they’re properly managed in that, will extract a great deal of greenhouse gases as a consequence of the reef being there, and more or less do it permanently. So there’s always good news and there’s lots of bad news. West Africa, the fishing, the term which I don’t really like, but it’s illegal, unreported, it’s unsustainable as well, but fishing, and this is one of the prime areas that is bringing people in from the surrounding countries and taking fish illegally, and then these fish will be transported off. This is a Korean vessel. On the bottom, so it’ll be transported to Korea, possibly through Europe, and some sold in the EU as well. On the bottom, it’s a mothership with illegal trawlers that are out there. And there’s now spotting mechanisms where local populations, because as was already said, people now have access to equipment like this, waterproof cameras and this, that, and the other, access to the internet to know exactly which ship it is that’s fishing, and people, they go out in their canoes and take pictures and then report that. So this is one of the interesting things that technology can be very helpful in this process. And then finally, I’m going to talk quite a bit this evening about the Arctic, changing environment and development pressures. These are some photos. I wish I had been in a nice position to be able to take these. They were taken by Department of Fisheries and Ocean Staff. But Nara whales and belugas coming up in the little areas that are open in the Arctic. Well, we know there’s going to be lots more areas open in the future, but we don’t know what the fate of these animals will be. Now, I did this diagram to try and understand the overall governance of ocean use. And I know a lot about that mainly because I’ve worked with some very interesting lawyers and others, people involved with fisheries management and ocean management. And don’t worry about all the details. I did this diagram about the year 2000. It hasn’t really changed much, except that now there’s not just the 1992 Rio, but as was pointed out, we’re up to 2012 Rio plus 20. And the important point here is that whatever we do with the oceans now doesn’t just involve Canada, doesn’t just involve a province in Canada. It involves international management, the use of global consensus documents like the Law of the Sea. It involves trade and investment, activities of various sorts. And I’m going to talk about some of these. National and local interests, which are often very vested interests and not in the best interest of the ocean, but sometimes they are and are not listened to. The generation of knowledge, which comes not just as knowledge from scientists, but it comes from people that have a flame in their belly, like we heard in our last talk, and people that are in native communities, First Nations, community groups, and many other interests. So knowledge now is drawn from many places. How do we put that knowledge together? And so we have things like a very, very good thing called the Global Ocean Forum. I don’t have time to go into the, but I suggest you take a look at it. And this has become kind of a pressure group at the international level. And you can see, don’t worry about all of them, but there’s a lot of different areas. And all of these areas relate back to the fundamentals of aquatic resource management, fisheries. There’s also yet another, I hasten to add, and I don’t know what they’re going to be able to do, a Global Ocean Commission that’s been established, launched just a few weeks ago, with a focus on the high seas, those areas of the deep blue that Jordan correctly pointed out, are not necessarily all the productive areas, but they do play a major role still in our use of the oceans. And one of the big questions is, how should high seas, marine protected areas be set up? And how should they be managed? Because all those neat things like bluefin tuna that go in a big circle around from the Gulf of Mexico up to the east coast of Canada, across to West Africa, and then across to here, and if they face a gauntlet of fisheries boats, a tremendous number, each of those fish is worth $50,000.OneortwoofthosefishmeansadifferenceforaCanadianfishermanbetweenagoodyearandabadyear.Andsotheincentivetohavesustainabilityoftheharvest,butther{e}^{\prime }salsoJapaneseinthehighseas,andther{e}^{\prime }speopleintheMediterraneanside,etc.,andther{e}^{\prime }ssomeillegalfishing.Soanyways,PaulMarti{n}^{\prime }saCanadianmemberofthis,andIwishhimluck,butwefranklyhavehadlotsofverygoodadvicefromGlobalOceanCommissions,andwehave{n}^{\prime }tseentheuptakeofthatadvicenearlyasstronglyasweshould,andtha{t}^{\prime }satroublingmatter.So{I}^{\prime }veentitledthetalk,NotJustForTheTaking,andIreallymeanthat.Theoceansarenotjustthereforustotake.Wehavetogive.Wehavetogivealot.Wehavetogiveourbesttomaketheusesoftheoceansustainable.Wehavetounderstandthatothercreaturesonthisplanethaveastrongrationaleforbeingincludedinthelistofvotersoftheocean,thepeople,thecreaturesthathavesometakeonthatmassivesetofresourcesoutthere.So,butforus,weatleastcantalkbackandforthashumanstoeachother,andwehavetodevisewhat{I}^{\prime }dcallaresponsiblecareapproachforCanad{a}^{\prime }soceans.Andso{I}^{\prime }mgoingtogothroughsomeofwhatIconsidertheelementsofthattobe,includingsomeofthethingsthatdirectlyrelatetofisheries.Firstquestion,andthiscomesfromJohnFraser,whoIthinkalotof,formerMinisterofFisheriesandOceansCanada,wholivesintheWestCoast,andhetalksasapersonwhoistotallyandabsolutelycommittedtothehealthandthewell-beingoftheoceans,andsays,whospeaksfortheoceansandwhataretheydoingaboutit?AndIthinkthatforyourgroup,Finn,youshouldaskthatquestion.Youshouldbeoneofthegroupstha{t}^{\prime }sspeakingfortheoceans,butwhatareyougoingtodoaboutit?Whatisitthatyoucandotomakeadifference?Andthatquestionshouldbefirstandforemostinyourmind.Her{e}^{\prime }sacoupleofCanadianauthorstoaddtotheverygoodlist,andthatwasashortlist,bytheway,thatJordanmentioned.Ther{e}^{\prime }slotsofothers.ButthebookSeaSick,writtenbyAlanaMitchell,formerGlobeandMailwriter,sheputacoupleofyearsofherlifeintowritingthisbook,andi{t}^{\prime }sverygood,andi{t}^{\prime }sbeenhighlyacclaimed,infact,andi{t}^{\prime }sbasedonscience,butsh{e}^{\prime }snotascientist,bethefirsttosaythat.Sh{e}^{\prime }sajournalisttryingtoexplainthingsabouttheoceans,andyoucanseefromhertitlewhatherconclusionis.FarleyMowat,whoisoftenacontroversialfigure,buthisbookSeaofSlaughterwillgointomoredetailaboutthethingsthatJordanwastalkingabout,aboutthisunendingslaughterofcreaturesfromtheoceanoverthelast500yearsinCanada.IonceshowedafilmaboutSeaofSlaughteratDalhousieUniversity,andthegraduatestudentsaskedmetostopitinthemiddle,andtheysaid,weca{n}^{\prime }ttakeanymore.Ifthisiswhatthesituationis,whyareyouspendingyourtimeonthis?Whydo{n}^{\prime }tyoujustgiveupandtryanddosomethingsimpler?Well,tha{t}^{\prime }snottheway{I}^{\prime }mconstructed,Iguess,butthepointis,i{t}^{\prime }snotpleasantreading,buti{t}^{\prime }sarealitycheckaboutwhatwehavedoneinthepast.And{I}^{\prime }dalsoliketopaytributetosomepeoplewho,youknow,Canadaasanationhasproducedsomeofthebestfisheriesandoceanscientistsintheworld.Atonepointintime,wewereprobably,alongwithafewEuropeancountries,havingthebestscientificjournalsandsoforth,andpayingthemostattentionintermsoffreeaccesstoinformationandgoodresearchcodesofethicsandfundingintheoceansciences.And{I}^{\prime }veonlyputthreenamesuphereofpeoplewhoareinvolvedinoceanstudiesoroceanscience,peoplethathaveregrettablypassedaway.Iftheywerestillalive,andther{e}^{\prime }smany,manyofmycolleaguesthatIcouldputuphere,I^{\prime }dbehardpressedtochoosewhichones.Butletmejustgiveyouthisverybriefprofileofthesepeople.RanMyers,RansonMyers,workedforthegovernmentandleftthegovernment,wantedtobemoreindependent,becamealeadingprofessoratDalhousieUniversity,andgotagreatfollowingfromtheworl{d}^{\prime }spress,becausehetolditlikeitwasusinghisaccuratescientificapproachesasbesthecouldaboutthestateoffisheriesinvariouspartsoftheworld,andincludingthoseontheeastcoastofCanada.ElizabethMann-Borghese,whomanypeopleworshiparoundtheworld,sh{e}^{\prime }sthedaughterofThomasMann,thegreatauthor,andawonderfulpersonwhogaveherselfovercompletelytotheoceans,alsoatDalhousieUniversity,butheadedtheInternationalOceansInstituteandtrained,andgotthemoneytotrainbyhoundingpeoplelikePierreTrudeauandothersinCanada,saying,pleasegivememoney,andthenusingthatmoneytogetmoremoney.Andsothousandsofpeoplenowhavebeentrainedinunderstandingthecomplexitiesofoceansbecauseofherwork.Shewasalsoagreatauthorontheoceansaswell.AndthethirdpersonwhodiedrecentlyandwhoIhadthegoodfortunetoworkwithwasapsychologist,sonotallislostforyouinthisfield.HesortedouthowtoreducethedamagefromtheinteractionbetweenfishermenandwhalesinNewfoundland.Thatwashisfirstclaimtofame,manymorethingssincethen.Buthelearnedhowusingbasicbehavioralthingsthatinvolveboththebehaviorofthewhalesandthebehaviorofthefishermen,sothatwhenwhalesgot,whichwasveryfrequent,whichwhenwhalesgotcaughtinthefisherma{n}^{\prime }straps,thecodtraps,andthesewerebigwhales,reallybigwhales,andeverybodygotupset.Thewhalesgotupsetandoftendied.Fishermenputthemselvesindanger,butlostagreatdealofmoney,andwhowantstokillawhale?Soanyways,heworkedthatoutandhadteamsthatcouldactuallygooutanddoit.Buthedidmanymorethings.Andthesearepeoplewhomadeasubstantialcontributionintheirlifetimes.Andserveasaninspirationformeandformanyothers.Gettingdown,andagain{I}^{\prime }mjustsuggestingmaybeifyo{u}^{\prime }reseriousaboutwantingtounderstandwhatweshouldbeaskingasresearchquestions,her{e}^{\prime }swhatsomeofthereadingoceanscientistsinCanadaaretalkingabout.Andtheybringinthesefourareas.Yes,improvethefundamentalscientificunderstanding,butw{e}^{\prime }vegottohavetheinformationaboutmonitoringandhowyouusethatinformation.Andyouhavetolookatreallyunderstandingtheimpactsofhumanactivities.Andthenyo{u}^{\prime }vegottobringthisinformationbackintogovernanceandmanagement.Soitis{n}^{\prime }tjustaboutmanagingaspecificfishstock.W{e}^{\prime }vegonebeyondthatnow.Becausewhenyoutryanddoit,wefindofteni{t}^{\prime }salmostimpossible,becausether{e}^{\prime }sbigquestionsthatareignoredinthatapproach.Thisisaratherinterestingnewdocumenttha{t}^{\prime }sjustcomeout.Butitgetstowhat{I}^{\prime }mgoingtotryandsayinsomeofthethingstonight.Thenther{e}^{\prime }sotherpeople.Sothescientificcommunityspeaksforthemselves.Thenther{e}^{\prime }sallthesefolks.CPOS,CanadianParksandWildernessSociety,theVancouverAquariumisagreatplace.EcologyActionCentreinNovaScotia,theLivingOceansSocietyintheWestCoast,WWF.Theyhavemajorprogramsthatrelatebacktothis.AndIwouldreally,reallystronglyunderlineFirstNationsandallthreecoastsofCanada,fourcoastsifweincludetheGreatLakes,theyhaveanincrediblyimportantrole,becausetheyhaveconstitutionalrightsthatrelatebacktotheoceans.Sowehavethisopportunity.W{e}^{\prime }vegotthelongestcoastlineintheworld.Andourmaritimeestate,peopledo{n}^{\prime }toftenrecognize,isabout,dependingonhowyoucountit,butitcouldbeashighas70$300 million. And of course, one of the reasons for that is simply that they won’t be able to use ice highways up there much longer. The season becomes too short and tenuous. And this is one of the persons I did a lot of mentoring with, Janelle Kennedy, on the Eastern Arctic, where of course this is a prime area for what’s going to happen in the future with icebergs and so forth. But also one of the most interesting areas, because we don’t know very much about the continental shelf in that area. Some people say it’s better known on the surface of the moon than it is along the bottom of that area. People are already looking at it, though, for oil and gas exploitation, for shipping purposes, and they’re also looking for fisheries. Surprising how many things are happening in the Arctic right now where people want to go up and test fish. On the East Coast it’s for things like cod. On the West Coast there’s already salmon moving around into all of the Pacific salmon are now found in some Arctic rivers. To the other coast, Gander and I was in a small airplane with John Lean, the person, the whale man. Gander and Fogo Island, all covered in ice at that point. And then to a place where I really enjoy being, which is Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, one of the great wooden shipbuilding and so forth places. And happened to be there the day they were relaunching the Lunos 2, almost newly built. And it’s kind of interesting if you look along that shoreline, there’s the Sea Shepherd. And you can see the Sea Shepherd, Paul Watson’s boat, which has been impounded by Canada for reasons that I won’t explain right now. And then you can see these other large boats. And you can see the Dartmouth ferry and a small naval vessel and dry dock there as well. It really is an active little spot. But don’t forget that the ocean’s influence extends to Ontario, not only directly through the New Orleans region, and particularly there for Quebec, but also the water comes out of Ontario, the quality of the water and so forth. Creatures from the ocean come up into the Great Lakes, including those alewives and some other little things that are really nasty and cost us billions of dollars in management of these species. But it’s also officially considered in Canada that these are inland seas that deserve to fall under the purview of fisheries and oceans for some things. And then we think of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Now, it’s a very interesting body of water there, but what I’d like you to look at is those little circles. And then I’m going to show you some more circles. One of the most interesting things for me of trying to simplify my understanding of very complex oceanography is to look at the things that go round and round in gyres and circles of one sort or another. A simple example is when you go sea kayaking and you’re out there straining against the current and so forth. Maybe the tide’s against you and there’s a strong current, maybe a wind blowing against you. So you go in shore and then you find a countercurrent and then you’re just swept along because that countercurrent is going this way while the main current’s going that way. So you get a free ride instead of being out in. So lots of other things get free rides. So if you look at what’s called the Haida Eddi here, you see these little swirls going out into the ocean there? Well, they’re driven by the fresh water, which is all that red stuff coming down from the rivers like the Skeena River and some others. And those swirls are driven by the current patterns of the ocean. And they go out and they transport all the larvae from the inshore and the nutrients out to the offshore. So you talked, Jordan, about the seamounts. And one of these now, Bowie seamount, is just out there up near the top end of it. That second set of swirls up there. And that’s how it gets all the fish that are out there that make it very special and why it’s a high productivity area. Another one is in the Beaufort Gyre up in the Arctic. And that’s a collection point for the whales in the Arctic and some of the fish species as well because of the high productivity. Same in the Gulf Stream. And here’s a good example of how little we understand. For a long time, the oceanographers didn’t understand that there were these gyres in that area of the Gulf Stream. So the Gulf Stream is going off, coming up the coast of the United States and heading off to Europe. Then there’s all these counter currents that are swirling around just like the ones I’d be looking for on a kayak. And they’re warm water. They’re bringing warm water in off the ocean. So if these counter currents happen to be in place just at the time that the scallops, which are down on George’s bank shelf, are spawning, then the little creatures coming up get swept away by the warm water because they’re cold water creatures. And you don’t get a good spawn that year. So if you’re going to try to understand the management of things, you have to understand phenomena like the gyres and the eddies in the oceans. And this is my first introduction here of things ecological, physical ecological phenomena that won’t come out through an examination of studying fishing pressure. Because they’re environmental in focus. And there’s lots of those kinds of things in the oceans. So this has led to great toss. You can’t believe, it’s just like among economists, what’s the saying that if you get three economists in the room, you’ll get four opinions or something like that. And the same is true with fisheries biologists. I’ve actually sat in the office of an ecological ocean scientist in British Columbia. I just happened to be there. When he was, this is after the Cod disaster, and he had just published an article with some others in Science magazine, very highly respected journal, saying that the fisheries management people basically didn’t understand what they were doing, which I agreed with him, by the way. And we were talking about that. The phone rings just at that moment from a fisheries scientist who I won’t give the name of in Eastern Canada, but who worked for government, and who was threatening to sue him for defamation of character because they were at odds. They were analyzing the same problem from entirely different points of view. And particularly when I lived in Nova Scotia, I could give you endless stories of this. And they were, in one case there was a whole very large ecosystem group, and they were shut down. They were shut down by the higher-ups because they were producing data that were at odds with what the population dynamics people were producing. I’m giving a simplified version of things. But the point is, and I used to say this to students when I was teaching fisheries things in Nova Scotia, don’t trust the experts. Form your own opinions. The experts are often very wrong, and they wear blinders just like everybody else in society. And one of the biggest ones is about fisheries management. The same could be said at times in the past for forest management. But fisheries management is inherently even more complex. At least trees stand in line and can be counted. Rarely is that the case with fish because of water currents among other things. So here’s just a little collection of books, and I could triple that collection about these different points of view, and I won’t go into details. Now, this is a sad story here. This is in Lunenberg, Nova Scotia. How many have ever been to Lunenberg? How many have ever been to Nova Scotia? Great, great. Well, if you go down to Lunenberg, you’ll see this very moving, very, very moving set of, what would you call these, obelisks maybe, I guess? And they list as much as possible the names of people who were killed at sea. In some cases, they don’t have all the names because it would be 50 or 100 people who were killed in 1927. Again, while we were living there, there was a terrible incident. But these are just people from Lunenberg area because this was the Grand Banks fisheries. And it’s very moving to see it. But the point is we remember a lot about our ocean past, and we even tend to glorify it or feel sad about it or whatever. But what have we actually learned? And there’s, just for a little window dressing there, there’s a couple of postage stamps to remind us about the glorious past. And that’s the fellow on the right, Angus Walters, who was a very famous captain of the fastest of the ships, the Bluenos. Newfoundland, that’s that abundant cod population. But the interesting thing is the man that told us early on stuff that is still being quoted is Harold Innes from the University of Toronto. Who was an economist who dealt with this idea of heartland and hinterland in Canada. And the fact is that we were hewers of wood, drawers of water, fur traders, but also we dipped into the ocean. And he wrote this, What Happens When You Get a Really Truly Abundant Resource, like the cod fisheries. That’s his book, written in 1940. Very prescient. And basically he’s saying that an abundant, tradable resource can fuel an economy, but it also traps you in many ways. And that is what has happened in Canada. In a sense we’ve relied on super abundant natural resources, not just fish, but it allows us, I’ve thought a lot about this over the years, trying to understand why we behave towards the resources we do. Like for example with the cod, when we lived in Nova Scotia, you’d go in and buy this fish that was awful in the stores. You couldn’t get good cod in the stores. And the reason it wasn’t good was because it was mishandled. Right from the time it wasn’t iced, it wasn’t bled so you’d have a nice open flesh, and it was treated as if it was going after the carals to be treated as salted cod, low value commodity. Some other people, Icelanders, Norwegians, and some others didn’t do that. They treated the fish property, they got very good value added, and they started respecting the resource base even more. So that’s the important thing for those with an economic bent to recognize, is that you can, one of the ways in which we can actually get more out of our resource is to add value to it, handle it carefully, and respect each fish that we catch, which gets again into why is it that we can go in and use trawlers and take a small fraction of the fish. But anyways, a lot of the stuff goes back to Harold Innes. And now the other thing is, and I hear I differ a bit from what was said about the empty oceans. Yes, the oceans are empty because we’ve knocked out a lot of the food chain, but there still can be an abundance. And as you correctly pointed out, Jordan, if you like eating jellyfish, which actually I do, they’re actually there. But I keep asking my Chinese colleagues, well, why is it that you eat chicken feet or certain other things, some of the certain other things? Well, it isn’t for the taste particularly, it’s for the crunch, the crunch value. And jellyfish is one of those things, and the same with Indonesians and others, they like the crunch, and they’re delicious. Now, they’re dried in Newfoundland. Newfoundland couldn’t believe it’s good luck when they discovered that there were actually people in the world that wanted to eat jellyfish. So they started drying them and exporting them into these little flat patties, you know. And there are certain other things that I could mention as well, and squid, of course, is one of them. And so what you find is an ocean that gets very abundant in those creatures that can be low in the food chain, often in what we call detritus food chain. You know, the stuff that rains down into the water column. So lots of fishermen are now happy to see no cod in Nova, well, I don’t know about Nova Scotia so much, but certainly, oops, everything shut off. I guess, have you got it there still? Can I have some technical help up here? I’ve got nothing on my screen, and I really like seeing the screen. Oh, it’s okay. Okay, and then how do I get it to go back here? Okay, so we now have very, very valuable snow crab and northern shrimp. And basically, the ecosystem has changed. Don’t expect the cod to come back. Unless something catastrophic happens to these guys, because these have basically replaced the cod. We’ll see cod for sure. We’ll see some other ground fish. We probably won’t see them in the abundance, because these guys are eating on the food chain now. So, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, you know, that there’s fewer cod. If you ask the fishermen, a lot of them that have made a lot of money off these new species, will say, hey, we’re making more money, we’ve got better boats, etc. The question is, and I tried to look at this question with some people in the Auditor General’s office some years ago, and we concluded that there was no knowledge base to support the hypothesis that these actually were being sustainably harvested, the new ones. In other words, we might end up with the same problem. But let’s go back again to another thing that was mentioned earlier, and that is electronic gear and so forth. Well, it’s not exactly new, but it’s in this period from about 1970 on, and this man got an honorary doctorate from, I think, the University of New Brunswick. And this, oddly enough, was one of his boats, which I happened to see in the dry dock in Lunenburg, and Captain Medford Matthews was a real innovator with gear, and he brought in, this wasn’t the first trawler that came, by any means, into the region, but it’s kind of like the early brand of the trawlers that are of a modern type and well equipped with all the gear that can take a lot of fish, sonar things and other equipment. Well, here’s what they look like now. Here’s another one with a couple of kayakers for scale. And these things are essentially the bulldozers of the sea. They do so much damage to the bottom, they rip things up, and I think eventually, probably we’ll see these things phased out for other types of gear. That’s my hypothesis. But in the interim, these are deadly machines from the point of view of what they can haul for fish. It doesn’t mean that they can’t be made to be useful contributors towards sustainability if they’re held in check. But particularly when you get in these big vessels and then you get facilities on them or factory boats that can accompany them, that can take an immense amount and stay at sea for long periods of time, because they can devastate a whole region of the ocean very quickly. Now, then we move to what happens to fish after it gets caught. If you look at this plant at the top, National Seafoods is one of the world’s major fishing companies and one of the largest ones in Canada. This plant located in Lunenberg was the world’s largest fish plant in the 1980s. Now, my daughter Laura will quite well remember when we used to go down to the cottage. Some days we were downwind of this plant and it was just a bad smell. They were taking all the remains and cooking it to make it into fishmeal and selling it. But what does National Seafood do now? White-fleshed fish such as cod, haddock, pollock and a bunch of others are kind of what some people in the banking business would call fungible, i.e. you can exchange them interchangeably. They’re white-fleshed, you can make them into fish and chips. You can even take something like tilapia, which is a freshwater fish, and call it cod. That happens sometimes illegally, but it happens. So in today’s market supply chain, because China has become the most efficient processor, they get all this fish going to China. It goes through big ports like Rotterdam, where it gets all muddled up. It could come from West Africa, it could come from South America, whatever. It gets turned into chunks of fish that are partially processed there. Then it comes back to companies like the one in Lundenburg, where people squirt some nice things on top of it, maybe make it a little fancier, make it into a frozen dinner or something like that. Then it gets made in Canada and then sent to the United States or consumed in Canada or maybe in Europe even. So that’s a reality. So if you were listening to the radio in the last few weeks, there’s been a release of a report that estimates that something like 30% of this fish is actually mislabeled. Because once it gets to Rotterdam or wherever, you don’t know whether it’s a cod or whatever it happens to be. So market supply chains go through this complex thing, and it makes it very difficult for us to know, A. Whether we’re really eating what we think is cod or whatever else it might be. B. Whether it was caught sustainably or even whether it went through some mishap in its process that lowered the quality of the fish. So this has become a major, major problem in ocean management and in management of the seafood chains, the sort of thing that you’re talking about, if you want to be a good citizen and only eat sustainably produced fish. Fortunately, there are solutions. But just to give you another example of this, and this is an area where Australia was furious with us. See this large fish, the Patagonian toothfish, which some of you may have eaten as Chilean. How many people, I shouldn’t ask the question, but if you want to raise your hand. Have you ever eaten Chilean sea bass? Okay, well Chilean sea bass is one of those fancy names that’s given for something that’s actually a fish coming from Antarctica. And for the most part unsustainably produced. And at one point in time, this has been cleaned up quite a bit now, but it was going from Antarctica, pretty much an unregulated fishery, even though the Australians were really making a pitch for it. And then it would go to China. It would be handled there. Then it would come to Canada. And then it would be transhipped to the United States as Canadian fish. Australians weren’t very happy about that, I can tell you. But again, this just illustrates things. So one of the ways to get around this is through all these various choices that you can make, and people that help you to make good choices. It started with the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and now the Vancouver Aquarium is in there, Seafood Watch. The most critical thing is something started by WWF and some others in the private sector, on what’s called the Marine Stewardship Council, which is now certifying some species of fish. And interestingly, many chefs now in the world will refuse, even in countries in places like Hong Kong and some of the big hotels, they will refuse to handle fish that are not certified. And this is a real step forward. And I could tell you some interesting stories, but I better move on. So just go to fishchoice.com and take a look at some of the things that are on there, or any of these individual websites. This is the future. This is the future that responsible seafood companies, like National Sea, see as what they would be faced with always. And countries like China are now starting to recognize that they will have to become involved. Then there’s some of the really nasty things like shark fin. I took this picture in a Chinese restaurant, but the interesting thing there is Yao Ming, the guy who is so tall that he reaches to this guy, a basketball player from China, highly respected within China, and a person who doesn’t just play basketball, but he’s very interested in public policy issues. And he came out and said, I will not have my wife to be, and I will not have shark fin soup served as is traditionally done at Chinese weddings. And I’m going to encourage all my fellow basketball players and sports figures and so forth to do the same. He’s probably had more impact than any other single thing of the scientists and others who wring their hands, because China is the primary place now for shark fin soup, and where all those 70 million or more shark fins are going. Now, little known facts. I think they’re facts. But it’s always interested me in Nova Scotia that there’s been a sword fishery. And if you go back far enough, there was all sorts of books written by people, I think Zane Gray type of books. Very rich people used to go to Nova Scotia and catch them off as a sport fishery. But in the 1940s still even, there was a harpoon sword fishery in Glace Bay up in Cape Breton Island. Hundreds and hundreds of boats. This is just one picture from the era. And they had these canoes that they went out in, and men would go out there with harpoon, waiting to catch a 400 or more pound swordfish. The interesting point about it is it still exists. And one of the points right now is that the Marine Stewardship Council has been asked to certify harpoon fisheries in the United States and in Canada. And then also the Pelagic Longline. Now, you got introduced to the longline, and some people put their hands to their heart and say the longline is the way to go, because it’s not involving those trawlers. But what the longline does is catches turtles, sharks, and all sorts of other things that are not the wanted species, at the same time as they’re catching swordfish. But controversially, the Marine Stewardship Council has awarded the Northwest Atlantic Canadian Sword Fishery, which amounts to about $10 million a year, certification that they were doing it properly. I’m not so sure, I don’t know, on this one. But the interesting thing is they had already awarded the spear fishery for the sword fishery. There are still using spears out there. And if you Google something along those lines, you can actually see little things for sportsmen in the United States, for example, going out on boats and throwing their harpoons at getting swordfish. But you can see what happens, and that the government in the late 90s really put a clamp on things, because you can see the decline on the swordfish going down there, and went below what is considered a maximum sustainable yield of biomass. And you can see as a consequence of stopping that fishery, how it’s built up, to the point now where they feel that they can reinstitute a limited sword fishery. So these are the sorts of things. This is an oddball little example. It’s not one of the great fisheries, but there’s dozens, even hundreds, of these other kinds of fisheries out there that don’t get the same kind of press as the cod fishery. The biggest single thing we have going for us now is the lobster. And then haddock is a ground fish that is still retaining some place in the scale of things. A very nice fish to eat, but these are the things that sustain the small communities of the South Shore of Nova Scotia, Bay of Fundy, and so forth. But the point here is that the haddock went down, and it went down maybe because of overfishing, but it wasn’t on the scale of overfishing of the cod. Almost certainly water temperature has played a role in it. So again, what’s causing the effect between fishing pressure and fish abundance? Sometimes not very clear. Here’s another one. A friend of mine took this picture last weekend or a weekend before. One day fishery, and you get all these collections of boats going out, and they kill immensely. They take huge schools of herring, and then the gulls and other birds are there, eagles, etc. And the point here though is that the abundance of herring is at the greatest level in the last 30 to 40 years. Responsible fishery scientists would say, we have no idea why. They may claim credit too and say, oh, it’s because of our careful management. But it’s been up and down and up and down. I don’t have time. There’s an awful lot of interesting stories about this fishery, and about the way the native people, the First Nations along the coast, perceive how it should be managed, where they wouldn’t have any of these boats out there. Because it’s mainly managed for herring roe, you know, the eggs. And they go to Japan and places like that. But they would manage by lifting the things out off kelp, where they’ve been spawned by the fish themselves, and get rid of the boats, period. So there’s differing points of view of what you can do. And some of those things I think are going to be the things for the future. Salmon. I have spent a lot of my life looking at, reading about, trying to understand salmon. I’ll be the first to say it’s really difficult. I’m not the only person to say that. There’s aboriginal interests, which are strongly constitutionally supported. Commercial interests, which often are on the decline. Sports fisheries interests, which claim to produce about five to 16 times the value per fish landed, because fishermen spend a lot of money. And then there’s aquaculture. Anybody here from BC? Great. Well, you know that this is not exactly an easy subject in British Columbia. I mean, everybody has an opinion on it, and it’s really difficult. But look at this. This is a plot several years ago of watersheds in Canada, because you have to involve the freshwater. Watersheds in British Columbia, I should say, were sockeye salmons in decline. So the yellow and red watersheds, huge number of watersheds under threat. That’s likely to increase because of global warming, and the streams are warming up, and other things happening in the watersheds. The pine bark beetle killing all the trees, trees go, water runs off, isn’t there for the spawning season. So the salmon’s truly in trouble, no matter what. Aquaculture, if you look at a net like this, this is a fairly well-run aquaculture setting in Quetzino-San. Each of those netted areas holds about 50,000 fish this size. If you’ve ever seen anything like that close up, it’s quite amazing. So this is just fish packed in place. The fish aren’t discontented, and there’s varying points of view about it. But some of you may know that our Prime Minister appointed a justice from British Columbia, it was called the Cohen Commission, to look at the future of the Fraser River Salmon, the biggest run. And don’t read all of this, but the basic point is that Cohen said, if people were expecting that I’d find a smoking gun, one causality to it, no, no way. And I think, I certainly felt that would be what he would come up with at the end, that there’s all sorts of factors. But read what he says, Fraser River sockeye face an uncertain future, shrinking resources, which may result in delays in implementing reforms in research, shrinking resources being less money around, DFO has been cut badly, meaning that the stressors to which sockeye are exposed will continue, and the deterioration of sockeye habitat will get worse, the waters constituting Fraser River sockeye habitat are warming. And then pointing out that basically, because the government had taken a bunch of amendments before receiving us to the Fisheries Act, that in fact the future of management of the Fraser River is unknown, and that’s putting it in the most positive terms. And so these are guarded comments, the whole report, the summary of that, if you want to get a sense of that particular very important resource and why it’s difficult to manage, read that report. So my concern, see we have these various things that we can do in Canada for the oceans, and two big things, one is the Fisheries Act, which is in a very old, one of the first pieces of legislation we had in Canada, and I won’t give you a boring and dull description of all the parts of it, but it sets the basis for conservation of fish, for pollution control, and a number of other things related to habitat, etc. And also sovereignty over our resource and sovereignty between the federal government and provincial governments in its management. It’s a very important piece of legislation, it’s been changed quite dramatically in the last year, placing less emphasis on the habitat aspect in particular. But we also have the Oceans Act in Canada, and this is a new piece of legislation that came out in the 1990s, and essentially set a new basis of management around ecosystems, sustainable development, in other words balancing between the various kinds of uses of the ocean, and specified the need for attention to marine protected areas, and also what was eventually called LOMAS, Large Ocean Management Areas, that take big chunks of the ocean and try and develop plans for them. I’m just going to give you a very brief overview of a few of these, and this talk will be available to anybody that wants it, and you can see in more detail. But the LOMAS represent a move towards the ecosystem based approach, and one that’s based on consultation among the various users, whether they’re First Nations, whether they’re oil and gas, fisheries, and so forth. It’s building relationships and dialogue among the various users. And the idea is to plan for surprises, plan for management strategies that you could actually implement, and get that information in advance of development. So one that I’m very familiar with is ESM, East Coast Scotiab shelf, and they produce good work and so forth. I won’t talk about it anymore. One that’s citizen led, scientist led, and led by both Canada and the United States is the area of the Gulf of Maine particularly, Georgia’s Bank is part of that, and then up into the Bay of Fundy. And here the federal government has taken a limited role, and it’s been the states and the provinces working together that’s really done some very innovative work. We won’t have time to go into it, but I wanted to say just one thing. This is the boundary line between the two countries, painfully worked out, and I could tell you interesting stories about that because I had some role in some of that. It was very interesting. But if you look up towards the Bay of Fundy and into towards New Brunswick, which is just to the right of the top of the line, of the top line, whales and ships collide up there because that’s where it’s a natural, one of these areas with lots of currents flowing and gyres and so forth, and it’s incredibly productive. The whales come up there to feed in the summer. Some of the scarcest whales, humpbacks are there, but some of the other whales, and they collide with the ships. So you get these ships going up into, particularly for an oil refinery located up there, and they find a whale draped over this. They have a kind of bulbous front on them, and there’s a whale, dead whale there. And so the right whales particularly, there’s only about 300 of them left I think, and they were being knocked off right now, no pun intended, in that area. So there was a simple solution. It was a very simple solution and one that’s worked remarkably well. They just changed the shipping lanes slightly, and they put in place a kind of a spotting mechanism because you can see the whales. And so people would know where the whales tended to be clustered on a given day, so there’s some leeway in where the ships go. And problem not completely solved, but let’s say 80% solved. So there really are win-win situations out there. And the charge for that was led by, you can see how Nova Scotia goes down to kind of a little point, not the big part of Nova Scotia, but there’s a little kind of peninsula, a beautiful place. The school teacher was living out there, and she took it upon herself to be part of the solution and organized local groups to actually spot and be able to say where the whales would be and demonstrate it to the scientists who didn’t really believe in this, I don’t think, very strongly, that it could actually be a solution. So it started from a citizen. And I have a lot of respect for what I see as citizen science in the oceans throughout this country. I could give you many other examples in the West Coast and the Arctic and so forth. Another one that I think involves a heavy degree of citizen input is the Gulf of St. Lawrence action plan, which is being implemented primarily through Environment Canada. And here there’s something called ZIP. We don’t need to go into details of it, but ZIP committees exist throughout the Gulf, particularly around Quebec. This is all about Quebec. And the neat thing about it is that it brings the stakeholders together, and they come to real solutions about local problems that affect their part of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. And the government and others provide a broader input into overall what the St. Lawrence action plan would look like. So there’s some degree of coherence throughout the whole region. Now these are good things that are happening, and they’ve been developed by people working together, painstakingly working together, I might add, for more than a decade of interaction, overcoming all sorts of obstacles, differing points of view, narrow points of view, etc. So these are some of the good things that are happening in Canada. One that I helped to get underway in terms of some of, I won’t go into all sorts of stories about it for time reasons, but a terrible name, PINSEMA, Pacific North Coast Integrated Management Area. And this includes what I hate, the word also world class, the phrase world class, but the oceans in this area are stunning in terms of the diversity of life and also the intactness of the ecosystems. In this whole area, in the northern part of Vancouver Island, up to Prince Rupert, there’s only 15 or 20,000 people living in that whole area. And that’s an area that’s probably about as long as much of the coast of Norway, for example. And you can actually find intact ecosystems. You can fly at reasonably low levels and see gigantic sunfish floating on their side into the way a thousand pounds or more. You can see whales. You can see if you’re in a boat where the seabirds go. And then there’s important fisheries activities in that as well. There’s a wonderful atlas of it if you want to look at it online and you can download that. But there’s all sorts of other activities. This is drawn from that atlas just showing who’s got oil and gas exploratory wells and tenures in the area. All sorts of people have staked that territory. There’s another one that shows all sorts of different fisheries interests. Well, interspersed with those, I don’t know if I’ve got the… No, I don’t. I took it out for time reasons. If I could show you where the corals are and where there’s a thing called glass sponges, which we thought were creatures that had gone extinct. They were studied as fossils in Germany. That was where they found them around the areas I think that are fossilized now in Germany. And suddenly, about 15 years ago, somebody discovered that there was huge beds of these things around this area that primarily in the area is kind of a pale orange. So what are you going to do about it? These were areas that were just beginning to be used heavily by trawlers. The trawlers were starting to plow right through these ancient beds because some of these are thousands of years old. And a stop was put to it. And now they’re all plotted. We know where they are. There’s exclusion zones for the corals, for the fisheries. And the same around up till about 2000, there was an official almost denial that there was these soft corals that were found on the East Coast. And the fishermen had been complaining about it, particularly the longliners, that the trawlers were going through and bringing up these things. And I went to a fishery association museum in southwest Nova Scotia, and they had all these big corals. And if you went on the West Coast to some of the, not commercial, but sports fishing shops and boat places, they’d have them on the wall. Same thing on the West Coast. Well, officially they didn’t exist. And finally, they did exist. And now there’s all sorts of exclusion areas for the red corals as well. So progress, but it’s slow and it’s painful. The Northern Gateway, I’m not going to even touch tonight if you want to ask me questions about it, but this is the prime example now of why we need something like PINCIMA to generate the kind of data that would be helpful to know how much, what is the actual risk. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the government has decided to more or less, not totally, but more or less, got the cooperation that had been established through PINCIMA, and that mechanism seems to be lost now. Another one in the North is the Bullfort Sea Partnership, which is a complicated thing, and you can see the vision of it, is basically ecosystem health and supporting sustainable communities and economies for future generations as well as the present. The problem with the Bullfort Sea Partnership is there’s a lot of things that relate to land claims and Northern local peoples up there that have made it very difficult, and I’m not blaming them, but there’s a lot of obstacles in the way still to make this move as fast as it should. Another mechanism that’s starting to get in place is Lancaster Sound. Lancaster Sound was one of the first places where there was sea-use planning in Canada, and at that time, that was in the 1980s. People were kind of looking at it as a bit of a curiosity. Now this is a very important part of the Northwest Passage that will become one of the areas used for shipping eventually. There’s a large part of that is now proposed as a National Marine Conservation Area, and this will be very interesting to see what this will actually mean in reality. Now I want to point out the National Marine Conservation Area, because we actually have legislation saying that all the representative areas in Canada, there’s 26 or 27 of them, something like that, each of those kinds of habitats should have representative areas where you could actually pinpoint and say, aha, this area is protected within that, and it will tell us about the area. It could be of use for fisheries management and so forth, helping to replenish stocks. We’re far from there. Just to highlight again what Jordan was saying, look at the small percentage of protected areas in the oceans in Canada compared to the land areas. Most people would say in the land areas it’s not enough. So I don’t look at the detail of this, but this shows all these different types of areas. You can look at Hudson Bay, for example, or the north and south part of the West Coast, Pacific Coast. There’s a lot of areas, but particularly in the Arctic, we need a lot more effort. One of the things that CPOS, which has been a prime contributor to this, they have a whole list of things that they feel are urgent priorities from marine protected areas, and they’re not all being acted on at this point in time. So we do have a document, and talk is very cheap, called the National Network of MPAs. Do we have a national network of MPAs in Canada? Well, here’s one point of view from a person who I respect a lot. Through the Pew Foundation, Daniel Pauley from UBC Fisheries Centre, who’s one of the people that really understands the oceans and fisheries very well in Canada and around the world. He’s been running a database called MPA Global, looking at marine protected areas all around the world. If you go and look at the Canadian entries, there’s 574 of them, including provincial coastal parks and ecological reserves and so forth. I can go out in my kayak and go right around the ecological reserves, two kilometres offshore from where I live, for birds, for example. Marine parks in British Columbia, there’s dozens of them, but they’ve been chosen not for their ecological value, although sometimes there is ecological value, but it’s nice safe shelters for boats that go up and down the coast, small pleasure boats or big pleasure boats. So this kind of overstates the case, but it’s not Daniel Pauley’s fault. This is following certain criteria. We’re starting to see this now emerge as networks within the regions. So for example, there’s whale sanctuaries, coral sanctuaries, and a place called the Gully where a lot of the really interesting whales that are offshore from Nova Scotia collect. And then there’s a lot of actually land-based ones, which are primarily for birds and protection of wetlands. The problem with this is can you really call it a network? What are the criteria? How will all of this relate, that I’ve got on this diagram, how will it relate to sustainable fisheries management? Because that’s the kind of question that we should be asking. I don’t think we’re asking that question very well in Canada now, but I would urge Finn to be thinking about that when you’re thinking about sustainability of seafood and so forth. How does it relate back to the other things in the ocean ecosystem, and how can we use those tools better? Pinsima, this diagram shows all these different places that I mentioned, the corals and other areas that deserve some sort of protection of one sort or another from here and now management issues, things like the trawlers and other activities, oil and gas in some cases. Now, here is the makings of at least a west coast, northwest coast network. Here’s what I’d like to see. If you look at Pinsima, and I’ve taken it out to the 200-mile zone because I feel we should be going out to the 200-mile zone on this, but if you had, I call it Bowie to Brooks, Brooks Peninsula is a really, I should put a picture of it in, it’s so interesting to see it from the air. It’s a finger of land that goes out to the sea, an interesting place because during the Second World War, when we were patrolling all along the coast for ships coming across from Asia, a lot of airplanes were lost in the Bowie, in the Brooks Peninsula because right at that point, there’s a change in the currents, and you get all, so there’s a north and a south current coming, and they change seasonally, and right at that point, you can get, I talked to a pilot about this when I was flying over with him, and he was saying that he had actually seen what looked like Niagara Falls coming up because the currents are clashing, you get this water coming up rising out of the ocean, and he said it was just like this wall of water coming up and then crashing down the other side in the atmosphere. So these are the things that only pilots see, I guess, but he said an exceedingly dangerous area, but it’s again a very important area, separating the north and the south and the kinds of animal migrations, whales and so forth and seabirds, and then if you look at the top end, there’s the Bowie Seamount, and there’s sea mounts, these mountains that rise up almost to the ocean, top of the ocean, but in the case of Bowie Seamount, it comes within 75 feet of the surface. Now I have talked to people that have gone out there on their sailboats, big sailboats, and scuba dived on that seamount. It’s filled with life, it’s absolutely filled with life, and so we have a whole series of these. This is the only one that currently gets any protection whatsoever from fishing, as far as I can tell. There’s other things in the Scott Islands, and rarity is very important. We’ll look in estuaries, another one of these strange little fish things that won’t go into the sponge reefs and so forth. So this is not just a big, bland body of light blue or anything like that. When you start looking at what’s on the bottom, it needs protection. The sea otters coming back, and they’re part of the ecosystem now. Some First Nations hate them because they’re taking oysters, they’re taking all sorts of creatures that they want to harvest. The coral reefs I’ve mentioned, Gui Hanas, which is land co-managed between Parks Canada and now a marine conservation area under the Marine Conservation Act, and the Haida people. One of the most innovative systems of co-management anywhere in the world. I mean, this is fabulous, and this is going to mean a whole different approach towards fisheries management in the area, towards how the Haida people perceive their responsibilities, and how the Government of Canada, and the province of Canada actually, it’s all done on a co-management basis. This is one of the most exciting things that you can possibly imagine. And this is what the southern end, you can see down that yellow tip, the southern end, which happens to be where the highest recorded winds were ever recorded. It was off Test Oil Rig there in the 1970s, I think it was, 200 kilometers an hour, something like that. So this is the kind of habitat that’s up there, and you can see the animals that are living there, the sea lions, in a beautiful area. And the sea mound, above that, rockfish. Those fish, many of them are 70 years old, and some of my colleagues who want to protect them say, would you eat your grandparents? Because they’re delicious, they’re served on many menus, and not very sustainably harvested. In fact, before Bowie Sea Mound, while it was still under consideration, that’s just a plot of the depth contours and these currents that circulate around on the Bowie Sea Mound, but fishermen were being told to go out there and fish while they still could. So even in the, this is say, seven or eight years ago, when it was actively known that Bowie Sea Mound was going to be handled, there was boats going out there. So now that problem is solved, but there’s all these other problems along the coast, should you allow boats to go out to other sea mounds. Triangle Island, a most amazing place. The day I went out there, the pilot said, you were lucky, you get one to two days a year when it looks like this, and it’s not covered in rain and fog. You can see the little blip on the top of it, that was a lighthouse. And they put the lighthouse up in the cloud level, so the lighthouse keepers could never see it. The weather was so bad there that lighthouse keepers often would get no food for two or three months at a time. Sadly, some of the lighthouse keepers went crazy out there as well. And there’s only the base of the lighthouse left. A hurricane blew the lighthouse itself away. And sadly also, one of the leading scientists that studied, it’s a great place, one of the great nesting areas for certain important sea birds. And sadly, one of the scientists fell off the cliff and she died. There’s a wonderful book though that’s been written about Triangle Island, with a lot of watercolours and so forth by an artist that went out at a later time. It’s a very interesting spot. Now, what do you think those things are? Innovation with ocean technology and sovereignty issues such as signing on to the law of the sea. We’ve never ratified the law of the sea, for example. I think it’s time to revisit and strengthen our commitment to the oceans. I think we’ve made a start with the Oceans Action Plan, but I think it’s got some good points and it’s faltering in some key areas and not enough resources or even attention is being given to it. Ask when the last time this was reviewed in Parliament, for example. The fisheries, as far as I can see, the committee that deals with fisheries and oceans matters in the current Parliament is pretty much dysfunctional. Certainly not dealing with the kinds of questions that we’re talking about here tonight. It will probably receive the report of the Commissioner on Environment, Sustainable Development and MPAs, say thank you. I know they won’t be needing any serious discussion of this, long-term discussion of this. Thank you very much for your hard work. And that’s what things have degraded to at various times now. We need much more than that. So in the work of Finn and with, I hope, your other colleagues around the country, that you will join the voices of those who do speak, I think, responsibly and sensibly about and for the oceans, but that you will take these kinds of broader perspectives and keep those in mind even as you focus very strongly on the need for going after the individual species and looking at the problems related to all of the fish that are out in the ocean. Because it’s clear we’re going to be eating more varieties of them and we’re going to find some of them very scarce still in the future. So thank you very much for your attention this evening. And we’re going to take another round of applause. So we’ve had your attention for a long time tonight. But you’re welcome to ask some questions if you’d like to do that. If you ask a question, then I’ll repeat it because then we can capture it on video. But we’d be more than pleased to take questions. So if anyone has one, then… Yeah, just to the general problem of sustainability. I don’t know if anyone’s heard of Donald Wright’s idea of a progress trap. So like our ancestors killing two mammoths, let’s say, over one is a good idea. That’s progress. But once they could drive 200 off a cliff and kill an entire herd and then kill more herds until they also… Our ancestors in those areas would starve to death because they’d killed all the mammoths, essentially. That would be a progress trap, quote unquote, from Donald Wright. And I was wondering if you guys have any thoughts about if that applies, if that’s like an oversimplistic generalization or if it fits, is there anything we could do about it? So the question is whether the idea of progress trap is relevant to this issue. The idea of progress trap is the expansion of technology to harvest beyond sustainable limits, I guess. Do you want to take that? Sure, sure. Well, it’s part of a larger problem of traps. And progress traps is certainly one. And we get caught in those traps because something works well for us for a time period. And certainly that was true in the fisheries case. And then when it doesn’t work well, we’re still adhering to that approach. So one of the things, and this is one of the reasons why I bring out the ecosystem work and so forth, we have to open our mind to alternative possibilities. And also there’s another little phrase that’s used called option foreclosure. You know, for example, if you lay out all the different uses in the ocean, and everybody’s scrambling for space in the ocean, you know, the fishermen don’t want aquaculture because they can’t park their boats or their nets are in the way, whatever it happens to be. The oil people want one thing, the aquaculturists don’t want the oil people, et cetera. So you’ve got to have some rational case for making choices. But option foreclosure, if you do it well, and zoning is one of the ways to do that, allows for more to go on but at a lower risk. And what we’re doing now, I think, is moving back towards a sectoral approach where it happens right now that the sector happens to be oil and gas. It could equally be some other sector in the future. It could be deep ocean mining, for example, or shallow ocean mining. And so we have to have a more rational basis than just following whatever we think at the moment is the best. So that’s what we’re dealing with, the progress trap. I think there’s also, and maybe it accompanies it, but a kind of a conceptual trap sometimes as well. You know, we adhere to ideas and therefore we want to open our minds up. But then something comes along. It could be some terrible accident, classic cases, the Exxon Valdez or something like that. And suddenly, bang, you’re in a whole new environment of thinking. And you’re not prepared for it. You don’t have solutions. You haven’t thought your way through the kind of knowledge bases you need. And so that’s another kind of trap that we have to face. Because that’s why I say, think about accidents. Many of the changes in our society are the result of accidents. And something so awful happens that we have to think of a new way of doing things. And so a lot of what I think the scientific community is dealing with in the oceans right now is to say, we’ve got to prepare ourselves for a future that’s very uncertain. And therefore we need to have a lot of knowledge. And we have to ask a lot of what ifs so that we are prepared to make direction shifts as necessary in the future. Whether they’re from climate change or some horrible accident or just changing priorities in society. One of those priorities for sure is that all those certification programs are going to become the way we do business. And those people who are not engaged in that in the fisheries are going to learn the hard way. That’s my prediction for five to ten years. What would be the negative consequences with zoning, especially economic consequences, the loss of jobs or closing of the mysteries? What would some of those be? The question is the potential negative consequences of zoning. Yeah, it’s a good question, a really good question. Well, to start with, it is if you impose zoning, it’s almost certainly going to have a lot of negative consequences. One of which is people simply won’t accept it and therefore illegal activities will take place. So the first thing about zoning is it’s got to be done on a consultative and collegial, and collegial is the wrong word, collaborative way, bringing stakeholders together. That’s essential. Otherwise, there’s all sorts of ways around zoning. The second thing about zoning is if there are economic tradeoffs, one has to look at that carefully because there may be ways to avoid them. And if you don’t look at the economics carefully, then you can do really dumb things with economic zoning. The third thing is if you’re going to make an assertion like we have both made tonight that we think MPAs, which is a type of zoning, can be helpful in the overall issue of fisheries management. Eventually, maybe we can get away with saying that for a number of years, maybe even decades. Eventually, we’ve got to show the results. So there needs to be a lot of monitoring and so forth as well. Otherwise, it’s your word against my word, so to speak. And so those are some of the consequences. On the positive side, if you do things right with zoning, you can actually get added value. You can have, well, I’ll give you an example. There was a full page ad in the paper in British Columbia, I think it was probably in a number of the papers, by a group of people engaged in marine tourism on the Discovery Somme area, which is up the coast a little ways. And the point was, in this case, that they feared a bunch of clearcutting that was going to totally destroy or largely destroy the potential for tourism. So you zone that. You don’t let that happen. Or do you just let it happen? Well, they’ve got the rights to clearcutting. And the people are saying, well, we’re going to lose our livelihoods. People aren’t going to want to come up and see clearcuts. So those are things that, if you do get together, there’s probably a good solution. And everybody gives at the end of the day, but there’s probably a solution. It’s the same as that example that I gave of the whales going and avoiding the ship collisions. For years, there was resistance again. There’s going to be ships crashing into each other and all sorts of things, or it won’t work perfectly. And that was the zoning one. So look for the positive side of it and anticipate if there are negative things, can they be addressed? Just from the point of view of an organization like FINN, I think I read that the IUUs also engage in a lot of odious behaviors that aren’t necessarily related to what you talked about tonight, i.e. human trafficking, drugs now, that sort of thing. And I’m just wondering, in order to help give the issue more political prominence, do you see linkages possible, possibly between this issue and others that other groups or other people may consider to be trigger ideas, if you understand the question? So the question is, given that there are illegal fishing activities and that those illegal activities spill into other domains of illegality, like perhaps drug trafficking and human trafficking, are there ways of making political capital out of those connections? And it’s interesting that the IUU, and I think that’s relatively new that people have been trying to make those linkages, even though we’ve known that there are linkages. I think the answer, the quick answer is yes, but it has to be done very carefully. And it has to be done on the, it has to be evidence-based, and it has to be done not just at a kind of a global thinking level, it won’t lead anywhere, it has to be got down to very serious things. To give you one example, in the 1980s, the fisheries industry in the south of Thailand really went into decline, and it was fish stocks that had been overfishing, and all they could catch were jellyfish and squid. And there were thousands of boats. So many of them turned into predatory action against the Vietnamese refugees coming out of Vietnam. And it was a terrible situation, really awful. Well, one of the things that happened was that Thailand, which was very concerned, and the rest of the world was as well, but Thailand decided that they would take on the function of turning this past industry into a processing industry for the world’s tuna, and successfully managed to build a whole new industrial basis around taking frozen tuna from everywhere in the world. If you look at all your canned tuna, if you happen to eat tuna, you’ll find most of it’s been canned in Thailand ever since. So it created a new industry that at least picked up some of the jobs and got out of a lot of the illegal other activities, and including a lot of the illegal fisheries activities, because the Thais were also going off into Indonesian waters and elsewhere and just savaging the fish stocks there and shrimp stocks and so forth. So there can be solutions to that. I think on this IUU thing, it’s a huge issue. FAO has been very useful on it, and a lot of countries are now buying in in a very good way, including many developing nations. I think we’re making progress on it, but there’s a long way to go still. And so anything that can link it to the other illegal activities, some of which are very odious to countries, that would be helpful. Do you think that aggressive activism like Sea Shepherd can be positive, or do you think that that’s counterproductive? The question is whether aggressive action like that of the Sea Shepherd can be productive, or whether overall that’s counterproductive. Well, I have a personal view on this. My personal view, which is I think agreed upon by at least some of my colleagues, not everybody, is that we need a number of different… It is a war that’s being fought. And Sea Shepherd is fighting actively on some fronts where others fear to go, but we need people who are on the fronts, whether it’s Greenpeace, whether it’s Sea Shepherd, whether it’s people who are milder in their actions, but still, for example, in the case of Sierra Club now taking harder stands and decided, which might include some actions that are not very nice, but not on the level of going out and ramming ships or whatever the Sea Shepherd has been accused of. I think that there’s a wide spectrum of things are needed, some of which are on that far end, and I don’t want people to be injured in the process. But they’re making a point in a dramatic way that others cannot make. Then there are the people that go out, and there’s lots of them, go out and make movies. They go out and do active research with money that’s raised for their cause, and many of the NGOs fall in this. So they’re not going that far, but they’re still activists, highly activists, and they’re going out and they’re looking at the problems locally and internationally and so forth, and they’re valuable. There’s people like myself that have chosen to work closer to government, but I’d like to believe that I understand some things about science, and I want to see that translated into public policy. If I ever went out and did something like Sea Shepherd, I certainly wouldn’t be welcome in some of the circles that I travel in with government people or whatever. So you make choices. Then there are scientists that often want to remain very close to their science, whatever it happens to be, and would prefer to bring that information freely and well out to the public and so forth, but not be the frontliners themselves. Then there’s others as well. I also believe in the power of one, individuals like the school teacher in the Wales in Nova Scotia. That was just an ordinary school teacher in a small rural school district who did something that was really very, very valuable at the time. We can find many other examples. I could tell you dozens of stories. There’s an organization that deals with fisheries management on a collective basis in the west coast of Vancouver Island, and they stick their necks out. They work collectively between First Nations and with governments. Federal Provincial is supported from a variety of different sources, and they manage a lot of species that are not the big flashy salmon or so forth, but other things. They’re making progress in setting the basis for a new form of fisheries management. It’s tough. Let me tell you how tough it is, because I’ve looked at this organization quite closely. We need people that are activists in different ways. We need people that are educators. We need researchers, a whole range. I must admit that I have a higher degree of respect for Paul Watson than many people might have. I think he’s shown us a lot of light into some very, very dark corners. I have a lead-up on the same question. I’m interested in how we can introduce this, or how can I extract something on the more daily interaction that we have, like choosing a better flavor? Are there any ways? With food on land, quality is an important aspect. I guess you could take an individual to a farm, show them the process of what a fat choice is. But how do you show something as this? We don’t have the same connection with the fish, with the animals. Is there another way of educating more generally the public? Why don’t you take the first… You’re a person who deals with behavioral psychology, which is all about psychology and behaviorism and consumerism. What can be done to link these issues to behavior at a local level? If there’s a project that you have or that already is circulating, that maybe we can point people… Because this is an intellectual talk, I’ll say, and I can’t really voice this information across adequately. So maybe if I can point an individual to a farm… The only real effective means of changing individual behavior that I think would actually work is for people to write their MPs and members of the cabinet. Because believe it or not, politicians actually pay attention to letters. And so a lot of what we’ve talked about tonight, especially the marine protected areas issue, isn’t going to be moved forward unless the politicians sense that there’s actual public demand. Like the framework’s already there, right? They’ve signed the treaties and so on. But the way they’re reading the population is it’s perfectly okay to ignore that. And the only way to change that, as far as I can tell, is to indicate that it’s actually not okay to ignore it. Because right now it is okay. And that’s not good. Our political system actually does work. It’s much more permeable than people really think. Because in some ways, it’s left to its own devices. You know, most people don’t really participate in the political system. So it leaves it in the hands of the very small minority who do. But it’s surprisingly permeable if you’re interested in permeating it. So that’s my take at least at the political level. That’s one. Let me give you four or five things that I think are really useful. One is, if you have the trust in them, these seafood guides are very helpful. And so you can use those in your own personal life. If you go into a restaurant, ask them, and if you happen to enjoy fish, ask them, tell me about this fish. What is the species? Where was it captured from? Is it certified fish that you’re serving? Ask the chef to come out and talk to you. I’ve done that. And go in, if you use an iPad or an iPhone, and challenge them on some things when they say they don’t know. They do. There’s no information. I did this once in a very respectable restaurant in Vancouver. I warned them. I said, look, I’m bringing a group of people who are leaders in this whole seafood process. They’re going to have all sorts of questions. So I brought my iPad. It was brand new in those days. It had just come out six months before. And we sat down and half an hour, by the time the poor chefs were sweating, let me tell you. But they answered all the questions correctly. We got all the information and we got past all these fancy names and so forth. That’s another way in dealing with the food industry. Do it at a supermarket. If you’re not getting good answers, write to the president of the company and say, I was in whatever chain it happened to be, local or national, and I could not get any answer about whether the crab that you’re serving was sustainably produced. Can you tell me? And if they can’t, go after them and say, please, I really want an honest answer. And you’ll make your decisions. A third way is, as you say, go to the politicians and keep going to the politicians. Find out who the politicians locally are that really have an interest in the subject. Because there are little clusters of people that don’t get very much support in both the Senate and in the House that really are interested. And they cross party lines in some of these things as well. And that’s another way of doing it. I think that on sustainable development in general, we have to go to the cities. I won’t say anything about Toronto and its political system right now, how much this would come up to the top. But I know certainly on the West Coast and I think a lot of places on the East Coast, it’s very central. People will talk about it to you. And they are the places where action is taking on interesting approaches. The next one is to figure out, and you can only do this yourself by looking at different organizations. Decide which organizations you’re going to support. And support them in ways, not just maybe giving them some money from time to time, but ask how you can help. Just to give you a couple of examples, World Wildlife Fund, Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, both have excellent, excellent people that need support. Not just money, but they need people behind them in various ways. And I guess finally, if you have children, will have children or whatever, work with kids. Kids genuinely want to do things better. They understand. Kids, you’re cute animals. I was a bit insulted about that fish that you chose. But I thought it was kind of cute myself. But the important point is that kids love whales. Our little granddaughter who is eight years old, she proudly announces, oh I’m doing a research project on Pacific Dolphin. And by the time she finished that thing, she knew a lot about Pacific Dolphins. Help people that way. Get at young people. Young people who really want to, because they are upset by these things. They see it. There’s a lot of stuff on television and so forth. They’re getting done that there’s a problem. And they happen to love these things. They love dolphins, they love seals, and they piss out on the other. And certainly whales. And they can’t understand why these things are in trouble, or the fish that they might eat are in trouble. So those are some concrete ways that you can actually address this. Keep that list in mind as you move ahead with Finn as well. Because I think it’s a really important question. I’m talking, and we all are talking, that may be a bit abstractly here, but in each case you can bring these things down to real life. Another one on the west coast, just to give you an out stop on this, if you go to any school around Victoria, Greater Victoria, you’ll see salmon images that the kids have individually made and painted. And they’re on the school fences. It’s in front of them. In some communities, spray painting around gutters and saying, this water leads to a salmon stream. So, awareness. Alright, so I think we’ve had your attention long enough. Thank you very much for coming. It’s much appreciated. And thanks to Dr. Hanson. Thank you.