those of you who are here in the audience those of you who have joined online on c-span. welcome. this is going to be a riveting conversation and i say that as someone who is a historian. so just a couple of minutes of comments before i turn it over to my friend and colleague steve moore who really will be running the show tonight. and that is in 1994. i was president of my university's college republicans. and it was more than a dream as a son of the reagan revolution. that -- army would soon be the majority leader. that phil graham's economic expertise along with leader armies at least for a narrow window in american political history would be ascendant in this town. and while we have to be careful as historians not to dwell in the past we can as we are on the brink of a red wave and i mean that philosophically not as a partisan. this year know that that isn't merely about party registration. about one party being in charge instead of another it is about the ideas that define us as a people namely freedom. flourishing and this town and this government spending a hell of a lot less money than it does. and so it is a great great privilege to have -- army. senator phil graham my one of my political mentors who a couple years later. he was thinking about running for a different office. he was in louisiana, and i said senator, you know, this is before there was a red wave in louisiana, would you adopt us as as our third senator? he said yes, son. you just keep doing what you're doing. so here we are many years later senator. good to see you. welcome back to heritage. but without further ado. it's also an equally great privilege to have steve moore back here at the heritage foundation to welcome him. here is our distinguished fellow and to this program over to him. it's right here so we can really boxes, thank you kevin for the kind introduction and i'm loving this new era at heritage. it's fantastic and his leadership has been amazing. we're going to have some fun today tonight and welcome to our c-span audience as well. --. army is a legend. he's one of the few people in addition to phil graham who actually cut this came to this town to actually make government smaller not bigger. so thank you to both of you and so we have i just got this note from newt gingrich. was the as you all know the speaker of the house and was the one with the army who really engineered the republican revolution in 1994. so i just thought if i may --, i'd love to read this comment from from speaker congrats, and it's really sweet. he says -- army was invaluable as a creative dynamic energetic member when we were in the minority and as a key part. of the contract of america majority an extraordinary force for good ideas and real reforms and a leader who helped re-elect the house gop majority for the first time in 68 years and helped develop the only four balanced budgets in our lifetime. that's pretty amazing. isn't it his new book provides vivid and wise insights into the legislative process and the house as an institution with gratitude newt gingrich. so that's this really nice tribute to -- army. this is the book if you haven't got if you haven't gotten this book yet. it's a great read. i actually think this book should be read by all people every political science major in america should be reading this book called leader. it really is a a great discussion of how washington really works and how things get done and don't get done in washington. and so we're going to kind of have some fun. telling our -- army stories. there's probably in this rum deck at least 15 or 20 people who work for you at one time or another and i i say in addition to all of the great. contributions you made directly to policy one of your great contributions was the incredible number of successful people who you mentored including myself. i'm and so my little story about -- army is that i work for -- on the joint economic committee in 1990. 3 and 1994 and i remember that that when that when i was on the committee, and i i decided by the summer of 19 of 1994 that i was going to leave the committee because i just had it, you know if you were a minority remember if you were working for a minority member in the house you might as well have not been there. i mean the democrats were so arrogant at that time after what 40 years of rule, you know, there was like republicans weren't even there. and so i remember i went to -- and i said look, i love working for you --, but i just can't i can't do this anymore. it's pulling my hair out. we're not really having much of an impact here and and i'll never forget --, you know. turn me said steve. you cannot leave now remember this and you said don't leave now because we're going to take the house in november of 1994. and you know dennis you were part of that revolution as well, and i said --, whatever you're smoking. i want some of it, you know, because it seems so incredibly and for people forget how improbable it seemed and that how many seats did you have to pick up like 60 seats or something like that? and it was it was obviously a tidal wave election and it was in no small part because a newt gingrich and -- army in the contract with american republicans. there's a lesson here when republicans stand for something they win. when they're just the lesser of two evils, which is most of the time they lose and so that was an incredible period and what you all did you and nude and the whole team from 1995 through 2000. it's true all the four only four balanced budgets in the last 50 years. we did welfare reform. we did the capital gains tax cut all of these incredible things --. army was also for those of the younger people in this room. you were the first inspiration for the flat tax idea. you were the one of the first inspirations for medical savings accounts. you never were with me on the term limits idea. i don't think you like that too much. but anyway that it's just so fantastic to have you here, so i wanted to turn the podium over to senator phil graham who actually i first met in this building, you know back in 1984 85 when when -- when phil graham came up with this crazy idea called the they called it the ground rudman. bill and the ground rubbin bell was basically automatic spending cuts if we couldn't get that deficit down and all of washington, you know had palpatel palpitations over this, but it was one of the few times senator that we actually cut spending under that ground rugby bill and he has been a crusader for small government as well also hails from the great state of texas. so give a nice warm. welcome to phil graham of texas. thank you, steve. well, nobody told me that i was going to say anything. i will say a few things. president reagan once put his arm around me and said i want you to look me and i said kept weinberger tells me. that your graham rudman is more dangerous than the soviet menace. were you assure me that that's not the case? and i said yes, mr. president, i'll assure you is not the case. well --, and i were destined to become friends. because we will both from texas. we're both economists. and we both came to washington because we wanted less government and more freedom. they're not a lot of people who come to government with the idea of having less of the very institution. that come to be part of. and the thing that i always found was very interesting and i never lost. my sort of all of it. and that was that --. always had this view that he was like a spy in the soviet union. that had become a leader of the central committee. and was one of the people actually running the soviet. so that when we got together, it was sort of like i was there as his american handler and he was telling me what was we were actually doing inside the belly of the beast. and i never cease to find that fascinating. i served in washington for quarter of a century. and i dealt with a lot of people. but i can say without any fear of contradiction. that of all the people that i ever serve with -- army was less interested that somebody. decorumi was less interested. in getting credit for things he did than anybody i have ever dealt with in, washington. is for is i could tell his aspiration other than saving america was owning a ford s-150 king ranch version. and he got it. and -- story is a story that reassures me about america. a -- was from cadoo north dakota. that's right in. i don't have any idea where it is. um, i went to north dakota campaigning once and i had to plug in the car to the tires from freezing. but he came from candor, north dakota. and he became the first republican majority first republican majority leader in 40 years. and he was an indispensable leader in changing america. and implementing the final stones on the reagan revolution and then he retired and went back to being just in plain citizen. to me that is a reassuring story about america. i once had a guy in china. asked me where did you come from? you know we try to look at leadership in america, and we just can't figure out where you came from. and i tried to explain to him that in america. the greatness of our country is that leaders just come from nowhere? and so people are always saying where are the reagans and where are the -- armies now that we need them? well, i never despair because i know they're out there. they're waiting to be discovered. they're waiting for the right moment. and the only thing that i well let me just say the contract will america. -- army wrote the contract with america. he gave it the name contract with america. i was the chairman of the republican senatorial committee. we tried to copy it by having our seven more and 94. we won more than seven seats. by the way now i'm not taking anything away from newt gingrich. he grabbed it he ran with it. he made it famous. he deserves all the credit he gets. but -- army was the father of contract with america. my welcome, but let me just say a couple of more things. from the beginning of the republic we had wasted money because of an inability to close government facilities, especially military bases. and so what -- did in a new and totally original idea of his own creation? was he came up with the idea of a commission? and then a straight up or down vote. in congress to approve the closing of military basis so that it allowed a congressman or senator to go to the military base as the bulldozer was pulling up and knocked down the gate and lie down on the ground telling his staff now just at the last moment rush in and drag me out and i'll be begging to die, but pull me out and then it'll be gone. and that's exactly what happened. we closed a lot of military bases. that should have never been built to begin with and were being operated just draining the blood out of american. um -- was very instrumental in welfare reform. the most successful reform of a government program in american history why we don't take that. reform program and apply it to every entitlement program the federal government. i don't understand. the average household in the bottom 20% of american income earners get over 45,000 a year in benefits in the federal government. is there any wonder that you can't get people to work? and we were able to implement a program and an area that was the most difficult area where you've got an unmarried woman with children. a situation where senator warren would say it's impossible for it to work. well, guess what? we reform the program we set time limits and within four years. 50% of the people had been on the program were working. it's amazing. what incentives do. so i'm very happy to be here today to one give credit. we're not enough credit has been given. partly because he lacked the skill to blow his own horn. and secondly to just say to -- that. it was a great privilege those years working with you one of the highlights of my career. was getting together with -- to get his spying report. that he was actually running the system. he came to washington to dramatically reform. and so --. congratulations thank you senator. those were terrific comments. just one thing about the contract with america. i remember -- talking to you after the republicans, you know won the congress and and i kind of was apologetic. i said, you know --. i didn't really pay all that much attention to the contract of america because i never thought she would win. and you said well steve if people thought we would win they never would have signed the contract of america. that was a great great period and and instantly i think you all remember your first hundred hours. what was it the first hundred hours? you did. i mean you pass more good legislation than probably the previous 25 years in that first hundred dollars. so it's an amazing revolution we have by the way. could i see a lot of new people have come in if what i'd love if any all of you in this room who at some point in your career work for -- army. could you please stand up? that's amazing. thank you all for being here. i'll say it again -- leggett. -- legacy is really the amazing people. he's mentored over the years. okay, so i wanted to call and kevin kramer. where are you senator there? are you out kid? we have another person for the second most person from north most famous person from north dakota here. kevin kramer is a senator from the state of north dakota and he is also i believe you are all you're also from can-do. he's also is how one of the odds the two of the most famous people in washington would come from can do north dakota senator. thanks so much for being. all right. neither -- nor i are the most famous person from can do however peter davidson could attest that dave osborne one of -- classmates all pro running back for the vikings was is from can do. eastern canada, he and dicker classmates well, i this is such an honor steve thanks for including me to be able to participate in something like this my 10 years in congress, this is a highlight it is it really is -- i mean it and for for the handful of you who've read the whole book susan and i know did she i'm sure she proof it many times. but i read the whole but i might have been the first person in america to read the whole book. i mean i was texting -- as i was reading it on the airplane going. i'm laughing so hard the people next to me are concerned. but just to give you a little context if you didn't read the book. i my daddy and -- army lived across the alley from one another in can do. and in the book -- tells the story about richard kramer the elder richard. there's a number of richards. they're in the book that he references but um was passed with teaching the younger richard how to climb polls when -- joined the rural electric cooperative as alignment for a summer job. now i love the fact that -- -- had to go union shop and work for co-op, you know, that was the last time he did either of those things but but but more importantly than that even charlie army -- brother who along with phil graham really is are the two stars of the book. i'd say they get more ink than anybody else combined. and so charlie army -- older brother and my daddy were best man at each other's weddings. they both married. well, they both stayed married to the same person their entire life. so just to give you a little a little of that my dad did teach -- didn't put this part in the book. he put the part about the climbing poles in the book. he didn't put this my dad -- tells me gave him his first one of his first economics lessons. yet -- and dad after work one day dixon. let's go down to it was a gordy's bar downtown kandu and have a drink. maybe he didn't. but richard kramer said --. you know that for the price of a drink at the bar downtown we could go to the liquor store and get a six pack. and my dad retired alignment and -- wrote the book on price theory literally wrote the book on price three. but the best book -- has ever ridden is is leader his memoirs or spectac. ular i encourage everybody. it's listening to watching to read it. and we celebrate that for sure because not only as steve says not only is it a great documentation of a historical moment. i mean it is a great documentation of it. significant historical moment here, but it has countless lessons to all of us. on how to govern and better yet how to behave. really and the two go hand in hand. i told you i laughed so hard at some points that people were concerned about me sitting sitting on the plane, but i'm just gonna give you a couple of of the lessons that i learned. first of all i one of the parts so i really laughed the hardest is when when the wives the faculty wives accosted you -- because he as a professor had written this piece. that the newspaper picked up that proved that. stay at home wives were overpaid. well, maybe not exactly but it's something like that something like that that in fact they were paid both for their consumption as well as for their as well as for their productivity. and so of course he's doing all this wonky stuff, but here's what it reminded me. it reminded me of shortly after -- went to congress his alma mater where you guys masters degree the university of north dakota at the time known as the fighting sioux until the ncaa said it was hostile and abusive. but which which by the way because of scarcity after that happened -- called me said, can you run over to grand forks and get me a fighting sue hockey jersey before before they're all gone. they were smart enough at und to print a whole bunch of them. but anyway. but at that event where he received the coveted sioux award the mc was the president of the alumni association and the state republican majority leader of the state legislature north dakota earl strinden. and -- gets up and gives this wonderful speech starting out about why how important the university system is because it not only teaches our children but teachers our children's children. right, that's pretty important. that's where the good news ended and he pivoted to the problem with the university system. of course phil is faculty governance, right? and i'm sorry he gives this oration of oration on faculty governance. why how bad that is and how it's ruining the university system and he gets all done and gets his wonderful ovation from all the wealthy donors to the university of north dakota and earl stranden gets up and says, just one quick announcement the dessert reception and honor of congressman army that was going to be hosted by the faculty has been canceled due to a recent lack of interest. one other thing about north dakota -- beloved home state and most of his family still lives there. i was distant can do about a week or two ago and and saw some of them but his preference for free markets senator graham. really supersedes the prairie populism of north dakota. he would add a hard time getting elected there. let's just say and although i think today he'd be hit that much better chance, but he did come and often knives game campaign for me in the 90s when i was young party chairman. he was the guy that would come and give the lincoln day speeches when we had no celebrities and from north dakota. we didn't even have a living republican that had been in at that time. but but we always had to get assurances that he would not talk about the farm bill or the farm programs and you would certainly not give his opinion about ethanol. and until until he came to cut the ribbon on the ronald reagan republic senator senator in bismarck. it just so happened that that same day john hoven the governor at the time now my colleague in the senate was to give the keynote address at the north dakota petroleum council, but he got sick. so they called scrambled in the mornings that could you get -- army possibly to fill in for john holden. and i said, i think i can. and as we were in the parking lot of the radisson and i said, this is your chance. to say whatever you want about ethanol in north dakota and he got up. i'll never forget he gets up in front of all these oilmen. he said kramer said i could say anything i wanted about ethanol. it was such a -- dumb idea that russians didn't even try it and and just true story and he got a standard ovation. he didn't have to say another word. i did one time. yes. i did one time try to plead my case for the farm bill. in his office. it's a --. you've got to admit free markets don't work in every situation because agriculture is heavily subsidized by all of our competitors. it's we just are trying to have a you know, a fair marketer at least level the playing field a little bit to which he said without thinking about it contemplating worrying about my feelings. he said i've never met an american decided to become a farmer because somebody put a gun to their head. and i said, okay, we'll talk about something else. let's talk about glenda or edie. anyway i know there's a 39 page index on -- book. i bet i have twice that many pages that i've written. notes stick so that i will always be able to go back to the things that that really matter because -- took army's axioms and turned them into really into army's parables. again historical as it is it taught us a lot of things. -- your i agree with you. i think it should be it should be required reading for every freshman for sure for every freshman that comes to congress for sure because one thing the newt gingrich said to me the first time i ever met him and i told him that you and my dad grew up together. -- army is the epitome of what one man can do in congress if he has the will ladies and gentlemen when he passed brac he was a junior member of the minority party. that should be encouragement for everybody that aspires to do big things. the lessons of your ten years leader proved that regular order works. regular order works. i've been in congress ten years. i've never seen regular order. but your book proves that regular order works when you respect every member. when you empower every committee. and you honor the chairman i'd like to see that return. i think we'd get back to a lot of those principles. if in fact we just took care of those. but perhaps the greatest economics lesson that you taught us. there can that you teach us in your book is that god's grace is in high demand and high supply and it's still free. it's still true one of the most important lessons i take from -- book. is that going home on weekends makes you a better member of congress than going on a codell? mean that was that that one's gonna hurt some people. but it's true. you inspired me to be a senator as well, and you know that. you know that and the reason and the way he did it, don't worry. it won't be as blunt as you put. was because i asked him in 1993 senator graham if such a celebrity from texas as he is would ever run for the open seat vacated by lloyd benson to which he said. i'm not a big enough, you know. to be to be a senator, but you have the potential. and you have always had, you know great aspirations for me. -- army and my father learned a really valuable lesson together climbing polls that if you work long hours you get time and a half. and then professor army became he became congressman army and leader army. and he and his entire team many of whom you've seen tonight and there are many others. proved that if you work long hours at their job. you don't make an extra penny. but just like my dad who earned time and a half benefited his family -- and his team. their hard work have benefited all of our families. and you can live without assurance --. you are a man to quote your own book not about you, but i'm going to quote it back to you our man of great great stature as well as a man of great. status there are two men in my life. without whom i would never be a united. they're both named richard. they're both from can do. and i love you both. thank you. thank you so much senator. that was so fabulous. by the way. i apologize. i forgot to mention the most important person in this room susan army, susan. thank you for everything you've done. so i asked a few people. would you like to say something about your husband? all right. i can't wait to hear what you have to say. ladies and gentlemen, susan. i'm not sure if i'm supposed to come up or not. but here i am so let me think about this my husband and i have been married for almost 42 years. and i've got to say it has never been boring. i remember when he first came to me, we'd only been married about two and a half years. and he said, you know honey i've been thinking about i i really think i could do a lot of good and do some good work if ran for congress. and i said what? i'm cooking dinner, you know we have children here. i don't what are you talking? so anyway, i just very quickly. i'd read a few articles on political families and how tough their lives were and i said if you do this honey, i'll have to think seriously about a divorce. and so i laughed and he said really and i said, well, i don't know. let's talk about it. so we did and he had he really had deep felt feelings. he had a plan and he knew who he was. he was an economist. and he'd been watching c-span and he would talk to me about this and he would say, you know. there's so many good things that we could do. and so i just really didn't want him to do it, but he did and he and i encouraged him to do what he wanted what his dream was. and he ran and against all odds he want. and then he said, you know, i'll never be in leadership those guys. they have to work all the time. i'm just going to be a regular member. just do my work i said, oh good. that's great because we can, you know, get back to a normal life. before i know it he's running for leadership. for eight years and but i look back now that we're out of it. it's so much better. i can look back and he did so much. i mean he and his team. they did so much he had the best team in dc and they did wonderful work together and i look back. you know, it's been what 20 years since he's been out of congress. and i'm amazed as i've gotten older. i'm amazed at what my husband and his team did. so it was worth it. it was worth it. the kids said it was good. before we hear from from -- army. there's one person in this room who really played a huge huge role in and -- army becoming a member of congress, but also majority leader was with the -- for many many years. really literally from the very start and that's carrie not carrie. where are you? can you come can you come up and say few words about those first campaigns? i mean the stories of that campaign and how -- really, you know rolled the dice and really put everything on the line was amazing. and so thank you for everything you did to make -- armory the success that he was i will try we're still trying to figure out if susan actually voted for -- in that first. well, i mean we've heard tonight from senator graham and and others about how much of a difference he it's true. it's a phenomenal difference he made. career, but i've tried to figure out what made him different. and so i thought of a few things one is he truly is fearless. and he chose to run for congress when everybody said the pool to try. i thought there's no way you're going to win against the the guy who was incumbent who had been mayor of arlington for 26 years who had millions of dollars and but he did it anyway, and he said i'm gonna i'm going to win my own way, and he knocked on 10,000 doors he made. thousands of phone calls you scratched his way. he got it done, but he was honest with me when he interviewed me. he and susan interviewed me to be his campaign manager he goes. and i didn't know two things. i don't have any money and i don't know anybody who does. and he was correct on that. you took on all the fights once you got up to dc and you know the base closing bill. he was literally a junior member and his second term not on the armed services committee. and i remember one time senator graham. he came back. i think he had. it shared the idea with you and you said that can't be done that's impossible. so i tried it one time and it goes i just that just makes you want to try it that much more and so with brian gunderson and others on the team after you know, three or four good years of getting it done it it got through and it continued for many many rounds and say billions and billions of dollars. but there are lots of other issues he took on school choice back when even the first bush administration was opposed to it when it was i think our first goal was to get a majority republicans to vote for it and now it's party orthodoxy, but it wasn't for a long time public housing reform with jack kemp walter faunt roy and all the others in those days ag subsidies, which you heard about which people thought you could never touch protecting the homeschoolers, which i think to this day probably shut down congress more than any other project i've ever seen but yeah, we just had remarkable success across a variety of issues and i was trying to think of other. house members or senators who left a legacy who left behind such a a big body of work and i think of maybe ted kennedy on the other side, maybe phil graham, but there aren't many. it's a very very short list. i think you can be proud of what what you left behind. another difference is he truly didn't give a hoot what anybody thought about. and that gave him remarkable freedom. he did what he thought was right and what his conscious told him to do and he couldn't be bent. i mean lobbyists couldn't bend him his donors and his district couldn't bend him and he lost several of them because they tried and he refused. he told constituents. what he believed and in one. famous encountered a town hall meeting a guy just keep badgering him over something over and over again and -- finally said i've had enough of you meet me outside after this and i'll kick your --. you may not have said but but that was kind of who he was but he's not justified or he's a thinker and that's another thing. i think that sets him apart is he really does spend time actually. i think thought time today is a pretty rare commodity my kids i try to get them to like. you've got empty time. think don't just go to your phone and look at something but -- would be in the shower. he'd be out fishing or he'd go for run or whatever and he would he would just think and so on a lot of times on monday mornings, he would call me in his office goes. i've been thinking. and i knew something was up at that point and he would have some. idea, like even back in the university came up with his invisible foot of government. corollary to adam smith's invisible hand of the market and you know, it's look it up. it's really well done, but he would come up with an idea in congress that we would either we would analyze for days. turn it into some project and and many of them would would change america and just he would take the time to think and today. we're just reacting to stuff that we see on the news or people are pushing, but he would actually take time. and think about it whether it's on a power pole in north dakota thinking about whether you should go back to college. or thinking about the flat tax or thinking about some of their economic concept. he also analyzed people. and he could unlock people because he would study them and understand them. and to this day, you know new gingrich is a great guy love the guy spent thousands of hours in meetings with him and the rest of the leadership i think -- probably analyzed new better than anybody else who's written or talked about nude. i'll i'll let you read the book to see his analysis of new but i think it's spot on he read widely. and he remembered what he read from all the the classic economists adam smith. he written. you know, george gilder was a great friend of his thomas soul milton friedman. some of the classics joseph schumpeter. i mean he read them and studied them and remembered them and learned how to apply them and different situations and he could articulate the concepts. whether it's a leadership meeting or at a town hall meeting or on a tv interview. he could he could explain it better than anybody else. i think i i know and many leadership meetings. there would be a big battle about something. and -- would then just launch into this? soliloquy bringing in several famous, you know economists of the past and just shut the whole thing down there go i can't argue with that. and later when when he became a believer in christ years into his career. he he learned to live out his faith in everything. he did and that gave him tremendous. peace. particularly toward the end when he was just unfairly maligned by a lot of people that should have been his friend, but he had to go through a lot and and get quite a few slings and arrows and he did it with a with a peaceful heart and not many of us could have. walk through it the way he did i think. but he also developed. true friendships with people that you wouldn't expect those who've been around a while. never ron dell evans. he and -- were great buddies didn't agree on hardly anything, but they were great friends. jim wright they became great friends, joe moakley rosa de laura, which is really surprised me. they became friends when they were doing the homeland security committee chuck schumer we attacked farm subsidies work with chuck schumer in the day jack brooks who was a crustiest guy in the world. but -- is the only guy who could joke with him and get away with it. even barney frank. they were actually friends people don't believe that they were his good nature allowed him to say things that most people couldn't get away with one of my favorite stories in the book is he was showing up at one of the office buildings and as he was going through vaccine waters happened to show up. and she was with some of her colleagues. you know maxine waters might appreciate this and it goes oh, maxine. i'm so glad to see you. she goes, why did he goes? well now we can call off the witch hunt. it's as she just laughed. and and her colleagues said maxine, you can't take that because oh come on. that was pretty funny. so she had a good sense of humor about it, too. he often said he was he was good at being pithy. the people didn't always like it when he -- on him. i've recently gone back to the hill after a 20-year absence and as i look at the hill today is a very very different place, but today's political entrepreneur as opposed to policy entrepreneurs today what typically passes as a campaign is to make an incendiary comment or perhaps tweet something that's outrageous go on their favorite tv network yell at somebody on the floor make a spectacle and then go send out millions of emails and text and try to raise money on it and then go back to the same thing the next day. that's pretty much what a large part of our movement has turned into which is which is unfortunate? we desperately need people who approach their job like -- did. i mean, it's hard to find an entrepreneurial congressman now partly it's because they've shut the rules down and members don't have an opportunity. to be effective on their committee or offer amendments on the floor like he did for so long. but i hope if republicans win they take the majority that they will reopen this and let members show that they can be a legislator and not just a perform. going forward we need that substance. we need the you know the political changes that can be made. for anyone who wants to understand the way congress worked during army and grams era. read his book. i really think it's it's a classic. book that people can learn from and and i agree members maybe heritage or someone could send a copy to all new freshmen when they come in. i think it would be well worth their their time to read it. they need to learn what it did. they need to replicate it because we need more leaders who can you know change america the way he did. i think he did come to a dc. we reached to ride around and pick up truck back in that 1984 campaign. he said i want to go to washington to save america. well, he did. you did. but we need people to do it every generation. so when you get a whole new crop, i think that can do. you did -- so it i'm terribly proud to have known you. proud to have worked with you and to get to know susan over the years and all the other members of our team that are here tonight. it was a wonderful group and incredible era. so thank you for let me be part of it. i'm going to tell one other quick -- army story and then i will by the way the book is leader by richard kay army and it is a wonderful read just one fun story that carrie reminded me of and i see that andy laperier here is here in the front row and worked, you know diligently and can helping put together the flat tax idea that their army flat tax and you may remember this story annie, but we had called in a bunch of really prominent economists to to you know to to have a conversation with -- about that plan and and so we brought in our laffer. and i think it was steve forbes. and i think like jack kemp was there or someone answered the three of them are huddled on this couch in army's office, and we're kind of sitting across from him and a -- army's first statement as he said gentlemen. said there is not been as much brain power on that couch since i slept there alone. all right. here from -- army the great one of the greatest majority leaders in the history of the house of representatives -- army. thank you. thank you all. i just really want to make two points. the first is about the house of representatives. i came to know and understand that. this is the most unique institution in the cause of liberty and representative democracy in the history of the world. and i was so privileged. to be part of it. i learned to loveth the institution. i learned to love the people who loved the institution one of the people. whose president recurs in my book and one of the few people with whom i served whose approval i coveted. was senator bird from west virginia people think that's a strange choice? but i love senator byrd for the way. he loved the institution. and i wanted him to remember me. as a person that did honor to the inst. i like to believe i succeeded. when i came there. the institution was run by regular order. the democrats were evil. we knew that but they ran a good ship. and as a young entrepreneurly minded. member of congress i could innovate legislation because i knew what the rules were. thanks largely to david hobbs. who taught me the ropes? but if you know the institutional structure and the procedures and the protocols and if you dare to believe they will be counted on. you can exceed in your individual initiative. you can't in a world that doesn't have that structure. now i look at the congress today and i feel bad i remember the people that i served. i remember the demonic democrats who were in charge of everything. but each and every one of those grumpy old men had served this nation in the service of its defense. they knew the sacrifice of that service. they understood the causal liberty liberty that they had paid for. and they treated liberty with a very very gentle and loving touch. and they deserve to be respected. and they were but now i've watched the house fall into a different direction. i've seen. republican speakers who fallen by the wayside and i can see i believe it is for one simple reason only. they left the structure behind. they got ahead of the body. they failed to respect each and every member. and their right to participate and then they would come to the floor. with a product that had not been seen or worked on by members at large. and try to bully it into passage. and it was a heartbreaking thing to watch. i believe. that if the states of this country preserve their integrity as granted in the constitution to administer their elections. and if the elections are administered fairly and honestly the republicans will regain majority of the house. i believe they do an extraordinary. good job. i've administering honest elections. the republicans will join will gain a majority in the senate. and i have a wish and a prayer. for these new majority run the organization in compliance with its rurals in its protocols and it's wonderful traditions. allow each member to be honored and appreciated and active. and doing what it is they do so well on every committee. you have people who have devoted a lifetime's career who have expertise and historical knowledge. that should be respected. and if you do that, mr. new speaker. you will retain your speakership because you will have an honest. happy and productive institution and it will be to your credit. that will mean you will have to stand up. to an administration that wants to go to the drying room together just a few of us. and we'll work it out and bring it back and you guys can pass it. you'll have to say no, we don't do things like that in our body. we do things in an all-inclusive and respectful fashion. together we are an institution. and by the way of all the things i admired about newt gingrich. the one thing i admired the most. he understood. congress was a separate and equal. body of this government and it's prerogatives and its obligations. needed to be protected. and they needed to be administered. and thank you newt for that great lesson. that's what we do. we come here to serve the nation. to do so together. in an inclusive fashion that is respectful of all our members. all our members even knows nitwits on the other side of the aisle. should be respected. i remember joe cap was being just because he couldn't throw a perfect spiral. and irrespass was i am a starting quarterback quarterback in the nfl. i apologize. i was elected by my citizen friends back home. and i apologize. to no one and on their behalf. i demand to be respected. now, let me just take a personal. i wrote this book. people think it's about me. it's not about me. especially those years in congress. it's about us. we did it together. i was never able to talk about my staff. i couldn't see them. we were a team. we were together we stuck up for each other. we stuck by each other and i wrote it one day i composed it to type, right? i found myself typing these words. we loved each other for what we love together. a safe and a prosperous and a happy america. we did that. and we did it so well with such a sense. of loyalty and loving affection through a system that i called respectful division of labor. that we became known as army guys. and i loved that. i thought it was fitting. your credit called called them carry not guys. you could have called them gillespie's if you like good whiskey. but we were army guys. and michelle davis was the first to enlighten us guys. that the term army guys is a gender-neutral term. we are all army god and we discovered did we not before we all broke up? there were people that were not of our staff not in our shop. there were other members of congress. there were even a handful of particularly enlightened senators. who've called himself army guys. so if you're an army guy, it's because you love one another. for what you love together a safe and prosperous and happy. america that's why we work. this is the prize for which we talk. so, may i ask you if you are. and army guy. will you stand and give yourself a hand? thank you. well -- army. it is fantastic to have you back in washington. i think this is your first one of your first trips back since you left town, and so it's a it's amazing that you were able to come here. it's a great book. it's called leader. truly. i mean, this is a great great book. it's a great read about how washington works and what it doesn't work senator phil graham. thank you so much for coming from texas. it was really fantastic having you and we will have drinks afterwards and all of the army guys and gals are going to be having dinner afterwards. so -- army. thank you for all you did for our country. you are a great great patriot. [applause] liz: hello everyone. i'm liz neely. i am absolutely delighted to be moderating today's session. this is "underwater: climate change and me." if a
hearing about oceans and coral reefs, first, i'm sorry for you, second, you can go out of the room. we will be diving into 45 minutes of conversation about our oceans. we will start at a sundrenched, shallow waters with coral reef, then make our way down into darker, more mysterious steps --depths. i am excited to be joined by two incredible marine scientists and authors. joining us today we have the author of "life on the rocks: building a future for coral reefs" dr. julie [applause] as well as an intrepid explorer, research scientist and author of "below the edge of darkness: a memoir of exploring life and light in the deep sea." dr. edith witter. we want to thank the national endowment for the arts for sponsoring the stage. our plan today is to explore both of the books that explore ocean science as well as personal stories. julie and edith both take us on personal journeys whether navigating medical mission -- mysteries or struggling before pushing forward. my own career path started in ocean conservation so it is a personal joy to explore these things. i am so excited to get into this together. my plan is i will ask each of them to make a provocative statement or ask a question to get you all thinking. in the final 15 minutes of the session today we will take questions. i will hand the floor to juliet he does in turn to talk about their books and then we will talk for about 15 minutes before we dive in. at the end of the talk today you will be able to get books signed by our two authors. so, provocative statements or questions. julie, let's start with you. julie: the story of coral reefs is one of struggle. i think we all know that. currently, predictions are that by 2050, 99% of the coral reefs will be lost on our planet. if that is the case, what can we as terrestrial people, terrestrial beings, people who live appear on land do to make what is beneath the waves less invisible to us? edith: in 2011 or 2012 we got the first video of a giant squid in the deep sea. that was the first time we were able to record this creature in its own environment. i maintained the reason it took so long to do that is that we were doing it wrong. we were scaring them away. if it took that long to record an animal over four stories tall , how many other creatures are there in the deep sea that we don't even know about? the giants would have -- giant squid have been float when they die so we have some specimens. we knew they existed. what about stuff that doesn't float? liz: on that note, let's talk a little bit about your books and takeaways people need to understand as they approach these questions. juli: this is a coral reef. coral reefs take up less than 1% of the ocean. they are quite small in terms of space. but they have a disproportionate effect on marine life. it's estimated that 25% of all marine species depend on call reefs at some point in their life. coral reefs are these incredibly vibrant, abundant places rich in marine life. but coral have a problem. they are bumping up against climate change. the reason why coral are first of all animals. they are like little cn enemies that live in -- see an enemies --sea anemonies that live in colonies. about the size of a pencil eraser. you can see in their tissue, the little green dots. those are algae that photosynthesize and feed 90% of the sugar they make to the coral. that is the energy coral used to make the limestone skeletons they live inside of that creates the architecture of our reef. when temperatures rise, and we don't know exactly who starts it, but either the coral kicks out the algae or the algae abandons the coral and it takes with it its color and also its sugar. so suddenly the coral is on starvation rations. it is bleached at that point. if the temperature does not fall -- if the temperature falls, the symbiosis can be reestablished. if it does not, the coral die. a bleached reef looks like skeleton, bones, a graveyard. that's ultimate what it is. this is a true reality for coral reefs around the world. already 50% of the reefs of bleached. -- have bleached. ejections for 2050 are really bad. -- projections for 2050 are really bad, but the book is not an obituary. people around the world are bolstering the health of coral reefs so as they come and do this period of stress as we warm our oceans and our planet, there are things we can do. i wanted to tell some of those stories. this is a reef in indonesia. you can see the rubble beneath those bars. that's a dead reef. those structures are called brief stars. -- reef stars. they are made out of rebar and they are networked together into a galaxy. what happens is the race has resiliency and after about 18 months, -- the reef has resiliency and after about 18 months of the coral has grown and after three years you have a reef that is completely restored. so there is a lot of work being done to protect the coral reefs and all the life they support. it's also a precarious time. edith: it was coral reefs that got me hooked on marine biology. i was smitten. when i saw my first coral reef i was 11. i decided i wanted to be a marine biologist. instead of becoming a coral reef biologist i became a deep-sea biologist. my first deep-sea expedition was in 1982 on a little ship where we went out and hauled that's behind the ship. and this was the primary way we knew about life in the depot -- the deep ocean, we dragged that's behind ships. we kept the animals alive in a container that kept them cold. when we dumped them out everything glowed. it was incredible. there were pulsating plankton, growing crip -- glowing krill, flashes from bangle jellyfish. i plunged my arm into the bucket. icy cold water. i pulled out a red shrimp the size of a hamster. it had nozzles on either side of his mouth that were spewing sapphire blue light that pooled in the palm of my hand, dripped between my fingers, drop back into the bucket and went on glowing. everything lit up. these animals had photo force. they had lures. they had all kinds of contraptions for being able to make light, to find food, to attract mates, to defend against predators. i wanted to know what that world look like -- looked like. i got the opportunity in 1984 when i got to meet with a group of scientist testing a new tool for exploring what was then and still is the largest least explored habit had on our planet, the mid water. it was a diving suit called wasp. it's not an acronym, someone thought it looked like the inset -- insects. yellow body, bulbous head, michelin man arms with pictures on the end of it. it was developed for diving to oil rigs down to 2000 feet. my first open ocean die was in the santa barbara channel. -- dive was in the santa barbara channel. they put us in one after the other and drop us to 800 feet to make sure we would not have a cost of phobic meltdown. i did not. i was so intrigued by what i was seeing that i saved that for the next dive. i went down 800 feet and i turned out the lights. i was blown away by what i saw. at the time there were no cameras that could record this. but this is what it looks like. it looked like a fireworks display. later when i was interviewed by our local newspaper, they asked me what is it like down there? i blurted out, it's like the fourth of july. they used that as a headline and i took a tremendous ribbing from my colleagues for such a nonscientific statement. i have lost track of the number of times over the years i have taken people down for their first drive and have them describe it like a fourth of july. it was incredible. i saw jellyfish that just blew my mind. i included these for juli. for her love of the spineless. this is a chain on the left in the light and on the right by its own bioluminescence. it was longer than this room. i brushed up against it with the wasp and it lit up, propagated down, and everything in the suit lit up. i could read all of the dials and gauges in the suit without a flashlight, just by the bioluminescence. this is a colony, sort of like a coral. it is a really bizarre creature. what an astonishing amount of light. some of these jellyfish produce different displays depending on how they were stimulated. the comb jelly on the left, you see the rainbow color because it is being illuminated. that's not bioluminescence. the bioluminescence, the cold, living light this creature makes, it can make it intrinsically as you see in the middle image or extrinsically where it releases it as a cloud of particles like an octopus or squid could release an ink loud in the face of a predator. a tremendous number of these animals can release their bioluminescent chemicals in the face of a predator temporarily blinding them in order to make an escape. the jellyfish intrigued me the most. they don't have eyes. who were these displays directed at? why were there different displays in the same jellyfish? i developed an electronic jellyfish that imitated certain displays. it turned out, this was enormously attractive to squid. this is what led to the giants would hunt. -- the giant squid hunt. liz: i would like to turn to the audience. raise your hand if you have ever been in the ocean. keep them raised. do we have scuba divers in the room? we have a lot of people who have been in the ocean. in these books we are traveling from locations near here, in the florida keys, for example, to the opposite side of the planet. we cover time from early in your career all the way up to the beginning of the pandemic. that is quite a sweep. i know writing books that combine science and memoir is an incredible intellectual and emotional challenge. since this is a book festival, let's start with the process of writing a book. i am curious about tapping into your memories and what motivated you to write these books. both of you. edith: i never intended in my life to write a memoir. i was contacted by a literary agent who saw an article about my research in the new york times and he asked me if i had ever thought of writing a memoir. i said no, go away. then, we got the first video of a giant squid using the electronic jellyfish. that also got written up in a lot of places. he contacted me again. this time he had a whole speech prepared about how i had seen things nobody had ever seen and i had -- i should be willing to share them with the world. i said, i don't know how. i'm a scientist. we don't write in the first person. i counted. from that time there were 40 emails from him. they weren't pushy, but he just kept sending them. have you read this memoir? have you thought about this? finally i decided, ok, i will give it a shot. one christmas i just took some time and started trying to write in the first person. i had kept first-person diaries, especially of my expeditions, what i saw on each dive, for example. actually, i ended up having fun writing the book. it was so freeing compared to writing science papers. i had a blast. i was very much benefited from the pandemic. i run a not-for-profit that takes a lot of time. with the pandemic i got a little extra time for the rewrite of the book. anyway, it was unexpected in every possible way. liz: i'm glad you're agent was persistent. in the footnotes you can feel the fun being had. your sense of humor comes across. juli: i was a little more intentional in my decision to write in the first person. well, i was a scientist. then i fell off the scientist path and started writing textbooks. then i was actually -- i got a little bit of a gig writing short articles for national geographic. that was really cool. a photographer i liked what i was writing and asked me to write the text for one of his books. i am a huge reader. i read everything. i think the idea that i could actually be an author was something i had not dared to imagine before this photographer asked me the right the text for his photography book. the first chapter was about coral. i rode my heart out. then, i did not hear back from him. i called the editor of the bug like, what happened? -- of the book like, what happened. he was like, i'm sorry, he is not going with you. but it was in that moment i realized i wanted to be an author. but i cannot not do it for someone else. i had to do it for myself and find my own voice. i started reading a ton of popular science. i would finish reading those books come put them on my nightstand and be like, i could never write a book like that. one day i put the book on my nightstand like i could never write a book like that because i did only write a book in my own voice. as i could only write a book in my own voice. that's what i realized i could only write a science book if i combined memoir with science and that is the way i have been writing ever since. in terms of memories it's interesting. i have some very vibrant memories, but i did not keep journals of all my dives. so i just have to rely on my memories. now that i'm intentional about going out, traveling, and telling the stories about what i am doing, i keep journals like crazy. i do journal after every dive, after every day, after every interview. that's really helpful. liz: we have already touched briefly on the fact that the way we write in science for publication is very formulaic and technical. you remove your personality and sense of humor. what you have done in these books is quite different. another hard thing is that science is perpetually building on a body of knowledge and when you write a book like this you have to stop reading, stop researching, and publish at some point. juli, for you, is there anything new you have learned a the publication of your book around the status of coral reefs or the ocean that you want to update us on? juli: what is amazing is call reese are still being discovered. that blows my mind because coral have to live shallow in order to provide the algae in their tissue with enough light for them to photosynthesize. as we know, the deep ocean is too dark for that to happen so coral have to live in to of water near the surface that they can have the photosynthesis that gives them all of their energy. yet, since the book was published, i have learned of three coral reefs we did not know of, a deepwater one near tahiti. one found at the mouth of the amazon river. that has long been considered too sentimenty for coral to be there. then there is one in honduras at the mouth of where all of these banana plantations were built. the fertilizer has been running in the water therefore essentially -- for a century and people thought there was too much fertilizer and sediment therefore -- there for coral to survive and these are really healthy reefs. the question is, what will the reefs of the future look like and are these forbearance to future reefs? these are questions we don't know the answer to now. liz: i have a follow-up question. you showed us what bleaching looks like. you mentioned how dire the circumstances are. it feels to me in your book you are doing an important balancing act between confronting the brutal reality of the threats to coral reefs and damage they have already undergone while maintaining hope in the future, specifically looking for data, evidence, case studies that give us a foundation for that hope rather than just closing our eyes to it. can you talk about your own feelings about the future of coral reefs are zero this book? juli: the book starts as this -- at this meeting i went to in florida called reef futures in to temper -- in december 2018. i went to the meeting expecting just a bunch of really depressed scientists, people reporting on mass bleaching's around the world that are happening. but what i discovered her all of these people doing the kind of restoration i showed you in the slides. and also, looking at the in credit -- incredible genetic flexibility of coral. coral are incredible at hybridizing. the idea of species for coral is very fluent. there was just a paper published last week that coral seemed to be able to integrate mutations from their somatic cells, the cells in their body, not in their reproductive line. they can take mutations from their body and put them into their genetic line and pass them onto their offspring. that's crazy. it should not happen in animals. there are people making spur banks of corals. making embryo banks of corals. freezing them. freezing embryos. doing all kinds of amazing projects to boost coral reproduction, to boost coral survival. it's definitely not game over. what is amazing is oceans are warming, warming at an alarming rate. 93% of the heat that carbon the oxide in our atmosphere holds has gone into the ocean. coral only have one to two degrees of above buffer before they start bleaching. dutch of a buffer before they start bleaching. but they seem to be trying to use this incredible genetic flexibility they have. people around the world are trying to bolster that. i did try to walk this line. i am glad it came off that way. the story is not over on this. it's really an active story. liz: in reading these books, there is an incredible broadening. as a reader you have to stretch your mind to think about what is happening on a global scale. we were talking about genetic adaptation, hero week efforts to create genetic material. i want to switch to you, edith. one of the things is it's hard for us to imagine the true expanse of some of these ecosystems we are talking about. you mentioned briefly in passing that the mid water is one of the largest ecosystems on the planet. can you help us really understand what that means? edith: so, the most incredible thing to me is how little of the ocean we have actually explored. the number you hear sometimes is we have only explored 5%. that's not right. that was based on mapping from a remote sensing device at the surface of the ocean, not actually visiting the place. we are of two closer to 30% now and that. but if you are talking about actually visiting, just the bottom of the ocean, not even the huge volume above it, only .05%. our usual protocol as humans is to explore a place and then exploit it. in the ocean we have reversed that. we are exploiting it before we have explored it. just decimating the fish population, dragging nets across the bottom that turn unbelievable gardens of eden into a place that won't sustain life for hundreds of years. all of this is going on out of sight and out of mind. we are introducing our toxins and pollutants into the environment as we are taking out every last fish and form of marine life that there is. as i said, we do not know how this system works. we are an ocean planet. when we look for life on other planets, we look for oceans. yet, we don't know how our ocean word -- world works. did the artemis go off? it was supposed to go off today. it didn't. anyway, $40 billion we have spent so far and they still have not got it off the ground. it will be $90 billion. we are not spending anything like that on our own planet. it does not make any sense. [applause] liz: you are one of the relatively small number of people who have done some of this exploring of our ocean in dives. can you talk about what it feels like? what do you see? how long does it take? just paint a picture for us as you drop into the depths. edith: every time i dive in a submersible i have the opportunity to see something, possibly a species i have not seen before. certainly a behavior or something somebody has never seen before. that excitement of discovery is so incredible. i think it has to be baked into our dna. it is how we have learned to survive on this planet. we are all explorers. stories about exploration excited from childhood -- excite us from childhood. a secret garden. going down a whole into a wonderland. finding an ancient cave. liz: a mysterious forest. edith: all these things excite us. we are explorers. i think we really need to be tapping into that right now because that is how we have learned to survive on the planet. exploring it. figuring out what is safe, what is not, what to do to survive. that's what we need to be doing right now. liz: one of the parts that really struck me, actually, it's reflected in the title of the book, the edge of darkness. as you are dropping through the water column you talk about how it is spectacularly blue and then strangely both bright and dark at the same time. then, that zone, that shadow zone shifts over the course of the day as the sun is high in the sky and as the sun starts to set and that sets off incredible biological phenomenon. edith: the edge of darkness is a really important shifting place in the ocean. because, there are so many animals out there that are using vision and they are paying attention to where the edge of darkness is. so, during the day, they do -- go down and hide below the edge of darkness because there are no hiding places. there are no trees or bushes for animals hide behind so they hide in the dark during the day then they come up and feed in the food rich surface waters where photosynthesis occurs under cover of darkness. that is the most massive animal migration pattern on the planet and it happens every single day in the ocean. but different animals handle it in different ways. there is a lot of activity. i watched this traffic of animals going up at night to feed. it is all being driven by light. so many of these animals that are living at the edge of darkness, below the edge of darkness, sometimes, never seen sunlight at all, they have eyes. because of bioluminescence. because approximately 75% of the animals in the open ocean environment make light. so it could be claimed that it may be the most common form of communication on the planet. that means we probably ought to know a little more about it. liz: yeah, you. one of the things i really enjoyed about your book and talking about the scientific process, you opened your slides by saying, we did not use to have camera sensitive enough to detect the light he were seeing. i love the stories are not creating the manual when you win when you need. you have a favorite story -- do you have a favorite story? about a piece of equipment that is near and dear to your heart? and dear to your heart? hobbyists and research scientists are operating in parallel with incredible amounts of knowledge that are parallel to each other but not collaborating. juli: yes, there is a huge coral world on land. coral hobbyists raise coral in the garages, basements, and living rooms. they have developed a lot of tools that are being shifted to coral restoration. one of the things that these people have discovered is that if you cut a coral, if you saw it and create another and, it grows as much as five times faster than regular coral. you can grow coral a lot faster and as they are starting to pharma, this is an important technique. they have known this for decades that this is what they do to create new pieces of coral that they sell or give to other people who are hobbyists. now, the scientists are taking these techniques and using them to propagate coral which they can then replant in the oceans. the equipment, the racks, they all came from the aquarium hobby. yet the hobbyists have their own names for coral that are not scientific names and the scientists have their scientific names. they haven't spoken to each other that much except for you're right that it's changing there's a horrible disease going through the caribbean right now called stony coral tissue loss disease. it infects about 22 species of coral and the tissue melts off. the scientists are going out in front of the infection front and collecting healthy coral than they are putting them in aquaria on land. so the zoos and aquaria who have been hard -- part of this hobby not just hobbyists but affectional's who do this, they are holding coral in safety appear on land while this terrible disease sweeps through the caribbean. >> i would like to welcome those of you in the audience you have questions to come to the front and stand in front of the microphones so we can take your questions for the final 10 minutes of the session. in terms of teamwork, collaboration, exciting projects you are watching right now, do you want to mention any of them? >> i have been involved in a couple recently that are exciting. i had to sign a nondisclosure agreement so you will have to watch national geographic next year. it's the best bioluminescence ever filmed anywhere. the new camera systems are amazing. i'm also working with a colleague on newer types of cameras that are smaller, cheaper, easier to deploy. i want to get as many of them out there as i can because the opportunities for observation, the more discoveries we will make. >> i can see we have a lot of people and not a lot of time so please keep your questions concise. >> i would like to thank you for coming. the sign language interpreters as well. my question is about negation and getting the word about climate change out there. i was a biologist in undergrad then i moved toward the policy realm. how do you communicate the dangers of oceans and climate change in the modern era? is it a story about what we have to lose or gain? >>'s i have been trying to emphasize what we have to gain. we emphasize what we have to lose, too many people shut down. it has been said that martin luther king not mobilize the civil rights movement by preaching i had a nightmare but that's why nobody wants to listen. >> i agree. it's about what we have to treasure on this planet which is so much and it's more than we even know. it's >> i used to live in papua new guinea. there is a mine on land but it has been disposing of the tailings in the deep sea by piping way out. do you know of any studies on how bad is this owing to be? second question is how much danger are we in from people who want to start doing mining on the ocean floor? >> i am horrified by the mining on the ocean floor. we have been seeing trawling, but they are talking about mining in bed sites, these incredible hotbeds of biodiversity and they want to scrape them. it's going to be horrific and once again out of sight out of mind. the dumping on the bottom, nobody is looking at that. we're putting the artemis in the air for $40 billion, we can't spend any money to go look at what this dumping has done at the bottom of the ocean. >> it feels like this goes together with the previous question as well. a lot of people think that the bottom of the ocean is empty and lifeless with mud. what we know is everywhere we look we find incredible richness and life. >> is part of the problem that these are international waters? is there something that international agreements that have to be made by everyone? >> they have been trying to make agreements and failing three years. this is a big and complicated question and i think to be continued. >> thank you again for speaking. as a student in my last year of college, i am getting a degree related to environment a policy, but i have spent so much time overwhelmed by the amount of change that needs to happen and feeling hopeless about the future. what advice would you give to someone who was to contribute and make a change but feels like individual contributions can never outweigh the effects of insurmountable climate change? >> i feel like we have a disconnect in the natural world that is really problematic. in my own backyard, i have seen real change with citizen science. we have a citizen science team at our organization and we train rigorously. they are doing real science that is expanding our understanding of our local environment and it creates environmental stewards, it enhances understanding of science. it creates a sense of community all of which has been missing. i am a big advocate for high-quality citizen science. >> my question is for juli. you showed pictures of the bleached then restored coral reef. you mentioned the reef stars that were used. if it takes one degree or two degrees of temperature change to bleach the coral, how much more does it take to restore it? i am interested in how that restored in that same area. >> the bleached reef, the reef that was restored was bombed out. there a thing called blast fishing which is common around coral reefs unfortunately. unless they put those stars in place, that rubble would roll around and reef could not reestablish itself there. that reef had been bombed 30 years ago. you see the sort of similar crumbling in a bleached reef. i should be clear that they were not the same places. what was the question? sorry. how could you restore a bleached reef? that reef star project has been only used on 10 hectares that was the largest restoration that exists right now. the question is, will that work and other places around the world? that is still to be seen. they have just done some installations in australia on the great barrier reef and also in mexico. it has not been long enough to see if they will come back in those places yet. >> we only have time for one final question. >> what advice do you have for those of us who are not scientists, but would love to contribute to conservation? how can we become part of these teams? how can we help impact? >> one way is to call your congresspeople all the time and tell them that you care. that we need to be worried about climate change in a way that is more serious man the way we have been. that's one thing you can do. put it on your reminder every month to call your congresspeople. i also have a sense that art and communication matter. as we bring art and science closer together, we have more impact. people tend to work on, have action when they feel something. we can know something in our brain, but we don't always take action based on it. when we feel something, that's what we act. connecting science and art is really important. >> we have had a special dispensation for one final -- >> what can my school community do to help the ocean? >> you can write to politicians. [applause] >> thank you. >> you would be surprised how much they listen. >> thank you to everyone who cares enough to ask that question what can we do. the answer is more than you would think and there is reason for hope in a whole vast ocean to care for it in our own particular ways. thank you so much. [applause] you can find us in the book signing downstairs starting soon.there are a lot of books ot there of the performance of the media and the journalism industry. why do we need another one? and what's different about.
the u.s. has no national bird. congress has never designated a national bird as it has a national mammal, the bison, and a national tree at a national flower. the bald eagle has been an emblem of the country since 1782 when we put it on the front of the great seal of the united states. and a very popular one. peter: why a national symbol but not a national bird? jack: congress has never designated a national bird. tomorrow congress could technically designate the sidewalk pigeon as the national bird. let's hope they don't do that. but, i am part of a group that is going to launch a campaign to have the bald eagle officially named by congress as the national bird. stay tuned. peter: there is a story we have all heard for years about benjamin franklin and the turkey and wanting that to be a national bird or the national symbol. jack: that story is somewhat apocryphal. then franklin did compare the moral values of the bald eagle with that of the wild turkey intending that the wild turkey was honest and hard-working and the bald eagle was a craven coward that stole fish from osprey and other birds. but he never said he wanted the turkey has a national bird or on the great seal of the u.s.. peter: why do you call this an improbable journey talking about the boat eagle? jack: because in some ways it's paradoxical. when the congress put the great -- the bald eagle on the great seal of the united states, americans loved the image and they have always loved the image of the bald eagle. throughout the 19th century americans regarded the bald eagle as a predator like the wolf, the coyote, or the mountain lion. that was a threat to livestock for farmers. a bald eagle was a living -- a living boat eagle was a bald eagle to be shot and americans taught hundreds of thousands of them and pushed the bald eagle in the lower 48 states to the brink of extinction by the turn-of-the-century. peter: how low that number? jack: we don't know because nobody was conducting an official census, but the bald eagle had disappeared from many of the eastern seaboard states. they had become a rare sight by the early 20th century. states where they were at once time very prolific. peter: how many today exist? jack: it is a really wonderful story. the population has come back dramatically. it quadrupled in the 20 tens. now, the estimated population across north america, and, the bald eagle lives only in the wild in north america, truly an all-american bird, today the population is approximately 500,000. all 48. that is north america. canada, alaska, the lower 48 states, and northern mexico. peter: there is a bald eagle in all jack: those jack: 48? yes. probably in the lower 40 83 hundred 20,000 or 340,000. -- in the lower 48 320,000 or 340,000. congress had been trying to come up with a great seal of the united states since july 4, 1776. on that day franklin, adams, and jefferson were appointed as the committee to devised the great seal and they failed miserably. two other committees were formed and failed as well. thompson held up his hands and said, we need a seal. he decided on the bald eagle. he insisted the eagle be an identifiable american bald eagle. peter: our guest is jack davis, a university of florida history professor, a historian who specializes in environment of history and conservation, the author of a couple other books "an everglades providence: marjory stoneman douglas and the american environmental century." and he won the pulitzer prize for " th gulf: the making of an american se closea. -- the gulf: the making of an american sea." what prompted you to write about the bald eagle? we are seeing the bald eagle today in numbers and frequency we did not to know 15 years ago. i am a baby boomer and i grew up never seeing a bald eagle because dbt devastated the population after world war ii. -- ddt devastated their population after world war ii. but the u.s. conservation service and state and local officials launched conservation programs beginning in the 1970's and have had tremendous success restoring the bald eagle populations. people see bald eagles today and get very excited. you jab the guy in the ribs next to you when you see a bald eagle. i thought readers would like to know a little bit about the bird and a historical relationship with the american people. over my house i see big birds flying and i can't tell if they are whole -- hawks, golden eagle, bald eagles. how do you tell a bald eagle? jack: if it is an adult bald eagle it's easier than a juvenile. adult bald eagles have a white head and a white tail, both males and females. if you can make out the whitehead and the white tail you will know it is a bald eagle. the juveniles are mostly dark. so, it's easy to confuse a soaring juvenile bald eagle, and they are large, with, say, a vulture. they are larger than hawks, though. so sometimes it is even hard for me to tell a difference between a vulture soaring and a bald eagle soaring. some people have described, a great mid 20th century fiction writer who knew bald eagles quite well used to say that "the bald eagles wing beat is more muscular than the borchers -- the vultures." peter: you teach at the university of florida. it had a special role in preserving or re-introducing the bald eagle? jack: yeah. by the 1970's most of the southern states had no nesting bald eagles. florida had a fairly healthy bald eagle population. so, what wildlife officials began doing in the university of florida began doing in the 1980's was relocating eggs from a bald eagle nests in florida. i did not know about any of this until i started writing the book. it was a fantastic story all happening under the backyard where i live. they began relocating eggs, hatching them in oklahoma at the sutton avian center. then moving them to the southern states without testing bald eagles. so today, if you see a nesting bald eagle in mississippi or alabama, more than likely, it is the descendant of a florida eagle. peter: what are the laws regarding a balding coke? can you collect their feathers? and you shoot them -- of a bald eagle? can you collect their feathers? can you shoot them if they are predators? jack: you cannot shoot or hunt a bald eagle in any way at risk of being penalized for violating federal law. you could go to prison. you could pay a heavy fine. if you find a bald eagle injured or dead or even a bald eagle feather, by law you are supposed to turn it into the authorities. then the carcass or the feathers are sent to the national eagle center in denver where they are processed. then the body parts, the feathers, are distributed to native peoples. peter: our native peoples allowed to use feathers? jack: yes. anybody part -- any body part. peter: are these laws unique to the bald eagle? jack: free much so. in 1940 the bald eagle -- pretty much so. in 1940 the bald eagle was protected under the bald eagle protection act, the only species with its own law protecting it. the penalty of harming the bald eagle probably exceeds any other penalty for harming other wildlife. peter: let's take a call and hear from robert in philadelphia. please go ahead with your question or comment for geoff davis. robert: -- jack davis. robert: you pre-much answered my question. i was going to ask about the relation between the bald eagle and native americans and how do they feel about the united states appropriating their bird? if there is a relation. jack: thank you sir. that's a good question. native groups have a long history of with bald eagles dating back thousands of years perhaps. the bald eagle for many native groups is regarded as a spirit bird. not all native groups, but many. native peoples have long used their feathers and body parts in religious ceremonies, in rituals. the bald eagle protection act technically criminalized that traditional behavior. but, in recent decades the u.s. fish and wildlife service has been working closely with a number of native groups to help them restore those traditional relationships. so, some native peoples, some native groups are allowed to take bald eagles out of the wild and there are at least seven native american aviaries around the country where injured eagles are rehabilitated or those that are rendered flight list remain for their lives and their feathers are collected for ceremonies. peter: you say ben franklin thought the turkey was more industrious, honest, and hard-working compared to the eagle. what are some characteristics of the bald eagle and how is it different than the golden eagle? jack: the differences are size. the golden eagle is slightly smaller. the bald eagle is a fishing raptor. it eats primarily fish. it will also eat land animals and birds. the golden eagle only eat land animals and birds. it does not eat fish edit mostly lives in the west. -- and it mostly lives in the west. the bald eagle is a fishing bird , but it does steal. ben franklin was right. it does a steel fish from osprey. bald eagles steel fish from other bald eagles. they are also scavengers. they will get down and dirty with vultures. when there is carrion about. that is one thing we have to be careful about today. now that there are more bald eagles around and there is roadkill, it's not unusual to see a bald eagle on the side of the road feasting on roadkill. you have to be careful not to hit them with your car. peter: john davis is also the author of "the gulf: the making of an american sea" that won the 2018 pulitzer prize in history. that was after the big oil spill in the gulf. what was the effect of that? jack: we still don't know the full effect of the bp oil spill of 2010. in the median area of louisiana and texas, it was devastating to many environments. it showed up as far west as at the shores of the florida coast. but, one thing i have to point out. when we think about offshore oil drilling, we typically focus on the oil derricks over water. where the greatest damage comes from is the infrastructure on shore. all of the oil has to be taken from the gulf of mexico and moved on shore to the refineries. that's where you see the majority of the spells, the classics bills -- the spills, the classics bills, the runoff and pollution associated with any industrial site. peter: your subtitle the making of an american sea. what was the point of that? jack: the u.s. shares gulf coastline with both mexico and cuba. almost through the exact mile. the u.s. coastline is 50% of the total gulf coastline. we really dominate the sea, politically, but also, economically, industrially. i chose that subtitle because the gulf of mexico rarely appears in history textbooks. if it doesn't. , it's just -- if it does appear it is just mentioned in passing and i want readers to know that this sea has played an important role in american history. so, i also understood my audience would probably be american. peter: what is the health of the everglades? jack: that's a sad story. the health of the everglades is not great. of course, congress adopted the comprehensive everglades restoration project in 2000. billions of dollars have been spent. not much has been accomplished, to be honest with you. probably the greatest success so far in restoring the everglades has been the restoration of the kissimmee river. that feeds into lake okeechobee. that is the watershed for the everglades. lake okeechobee is still a mess. we are still dumping what i refer to as the cow tide and sugar tide down the rivers. it is devastating very valuable ecologically esturine environments at the end of those rivers. >> it is stunning you fly into miami. all of the lights of miami end abruptly at the everglades. jack: a lot of people don't realize that the everglades recharge the biscayne aquifer, the soul freshwater drinking source for the south florida population. as we continue to deprive the everglades of a proper level of water we are depriving that aquifer of its proper level and that allows saltwater intrusion that will become more common with the rise of sea levels. peter: jack davis. his most[applause] liz: hello everyone. i'm liz neely. i am absolutely delighted to be moderating today's session. this is "underwater: climate change and me." if you are not interested in hearing about oceans and coral reefs, first, i'm sorry for you, second, you can go out of the room. we will be diving into 45 minutes of conversation about our oceans. we will start at a sundrenched, shallow waters with ra
then make our way down into darker, more mysterious steps --depths. i am excited to be joined by two incredible marine scientists and authors. joining us today we have the author of "life on the rocks: building a future for coral reefs" dr. julie [applause] as well as an intrepid explorer, research scientist and author of "below the edge of darkness: a memoir of exploring life and light in the deep sea." dr. edith witter. we want to thank the national endowment for the arts for sponsoring the stage. our plan today is to explore both of the books that explore ocean science as well as personal stories. julie and edith both take us on personal journeys whether navigating medical mission -- mysteries or struggling before pushing forward. my own career path started in ocean conservation so it is a personal joy to explore these things. i am so excited to get into this together. my plan is i will ask each of them to make a provocative statement or ask a question to get you all thinking. in the final 15 minutes of the session today we will take questions. i will hand the floor to juliet he does in turn to talk about their books and then we will talk for about 15 minutes before we dive in. at the end of the talk today you will be able to get books signed by our two authors. so, provocative statements or questions. julie, let's start with you. julie: the story of coral reefs is one of struggle. i think we all know that. currently, predictions are that by 2050, 99% of the coral reefs will be lost on our planet. if that is the case, what can we as terrestrial people, terrestrial beings, people who live appear on land do to make what is beneath the waves less invisible to us? edith: in 2011 or 2012 we got the first video of a giant squid in the deep sea. that was the first time we were able to record this creature in its own environment. i maintained the reason it took so long to do that is that we were doing it wrong. we were scaring them away. if it took that long to record an animal over four stories tall , how many other creatures are there in the deep sea that we don't even know about? the giants would have -- giant squid have been float when they die so we have some specimens. we knew they existed. what about stuff that doesn't float? liz: on that note, let's talk a little bit about your books and takeaways people need to understand as they approach these questions. juli: this is a coral reef. coral reefs take up less than 1% of the ocean. they are quite small in terms of space. but they have a disproportionate effect on marine life. it's estimated that 25% of all marine species depend on call reefs at some point in their life. coral reefs are these incredibly vibrant, abundant places rich in marine life. but coral have a problem. they are bumping up against climate change. the reason why coral are first of all animals. they are like little cn enemies that live in -- see an enemies --sea anemonies that live in colonies. about the size of a pencil eraser. you can see in their tissue, the little green dots. those are algae that photosynthesize and feed 90% of the sugar they make to the coral. that is the energy coral used to make the limestone skeletons they live inside of that creates the architecture of our reef. when temperatures rise, and we don't know exactly who starts it, but either the coral kicks out the algae or the algae abandons the coral and it takes with it its color and also its sugar. so suddenly the coral is on starvation rations. it is bleached at that point. if the temperature does not fall -- if the temperature falls, the symbiosis can be reestablished. if it does not, the coral die. a bleached reef looks like skeleton, bones, a graveyard. that's ultimate what it is. this is a true reality for coral reefs around the world. already 50% of the reefs of bleached. -- have bleached. ejections for 2050 are really bad. -- projections for 2050 are really bad, but the book is not an obituary. people around the world are bolstering the health of coral reefs so as they come and do this period of stress as we warm our oceans and our planet, there are things we can do. i wanted to tell some of those stories. this is a reef in indonesia. you can see the rubble beneath those bars. that's a dead reef. those structures are called brief stars. -- reef stars. they are made out of rebar and they are networked together into a galaxy. what happens is the race has resiliency and after about 18 months, -- the reef has resiliency and after about 18 months of the coral has grown and after three years you have a reef that is completely restored. so there is a lot of work being done to protect the coral reefs and all the life they support. it's also a precarious time. edith: it was coral reefs that got me hooked on marine biology. i was smitten. when i saw my first coral reef i was 11. i decided i wanted to be a marine biologist. instead of becoming a coral reef biologist i became a deep-sea biologist. my first deep-sea expedition was in 1982 on a little ship where we went out and hauled that's behind the ship. and this was the primary way we knew about life in the depot -- the deep ocean, we dragged that's behind ships. we kept the animals alive in a container that kept them cold. when we dumped them out everything glowed. it was incredible. there were pulsating plankton, growing crip -- glowing krill, flashes from bangle jellyfish. i plunged my arm into the bucket. icy cold water. i pulled out a red shrimp the size of a hamster. it had nozzles on either side of his mouth that were spewing sapphire blue light that pooled in the palm of my hand, dripped between my fingers, drop back into the bucket and went on glowing. everything lit up. these animals had photo force. they had lures. they had all kinds of contraptions for being able to make light, to find food, to attract mates, to defend against predators. i wanted to know what that world look like -- looked like. i got the opportunity in 1984 when i got to meet with a group of scientist testing a new tool for exploring what was then and still is the largest least explored habit had on our planet, the mid water. it was a diving suit called wasp. it's not an acronym, someone thought it looked like the inset -- insects. yellow body, bulbous head, michelin man arms with pictures on the end of it. it was developed for diving to oil rigs down to 2000 feet. my first open ocean die was in the santa barbara channel. -- dive was in the santa barbara channel. they put us in one after the other and drop us to 800 feet to make sure we would not have a cost of phobic meltdown. i did not. i was so intrigued by what i was seeing that i saved that for the next dive. i went down 800 feet and i turned out the lights. i was blown away by what i saw. at the time there were no cameras that could record this. but this is what it looks like. it looked like a fireworks display. later when i was interviewed by our local newspaper, they asked me what is it like down there? i blurted out, it's like the fourth of july. they used that as a headline and i took a tremendous ribbing from my colleagues for such a nonscientific statement. i have lost track of the number of times over the years i have taken people down for their first drive and have them describe it like a fourth of july. it was incredible. i saw jellyfish that just blew my mind. i included these for juli. for her love of the spineless. this is a chain on the left in the light and on the right by its own bioluminescence. it was longer than this room. i brushed up against it with the wasp and it lit up, propagated down, and everything in the suit lit up. i could read all of the dials and gauges in the suit without a flashlight, just by the bioluminescence. this is a colony, sort of like a coral. it is a really bizarre creature. what an astonishing amount of light. some of these jellyfish produce different displays depending on how they were stimulated. the comb jelly on the left, you see the rainbow color because it is being illuminated. that's not bioluminescence. the bioluminescence, the cold, living light this creature makes, it can make it intrinsically as you see in the middle image or extrinsically where it releases it as a cloud of particles like an octopus or squid could release an ink loud in the face of a predator. a tremendous number of these animals can release their bioluminescent chemicals in the face of a predator temporarily blinding them in order to make an escape. the jellyfish intrigued me the most. they don't have eyes. who were these displays directed at? why were there different displays in the same jellyfish? i developed an electronic jellyfish that imitated certain displays. it turned out, this was enormously attractive to squid. this is what led to the giants would hunt. -- the giant squid hunt. liz: i would like to turn to the audience. raise your hand if you have ever been in the ocean. keep them raised. do we have scuba divers in the room? we have a lot of people who have been in the ocean. in these books we are traveling from locations near here, in the florida keys, for example, to the opposite side of the planet. we cover time from early in your career all the way up to the beginning of the pandemic. that is quite a sweep. i know writing books that combine science and memoir is an incredible intellectual and emotional challenge. since this is a book festival, let's start with the process of writing a book. i am curious about tapping into your memories and what motivated you to write these books. both of you. edith: i never intended in my life to write a memoir. i was contacted by a literary agent who saw an article about my research in the new york times and he asked me if i had ever thought of writing a memoir. i said no, go away. then, we got the first video of a giant squid using the electronic jellyfish. that also got written up in a lot of places. he contacted me again. this time he had a whole speech prepared about how i had seen things nobody had ever seen and i had -- i should be willing to share them with the world. i said, i don't know how. i'm a scientist. we don't write in the first person. i counted. from that time there were 40 emails from him. they weren't pushy, but he just kept sending them. have you read this memoir? have you thought about this? finally i decided, ok, i will give it a shot. one christmas i just took some time and started trying to write in the first person. i had kept first-person diaries, especially of my expeditions, what i saw on each dive, for example. actually, i ended up having fun writing the book. it was so freeing compared to writing science papers. i had a blast. i was very much benefited from the pandemic. i run a not-for-profit that takes a lot of time. with the pandemic i got a little extra time for the rewrite of the book. anyway, it was unexpected in every possible way. liz: i'm glad you're agent was persistent. in the footnotes you can feel the fun being had. your sense of humor comes across. juli: i was a little more intentional in my decision to write in the first person. well, i was a scientist. then i fell off the scientist path and started writing textbooks. then i was actually -- i got a little bit of a gig writing short articles for national geographic. that was really cool. a photographer i liked what i was writing and asked me to write the text for one of his books. i am a huge reader. i read everything. i think the idea that i could actually be an author was something i had not dared to imagine before this photographer asked me the right the text for his photography book. the first chapter was about coral. i rode my heart out. then, i did not hear back from him. i called the editor of the bug like, what happened? -- of the book like, what happened. he was like, i'm sorry, he is not going with you. but it was in that moment i realized i wanted to be an author. but i cannot not do it for someone else. i had to do it for myself and find my own voice. i started reading a ton of popular science. i would finish reading those books come put them on my nightstand and be like, i could never write a book like that. one day i put the book on my nightstand like i could never write a book like that because i did only write a book in my own voice. as i could only write a book in my own voice. that's what i realized i could only write a science book if i combined memoir with science and that is the way i have been writing ever since. in terms of memories it's interesting. i have some very vibrant memories, but i did not keep journals of all my dives. so i just have to rely on my memories. now that i'm intentional about going out, traveling, and telling the stories about what i am doing, i keep journals like crazy. i do journal after every dive, after every day, after every interview. that's really helpful. liz: we have already touched briefly on the fact that the way we write in science for publication is very formulaic and technical. you remove your personality and sense of humor. what you have done in these books is quite different. another hard thing is that science is perpetually building on a body of knowledge and when you write a book like this you have to stop reading, stop researching, and publish at some point. juli, for you, is there anything new you have learned a the publication of your book around the status of coral reefs or the ocean that you want to update us on? juli: what is amazing is call reese are still being discovered. that blows my mind because coral have to live shallow in order to provide the algae in their tissue with enough light for them to photosynthesize. as we know, the deep ocean is too dark for that to happen so coral have to live in to of water near the surface that they can have the photosynthesis that gives them all of their energy. yet, since the book was published, i have learned of three coral reefs we did not know of, a deepwater one near tahiti. one found at the mouth of the amazon river. that has long been considered too sentimenty for coral to be there. then there is one in honduras at the mouth of where all of these banana plantations were built. the fertilizer has been running in the water therefore essentially -- for a century and people thought there was too much fertilizer and sediment therefore -- there for coral to survive and these are really healthy reefs. the question is, what will the reefs of the future look like and are these forbearance to future reefs? these are questions we don't know the answer to now. liz: i have a follow-up question. you showed us what bleaching looks like. you mentioned how dire the circumstances are. it feels to me in your book you are doing an important balancing act between confronting the brutal reality of the threats to coral reefs and damage they have already undergone while maintaining hope in the future, specifically looking for data, evidence, case studies that give us a foundation for that hope rather than just closing our eyes to it. can you talk about your own feelings about the future of coral reefs are zero this book? juli: the book starts as this -- at this meeting i went to in florida called reef futures in to temper -- in december 2018. i went to the meeting expecting just a bunch of really depressed scientists, people reporting on mass bleaching's around the world that are happening. but what i discovered her all of these people doing the kind of restoration i showed you in the slides. and also, looking at the in credit -- incredible genetic flexibility of coral. coral are incredible at hybridizing. the idea of species for coral is very fluent. there was just a paper published last week that coral seemed to be able to integrate mutations from their somatic cells, the cells in their body, not in their reproductive line. they can take mutations from their body and put them into their genetic line and pass them onto their offspring. that's crazy. it should not happen in animals. there are people making spur banks of corals. making embryo banks of corals. freezing them. freezing embryos. doing all kinds of amazing projects to boost coral reproduction, to boost coral survival. it's definitely not game over. what is amazing is oceans are warming, warming at an alarming rate. 93% of the heat that carbon the oxide in our atmosphere holds has gone into the ocean. coral only have one to two degrees of above buffer before they start bleaching. dutch of a buffer before they start bleaching. but they seem to be trying to use this incredible genetic flexibility they have. people around the world are trying to bolster that. i did try to walk this line. i am glad it came off that way. the story is not over on this. it's really an active story. liz: in reading these books, there is an incredible broadening. as a reader you have to stretch your mind to think about what is happening on a global scale. we were talking about genetic adaptation, hero week efforts to create genetic material. i want to switch to you, edith. one of the things is it's hard for us to imagine the true expanse of some of these ecosystems we are talking about. you mentioned briefly in passing that the mid water is one of the largest ecosystems on the planet. can you help us really understand what that means? edith: so, the most incredible thing to me is how little of the ocean we have actually explored. the number you hear sometimes is we have only explored 5%. that's not right. that was based on mapping from a remote sensing device at the surface of the ocean, not actually visiting the place. we are of two closer to 30% now and that. but if you are talking about actually visiting, just the bottom of the ocean, not even the huge volume above it, only .05%. our usual protocol as humans is to explore a place and then exploit it. in the ocean we have reversed that. we are exploiting it before we have explored it. just decimating the fish population, dragging nets across the bottom that turn unbelievable gardens of eden into a place that won't sustain life for hundreds of years. all of this is going on out of sight and out of mind. we are introducing our toxins and pollutants into the environment as we are taking out every last fish and form of marine life that there is. as i said, we do not know how this system works. we are an ocean planet. when we look for life on other planets, we look for oceans. yet, we don't know how our ocean word -- world works. did the artemis go off? it was supposed to go off today. it didn't. anyway, $40 billion we have spent so far and they still have not got it off the ground. it will be $90 billion. we are not spending anything like that on our own planet. it does not make any sense. [applause] liz: you are one of the relatively small number of people who have done some of this exploring of our ocean in dives. can you talk about what it feels like? what do you see? how long does it take? just paint a picture for us as you drop into the depths. edith: every time i dive in a submersible i have the opportunity to see something, possibly a species i have not seen before. certainly a behavior or something somebody has never seen before. that excitement of discovery is so incredible. i think it has to be baked into our dna. it is how we have learned to survive on this planet. we are all explorers. stories about exploration excited from childhood -- excite us from childhood. a secret garden. going down a whole into a wonderland. finding an ancient cave. liz: a mysterious forest. edith: all these things excite us. we are explorers. i think we really need to be tapping into that right now because that is how we have learned to survive on the planet. exploring it. figuring out what is safe, what is not, what to do to survive. that's what we need to be doing right now. liz: one of the parts that really struck me, actually, it's reflected in the title of the book, the edge of darkness. as you are dropping through the water column you talk about how it is spectacularly blue and then strangely both bright and dark at the same time. then, that zone, that shadow zone shifts over the course of the day as the sun is high in the sky and as the sun starts to set and that sets off incredible biological phenomenon. edith: the edge of darkness is a really important shifting place in the ocean. because, there are so many animals out there that are using vision and they are paying attention to where the edge of darkness is. so, during the day, they do -- go down and hide below the edge of darkness because there are no hiding places. there are no trees or bushes for animals hide behind so they hide in the dark during the day then they come up and feed in the food rich surface waters where photosynthesis occurs under cover of darkness. that is the most massive animal migration pattern on the planet and it happens every single day in the ocean. but different animals handle it in different ways. there is a lot of activity. i watched this traffic of animals going up at night to feed. it is all being driven by light. so many of these animals that are living at the edge of darkness, below the edge of darkness, sometimes, never seen sunlight at all, they have eyes. because of bioluminescence. because approximately 75% of the animals in the open ocean environment make light. so it could be claimed that it may be the most common form of communication on the planet. that means we probably ought to know a little more about it. liz: yeah, you. one of the things i really enjoyed about your book and talking about the scientific process, you opened your slides by saying, we did not use to have camera sensitive enough to detect the light he were seeing. i love the stories are not creating the manual when you win when you need. you have a favorite story -- do you have a favorite story? about a piece of equipment that is near and dear to your heart? and dear to your heart? hobbyists and research scientists are operating in parallel with incredible amounts of knowledge that are parallel to each other but not collaborating. juli: yes, there is a huge coral world on land. coral hobbyists raise coral in the garages, basements, and living rooms. they have developed a lot of tools that are being shifted to coral restoration. one of the things that these people have discovered is that if you cut a coral, if you saw it and create another and, it grows as much as five times faster than regular coral. you can grow coral a lot faster and as they are starting to pharma, this is an important technique. they have known this for decades that this is what they do to create new pieces of coral that they sell or give to other people who are hobbyists. now, the scientists are taking these techniques and using them to propagate coral which they can then replant in the oceans. the equipment, the racks, they all came from the aquarium hobby. yet the hobbyists have their own names for coral that are not scientific names and the scientists have their scientific names. they haven't spoken to each other that much except for you're right that it's changing there's a horrible disease going through the caribbean right now called stony coral tissue loss disease. it infects about 22 species of coral and the tissue melts off. the scientists are going out in front of the infection front and collecting healthy coral than they are putting them in aquaria on land. so the zoos and aquaria who have been hard -- part of this hobby not just hobbyists but affectional's who do this, they are holding coral in safety appear on land while this terrible disease sweeps through the caribbean. >> i would like to welcome those of you in the audience you have questions to come to the front and stand in front of the microphones so we can take your questions for the final 10 minutes of the session. in terms of teamwork, collaboration, exciting projects you are watching right now, do you want to mention any of them? >> i have been involved in a couple recently that are exciting. i had to sign a nondisclosure agreement so you will have to watch national geographic next year. it's the best bioluminescence ever filmed anywhere. the new camera systems are amazing. i'm also working with a colleague on newer types of cameras that are smaller, cheaper, easier to deploy. i want to get as many of them out there as i can because the opportunities for observation, the more discoveries we will make. >> i can see we have a lot of people and not a lot of time so please keep your questions concise. >> i would like to thank you for coming. the sign language interpreters as well. my question is about negation and getting the word about climate change out there. i was a biologist in undergrad then i moved toward the policy realm. how do you communicate the dangers of oceans and climate change in the modern era? is it a story about what we have to lose or gain? >>'s i have been trying to emphasize what we have to gain. we emphasize what we have to lose, too many people shut down. it has been said that martin luther king not mobilize the civil rights movement by preaching i had a nightmare but that's why nobody wants to listen. >> i agree. it's about what we have to treasure on this planet which is so much and it's more than we even know. it's >> i used to live in papua new guinea. there is a mine on land but it has been disposing of the tailings in the deep sea by piping way out. do you know of any studies on how bad is this owing to be? second question is how much danger are we in from people who want to start doing mining on the ocean floor? >> i am horrified by the mining on the ocean floor. we have been seeing trawling, but they are talking about mining in bed sites, these incredible hotbeds of biodiversity and they want to scrape them. it's going to be horrific and once again out of sight out of mind. the dumping on the bottom, nobody is looking at that. we're putting the artemis in the air for $40 billion, we can't spend any money to go look at what this dumping has done at the bottom of the ocean. >> it feels like this goes together with the previous question as well. a lot of people think that the bottom of the ocean is empty and lifeless with mud. what we know is everywhere we look we find incredible richness and life. >> is part of the problem that these are international waters? is there something that international agreements that have to be made by everyone? >> they have been trying to make agreements and failing three years. this is a big and complicated question and i think to be continued. >> thank you again for speaking. as a student in my last year of college, i am getting a degree related to environment a policy, but i have spent so much time overwhelmed by the amount of change that needs to happen and feeling hopeless about the future. what advice would you give to someone who was to contribute and make a change but feels like individual contributions can never outweigh the effects of insurmountable climate change? >> i feel like we have a disconnect in the natural world that is really problematic. in my own backyard, i have seen real change with citizen science. we have a citizen science team at our organization and we train rigorously. they are doing real science that is expanding our understanding of our local environment and it creates environmental stewards, it enhances understanding of science. it creates a sense of community all of which has been missing. i am a big advocate for high-quality citizen science. >> my question is for juli. you showed pictures of the bleached then restored coral reef. you mentioned the reef stars that were used. if it takes one degree or two degrees of temperature change to bleach the coral, how much more does it take to restore it? i am interested in how that restored in that same area. >> the bleached reef, the reef that was restored was bombed out. there a thing called blast fishing which is common around coral reefs unfortunately. unless they put those stars in place, that rubble would roll around and reef could not reestablish itself there. that reef had been bombed 30 years ago. you see the sort of similar crumbling in a bleached reef. i should be clear that they were not the same places. what was the question? sorry. how could you restore a bleached reef? that reef star project has been only used on 10 hectares that was the largest restoration that exists right now. the question is, will that work and other places around the world? that is still to be seen. they have just done some installations in australia on the great barrier reef and also in mexico. it has not been long enough to see if they will come back in those places yet. >> we only have time for one final question. >> what advice do you have for those of us who are not scientists, but would love to contribute to conservation? how can we become part of these teams? how can we help impact? >> one way is to call your congresspeople all the time and tell them that you care. that we need to be worried about climate change in a way that is more serious man the way we have been. that's one thing you can do. put it on your reminder every month to call your congresspeople. i also have a sense that art and communication matter. as we bring art and science closer together, we have more impact. people tend to work on, have action when they feel something. we can know something in our brain, but we don't always take action based on it. when we feel something, that's what we act. connecting science and art is really important. >> we have had a special dispensation for one final -- >> what can my school community do to help the ocean? >> you can write to politicians. [applause] >> thank you. >> you would be surprised how much they listen. >> thank you to everyone who cares enough to ask that question what can we do. the answer is more than you would think and there is reason for hope in a whole vast ocean to care for it in our own particular ways. thank you so much. [applause] you can find us in the book signing downstairs starting soon.
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