479. The MLPA Laugh of the Day::: A Satire of the Excessive Parameterization of Kelp by the Science Advisory Team (SAT) [Go Dave Rudie!]

CAPTION: Bull Kelp! ::: Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Satire of the Science Advisory Team (SAT). The t-shirt design is based on a two-minute public comment of Dave Rudie, who is part of the Regional Stakeholder Group (RSG). This t-shirt is the beginning of my own little MLPA Campaign: instead of "MPAs Work" or "I Love MPAs," I thought up of the "Fish-in-a-Box" Campaign with a simple logo. I needed to incorporate some existentialism and absurdism (not to mention humor!) to the whole process.

Granted the November 10, 2009 Blue Ribbon Task Force (BRTF) meeting (south coast Marine Life Protection Act) is done and gone and probably no longer on top of most people's plates... but I'm still in a mode of reflection.... Well, this process is a good chunk of my Ph.D. thesis... so maybe I can call this "delayed reporting." University research is known to lag behind the rest of societal operations anyway.

I was so impressed by Dave Rudie's 2-minutes, 2-cents worth of a speech (Dave Rudie is an RSG member who participated in the FIC/FIN group I took notes for, FIC = Fisheries Information Committee, FIN = Fisheries Information Network) that I went back to Cal-span (http://www.cal-span.org) to try and write down most of his speech, word for word. He illustrated two major points and with cunning wit, which ultimately left the whole room in a bellow of laughter. Too bad the Cal-span footage did not pick up the audio of a light-hearted room amidst a tense, high-stress process. See the quote below that's worth far more than two cents (slightly paraphrased; it's not exact)!

"My name is Dave Rudie, and I represent Catalina Offshore Products. I represent small family fishermen who are out there working on a daily basis. Most fishermen that sell to me are day-boat fishermen. They go out to catch sea urchin or lobster. And these are the men and women who are going to be the most impacted by these marine protected areas. They have fully engaged in the process. They are not opposed to the process. They participated. They unilaterally support Option 4 [San Diego?]. I undersand that that's been somewhat taken off the table, but that's what the hard-working fishermen support. Option 4. They support it because it meets the science guidelines best as we were given to us. We were told to protect all the habitats, not just the three forms of kelp habitats--

"Two of my sea urchin fishermen work in the northern part of the La Jolla area in Option 1. That northern part has a large population of sea urchins just outside the kelp bed. The divers wait until the sea urchins get to the edge of the kelp to harvest these sea urchins. If the divers are not allowed to harvest those sea urchins, these urchins will likely march to the klp as they have in many places in San Diego in the past. These sea urchins will not only eat the average kelp, but the maximum kelp, the persistent kelp, and the gap kelp--they would also eat the quality kelp. They would eat all kinds of kelp as the sea urchins march through that kelp bed.

Work Group 1 was supposed to come up with middle ground solutions. A win-win situation. Not a win-lose situation. Option 1--the old Proposal 3--is a win-lose. Win for the preservation community and lose for the fishing community. I am 100% against Option 1."

In the speech above, Dave Rudie harps on two main issues: (1) he represents small family fishermen, and these are the people who will be most impacted by the marine reserves, and (2) the excessive parameterization of kelp by the Science Advisory Team (SAT) had reached the brink of absurdism, and hence set up the joke of all jokes of everyone's last chance to speak before the BRTF made their decisions on an array of marine protected areas (MPAs). Mic Kronan, the harbormaster of Santa Barbara, also emphasized the holistic relationship between marine conservation and marine management, and over the course of the MLPA process, it seemed like marine / fisheries management fell into the limelight. Some speeches were conceptual and ideological... and some speeches were quite practical. I think Dave's was the most memorable of the ideological speeches.

I'll be putting up the maps (Option 1-2-3-4 references) in a near-future blog.

460. Poem "A Victory of Loss" Inspired by the MLPA (Marine Life Protection Act) Process

"A Victory of Loss" Prose Poem. PDF version found here: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/victoryoflosspoem.pdf

The last time I spoke with a fisherman at the last FIN (Fisheries Information Network meeting), he told me that the FIN proposal was doing well in terms of advancing to the next round of the MLPA (Marine Life Protection Act) process, but at the same time, there was no reason for any of the meeting attendees to pat each other on the back, nor give each other a round of applause. In fact, everyone looked quite sullen, as if they were all at some funeral, or memorial. The fisherman then told me that the FIN's proposal success was great and dandy, but it only meant that fisheries-related stakeholders were allowed to pick their own poison for some form of collective suicide, or if not suicide, then a massive injury to the industry. And my being all metaphorical and poetic and being a hunter of paradoxes and ironies of life... I instantly saw value in this commentary... and voila! Why not write a prose poem about the subject matter?!!

355. Cartoon and Supplemental Documents for "First Job as Objective Notetaker for Fisheries Stakeholder Meetings"

Who's Fishing Who? Cartoon Vic made as a Pleasant Start for her Notetaker Position for Fisheries Stakeholders. Vic likes to dream about other organism's perception of humans, obviously! Or "putting humans back into the ecosystem" type of jokes. I was going to venture into a BEERS bash on the Marine Science deck and I felt like that since I did not accomplish much during the week, the least I can do for Halloween is show up with a few copies of a cartoon to life people's spirits up. I gave my friend Becca a cartoon and I gave a copy of the cartoon to Kyle, my housematey, who just went 30 earth-orbits-around-the-sun on Halloween. It's called a Non-Traditional Birthday Card!

Who's Fishing Who? Gray Version. A successful experiment in "Color Framing."

In the Name of Cuteness! Kelp Forest Representation by http://www.bluebison.net!

Page 1 of Vic's Adjusted Resume for the Notetaker Position in the Fisheries Stakeholder Meetings during this upcoming year. PDF file below.

Page 2 of Vic's Adjusted Resume for the Notetaker Position in the Fisheries Stakeholder Meetings during this upcoming year. PDF file below.

Page 3 of Vic's Adjusted Resume for the Notetaker Position in the Fisheries Stakeholder Meetings during this upcoming year. PDF file for the Resume/Statement of Purpose. Current sketch statement of purpose was creamed by a professor who claims that psychology and the environment cannot be connected... though environmental problems are interdisciplinary. I have very mixed feelings but I have an academic community from various disciplines and departments who are supportive and very open to my ideas of fusing artistic "cognitive mapping" techniques into stakeholder analysis. I suppose support is wonderful when you have it in the masses, even though there may exist a few naysayers to everything you do: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/4vminnichresumesopFICMLPA.pdf.

Vic's First Attempt at a Statement of Purpose. Wrote before the first sushi meeting with Drs. Richards, Culver, and Diane Pleschner Steele (never turned in, can disregard) http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/5.victoriaminnichsop.pdf.

Overview of the Grant Proposal to the Resources Legacy Fund Foundation, which I believe is associated with Hewlett Packard and a couple of other companies. Teamed up with California Government with resources management.
http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/6.fisheriestakeholdersmeetings.pdf.

Sometimes you look at such a proposal and you think "What a great idea!" But the other thought that comes to mind is that I wished I could rewind the clock and have a conversation with Honorable Theodore Roosevelt, and ask him to swing his big stick a few more times, and parcel up and save some ocean while you're at this whole National-Parking-of-the-West business. You didn't need 1000 scientists crawling all over Yosemite like leaf cutter ants in a gopher mound just to convince the President to make this Initial Child's Visual Aesthetic as a National Park! Sometimes first impressions and visualized instinct can make good decisions. And sometimes... it won't.

The complexity of the environmental problem is ultimately determined by the number of humans who are impacted (and still alive) and the number of humans who are involved It's all a human perception and human-definition-of-problem issue. So then, you come up with a complex grant proposal to conduct this elaborate, dicy dance among dozens of hundreds of stakeholders to inform and appease and solve problems... that might take years to shift and implement change.

But what do you do? In an Era of Too Many Humans and Not Enough Space? What do you do? Enjoy the show, I suppose. And relish in your Plan B to Post-Human Earth. It's one of those moments where you wonder "What's the Point"?

Fisheries Recorder Contract with all the specks and Fine Print:
http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/7.FISHINGrecordercontract.pdf.

Just signed (again) and sent off through FedEx (again).

354. First Job as Objective (Non-Side-Taking) Recorder for Fisheries Stakeholder Meetings

I signed a form (err, some Memorandum of Agreement), and honestly I don't know what I am signing my life away to (I signed this form a couple of weeks ago and I received it in Return Mail! So I am going to have to FedEx this puppy ASAP!). The wording of the fisheries contract is so official. I know a guy named Wilson (who's a great writer and probably finished with law school by now) who says he always reads The Fine Print, even the Fine Print for credit card agreements. I guess that's what lawyers are trained to do: read the fine print, pick it apart, and see where there are flaws and loopholes in the logic. So, right now I am reading Fine Print once again, and all that flashes to my head are not big, scary formal words, but more so one of the most pleasant conversations I had ever had with Drs. Carrie Culver, John Richards, and Diane Pleschner-Steele, all very enthusiastic, intelligent individuals involved in fisheries more so with a foot-in-the-door-with-the-university-government-and-the-public. More outreach-type characters of the university rather than "purebred, ivory tower academics" with a potentially higher degree of isolation from Reality, whatever reality is. I don't even know whether people OUTSIDE the university even know what Reality is, let alone myself. Diane, John, Carrie, and I had a very extensive conversation a few weeks ago (which I wished could have been recorded, it was so cool!), all over a sushi lunch (I had Teriaki chicken and California rolls) at Takenoya Japanese Restaurant off of Calle Real, in Goleta, California. Even though I was sleep-deprived I think that it worked toward my benefit, because my social guard was quite down and the ability to express my views were much more fluid due to the lack of policing of my social consciousness. Diane (as well as John and Carrie) informed me about the political/governmental baseline for the upcoming fisheries stakeholder meetings. They described to some degree the characters involved in the creation of upcoming marine protected areas and their general understandings or positions of these characters. Given my existing mental database of contacts in fisheries, I asked how several marine scientists at UC Santa Barbara and in the vicinity would be involved in these fisheries stakeholder meetings. So, I have a clearer, yet still low-resolution picture of who's who, who does and thinks what, and how they will be involved. But, the higher resolution will ultimately come from my participation in the upcoming fisheries meetings.... Are there any universal truths of huma behavior, or does it boil down to the unique interactions of a series of distinctive personalities? We shall see.

During our munching on sushi (talk about consuming the organisms that we study), I provided some of my background involved in fisheries (apparently John Richards saw my rock crab film on Youtube! he had a pretty enthusiastic response!) and I described myself as desiring to be an Objective Observer and Recorder. I am not interested in taking sides of any particular group of individuals (which makes me really bad in being a competitive athlete), but I am more so interested in the conclusions and perceptions of stakeholders and how do they come to their conclusions (which may make me a more successful compromiser, problem-solver and collaborative visionary). Kind of like some form of universal "scientific method" for analyzing all forms of human thinking. The issue about stakeholder "conclusions" is that in many occasions the conclusions "differ" and I want to show that the differences are not only in word usage, but in value systems and cognitive maps. But, as a Keen Notetaker, the most important thing I do is be a friendly, optimistic presence, recording nearly all the things that are happening in these fisheries stakeholders meetings that are catered toward getting fishermen more involved in the process of creating Marine Protected Areas in southern California, fulfilling the California Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA), initiated around 1999--pardon my vague and fuzzy memory. Diane mentioned "This process is not science. This is politics." But I find it ironic though, in my mind that I consider politics and human behavior as a form of science and I view all forms of science as heavily political--the pursuit of science is ultimately an endeavor of Collective Common Agreement. So scientific practice BY DEFAULT is political, unless you are independently funded to do your research and don't have to be at the mercy of what the rest of the world thinks.

Overall, I really bonded with Diane, John, and Carrie, and I am excited to work with a system that keeps me close to the ocean and adds something to the dinner table conversation--my father's got the vegetation and wildland fire and I've got the fisheries deal. Land and ocean. Got most of the earth's surface covered right there. The tragedy for me is that land can easily be partitioned in space and time, but the ocean is one giant soup--err, swimming pool, err-meshpot of abiotic and biotic factors and systems can't be defined so concretely. The rules of the game change pretty rapidly. Makes me feel jealous about my father's and Armand Kuris' work, where systems can be discretely defined. as Todd Huspeni stated one time in class, "One of the most defined habitats on planet Earth is a rat's gut." That was so profound. And so true.

I also mentioned that I am tickled with my pre-existing experiences with fisheries. Particularly how I encountered "environmental stereotypes" of fishermen during my in-classroom schooling at UC Santa Barbara. But then, upon pursuing a rock crab film, I encountered several interesting, witty characters who transformed my initial narrow perception of fishermen into an expansive, multi-dimensional story of a few of the last remaining professions that require very generalist, interactive knowledge of the land--much like my grandfather's generation. People working directly with the land in a tradesman/craftsman sort of way is like a dying-breed of jobs. At least in my generation. At least in California. I have probably mentioned this before, but if I ever hosted a Biologically Incorrect Comedy Night, the first people on my list would be geologists, biologists, and fishermen (and potentially ranchers).

I have known Dr. Carrie Culver for quite a while--since my undergrad days in her thorough presentation of biocontrol in sabellid worms within abalone. We had several intermittent conversations over the years and she had been very supportive of my desire to pursue science and outreach. And right now it is very exciting to work along side her.

Right now there has been quite a bit of email correspondance going on, and I wished I could keep up as much as I should, but due to the passing of my grandfather, several systems of my life have collapsed, as if my sense of self and reality were like some Collapsed Fishery (where everything tumbles down, but not just the vanishing of fish, but the alteration and collapse of lives and infrastructure and human relationships involved with this pursuit of fishing). But not all fisheries are collapsed, and some can be rebuilt, or reconstructed in such a way that can be sustained. Everyone comes out win-win-win, all with some degree of sacrifice.

With death comes rebirth. Such is the way of the phoenix. Death clears space (at a micro or macro scale), and makes it vacant for new ideas. It just takes a lot of time to rebuild yourself. And rebuild relationships. I hope that my involvement as Objective Notetaker in the upcoming series of Fisheries Stakeholders Meetings will be positive and redeeming for myself and for my understanding of humanity (well heck, Obama's got in, there's some hope already!). This is the first time I will be holding a paid job for my writing skills, and this is the first time, Post-Question-Reality, I will have an opportunity to prove myself!

So, honestly, there are beautiful, colorful faces and stories behind a very scary, formalized document entitled Memorandum of Agreement, that upon signing, formalizes an agreement as my role of Noteaker for Fisheries Information Advisory Committee Meetings. This document only exists due to the need for formality from the Massive Jungle of Bureaucracy. Bureaucracy = people and paperwork. Bureaucracy is the problem. But bureaucracy can solve the problem. And so it goes.

IF ANYONE READS THIS, PARDON MY SLOPPY ENGLISH. IT'S A JOURNAL ENTRY HERE. I AM EXPERIENCING INTERFERENCE AND CONFLICT OF INTEREST IN PURSUITS. SUCH IS DIFFICULT TO PRIORITIZE LIFE WHEN THE ONCE STABLE CARPET OF FAMILY DYNAMICS IS SWEPT BENEATH YOUR FEET.

Some notes. Can't sue if I die--err pass. "die" is a harsh word. Passing is more graceful and eloquent. I can't sue if they pass. Two-way street. Agreement can be terminated within 30 days written notice. Contract may terminate given whatever reasons. No alteration of the contract is possible unless there is a written, formalized agreement. California Fisheries Coalition (Alliance of Communities for Sustainable Fisheries), will retain all rights to the work that I generate for this Note-taker position. Cool. Exclusive rights to reproduce or copy the work, data, mult-media reports, etcetera. Contract not official until both parties signed. Agreement of duties on the third page. Okay! Ready for the ride. "Go fall off a log!" as my dad would say!