The Man in the Middle of Maine's North Atlantic Right Whale Crisis

As I think you know by now, I believe technology can solve most things - but sometimes the right tech just can’t come fast enough, and in the meantime, the most innovative tool at our disposal may be good old fashioned dialogue. 

Such is the case in Maine where a dwindling population of the large and lumbering North Atlantic Right Whale has pitted lobster fishers and environmentalists against each other. The environmentalists say gear entanglements are largely responsible for the spiralling population which they say risks extinction. The Maine lobster fishers say the numbers show they aren’t to blame for mortalities, and most are loath to adopt current "ropeless" gear citing its expense and lack of proven effectiveness. The polemic threatens Maine’s whole lobster industry which, by the way, contributes 1.5 billion dollars to Maine’s annual economy. 

Both sides have now sued NOAA, the US agency that oversees fisheries management.  One side says the proposed rule changes are overreaching, the other side says they aren’t broad enough.  

NOAA, by law, has to convene all parties and attempt to develop consensus recommendations to save the whales. Our next guest has been mediating the difficult work of that group.

David Plumb of the Consensus Building institute grew up in Maine and  in honour of the recent Mother’s Day holiday,  I should add that he originally learned his mediating craft by taking a class from his mother. Since then he has worked as a professional mediator all around the world.

Today David has the unique, and perhaps unenviable, position of working as the mediator between all of these parties. For us this is an opportunity to better understand what’s at stake and what are the tools available to create both a happier fishery and whale population on the planet.

As you will hear in the podcast, the current congressional ruling pushes changes down the road for several years, while providing for upwards of 50M in annual grant opportunities to innovate solutions. For all of you innovators out there, here are some links about this opportunity:

https://www.maine.gov/dmr/news/fri-12232022-1200-message-commissioner-keliher-federal-budget-package-includes-pause-whale

David Plumb
Consensus Building Institute

Transcript

The Man in the Middle: Maine’s Right Whale Crisis 

Abigail

Welcome to the podcast today where we celebrate Innovation for a Happy Planet. I am your host Abigail Carroll. 

As I think you know by now, I love technology - but sometimes tech can’t come fast enough and in the meantime, the best innovation can sometimes be good old fashioned dialogue. 

Such is the case in Maine where a dwindling population of the large and lumbering Northern Atlantic Right Whales have pitted lobstermen and women and environmentalists against each other. The environmentalists say gear entanglements are largely responsible for the spiraling population which they say risks extinction. The Lobster fishers say the numbers show they aren’t to blame. The polemic threatens Maine’s whole lobster industry which by the way contributes 1.5 billion dollars to Maine’s economy. 

Both sides have now sued NOAA, the US agency that oversees fisheries management.  One side, says the rules are overreaching, the other side says they aren’t broad enough. Yet NOAA by law has to convene all parties to attempt to develop consensus recommendations to save the whales. Our next guest has been mediating the difficult work of that group.

 David Plumb of the Consensus Building Institute grew up in Maine and originally learned his mediating craft from taking a class from his mother. Since then he has worked as a professional mediator all around the world. 

Today David has the unique and perhaps unenviable position of working as the mediator between all of these parties. For us this is an opportunity to better understand what’s at stake and what are the tools to create both a happier fishery and whale population on the planet.

Welcome to the podcast, David.

David 

What a fun program.

Abigail

Well, I'm really excited to hear from you today on this really important issue of the right whale, and it's become a huge polemic in Maine, and somehow you found yourself in the middle of it.

Abigail

You work for an organization called the Consensus Building Institute.Tell me what that's about and what your role is there.

David 

The Consensus Building Institute, is a nonprofit organization. We're based down in Cambridge, Massachusetts, though I work out of my home here in Portland, Maine. We get involved in a whole range of issues where groups of people need to resolve conflict or just need to work more constructively together. So our focus is typically around public issues and public policy that's brought us into this space of environmental and land use and ocean issues. In addition to working on topics that are relevant for Maine in New England, I also lead up our work in Latin America. So we have an office down in Chile that I set up when I was living down there. 

Abigail

Great. Let's just segue right into the right whale. Who contacts you? We've got a problem in Maine. We've got two conflicting parties. We've got the fishermen, we've got the environmentalists. Who hires you?

David 

<laugh> Right? That's a good question. So CBI Consensus Building Institute has been around for a while. We've been around since the early to mid nineties. In the case of the work around right whales, this is something where we work with the federal government and NOAA. And it's very interesting, and folks might not know this, but when you have an endangered species like the North Atlantic right whale, the federal government has a process called their take reduction teams. And it's kind of a weird name, but what it essentially means is there's a law that requires the federal government to pull together a group of diverse stakeholders, including fishermen, and environmentalists and academics and researchers, and the state managers and federal managers, and pull them all together into a group.

David 

And that group legally is supposed to come up with recommendations about how to handle the interactions between, commercial fishing, and an endangered species like the right whale. We facilitate, meaning we're helping to guide the work of these take reduction teams around the country in different species on the West coast, on the East Coast. And my colleague, Bennett Brooks, has been leading that work over the years. And because I'm up here in Maine, I started to get involved in the work around the Atlantic large whale take reduction team. And that Atlantic large whale take reduction team is very focused on the right whale issue. And so together with Bennett and some other colleagues, we've been, in the middle, guiding that group for several years and trying to help that group come up with something that feels like constructive recommendations, to address declining numbers of right whales.

Abigail

Interesting. So let's get into the situation. What is the issue?

David 

So the issue is we have a species, this North Atlantic right whale that is very, very low in numbers. The latest, 340, 3 50. It's hard to know there's a fairly good lag in data, unfortunately. But the numbers are low, and sadly they're declining. They were very, very low, you know, 15 years ago they were, they Rose a little bit, and now they're declining again. And the reason we have an issue is not just because we have a very large mammal that's about to go extinct, sort of on our watch kind of thing. But the challenge is a lot of the problems that the right whale's finding, are human related. [Yeah.] And there's two biggies. One is it gets entangled in fishing gear, particularly vertical lines that are in the water. and the other biggie is, ship strikes where it gets hit.

[It's kind of a slow moving whale <laugh>, and it hangs out on the surface, for a good part of the time, and it gets hit, and killed or hurt. You can imagine on the East coast of the United States, there's a lot of ships moving around <laugh>. [Yeah.] Right? So that's a really big issue. And I said to the United States, the, this whale goes back and forth between the US and Canada, and it's actually been shifting more towards Canada,for more of the time.

And so this requires coordination between the two countries, and that's always, you know, challenging as well. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And on the commercial fishing side, which is the purview of the group that I've been working with, you've got some really important fisheries up and down,the US East coast and in Canada. And so addressing those fisheries really touches people's livelihoods. [Yeah.] And whole communities and people's fishing culture. So it really goes in deep to people's sense of security and livelihood.

Abigail

Absolutely agreed. And I think the pushback from the lobstermen is that there really haven't been any deaths, but if I understand correctly, the entanglements are a problem in themselves because it could predict a premature death.

David 

So l let me preface what I'm about to say, to say, I am not a scientist. Right? [Yeah, yeah.] I'm a mediator Right. And a facilitator. So I will repeat some of the things that have been said. Yeah. And this is one of these areas that is very politically fraught as well, in addition to this sort of legitimate conversation and back and forth around understanding science. So if you listen to Maine lobstermen or Maine's Congressional delegation or others, the governor, they will repeat a phrase, again and again, they were in Washington just two weeks ago testifying, on this, that the last known entanglement of a right whale in Maine gear was in 2004. And that whale survived that entanglement. And as you said, Abigail, there's been no documented deaths of right whales from main lobster gear. 

So that is the factually correct in terms of known entanglements, since 2004 or deaths. The challenge with that statement, and if you'll hear in the same congressional testimony that happened, a couple weeks ago in Washington, is you'll hear scientists, for instance, from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and others saying, 'okay, you can say that but we know that we can actually have leftover gear on the whale in 8% of the cases. Because we have scarring, we have clear evidence of serious entangle events, but only in 8% of the cases we can have gear and only a minority of those, of where we have gear, we can attribute the gear. Right. So the scientists are gonna push back on what you'll hear from the lobstermen, and both are correct.

And it just makes it very difficult for folks to settle in on some of the basic facts that we're dealing with. Let me just say a few more things about whales and, and the Gulf of Maine and right whales, they congregate, south of Nantucket and  Martha Vineyard, you know, south of the islands, Massachusetts. And they congregate in Massachusetts Bay. They calve down off the coast of Georgia, and a little bit of Florida. And then they congregate up in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, in Canada at different times of the year. Right. So they make this big movement up and down the East coast, and they don't congregate off the coast of Maine much. They don't.

Abigail

Interesting. So why is this a Maine issue?

David 

Because they do go there <laugh>, right? So that's the problem. Like, they don't congregate, but they do go there. 

Abigail

They travel through.

David 

Yeah. It's like, don't do it, don't do it whale. [Right.] Don't go there. And so what you have is a situation where it's not their primary place where they go. Right. They don't congregate. But there's so much gear in the water off the coast of Maine that all the risk models that try to say, where's the actual risk of entanglement? The risk models show the risk to be very high. [Yeah.] Because you've got a ton of lines in the water in the occasional whale that swim through there. that's the rub here is the fishermen rightly say it's not where they hang out. And at the same time, there's evidence that they do occasionally swim through the waters. And boy, there's a lot of lines in these waters up here in Maine.

Abigail

And the whale plays a really important environmental role through their excrement it supports a whole ecosystem. It pulls carbon out of the air. So it's not, we don't wanna protect them just cuz they're adorable. We wanna protect them because they actually also have a really important role that they play in our ecosystem.

David 

I mean, whales are interesting, aren't they? Because, they really speak to the overall health [Right] of an ecosystem. And they're iconic. It is a little bit of a human bias, right. That we are more biased to sort of the bigger, more notable, noticeable creatures, <laugh>. 

Abigail

But they're mammals.

David 

And they're really big marine mammals. And I think part of it is, are they a window into the overall health of an ecosystem? And also they're emblematic of, are we capable in 2023 of coexisting with these large creatures. Shouldn't we be able to do this in 2023? [Right.] So I think that's what's compelling. And I think it's also compelling to fishermen too, right? 

Abigail

So this, again, I'm gonna come back to this, you know, this seems to be Maine's problem, but they're congregating south and north of us. So what are these other regions doing today that's different? So that they're not in the, you know, newspapers with the big polemic?

David 

What's happened in Massachusetts, for instance, where there's a lot of congregation, are really large closures, for fishing activity over, good parts of the year. And so they've really leaned into, making sure that fishing gears outta the water in some of the key times of the year. And then there's also significant closures, uh, in the calving grounds, off Georgia and Florida, and that area 

Abigail

So Massachusetts has been more aggressive because it's more obvious that there's a linkage. Is that what's happened?

David 

That is a great question. It is clearly where the whales are present and aggregating, and so it is evident that something needs to happen. If you look at Maine, it's that challenge I mentioned, which is the occasional whale. And a lot of gear in a very, very important industry.

David 

And so it's super scary for communities along the coast of Maine to imagine disruption to this activity. 

Abigail

Now that we have a deeper understanding of the problem at hand, when we come back from a break we’ll talk about solutions.

Break

Abigail

Welcome back to Happy Planet. 

Abigail

When you are drawn in, how do you operate? What's your role? How do you navigate this crisis and how do you resolve this?

David 

So in this particular issue, our role is fairly defined as the facilitators for this group called the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction team. Where NOAA you know, the federal government has hired us to help that team function as well as possible. And what that means is we are working with individual members of the team, and we're working with NOAA to structure the conversations that the team has and to try to guide those conversations to make them as productive, constructive, and useful as possible. As I mentioned, we do this in other teams that are dealing with different species around the country. The Atlantic large whale take reduction team, has the highest mountain to climb <laugh>. It is the hardest one.

Because what the risk models show is that team had to put together a package of recommendations that would achieve approximately 90% risk reduction. [Wow.] How do you do that without causing harm to fisheries? At the same time, there's a context around this, which is a legal context. Many members of that team and around that team have active litigation against the federal government, against each other, against others. Right. And so there's a legal context around that, and there's a political context around it. And what we saw in national legislation that put the pause button on the work of that team, at the end of last year,

Abigail

And that is because there was a rider, an omnibus rider, is that what put it all to rest? So we've basically kicked the problem down the road by six years, is that correct? 

David 

What that legislation did was say that the current regulation around lobster and Jonah crab, which are the two big pieces of this, is sufficient until 2028. But what it says is, you know, we're gonna put the pause button on new regulation, for a period of time. One important thing that legislation also did was provide significant funding for innovation, um, which is right up your alley Abigail. Right? It did provide enormous fund. It's like 50 million,and, you know, for innovative gear and for research and things like that. So it provided hopefully some positive reinforcement of the technology advancements and the other advancements that can help find some longer term solutions to this.

Abigail

Yeah. And what is it, breakaway gear and things like that, or ropeless lobster gear, which is run with little AI or I don't know. 

David 

There's different names, but the sort of more common name would be called on demand gear. [On demand that’s it.] People also call it robless gear for sure. The idea behind that gear is that instead of having a vertical line just there in the water all the time, like going from, you know, your traps up to the, to the buoy, you've got your line down at the bottom in like a bag or in the trap itself. And you can through some radio or cell thing, activate that and it opens up and the buoy shoots up to the surface right when you need it. So the whales aren't swimming through lines, they're just swimming normally. And then when you're ready to pull your gear, you can activate it. And there's been trials on that for some time. It's really challenging to imagine the full Maine lobster <laugh>.

Abigail

Right it's a lot of traps.

David 

There's so many challenges with it too, because buoys on the surface serve a purpose. They serve a purpose for signaling where gear is at to avoid gear conflicts, not just between lobstermen, but also, with the mobile gear fleet, so that folks don't drag through traps and stuff like that. So there's a reason, you know, buoys serve multiple reasons and solving for that's really challenging. And so there are applications for on demand gear that make sense. And then there's other places where it's just like, wow. Yes. It's hard to imagine that being, you know, done at scale.

Abigail

But at least it sounds like there's a nice budget to be pushing these forward. And, maybe there's people like Woods Hole that can start innovating or Gulf Maine Research Institute innovating in this direction. 

David 

And it's happening already, and it will happen more with these funds. I will say folks who are on the take reduction team fishermen, have been active in some of the testing and trials, particularly the guys, not as much the Maine folks, but, folks who do way offshore, often based outta New Hampshire and elsewhere, who were like out there towards George's Bank almost, uh, fishing, uh, lobstering in the deep water. And those folks have been doing trials and trying to figure out if it works. And it's been frustrating because it works sometimes and it doesn't always work. Right. And then you're, you have a problem of lost gear or things like that. 

Abigail

Welcome to fisheries. I mean, nothing works all the time in fisheries. That's just an occupational hazard is that, you know, it could improve it. But there's never a silver bullet, cuz you're dealing with nature. 

David 

I mean, that's the other thing. And I think it's one of the things that fishermen also try to really stress in these conversations is like, how intense it is to be out there in these offshore waters fishing, it's pretty wild out there.

And so, um, I think folks always wanna remind, particularly sort of the environmental community that has this vision of like, oh yeah, we'll, just, everyone will use on-demand gear and it's, everything's gonna be fine or we rope this or that. And it's like, it's pretty challenging. So one of the things I was gonna mention is that, while the take reduction team is on pause, because of this legislation at the end of last year, in the face of this enormous hurdle of trying to understand how to get 90% risk reduction, the take reduction team members actually started to circle around the elements of what that might look like. 

[Hmm]. And that was interesting to see. It's what motivates me and my colleagues is that even with all the tension and the difficulty, we see that there's opportunity to work more constructively together if you can figure it out.

Abigail

So the ultimate ocean innovation is open dialogue,

David 

<laugh>. Well, I think there's process innovation, right? It's like, we can do this, folks. And, I see it. Look, I have seen it and I continue to see it, right? And that's where our heads go, is how do you get people having those conversations that unlock a better outcome, an outcome that perhaps wasn't as visible at the front end before you walked into that conversation.

Abigail

Well, I think you're also giving a proper voice. I mean, It sounds like, you know, people wanna be seen and they wanna be heard. And not depicted as the enemy, right? I mean, I think it's very easy to be like, oh, the lobstermen are the enemy of the right whales. I mean, the lobstermen I know are, are great, you know, naturalists. They, they're really engaged in the environment. They know a lot about it. This is why they're lobstermen is because they love the ocean and its creatures. 

David 

That's exactly right. And so, we've been over the years at CBI, my organization, we've been trying to kind of boil it down into what are some of the ingredients that allow people to engage in that constructive space. And let me name a couple of 'em. One is what you just said, people want to be heard, right? And we call that acknowledgement. When we say acknowledgement, it's like, are people being listened to genuinely? And is their experience being understood by everyone, right? Are they being acknowledged for what they're bringing to the table and who they are, and how they see the world. So that acknowledgement has to happen, and it means that fishermen, you know, need to be acknowledged. And it cuts both ways, right? Because NGOs, if you listen to the rhetoric, are cast out there as like, you know, blood sucking, you know? Radical, blah, blah, blah. And these are people who care about whales. Many of the folks on the take reduction team are the ones out there literally cutting rope off whales,in their disentanglement teams, or they're doing necropsies of dead whales to understand why they died. These are people who are incredibly committed. Acknowledging that they're not here to like, make fishermen's lives miserable. They're here to say in 2023, it shouldn't be allowed that we have a large mammal, die on us, like this, go extinct.

The other one we do agency. Now, when I use the word agency, I mean control essentially, right? How do I feel that I have a say in what's happening here, the fishing community is particularly used to having a pretty high degree of agency in their own management through the council system, in the way that that's all all managed in the United States, right? And so they're used to being in the thick of it and wrestling with the data and making decisions on the council with other stakeholders.

And, that's where they're coming from. And when they're in a process where they don't feel like they have that agency, where the federal government or somebody's coming in and just sort of making rules, that is very frustrating. And so how do you create mechanisms and processes where people feel like they have that voice? 

Abigail

Interesting. I've been talking to lots of innovators you know, in this ocean space, and I am wondering sort of about the bigger future of these commons, right? We're all gonna be using the ocean, and we're gonna be using it in different ways. You know, lots of people wanna start with EVs and batteries. There's a big discussion about deep sea drilling. We have no idea, really what the ramifications of such an activity, would it be. We have offshore wind. I suspect that we're gonna have a lot of floating solar installations as people have electric boats, and they need to recharge offshore. The world's gonna, you know, potentially look really different. And I feel like the ocean could be very central to this. How are we gonna manage this? How do we manage these commons?

David 

So it's the great debate, right? Because oceans have always been a space that have been challenging to manage because of their essence of being a commons, right? And when you start to get, multiple jurisdictions, or you start to get even further offshore, multiple countries, like all these things are really challenging. 

We don't have like a formula per se on that. I will say that the more you're able to create credible conversation and dialogue where you're lifting up people's voices, you're showing about how those voices are, um, being directly woven into the decisions that are made, and then there's some consequence around that, that creates a pathway towards coexistence and, wiser decision making.

Abigail

So you've worked all around the world. Are there other models, other countries that are managing these commons well? Their fisheries or offshorewind? Are there models that we should be looking at? Or are we becoming a model?

David 

Certainly other countries on the issue of offshore wind, like are a decade or two ahead of us. And so there's been more experience in trying to manage it in terms of a specific model, there's many efforts around the world in the US and elsewhere about collaborative ocean management, right? And I don't have a great one to share right now, that's like the perfect example. but most, conservation organizations and, others, are realizing that having this sort of collaborative, multi-stakeholder approach to, ocean management and ocean conservation,can be more powerful and sustainable over time, because it's less of an adversarial push and pull, and more of how are we finding ways to have our interests met through this action. 

Abigail

So I wanna know, are you optimistic about the <laugh>, about the state of affairs of our ocean, of the climate? In your own way you're right at the forefront of a lot of these issues.

David 

It's interesting, these words, like optimistic or pessimistic, I feel like there are things that give me hope. There are things that make me enthusiastic that we're gonna do this, right? We're gonna figure this out. You know, let me give you a couple examples here. In the state of Maine, um, you know, climate change can be a divisive issue. In the state of Maine, the state created this climate council, and through some collaborative smart work, they came out with a climate action plan. And like a lot of people were on board with that plan. And what it meant is Maine's been able to act efficiently and quickly on key issues of preparing for changing climate, um, reducing emissions.

And as you build those sort of, bigger coalitions you're able to move quickly. And Maine has, Maine's doing well. And so that's really encouraging. I mentioned that I do a fair amount of work in South America and in Latin America and Chile, there's some very interesting things happening. The Central Bank of Chile, together with the finance ministry, made Chile, the first country in Latin America that's gonna have to start reporting on what they call their natural capital [mm-hmm]. <affirmative>, which is essentially around biodiversity and the environment. And they need, they're gonna start re reporting on that alongside their like GDP numbers and their financial indicators. [Very interesting]. Yeah. And other, you know, a handful of other countries are starting to do this, like the UK and New Zealand, some of the like, leading countries on this, and Chile's doing it, right?

And part of it's because there's a new generation of leadership at the Central Bank and in government that's saying this is really important, right. Particularly for a country that exports a lot of natural resources like Chili does. I find that incredibly encouraging. Um, and I think that's gonna be sort of the pathway of the future is like we're starting to say, oh, I'm just gonna pull this into my logic of how I see the way we move forward.

Yeah. Because if I don't, I'm essentially mortgaging my future. Because these are the natural systems that are allowing us to function as humans on the planet. It doesn't have to be super political per se. It can be just more straightforward of like, yep, these are indicators we're gonna need to be paying attention to. I am very clear-eyed that, um, we're in a moment of heightened polarization. And that sort of tsunami of polarization is very scary when you look up and see how high that wave is and wondering if it's just gonna like, sink us all <laugh>. So I'm clear-eyed about that level of challenge. And at the same time, if we're able to interact in the areas where we have influence, right? If I'm able, you know, to make the conversations around offshore wind be more constructive and lift up people's voices, that's great. You know, I'll do that part. Others are gonna have to do other things. <laugh> 

Abigail

Right, right. We need everybody. Everybody's got a play roll here.

Thank you David for coming on the show today. It certainly is a complicated issue and I am grateful for your time spent here trying to help us better understand it. The downside of the situation appears to be that it’s far from over. The plus side is that the lobstermen and women can keep working and there is considerable grant money on the table for innovation in lobster fisheries. With the right innovation, this whole issue could go to rest. So if you're an innovator,  and I know many of our listeners are - look for more info on that grant money in our show notes.

Thank you for listening. Please follow Happy Planet wherever you listen and leave us a rating and review - it really helps new listeners discover the show. Happy Planet was reported and hosted by me. I am also the Executive Producer. The talented Dylan Heuer [hoyer] is our producer and editor. Composer George Brandl Egloff created our theme music. Learn more about my work and get in touch by visiting happyplanetpodcast.com.