Entangled Film Discussion
Welcome back everyone, I hope you enjoyed the film as much as I did and I'm very excited to have you back for — we're planning on about 30 minutes of discussion please post any questions you have in the Q&A box or the chat box, and we will monitor that and try to answer as many of those questions as possible. I am going to give you a fuller introduction of our panelists tonight t so you know a little bit more about both of them. David, who you should have heard at the beginning of the presentation, is an award-winning journalist who covers the environment and fisheries for the Boston Globe — that's his day job. In that role David has previously covered the war in Kosovo,
unrest in Latin America, national security issues in Washington DC and terrorism both in New York City and Boston. That kind of background apparently prepared him well to grapple with whale and lobster politics in the northeast. His interest in filmmaking in the environment has led him to direct and produce a number of award-winning films — which we encourage you all to track drown track down. Those include "sacred cow" — I’m sorry "Sacred Cod" — about the collapse of the iconic cod fishery in New England, "Lobster War" — examining the climate-fueled centuries-old conflict between the U.S. and Canada over an area of rich lobstering waters — and
"Gladesmen: The Last of the Sawgrass Cowboys" —which is about the federal government's ban on Florida’s iconic airboats in much of Everglades National Park and surrounding everglades in an effort to repair environmental degradation from the past. In 2019 David and his co-director and producer —of some of those previous projects — collaborated again to make "Entangled" and we're very happy to see the results of that tonight. I’m also delighted to introduce Jane Davenport. Jane's a senior attorney with Defenders of Wildlife her work at Defenders has been relentless and cutting edge in defense of a wide range of species from marine wildlife — such as right whales and dolphins sharks and sea turtles — to freshwater aquatic species and bats. Jane is a recognized expert in the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act among other things. and a really treasured colleague for myself and all of us at Defenders. Jane earned a master's degree in environmental studies from the Yale
School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a JD from Yale Law School. We're going to have about 30 minutes of conversation, in particular, we're really interested in questions from the audience so please submit any questions that you have that you would like to ask David and Jane. With that, I have a question for David. I’m really interested in how "Entangled" came about. You said at the beginning — in case people missed it — you were inspired to try to tell the story in long-form about a particular species because of your reporting on the biodiversity and extinction crisis that's looming. Tell us, how did you come to pick right whales and
how did you decide film was the right way to tell the story. Yes, it's a good question thank you. So in some ways this film was the outgrowth of my previous films that you mentioned, it's kind of like the capstone of a trilogy of films that I’ve made about how climate change is affecting our oceans and particularly the Gulf of Maine — which has been warming faster than nearly any other body of water on the planet — and my interest in telling those stories was so that we could show how climate change is not some just an abstract threat, but one that is having a real and significant impact on people's lives now, and so the first film — it's funny you said sacred cow because when I first started making this film — Jane may remember this —but at one of the first scenes was at the incidental take reduction team and and I asked someone from NOAA to just tell everybody who I was and why I had cameras there and what I was doing and he also introduced it as sacred cow and I had to correct him in front of everybody, but "Sacred Cod" was a film about how the warming waters of the Gulf of Maine has led to a collapse of our iconic cod fishery which is what brought settlers from Europe and the pilgrims and sustained generations of fishermen and brought great wealth to New England, and to this country in its early years and so it was pretty shocking to a lot of people when all of a sudden the federal government imposed a moratorium on cod fishing and there had been years and/or decades of pressure on that fishery from overfishing and it was really — I think scientists say — climate change that led to the collapse and then I made a film called "Lobster War" which was also about how climate change is affecting our ecosystem and that film looks at how climate change in some ways has had the opposite effect while we've seen a collapse of the lobster fishery south of cape cod to the extent that we've lost nearly 90 percent of the catch the last time I checked, there has actually been a boom in the lobster fishery north of in the northern, eastern parts of the Gulf of Maine and particularly that boom which arguably is also a function of the warming waters which has led to a kind of sweet spot in that in this portion of the gulf of Maine where there is a small island known as — which is basically a rock — that both the United States and Canada have claimed since the end of the revolutionary war — it's called Machias Seal Island — and nobody really cared about this island until about a decade ago when all of a sudden the waters around that island — which both countries refer to as the gray zone because they both claim those same waters — once those waters became abundant with lobster the Canadians who long-ceded the waters to the American said, "hey those are our waters too and we're going to fish them," and that led to all kinds of conflict and when I was making that film I learned a lot about the impact of these things called vertical buoy lines — the ropes that extend from the surface to the seafloor — and their impact on marine mammals and particularly north Atlantic right whales and as a reporter for the Globe I’ve been writing a lot about right whales but in a piecemeal fashion and as I’ve learned sort of the power that that films can have and how they convene audiences and how they kind of command your attention, I thought this is another example of how climate change is sort of roiling another very significant industry and a very significant part of our ecosystem and as everybody hopefully just watched there is significant concerns about how the warming of the Gulf of Maine has led to the collapse of the the primary food source of north Atlantic right whales — a rice-sized creature called Calanus finmarchicus — which has pretty much, you know, their populations have declined by some 90% or more in primary summer feeding grounds of the whales and so they had to go elsewhere and they primarily moved from from near the Bay of Fundy where they fed traditionally up to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in Canadian waters and they arrived there in significant numbers for the first time in 2017, when we had a catastrophic loss of the right whales. We lost 12 right whales in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence that Summer out of 17 that we lost altogether and arguably that was a function of climate change as well — so anyway — all of these factors were things that I’d been writing about and I felt like —again as I said —with the confluence of this report from the United Nations that this was a really important story to tell and my hope was that people would recognize the urgency of the crisis for right whales but also understand that as we make these regulations and as we try to come up with solutions to reduce the serious mortality — the serious injuries and mortalities of right whales — that we try to find a way to do it so that we don't destroy a vital part of our economy as well and figuring out how to thread that needle is what this film is about and it's clearly a very difficult thing to do.
Thank you for that. We're getting a lot of questions about how to how to save the right whale, what's being done, and what can be done. I want to ask you one more question about the film before we turn to that. Could you tell us a little about what
was most challenging in making the film? The technological, human, cooperation, weather...? Tell us a little bit about the process of making the film. Getting Jane Davenport to talk to me. Jane's very busy I can understand that. She's busy, she's exacting she's tough on you if you don't quite get it right... No, she was not a very difficult person to get to talk to. You know, I think the challenging part was ending the film and figuring out how to put a bookend to this because this is a story that is still unfolding and I thought I had the end of the film when — in the final meeting of the take reduction team we see this historic unprecedented agreement where all but one of the members agrees to take what seemed like really hard difficult decisions to make sacrifices and do something that would make a substantial impact on the future of this species and there was a lot of a lot of grandiose commentary, and then all of a sudden that wasn't the end of the film when I began to see that there was this huge backlash in Maine and there was an effort essentially to rescind their agreement and the folks in Maine, the congressional delegation, the governor, lobsterman, put a huge amount of pressure on the Trump administration to essentially take these rules and put them in a kind of regulatory black hole and I was sort of waiting for the outcome of these rules and they didn't — they were not — released, and finally there were several lawsuits that also reached some form of resolution so we had to incorporate that toward the end — and so it was really challenging to figure it out. So finally last Summer, we decided to put a
bookend on the film, but then because of all of these developments including the federal government released the draft regulations on the last possible day that they possibly could at the end of the year in large part because of the Defenders of Wildlife lawsuit against the National Marine Fisheries service, I needed to somehow address that and there were also other developments, for example, when I started making this film the estimated population for right whales was roughly 411 — this was in 2019 — and then last year late in the fall the population estimate was revised to 356 and that was just a huge drop-off and so I also wanted to account for that so earlier this year we decided to update the film and you know if I were to recut the film again there would I would have to account for other developments including this thing called the biological opinion and there's so many — it's continuing — so that was really the most challenging thing. That's fascinating, it is a story that is rapidly evolving that's for sure.. well we hope you'll make a sequel and keep us updated. Jane I’d love to bring you into this conversation we are getting a lot of questions I think people are looking for some hope and some action here we're getting a lot of questions about some of the technologies the reckless technologies that are being developed, could you just talk a little bit about the options that we have as a society for addressing some of these threats and particularly there's an interest in some of the technology that's being developed that'd be great. Yeah, and of course David’s film did a really good job of previewing some of those technologies that are not only in development but that are in use. Both in the United States and Canada, there are a lot of forward-thinking fishermen who are really motivated by the idea that, especially when you do have a closure, it's better to be able to fish in that closure than not fish, so the Canadian government has been much more nimble in responding to this crisis than the U.S. government has. There have been
rolling closures in Canada over the past several summers and that has proved a tremendous incentive to fishermen to work with scientists and engineers and the government to get into these closed areas and test these ropeless technologies, and there's not one ropeless technology, there's a bunch of different mechanisms that can be used to get a trap or a pot or a trawl— which is a string of trap or pot— from the ocean floor to the surface so it can be retrieved onto a boat. David’s film shows the Smelts technology — which is these lift airbags — there are other technologies where the flotation device where a buoy and a rope get put into basically what looks like a lobster trap and that trap is the first on the end of the trawl and then you set all your traps and you go away and you come back and you send an acoustic signal through a modem and the lid pops off and up comes the buoy and up comes the rope so you still have rope it's just not sitting in the water the entire time you're fishing so you're only fishing for lobsters you're not also fishing for whales while you're doing that. There's a lot of gear retrieval technology that the military has been using for dozens of years and in a lot of ways it's about bringing the pieces together it's about taking technologies. getting them into the hands of fishermen and getting their feedback and their innovation to say "well it doesn't work this way but let's do it that way."
Some of our colleagues in the conservation field are actively working with fishermen. My colleague Erica Fuller from the Conservation Law Foundation featured in the film, they have gone to the National Marine Fisheries Service and helped get experimental fishing permits together so that the government can approve this kind of experimental fishing. I think know there's still a lot of pieces to the puzzle. There are different purposes of a buoy and a rope — right — it's not only to be able to get your gear back on the boat, but it's also to indicate to other fishermen where your gear is because if you're a lobsterman and you've got traps and pots on the bottom and along comes a guy who is judging for scallops if he doesn't know where your gear is he can drag your gear away — right — there's a gear conflict aspect that we have to be able to solve so that everybody can see the gear that's on the bottom. There's also an enforcement piece of it — right — because
if you're the federal government or you're the Massachusetts Department of Maine Fisheries, you want to make sure that everyone's complying with the law in terms of their gear so your enforcement boat — right now — has to be able to go out there and pull the traps and make sure everyone's got their tags. So there's there are components of this that go beyond simply, "here's a rope and the rope is how I get my gear." That's one of the reasons that Defenders and our allies have been pushing hard for the past four years on a bill that's been introduced and reintroduced in the past couple of sessions of congress called the Save Right Whales Act, and basically what this says is we need federal money to do this — right — this is like a moonshot, I mean if we can put people on the moon we can put federal money into saving the whales or more recently if we can put the rover on mars you know, the kind of money that we need for this is pocket money compared to those kinds of national efforts, but if we have that significant investment of federal money then we can bring the engineers and the fishermen and the tech people who can figure out how to make these systems talk to each other. We need the government to work on regulations for all of this. So it's possible. It's not here today but it's also not Star Wars, this is not some futuristic plan, it's
not going to happen for 25 years but it's going to take money and it's going to take political will to make these kinds of innovations happen. And not just for the right whales, entanglements are a problem all around this country. They are a problem on the West Coast they are a problem in Alaska, there's a much bigger picture here, they're a problem around the world, we have to develop these technologies to bring fishing into the 21st century if we're going to have healthy populations of whales and sea turtles and other marine life that gets tangled up in these ropes. I would just say I think the work that both of you are doing — David to bring awareness public awareness to these issues and conflicts and Jane your work on changing public policy — those are both really valuable ways to make a difference to get some of these solutions implemented so I'm really happy that you're both able to talk about those today.
Jane, I guess talk a little bit about what some of our audience members can do spreading the word, I think about this film and about these issues generally, but tell our audience what we would recommend what actions they take, obviously, there's a lot of information on Defender's website about right whales and about the project and we'll make it easy for people to know how to contact congress to talk about the Save The Whales Act, is there anything else you'd recommend people do to help advocate for these issues. That would be my number one pick, and we make it really easy on our website to send an email to your congressperson, but I'll tell you what's even more effective than an email is a phone call or a letter — right — because congresspeople respond to their constituents and they respond to their constituents who show they really care so it's easy to go to congress.gov and look up your representative and call and say you know my name is Jane Davenport and I am one of your constituents and I want to know are you co-sponsoring the Save Right Whales Act, I want to know are you supporting appropriations through the annual appropriations process to work on these technologies, to work on plankton monitoring, to work on all these complicated pieces of the puzzle that all have to be solved at the same time. So truly as individuals I think that's the squeaky wheel gets the grease and constituent calls to congresspeople get attention because they want your vote the next time around so... And it's not just congresspeople
in New England I mean this bill that we've gotten successfully introduced with bipartisan support has gotten sponsorship from congressional representatives around the country, so it doesn't matter what part of the country you're in, you don't have to be living on the East Coast where the right whales are to make a difference and tell your congressional representatives that they need to support the right whales, they need to support a strong Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act, these fundamental statutory protections for our critically endangered marine wildlife, you can do that from any of the 50 states in the country. I think we have someone joining from Idaho today so that's a good note. I'd be interested in both or either of your answers to this, we're getting some questions — a lot of questions — about the fishermen, and David you portrayed a real range of attitudes and frustrations and experiences in the fishing community. I'd be really interested in your thoughts about those conflicts
and our we've got several questions about, are their ways to compensate the fishermen. Jane mentioned federal funding for the technology and things like that but talk a little bit about the conflict — that we can in addition to regulation about the whales — ways that the fisheries the fishermen can be part of the solution if properly incentivized or helped or led. I would say first of all there is a wide range of views just like on the other side there's a wide range of views about how to address this problem. So Jane has a different view than other
environmental advocates have about how to either coerce or pressure the government to take action but I think lobstermen, I think they're the fishermen that we follow in the film, I chose Rob Martin and his partner Lori Karen because, first of all, they are the most affected people by existing or previous whale regulations — their fishery has been closed for several months a year for some seven or eight years now — and so they've had to learn the hard way that if they don't pay attention and don't try to get involved and try to figure out how to solve the problem they're just gonna be left behind So Rob, like some other fishermen has been testing ropeless gear and we increasingly seen Canada fishermen — who are also having their fisheries closed — also testing ropeless gear, so in some ways if necessity is the mother of invention, closures — like the ones that just took effect this year... So one of the things that's not included in the film when I said that it was a hard thing to put a bookend on — one of the other developments that occurred since the film ended, was that starting this winter — in part because of legal pressure and in part because of the onset of these federal rules, the state of Massachusetts closed nearly its entire lobster fishery, not just the area around Cape Cod Bay, but extended all the way up to the border with New Hampshire and around to parts of Cape Cod to essentially ban lobster fishing when whales are in the vicinity from February through May, or until the whales are no longer clearly seen in our waters. So now there's a lot of interest from fishermen here about testing ropeless fishing and there are now studies and calls for ropeless fishing — which is actually technically illegal — to be used in a commercial way right now because — and Jane can talk about this — because right now, to get a permit, to fish, you need to agree to abide by specific practices and use specific kinds of gear and lots of folks have been urging the state of Massachusetts and the federal government and other states to change the rules to allow fishermen to start using this other kind of gear and I think in the next year or two we will likely see that in the federal rules — Jane can talk about this as well — which are supposed to finally be released sometime this summer, are also likely to allow for some kind of testing in two new closed areas that will likely be part of the final rules. But the point is that if there are closures and there are more significant regulations, then it seems like fishermen will have more incentive to start testing and using the system. That all said, the critical problem is while Jane noted that this technology has matured quite significantly in recent years and is viable for the most part, it is still really expensive, and so for a lobsterman who is at the whim of changing prices, at the whim of mortgage payments on his or her boat, and who is always at the mercy of all kinds of expenses —fuel costs, bait costs — having to spend tens of thousands of dollars to to completely change the way they fish and the way their parents fished and their grandparents fished and to re-outfit their 800 traps to use ropeless gear would be very expensive. So ultimately, in order for this fishery to really make the transition,
as Jane said we're going to need some kind of government support for that transition. Great thanks. We have so many questions in the chat, we are not going to be able to get to all of them though we will certainly try to respond separately to as many of them as we can. I want to
ask one question to both of you over the course of all of your work on right whales and on fisheries generally, tell me the most surprising thing about whales that you've discovered and the most surprising thing about the people that you've worked with. Jane, you're on the spot first. So it's my mission in life that no one ever uses the phrase "gentle giants" when it comes to whales or manatees, I mean we as humans, we tend to say "oh well a whale is a gentle giant," well that's because it doesn't have large teeth like a shark and it's not going to take a bite out of you but we have to respect that these are really strong and powerful animals and David's film shows footage of Joe Howlett who was a dedicated and innovative Canadian fisherman who spent so much of his time on disentanglement, fishing was his real job and disentanglement was his passion and his public service and it wasn't the whale's fault and it wasn't Joe's fault and he was killed by whale so I think we need as humans to respect that these animals — in nature — they have their own agendas and it's not about us — right — they're not there to have awesome photographs with a scuba diver, don't ever approach a whale. Number one it's illegal but two it's dangerous. I think what's so amazing is this is the most studied whale population in the world. You saw the footage of Amy Knowlton and her colleagues taking pictures and documenting and having books of all these whales where they have names they can be identified and yet we don't know where most of them are for a good chunk of the year, the closure in Cape Cod is built around when a full one-quarter of the population is there feeding. Where are the other three quarters? We don't know we can't tag and track whales, we can't LoJack them like we could a car because you know the tags are too injurious to a whale, you can't tag a whale like you can a bird or a fish so we don't we where they go. So, just sum that up, there's so much mystery about them, they're trying to live the life that
they've lived for a million years plus and we know so much about them and yet we still know so little and we have to respect that they have their own lives and their own way of being in the world and in my view we need to figure out how to get out of their way and stop killing them. We may not be going out and harpooning them anymore but we're running over them, we're catching them, we've polluted their environment with so much noise they can't hear themselves think. I saw a pop-up in the chat, sharks have cartilaginous fins so you can put like a cartilage piercing in your ear it's not gonna hurt you for a whale you have to tag them by shooting into their blubber and that introduces infection so there's so few right whales you can't tag them, because it's just simply not safe because you could actually kill them eventually if you did that. I would just add to that. So one of the most surprising things to me when I started making this film and knew very little about marine mammals let alone right wales was it seemed like a simple solution, why don't you just tag each of them — there're like 400 or so left —let's just..., we can monitor where they go and we track them pretty closely from the air
and from the sea but it goes beyond that. The problem, as it was explained to me, is that they have actually tagged some right whales there have been tags that have been developed that aren't necessarily causing infections but they don't stay on, the whales go down to the seafloor and kind of rub them off and apparently they don't stay on very well. I still am skeptical and think that there could be some kind of way to like wrap it around a tail or a fluke — I don't know obviously it's above my pay grade — but I would love to see some sort of invention that would make it easier for us to track them because that could potentially solve a lot of problems... but I would say for me the more surprising issue was just how different the Canadian system of addressing these issues is than the American system. As I started making this film, and I was watching the take reduction team process I was just really impressed I was just like this is this is democracy in action this is this wonderful example of our federal government convening stakeholders from the fishing industry and from scientists and state and local government officials and federal officials and all coming around the table and being given a mission and coming facing really hard choices and coming up with serious solutions, and I was like "wow that was impressive," and then I saw the dysfunctional side of how that can be played, that system, and how it can be drawn out and how in this weird way the only thing that really prods the system into action is lawsuits, and that seems like a whole kind of crazy way to make policy when you know it gets stymied and you have to coerce it through lawsuits whereas the the Canadian system on the outset seems almost authoritarian in that it's essentially a very top-down system where a group of ministers will come together and they might listen to their constituents in the fishing industry or they might be too influenced by the fishermen but they come together and whatever their interests are they make decisions and those decisions can be put on the water with so-called — they like to say — "with the swipe of a pen" and and so after the the 17 right whales died in 2017 and 12 of them in Canadian waters, by the next fishing season the Canadian government had a serious regime of closures and other regulations to protect the whales. Then, of course, they eased up on them the next year,
and then in 2019 we saw nine of the ten right whales that died that year in Canadian waters in part because they eased up on those rules but then they clamped down again and last year there were no right whales that were found dead in Canadian waters and so far this year there haven't been any that we know of, at least. In short, the thing that was really surprising to me is that there are just very different ways of approaching this, and two and a half years now after the federal government launched this urgent quest to try to solve this problem we still have no rules in effect that are taking serious action to try to reduce serious injuries and mortalities of right whales. Oh it goes back longer than that, we've had no new regulations in the United States on addressing fishing gear entanglement since 2014 and you know it was 2017, April 2017, before we started seeing the death toll just climb crazy, that the nymphs right whale population biologists came to the meeting of the take reduction team and told us that we thought that right whales were on the increase, from the conservationist's point of view it was slower than it should be, but we still thought that births were outnumbering deaths and that the population was growing, and that was when the atomic bombshell dropped and we found out that the species has actually been in decline since 2010 and I do want to mention here that obviously the focus of our whole discussion is about entanglements,and entanglements are only part of the problem, and we also have to recognize that it's not just entanglements it's vessel strikes as well, and we need to put pressure on the federal government to expand what's called the vessel speed rule, it's basically like slow zones for schools, you have areas where they know right whales are, they ask vessels or they require vessels to slow down because then the whales can get out of the way, so you know we're not going to solve this extinction crisis just by looking at entanglements we have to look at vessel speeds, we have to look at ocean noise pollution. One of the most interesting,
but also just the most tragic studies, that I've read about the right whale, there's a ton of work done on whale poop, I mean they collect whale poop they'll have sniffer dogs and they'll collect it and they can test hormones, they can get all sorts of information from whale poop and a researcher was doing some of these collection studies on right whales when 9/11 happened and everything shut down right all of a sudden there's no planes there's no boats everywhere world just came to a halt, she was doing the research and got sort of — the before 9/11 after 9 /11 when there was that giant silent pause — and all the stress hormones in the whales just plummeted, they were like "oh I can hear myself think," and then, of course, it all ramped back up again. So you think about what it's like to be a right whale where you can't communicate with each other there's just this cacophony of ocean noise going on all the time and you know, we're humans we depend mostly on our sight and not on our hearing so we don't have that same kind of everything in the world depends on our hearing for at least many people, but think about what that's like to be a right whale when you can't hear yourself think when you know you're getting hit by ships you're getting entangled by these ropes like we as humans are responsible for all these things and it doesn't mean we're evil or bad that's why it's called incidental take, it's an accident no one's intending to do this but we have to be more conscious of how our ways of life, our ways of making a living are affecting these species in the world around us. Well, we're running a little past time I think we all could stay and talk for a lot longer about right whales. You've both done a tremendous job — David through the film and Jane through your work and through talking about all the different ways we can get involved in this. We really encourage all of you too, again look at Defender's website, Jake has posted the link in our in chat but you can also just find it on our website to learn more about right whales and what you can do to help them and really encourage you to — one of the best ways to get excited about these issues, and to learn how to be more involved is to watch products like this film and share information about it with your friends and connections, I think with that we're going to close David I did want to ask if there's anything you want to tell us about your next project, I hope it has something to do with whales and we're really glad you picked whales from all the topics you certainly could have covered. Anything else you want to tell us? Thank you, I did write a story in today's Boston Globe about the lobster diver who was ingested by the whale.
Not ingested! Ingested is different than swallowed, ingested into the mouth but not necessarily through the esophagus. I'm gonna go look that one up I'll continue to use the word ingest we'll let that one go but I do like to note that the whale chose the guy who was not using vertical buoy lines a bit of irony. I have actually just started working on a new film and I'm not going to say too much about it yet but it's climate change-related and it has to do with sea-level rise and trying to reflect the challenges of us sort of making decisions that will have ramifications in the decades to come and how we choose to live by the sea and that sort of thing so that's a project I'm just starting and laying the groundwork for now, I just shot my first scene this week. That's fantastic we all look forward to seeing that and hope you'll come back and talk to us about it again. I want to respond to one, on the note about climate change,
and responding to one of the questions in the chat earlier about whether people, whether we felt like people were more engaged in environmental issues in the U.S these days and I wanted to say I think climate change has had a really profound impact on younger people and on a really diverse audience of people and has brought a lot of new people into the environmental movement. I think in my adult lifetime an environmental issue hasn't been on the agenda of the President of the United States and climate is front and center on the Biden Administration's agenda so the issue is very serious and very profound and, as I'm sure David's going to tell us, could have ruinous effects on all of us, but it has also mobilized a broader constituency that's really looking in a very intersectional way about environmental issues, and so I'm hopeful that bringing attention to these issues and getting more and more people involved really can matter in our politics and in the way we run public policy and I hope you're all seeing that too, but in the meantime thank you for joining us tonight David, thank you so much for sharing this film with us for making this film and for taking the time to speak to us about it. Jane thank you for all the work that you do and for sparring with David and everyone else in the film that we saw, and huge thanks to our audience for those of you who are sticking with us and for everyone who joined for your really thoughtful questions and ideas. There are lots of really good ideas
in the chat that we're gonna take a look at too. Thanks everybody for joining us thank you I hope everybody spreads the word to your friends and family about the film and I think someone from Defenders will be sharing links so that you can share the film in the future. I think that's right great thanks everybody, have a great night good night thanks so much
2021-06-25 10:00
