Andrew Kornblatt sits down with deep-sea ecologist and science communicator Andrew Thaler and dedicated ocean advocate and Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, Angelo Villagomez for a panel discussion on the recent actions of the Trump Administration around NOAA, Ocean Monuments, and Conservation. Come for the Ocean Politics, stay for the Pauly Shore references.
Andrew Kornblatt: Welcome everybody to Ocean Science Radio, the podcast that brings you the latest, greatest, and sometimes deepest stories in the ocean. I'm Ocean in climate communication specialist Andrew Kornblatt. Unfortunately, today, Francis will not be able to be joining us, but I am joined today by two really awesome people in the ocean space to discuss some happenings in the ocean and the marine protection worlds. So, without further ado, let's jump into this discussion with a bit of an introduction. Angelo, can you introduce yourself?
Angelo Villagomez: Hey, this is, uh, Angelo Villagomez. I work in an organization in Washington DC called The Center for American Progress, where I focus on ocean issues and work with indigenous peoples in the us. But I have been a professional ocean advocate for the last 20 years, and, uh, have helped designate some of the world's largest protected areas, not just in the United States, but in many other countries.
Andrew Kornblatt: Thank you for joining us today. I know that you've got a lot of work to do, especially with current events. Andrew, can you introduce yourself?
Andrew Thaler: Hello everyone. I am Andrew Thaler. I am a deep sea ecologist, a conservation technologist, and an ocean educator. I run a small environmental consulting firm on the Maryland Eastern shore, where we focus on high seas policy, particularly surrounding deep sea mining, as well as developing tools for stakeholders who want access to ocean sensors and educational programming for people around the world.
Andrew Kornblatt: In addition to that, you both write for a singular publication that's been in existence for, what, 16 years now? So,
Angelo Villagomez: But it's not very popular. Oh,
Andrew Thaler: I believe we're on 17 years.
Andrew Kornblatt: 17 years. You're, you say it's not very popular, but I posted a link of yours to Reddit and a couple of comments were, oh my God, Southern Fried Science. I love that blog. I'm so glad to see it's still running.
Andrew Thaler: Actually, I have about 40 chatbots that I have just trolling Reddit to say stuff like that.
Andrew Kornblatt:
Andrew Thaler: Sure. So Southern Fried Science is an ocean science and conservation blog that has been running, uh, continuously since 2008. Our founding moment was Thanksgiving day 2008 when I was bored and made a blog, and it has been consistently updating for the last 17 years. We've written about 9,000 articles about the oceans. We've had a rotating cast of probably about 25 different writers. Currently. Our, our main writers are me, Angelo and David Schiffman. Angelo and David Schiffman were both just declared among the 500 most influential people in Washington dc. So,
Angelo Villagomez: Which means that this blog and the Washington Post have the same number of influential writers in Washington dc
Andrew Thaler: This is True.
Angelo Villagomez: Who could have guessed all, all, you know, when you were sitting there when Barack Obama was president and you were enjoying your Thanksgiving dinner, who could have thought that it would lead to this place today?
Andrew Kornblatt: Oh, man. Now I'm nostalgic. We have some people who are very educated, knowledgeable, and doing real action in the ocean space On this conversation, one thing that has been really hitting home for me is that there's been obviously just an overwhelming slew of executive orders coming out of the current Trump administration, and in quite a number of them have been targeting ocean issues, things like no funding and marine monuments and deep sea mining regulations. Can we talk a little bit about how these policy shifts might impact ongoing research and what strategies the scientific community can employ to maintain critical monitoring programs despite these looming funding cuts?
Angelo Villagomez: Yeah, so, you know, Steve Bannon, who is one of the advisors to the president, has been advising him to flood the zone and to overwhelm us with just so much that we have no idea how to respond. And that's kind of what's happening here, is we've got, you know, the, the voluntary departures from the government. We've got the forced departures from the government, we've got the doge cuts for the government, we've got the government stopping the grants that they've given out. And I think what you invited us to talk on is to talk about the rollback of regulations that President Trump is illegally doing through executive order. We can actually pick every single one of those things apart, and each one could probably be an hour long podcast of like how terrible it is, how each one is gonna harm different people in different communities differently. But it's all happening at the same time, and we're trying to respond to all of this all at the same time. And while all of this is going on, they're also flooding the zone on every other issue, like when it comes to immigration, whatever's happening in Gaza, in Ukraine. And so, you know, for the, for the American consumer of information, it's just impossible to like fully understand what's going on and how incredibly bad all of this is going to be for our country.
Andrew Kornblatt: Thaler, do you have anything to add to that?
Andrew Thaler: I mean, oh geez. That, that covers kind of the gamut of it. You know, my only advice from the ground is that we all have very particular expertise If we're scientists, we all have particular focus areas recognizing that this flood the zone strategy is affecting a huge number of people across a huge range of different issues. One of the things you can do as an individual is decide what your expertise is and focus on that and narrow down on that and hammer on those points as much as you can and encourage everyone else, you know, who has a diverse range of expertises to focus on their issues as well. And make sure that, you know, I, I can talk a lot about the consequences of deep sea mining in the deep sea mining executive order. I can talk relatively competently about the opening up MPAs to overfishing and the things going on with that.
Andrew Thaler: I can talk much less competently about things like immigration and the war in Gaza and the war in Ukraine, and I guess the war that's about to start in India and Pakistan. So, you know, I've, I've been focusing very much on the things that I can specifically influence. I talked at the NOAA rally that happened a couple of months ago at this point. I was helping with some of the lawsuits. I was helping with connecting, terminated Noah scientists to journalists so that they could write articles and give interviews. I'm involved directly or slightly indirectly in several of the lawsuits happening right now. So focusing on what you have expertise in and really, you know, find the nail that you can hit with your hammer and just keep hitting it.
Andrew Kornblatt:Yeah, we, you mentioned kind of a specialized focus defense strategy to flood the zone when we were chatting a while back about project 2025 and its impact on NOAA. And one of the things that really struck to me was that as anybody who has different cares or interests where each of these Venn diagrams kind of overlap, it's good to hyperfocus on those, but it seems like more and more stuff keeps, keeps popping up. Like one thing that wasn't mentioned is the broad attack on the separation of church and state, especially in education and the attack on teaching actual history in education as, as opposed to what they call fighting indoctrination and DEI or whatever. But back to the subject at hand, you specifically brought up deep sea mining, which is one of the main topics of this conversation. And I wanted to ask both of you, you know, looking at the Trump administration's approach to deep sea mining, it seems to contrast with many international frameworks. How might these unilateral policy changes affect US standing and international ocean governance bodies? Like what are the implications that this could have for global marine conservation efforts?
Andrew Thaler: So there's one major thing happening right now that really kind of throws the entire global regime regarding how we treat the ocean beyond national borders. And that is that the Trump administration put out an executive order that is directing Noah as well as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to develop expedited permitting processes for deep sea mining applications, both in the US national waters and in international waters in the high seas, and particularly in the clipper and clarion zone. Where this becomes a big problem is that there is a UN treaty called the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea that 169 nations have signed and ratified, and a handful of nations have not including in the United States, but have treated as customary law. So functionally speaking, the US has been beholden to the law of the sea for the last 30 years. And the Law of the Sea creates this body called the International Seabed Authority, which is in charge of deep sea mining in areas beyond national jurisdiction.
Andrew Thaler: So there is a mining company out of Canada that has decided that it doesn't like the process being developed at the ISA, that they think it's going too slow, that they think it's being held back, that they think it's pushing towards a moratorium rather than actual mining, and have decided to go it alone and have asked the US for permission to mine, but specifically permission to mine in the high seas, not in US waters. And that throws a lot of international agreements into disarray because if the US is not gonna follow the law of the sea on this one issue, is it gonna follow the law of the sea on any other issues? And if the US is abandoning the law of the sea, why would any other major economy need to follow the law of the Sea as well? So we're kind of in a holding pattern right now
Andrew Thaler: I wanna do this whole, like, you know, hit every nail you have with that biggest hammer you have, but also, like, don't run around like you just had your head cut off and you're a chicken because you need to focus on like, what's in front of us. And right now what's in front of us is that a mining company has put in an application to mine in the high seas. They don't have permission yet, they likely will, or you never know because like forming a partnership with the Trump administration is always a gamble. And maybe they're being used for a tariff negotiation and who knows. But at the moment there is a company with a permit application into mine and the high seas and how that actually shakes out over the next probably six months, is gonna determine a lot about how this multinational regime that's been formed around the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea moves forward.
Angelo Villagomez: Yeah, Andrew, there's a, uh, an interview floating around on the internet of, uh, George W. Bush from 2011. Uh, this is a man that I never considered eloquent, but he, he talks about how every couple of decades some isms are floated in America and its protectionism and isolationism and how the last time was in the 1920s when we withdrew into ourselves and they implemented tariffs in the 1920s, which, you know, basically slowed down and, and ended trade Bush talks about how we thought that we didn't have to care about what was happening in Europe, and we all kind of know how that turned out. Mm-hmm. And this America first, America First, America first. This, this way of looking at the world is just not how I, I think Americans have thought about things for many, many decades. You know, the things that happen in Mexico and Canada are going to affect us, nevermind U Ukraine and Gaza. And I, I think a lot of people in the rest of the world can, can kind of see this. And I, I think for the rest of the world, they don't know whether to laugh at Trump or to be terrified.
Andrew Kornblatt: Maybe a little combo of both.
Andrew Thaler: I mean, always has to be both.
Andrew Kornblatt: Yeah. Last time America first was a huge rallying cry. I mean, besides the Reagan years, but like back when we were talking about it in the twenties, Dr. Seuss, the famed cartoonist and illustrator, made a ton of political cartoons that lampoon the idea of America first as feeding on the roots of liberty and equality and, you know, serving the interests of fascists internationally. And it is slightly terrifying from not only a political perspective, but also from an ecological and conservation perspective that this rhetoric is not only come back in the last 10 ish years, but it has come back in full force. And another phrase that's been bandied about again is drill, baby drill around the extraction of resources like nodules at the bottom of the sea. So, one thing that I would love to ask both of you is, given the real technical and complex nature of issues like deep sea mining or marine monument protections, what communication strategies might be most effective in helping the general public understand what's really at stake? How can scientists and activists effectively communicate these complex issues to build broader public support and groundswell for ocean conservation and protection?
Angelo Villagomez: I, I think you bring up the larger issue of scientists and liberals are very bad at communicating, whereas Republicans are terrific at communicating. You know, like, you know, just like to bush, you know, Trump is so bad that we look back on him and think of how eloquent he is, but, you know, he talked about tax relief and he talked about No Child Left Behind. Probably the, the best messaging that I've seen emerge in the last 12 months is coming from Canada when the new Prime Minister talking about Build Baby Build. And there's a, a book making the ways around here in DC by Ezra Klein called Abundance and, uh, center for American Progress has been talking about this for the last two years of when, you know, when it comes to issues like climate change, how are we gonna make that just transition from coal-fired power plants and diesel and those things to solar and to, you know, wind and other types of cleaner energy?
Angelo Villagomez: And I, I think the answer is probably build baby build and, and that can be a liberal rallying, it's already a liberal rallying call up in Canada, and that could be something that we do in the United States now that doesn't address the phishing issues. This is sort of like a very American way of approaching the world of, you know, if you ever watch like an American movie, the solution is always robots or like some technology or, or nuclear weapons, you know, so, so, but I do think this build baby build idea will appeal to a lot of people because it means, it means jobs, it means community, uh, but it also means, you know, taking action, doing something positive towards addressing these issues.
Andrew Thaler: So I will, I will disagree with Angelo just a little bit. Okay. Um, generally speaking, yes, the, the liberal movement and the Democratic Party in particular is terrible at communicating at a national level. But at, in local elections, when you have actual local advocates on the ground, I think the message of progressivism and liberalism moves much more powerfully through communities. So we just had a local election down here. I'm on the Maryland Eastern shore. My representative is Andy Harris, who's like the Congressional America First caucus or whatever he wants to call it. Like we are a very red district. I'm a local politician in my town for a while. Dick Cheney was one of my constituents. So like we are, we are not, we're not a blue
Angelo Villagomez: District. And then, and then JD Vance visited him, right? Isn't that what happened?
Andrew Thaler: Yeah, Dick Cheney's still alive.
Angelo Villagomez:
Andrew Kornblatt: No, he shot death in the face and made death apologize for it. Yeah.
Angelo Villagomez: A apologies to the Cheney family. I had no idea.
Andrew Thaler: Yeah, no, both, uh, both the Cheneys and the Rumsfelds were my neighbors at some point. Wow. But, uh, more to the point, uh, Easton just had a big election, and it was a local election. It was a, it was a city council. Easton is a city that is very solidly a 49, 49 Republican Democrat split. And it was an absolute route. The Republican candidates, all three of them lost by incredibly wide margins. I've never seen margins this wide. It was historic voter turnout. 3000 people turn out to vote, which huge in a local election. And thinking in terms of like, what's happening in your community in small scale, local elections, a 3000 person turn turnout was historic, and the Democrat won by 67% and they were running on housing, and they were running on affordable housing. They were running on middle housing and affordable housing and, um, development.
Andrew Thaler: And those messages resonate very powerfully. And I think, you know, if you step away from the national field for a minute, if you look at your communities and if you, you know, do what you can do to, to reshape the, the political landscape of your communities, that builds and that builds up to the national level. And I think, you know, that's what Republicans did really well for the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties, was build those local coalitions and we're seeing the, like the end result of a 40 year investment in local elections coming from the Republican party. And, you know, we're late to the game, but like the strategy worked, don't ignore the fact that their strategy worked and, and use it and build local coalitions.
Andrew Kornblatt: I, I would agree with you to an extent. I think that the work that Alec and, you know, the Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute did, went beyond just local. It was tying local efforts to think like more from a organizational standpoint of multiple cells learning from each other to work up to, you know, more national pushes, get things like Roe v Wade overturned. You have to get groundswell and get different electors and other positions in at local areas and get certain legislation in the bag ready to go to, you know, in d and d terms, ready their action for when certain federal actions take place. Alec went around to all these different, uh, mayoral and city groups and start pushing for local, organizing local legislation that would be enacted if and when their larger desires and tactics were put in place. So I, I think it's a yes. And in that situation, to quote the very popular 1990s Pauly Shore movie, biodome, you gotta think globally, but act locally
Andrew Thaler: I had no idea that Biodome too, um, was, uh, managed by Steve Bannon, the actual biodome,
Angelo Villagomez: That quote from Paul Shore who knew
Andrew Kornblatt:
Angelo Villagomez: I also, I I definitely saw that movie in theaters
Angelo Villagomez: And thought it was great.
Andrew Kornblatt: It was a fun movie.
Andrew Thaler: It was great. Yeah. There was an era of poly shore that was phenomenal. Yeah.
Angelo Villagomez: Encino, man. I mean, just terrific. Oh,
Andrew Kornblatt: Well that was like Brendan free. Okay, we're getting off topic. Uh
Andrew Thaler: Are we though?
Andrew Kornblatt: We are a little bit, I I wanna bring it back to the conversation at hand and one of the things that's happened just now while we're recording this podcast is that Trump has come out against, or has,
Angelo Villagomez: I can explain it for you. Yeah.
Andrew Kornblatt: Can you explain a little bit what's, what's happening right now that that has caused a little bit of commotion?
Angelo Villagomez: Uh, when we started this interview, the executive order was not up. I closed all my, uh, tabs so that I could focus on this, but in 2015 or 2016, president Obama designated the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, which protected, it's at the edge of the exclusive economic zone in New England. So it's about like 150 or 200 miles away from land. It's, it's like a, a pizza shaped, uh, protected area up in New England. When Trump was president the first time, uh, he overturned those pre protections. And then in the first week of Biden's, uh, administration, he put those protections back in place. Biden helped publish a management plan, uh, Biden hired staff so that the place could be actively managed. And according to the press secretary who tweeted about this earlier today, today President Trump is going to overturn those protections again and opened the area to fishing.
Andrew Kornblatt: So this is now what the second major marine protected area that he's executive ordered?
Angelo Villagomez: Yeah, it's the second monument. And, you know, and it's pretty wild that the ocean was the first ones that he went after. 'cause last time he also opened up several land monuments, but did them earlier in his administration. And so a couple weeks ago in April, he opened up the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument. And what he did is he opened about 84% of that to long line fishing and to perse fishing. And I'm, I advised the government on fishing out there, I've seen the order from out of the regional office that has opened it up to fishing. So all, all of the boats have received notice that they're now allowed to go fish in those places. And that's gonna play out in New England very, very soon. And, you know, the ocean is a very big place. It's not like these fishing boats don't have other places that, where they, where they can fish. Where you take in like into account the overall size of the ocean. These areas are actually quite small. And, you know, on the east coast of the United States, like less than 1% of it is protected. Like it's very, very few protections. This will harm the habitat. But this was in no way harming the phishing industry in a big way. So it's very much an ideological thing. It's just like a Democrat did it, so I'm gonna overturn it. So there's a little bit of that.
Andrew Thaler: It does speak to the weakness of using the Antiquities Act to create these large scale protected areas because the Antiquities Act is a great way for a president to unilaterally protect a piece of land or ocean. But it's also because it's an easy way to put into effect. It's an easy way to pull out of effect too.
Angelo Villagomez: And, and now I will disagree with you
Andrew Thaler: We do not look the same.
Angelo Villagomez: Uh, but, but you know, we wish we could say this was unprecedented. But this has happened before because Trump did it in his first term, but no other president had had ever done anything like this, which is why it's going to the courts.
Andrew Thaler: Well, but that also speaks to, that speaks to like a larger issue we have right now is that so much of what actually keeps our country running is norms and
Angelo Villagomez: The vibes. Yeah.
Andrew Thaler: Norms don't protect you protect the vibes if you have a president who doesn't care about norms. Yes.
Andrew Kornblatt: So one thing that I can add to this is, uh, back in the day, I used to work for a nonprofit up in the Marin area. And this was trying to protect a designated wilderness area in the Drakes Bay estuary because there was this whole issue around a oyster farmer who had purchased this land that was set to Rewild, and he knew that, uh, it was set to Rewild and bought out the lease with knowing that there was this running clock and tried to get it changed so that he could renew this lease and continue building on there. And to most people, that didn't sound like a big issue. Like this is just a local farmer, you know, using the habitat and it's gonna be great and it's great for local economy and et cetera, et cetera. But the issue was, and one of the reasons that the Koch brothers actually got involved and hired him a lawyer to defend his position, was that it, it set a precedent that if you opened up this land that was set for a wilderness designation, then who's to say what else would be opened up for logging for coal for other traditional uses for old leases to be rere renewed in these now wilderness designated areas or to be wilded areas?
Andrew Kornblatt: And I'm wondering if there's something like that going on with the marine protective area push under the current administration if they're trying to test the water, so to speak, because less people seem to really care about a quote unquote marine park out in the ocean that they don't engage with or don't have the ability to go visit.
Angelo Villagomez: Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, there's a camel under our tent, right? Its nose is sticking through. Uh, and he's already issued executive orders to look at mining, oily, I just invented a new word oiling. I like it. Mining, oil drilling and other extractive activities in our national parks and in our monuments. And so I I I think all nature conservation is out the window under this administration and nothing is sacred. And we could have uranium mining in Yellowstone in two years. I think that's the degree to which they want to open up this, this pipeline of, of energy and, and mineral development. So you're absolutely a hundred percent correct. This is precedent setting. We gotta stop it now. Uh, you know, those lawsuits need to be filed. And, and, and when you think back to like the first Trump presidency when he was, he was also issued a bunch of executive orders that time around. He would issue the executive order, somebody would sue him, the courts would throw it out, you know, he'd issue another one. Somebody would sue him. That one would get thrown at, thrown out. They're, they're actually a little bit more sophisticated this time around, like what they did with Yeah,
Andrew Thaler: Yeah. Some of them are more sophisticated, some of them are written by, are they Chad, GPT? They're, they're literally, literally Chad G that have been written by Chad, GPT. And you can see it,
Andrew Kornblatt: Uh, it's so stupid.
Angelo Villagomez: Sorry. But you know, this, there, there's absolutely more of this coming and we know that they're gonna flood the zone. We need to stop this now. We need cases to be filed in court. We need to put a stay on this. 'cause th this is again, like, you know, the trial balloon testing the waters. This is only the beginning. And if you read Project 2025, all of this is printed out in black and white. This has been the plan for, for years mm-hmm
Andrew Kornblatt: We Did cover project 2025 in a previous episode. Okay. And it was terrifying then. And it is still terrifying now. And I would hope that not only our listeners, but also, you know, say democratic leadership might actually read it and, uh, take note. But going back to a little bit more of the subject at hand, I wanted to touch more on these marine protected areas. Many marine protected areas serve both conservation and cultural purposes for coastal communities. How do these policy changes disproportionately impact, you know, both indigenous communities, small cell, uh, small scale fisheries and other vulnerable populations that depend on healthy marine ecosystems? And is that a worry about future executive orders as well?
Angelo Villagomez: So these two protected areas are actually offshore. And for the, the one out in the Pacific, the boats are either based in American Samoa or Hawaii. Uh, so the, the American Samoa boats, the, the long liners, they don't actually ever leave American Samoa. It's only the, the purse sanders that are going to this area. But they have to leave 200 miles to get outside the EEZ travel a few hundred more miles before they even enter these protected areas. So these are in the Pacific, these are large industrial vessels. The, the long liners are over a hundred feet long. The purse sanders are 200 feet long. Almost all of the fishermen on the boats actually aren't American citizens. They're not paying a minimum wage. The way that these fish enter into our economy, um, is that they're either landed in American Samoa where they end up in a, a can of star kiss tuna, or they go to Hawaii where they end up on a sushi plate in either in Hawaii or Japan or, or somewhere in the United States.
Angelo Villagomez: So, you know, I have made a career out of, uh, talking about the cultural connections to these habitats, but the, the people who are really going to be affected are the industrial fishing vessels and then also some of the, the bycatch species think things like the whales and the birds and the turtles and the sharks. I could talk to you about how, you know, what do those species mean to, to peoples in the Pacific hint. They're very important. You know, it's similar in New England. It's not like Uncle Joe going out and catching a couple fish on the boat. You know, these are, these are big boats. I think they're mostly drop traps. I think that's lobster, but you know, it's, the ocean's a big place. Um, there's a lot of other places where they could be dropping these traps, but you know, the only ones really going out.
Angelo Villagomez: The one in New England is like at the edge of the exclusive economic zone for like 200 miles out. I mean, if you just imagine if, if your, if your vessel's going 20 knots, which is, that's like, that's cooking like this is 10 hours away from Boston or more, the industrial advocates will sometimes try to paint this image of like the small boat fishermen or the indigenous fishermen who's being harmed and not being able to practice their culture. But with these two particular ones, it's big and offshore, but you know, down the line, they're probably gonna, are gonna be other more coastal things that are gonna be threatened.
Andrew Kornblatt: Andrew, can you tell us a little bit about, just so that we are aware, when it comes to deep sea mining, you've covered this in past episodes, but can you give a little bit of a refresher of what are we afraid of in regards to deep sea mining? Like the ecological impact or, or things like that? Yeah,
Andrew Thaler: So the deep sea mining that is being proposed right now that the permit applications have been for is polymetallic nodule mining. And polymetallic nodules are basically cobblestone that form on the abyssal plane. And they take four to 30 million years to form. They accrete chemically around hard objects that fall in the sea floor. So if you cut them open, you'll often find something like a shark's tooth or a diatom test or a radio alarm and anything hard that sinks to the sea floor. And the nodule itself then becomes a habitat builder, an ecosystem foundation. And so you have sponges and you have nematodes and you have lots of like these small benthic critters that grow around on the nodule fields. And those of course then support larger mobile scavengers and larger benthic scavengers that, uh, move across the sea floor. And so you have these very large ecosystems.
Andrew Thaler: They're incredibly biodiverse. They're as biodiverse as the rainforest. The biomass is not particularly high. It's mostly tiny animals. It's mostly little nematodes. But what happens is this forms a foundation for the entire deep ocean ecosystem. And I don't know if you saw the recent report that it was just published in science and covered in the New York Times by Katie Croft Bell, who did a, a systematic assessment of how much of the deep sea we've actually explored. And in the past we've said, you know, we've explored maybe 5% of the deep ocean. 95% of the deep ocean is left to, is left to discover. But what she actually determined from looking at the extent of research effort and the maps that have been compiled and the sea floor surveys that have been done, is that we've actually studied less than 0.0001% of the deep seabed. So what we're really losing when we mine these ecosystems is access to knowledge that has yet to be discovered.
Andrew Thaler: So I, I did a, a, a junket back with Angelo years ago when we were working on the Mariana Trench Monument. And we were talking about, you know, what is the most valuable resource of the Deep Sea? The most valuable resource of the Deep Sea is insight. It's what we can learn about life. It's what we can learn about ourselves. It's what we can learn about evolution and what we can learn about medicine and what we can learn about nature. That's really the resource that has the most value in the deep ocean. And that's a real qualitative value. Discoveries in the deep ocean have resulted fundamentally in the entire 30 year transformation of the medical industry to the tune of several hundred trillion dollars. So there's a real economic value to that as well as a real human value to that. Because, you know, the reason you can get a DNA test, the reason we can screen for cancers, the reason we can look for genetic disorders in children, the reason we can develop mRNA vaccines, that all comes from discoveries we made 30 years ago in the deep ocean. So, you know, that's really the kinds of things that are at stake there. The things, you know, the Donald Rums, um, Rumsfeld making another cameo here, but the Donald Rumsfeld, the Unknown Unknowns, the things we don't even know, we don't know.
Andrew Kornblatt: I was wondering if you're gonna use that quote.
Angelo Villagomez: And that was around the time that Paul Shore was making Biodome
Andrew Kornblatt:
Andrew Thaler: The buoys, I'm gonna say the buoys, the thing that scares me the most right now, and it changes on an hourly basis, but there has been an order that comes out from, uh, actually the Coast Guard to remove a series of navigational buoys across New England that could cause havoc for Mariners across the board for researchers, because those buoys have data sensors on them as well for bay pilots because they need those buoys to pilot big ships into port. You know, if you can't navigate properly and you're running a big tanker, tankers run a ground. That's how we end up with big coastal oil spills. So, you know, the thing that's scaring me today, and this will change certainly by tomorrow and by the time this podcast comes out, is the removal of critical navigational buoys across New England.
Andrew Kornblatt: That is kind of terrifying. Angelo, what about you?
Angelo Villagomez: For me, I think it's like the weather data and people very focused on the hurricanes. I think for some people in the Caribbean and like here on the East coast when there's a storm, every news channel up and down the coast becomes storm center five or you know, whatever, and, and you get it. Uh, but out in the Pacific, like we don't have that infrastructure. And basically all we have to go by are these press releases from Noah in Hawaii to tell us where storms are. It really hit home to me. I, I flew from, uh, California to DC last week and you know, Noah provides storm data and atmospheric data and there was a storm over the Appalachian mountains and my airplane dipped down. You know, it was coming across sort of like Iowa, Ohio, but then it dipped down to South Carolina and Georgia and kind of did like a run around of, of the Appalachian Mountains.
Angelo Villagomez: And the reason my pilot knew to do that was because he had access to Noah data that's like the, the core of it all. But we're not thinking about slashing Noah jobs leading to plane crashes. But like you, you know, you, you start putting two and two together and you know, and they're also pulling out Jenga blocks at the Department of Transportation. Like we've heard of, uh, what's happening in Newark right now where the, you know, FAA, uh, is losing track of planes for a minute at a time. Those are the moments when disaster happens. These, these are professionals that work for our government who have dedicated their lives, who know how to do this. Right? They just, they just make it happen. And we don't even have to think about it. You know, I, I've flown for 40 years and have never really had to think about the weather and how it would affect my flight, but it did back in the 1920s and thirties.
Angelo Villagomez: The question of the day is how bad is it going to get? And you know, I do care a lot about fisheries and there, I know there are fishermen all across this country who make a living, uh, based on the management of our fish. And I think, you know, a lot of folks like to make fun of, uh, the, the fish managers and maybe, you know, it's a hard job. Um, they get a lot of criticism from the NGOs, they get a lot of criticism from the fishermen, but they show up and they do their job and they count the fish and they, they set catch limits, uh, and they do their best to manage our, our fish populations. But are we gonna do, are we gonna kick fisheries management to the states? You know what, what if the states disagree on how many fish should be caught? It's just gonna lead to absolute chaos. There are just some things that need to be managed at, at the federal level. Our, our government, it supports us. Like we, we, if we don't hear from our government, that's a good thing. That means it's working. But you know, as they start pulling out all these different Jenga blocks of our government, things are just gonna start failing. Like systems are going to fail mm-hmm
Andrew Kornblatt: I have, I have not been flying anytime recently and I I have been terrified to do more so down the line, especially when I have to take my daughter to hang out with my mother in Texas or go to DC for some sort of conference or, or something like that. But, uh, but yeah, it's, it, I've never been afraid of flying before and in the last year it's become more and more of an issue of like, what the heck are we doing? I now don't trust this technology as much because of the externalities. And it seems like that is not just about aviation and transportation, but it's like I milk, right? Can't trust milk, can't trust, uh, chicken, can't trust all of these things because
Andrew Thaler: You have to drop a Pauly Shore reference in there now.
Andrew Kornblatt: Uh, uh, uh, s Moochie Nucci.
Angelo Villagomez:Hey buddy. We're weezin the juice.
Andrew Kornblatt: Yes,
Angelo Villagomez: It, it's, uh, it's an evergreen post. It's, uh, five things you can do if you're off about the latest Trump executive order. So just, you know, delete the name of the executive order and plug in a new one. And, and this is my, you know, my general response or anybody who says, what can I do? The answer is work in your community. Uh, 'cause you are more effective in your neighborhood and the people who are gonna listen to you most are the people who know you and care about you and trust you. So that's like, I would, I would focus my efforts there. In the, in the blog I talked about the importance of reaching out to your locally elected officials. I don't care who you are, but if you are a scientist who says you work on policy, your representative should know your first name, your local state senator, like they should know your first name.
Angelo Villagomez: Uh, so that when they see you on the street market or at the grocery store, they're like, Hey, Andrew, the scientist, Hey man, good. You know, good to see you. Because like that is, if you wanna affect national policy, you have to start where you are. The other thing is like, support your community. So, you know, some, a lot of people think, oh, I need to start an NGO, uh, but I, I don't care where you live. Somebody already has an NGO that is doing good work in, and, and maybe it's, maybe there's like an environmental high school club and it's the biology teacher and she's overworked. Uh, she has no money to support this, but if you gave her a hundred dollars to pay for pizza for one of the meetings, like that would be so incredibly meaningful for that particular teacher and for those students, I mean, know, we could sit here and brainstorm like other small things that you could do in your community, but you know, just think about supporting the people that you know who are kind of already doing this. And like, I, I'm from the Western Pacific. I'm from the middle of absolutely nowhere. I guarantee you there's somebody doing this everywhere. Like I, it doesn't matter how remote you are, there are people who are doing this and you should, you know, support them, support each other. And you know, while you might feel alone, if you know suddenly you have two or three people that you're working with, that's a team.
Andrew Kornblatt: What about you Andrew? What do, what are your thoughts on that? What, what can we do?
Andrew Thaler: So, uh, my mentor through all this has been a young man named Angela Villagomez. So I agree with everything that he just said. He, you know, more than anyone, any other one person, Angela's been my mentor into the policy world. But I would say in addition to all of that is run for something if you have expertise and you are frustrated because you cannot get elected officials to make decisions based on science, become the elected official and make the decision based on science. And I'm not talking about like national campaigns. I know there was a big campaign a while ago to get scientists to run for Congress and stuff. I'm talking about local things. If you wanna protect the wetlands in your community, run for the zoning board, if you wanna encourage electric vehicle adoption, there's probably a board or a commission in your county that is in charge of determining whether or not new construction has, you know, the right hookups for EV chargers in, in, in new homes.
Andrew Thaler: And that makes a huge difference in whether or not people will invest in an EV if they already have the Chargers at their house. You know, there are wetlands commissions, there are waterways commission. I'm the commissioner of Climate Change for my town. It is an objectively ridiculous title, but we do a lot of, uh, really good work building a resilient infrastructure for the community. Look at your municipal charters. Look at the kinds of positions that are available for you in your town or your county or your even neighborhoods. Sometimes depending on the level of a municipal governance. And pick a chair, pick a board, pick a commission that you can actually do meaningful work on and then run for it and serve on it. They're usually not as heavy a lift as you think they are in terms of time commitments. And you can get a lot done. There's a town. There's a town the next county over for me called Trap. And they just canceled the town council election because no one ran. Move the trap and run for the council and you can control the town.
Angelo Villagomez: Yeah. Turnout for these local elections is abysmal, low twenties, thirties, forties. And so, you know, if you run and you're serious about it, you knock on a handful of doors, there's a good chance of winning. You know, the other thing that you can do if you're not ready to run for office, the thing that you can do to get your feet wet is run for precinct captain. And then like, I guarantee you, your precinct does not have a captain and the party Democrat or Republican. We're, we're bipartisan here. I'm not probably be more than happy to have you join as precinct captain and you know, that's an opportunity for you to connect with the people in your neighborhood. You knock on your doors basically like you whip these votes and you get people out to vote. You do that for a year and then you run for commissioner the following year. There's a pretty good chance you'll win and it doesn't matter where you are in the country.
Andrew Kornblatt: Well thank you so much both for your advice. I hope that our listening audience takes some inspiration from this. You know, I, I know that I'm gonna be talking to my local community more. I hope that everybody else just takes some time to get out there, build that community. 'cause it's not just great for getting stuff done. It's also great for resilience. And in the words of Paul Shore, if you're edge, 'cause I'm wheezing, all your grinded just chill.
Angelo Villagomez: Amen.
Andrew Thaler: Absolutely
Andrew Kornblatt: Thank you so much. And this has been another episode of Ocean Science Radio.