99% Invisible - 338- Crude Habitat

Episode Date: January 23, 2019

Santa Barbara, California, is a famously beautiful place, but if you look offshore from one of the city's many beaches, you'll see a series of artificial structures that stand out against the natural blue horizon. These oil platforms are at the center of a complicated debate going on right now within the environmental community about the relationship between nature and human infrastructure. Crude Habitat 99% Invisible’s Impact Design coverage is supported by Autodesk. The Autodesk Foundation supports the design and creation of innovative solutions to the world's most pressing social and environmental challenges. Learn more about these efforts on Autodesk's RedShift.

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There are a lot of beautiful places in California, downtown Oakland, for example. But Santa Barbara is like stupid beautiful. Yeah, it's like a comically picturesque California scene here. A few months back we sent producer Emmett Fitzgerald down to Santa Barbara on a really taxing reporting assignment. We've got all these beautiful sailboats, you've got pelicans, you just saw two dolphins, the sun's beginning to set. It's a rough life. Oh, here comes a wave.

That was close. And it really put himself in harm's way for this story. But if you look out at the ocean from this scenic spot, you'll see something else. Something a little less conventionally attractive. Right along the horizon line, you've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, big offshore oil platforms. They look like buildings out there floating in the water or giant battleships or something. Not the prettiest. You can tell why people here don't love them. Those oil platforms off Santa Barbara are at the center of a complicated debate going

on right now within the environmental community about the relationship between nature and human infrastructure. Although, they have been a source of controversy since they first went in the water back in the 1950s and 60s. I came to Santa Barbara in 1966. This is Rodric Nash, an environmental historian who moved to Santa Barbara from New Hampshire to take a job in the history department at UCSB.

And it didn't take him long to fall in love with his new home. I began to realize what people had told me. They said, Santa Barbara's like the American Riviera. It's kind of a paradise. It's a land of endless summer. But at the time he says there was a sense that this coastal paradise and its lucrative tourist economy was under threat from these massive oil rigs

going up all throughout the Santa Barbara Channel. There were cries from the people of Santa Barbara saying, not so fast, let's think about the consequences of this. We look out at the channel. This is the million dollar view. This is what the economy and the culture of Santa Barbara is about. And now suddenly we're putting all shore oil rates out there. And we're not so sure that we're protected from spills.

But at the time, there wasn't a whole lot anyone could do. The EPA didn't exist yet. There were no major environmental regulations in place, and so the oil platforms went in. And they operated without any major spills until January 28, 1969. I was working on the fourth floor of the old Paseo building that overlooked the ocean.

This is Bud Bottoms, a local artist who actually passed away last year. This audio is from a video interview that Bottoms did a few years back where he described getting a phone call from a friend who had flown into Santa Barbara earlier that day. He was flying over the channel this particular day and he saw a big blow out. He said there's oil kind of from underneath this platform. Like crazy. The whole ocean out here is black and it's boiling up. Union Oil, the owner of the platforming question, had failed to build a large enough protective casing for one of its wells. And the oil, which was under immense pressure, forced its way around

the well and erupted through the ocean floor. 1,000 gallons of crude were pouring into the ocean every hour. Roderick Nash heard about the spill that same day, but he says it took a little while for the scale of the disaster to really set in. I can remember walking down to the beach, no change, no change, and then I walked down to the beach one day and it was a black tide, There was oil and suddenly the postcard beaches of Santa Barbara were black. Crude oil floats on top of water and so the spill was particularly deadly for sea birds that dive into the water to catch fish. If you go in and your feathers are covered with oil and you can't fly, then you flap, flap helplessly on the beach.

It was an apocalyptic scene, although Nash says the most uncanny thing may have been the sound. The waves were very quiet, because they were oiled. They had sort of a mushy sound, because what was really breaking was two, three inches of oil on top of the water. We stood there and cried. I hear grown men and women sitting there crying because the beach was half their life. And we thought it was all over for us. But as sad as the 1969 spill was, but bottoms was mostly just furious. I got so angry. I just screamed out. We got to get oil out. was mostly just furious.

He recalls screaming get oil out at work. And so goo, spelled GOO exclamation point, became the name of a new environmental organization that bottoms helped launch in Santa Barbara. And Goosegoal was simple. Stop all drilling and eventually get those platforms out of there. We said, well, why can't we do? You know, it's a stop the oil drilling and our beautiful pristine ocean town, Santa Barbara. Goo held rallies and marches.

They organized a human blockade to prevent oil trucks from reaching the harbor, and there were more creative forms of protest. We would send out bottles of little bottles of oil that was collected out of our harbor to the every, every government official there was. This thing is safe for themselves what we were dealing with. The oil spill quickly became an international news story.

In part because of the timing, this was the very beginning of the modern environmental movement. Rachel Carson's landmark book, Silent Spring, had come out just a few years before. The Apollo 8 spacecraft was orbiting the moon for the first time, sending back photos of the Earth, looking like a blue, green marble in the empty desert of space.

For the first time, people were beginning to understand that the planet was small and fragile, and that humans were doing a great deal of damage. And so all those images of oil drenched seabirds dying on beautiful California beaches… They went around the world. People looked at these birds and they thought this is Santa Barbara. The spill was a galvanizing event for environmentalists. On the first anniversary, activists rallied in Santa Barbara, and some of them went on to organize

the first Earth Day. Saying, this is why we need it. This is why we need an Earth Day because of something like the Santa Barbara oil spill. The oil spill inspired Roderick Nash to start one of the country's first environmental studies programs at UC Santa Barbara. It also fueled debates in Congress and helped rally support for some of the most important environmental bills in US history. The 1969 National Environmental Policy Act was followed by the Clean Air Act in 1970, the Clean Water Act in 1972, and the Endangered Species Act in 1973, just to name a few.

Increasingly as you look back at it, from now, 50 years, and you look back at it, you can really say, holy cow, there was a lot of change. And the Santa Barbara oil spill had a lot to do with that change. The spill catalyzed a national movement, but there was still the question of the platforms themselves. Local opposition put a stop to most new oil exploration of California, but the existing oil rigs have continued to operate for decades. Today, many of those old platforms are reaching the end of their productive lifetimes, and

based on their original lease agreements, they should be decommissioned and removed from the water. Carla Frisk is on the board of goo. It's still around. And she can't wait for the oil companies to be gone. Get to the end of your lease and be done. And then get your equipment and go away. Get oil out if you will.

Yeah, the name still says it all really. Yeah, you don't have any doubts about what the organization is about, right off the bat. Frisk wants the oil companies to return the Santa Barbara channel to the way it was before the platforms went in the water. A pristine ocean environment without any giant artificial structures. And when you go down there, you know, that you would never know that they were there. I mean, that's really what it should be. You know, when you have come to the ocean, it should be the ocean.

That simple goal, the one that members of Gooh have been fighting for since the 1960s, it would seem like it's time has finally come. But there's one little hitch. These platforms are the most productive habitats in the world ocean, habitats in the world ocean. Anywhere in the world. This is Milton Love.

I'm a research biologist at the Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara. Love is author of classic science books, like, and this is really the title, probably more than you want to know about the fishes of the Pacific Coast and also the sequel. Certainly more than you want to know about the fishes of the Pacific Coast, a post-modern experience. It's a 650-page home full of fish-faxist, historical anecdotes and some of his original poetry.

According to Love, it weighs 5.4 pounds. It's actually a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands. And it feels cliche to say that a scientist just really loves the thing that they study, but it must be said. Milton Love's Fish. I have two tattoos of fish, and one is of a cow-cod, which is a rock fish. But the other one is of a deep water angler fish. Is it in a decent place? Can I see it? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, hold on a sec. I have to take my shirt off. Without thinking twice, he pulls off his shirt to reveal a fading shoulder tattoo. It's this big female angler fish with a tiny little male fish latched onto her side. So there is the female and that little nubby thing that's the male there. Love grew up fishing on the beaches and piers of Santa Monica. He studied biology at UCSB and

eventually ended up back at his alma mater where he started up his own research lab, the Love Lab. But in the lab's early days, he had a really hard time getting grants to fund his fish research. And, uh, in 1995, I was at a low point. There was no question. I had no funding. But just when things were at their bleakest, Love got an unexpected phone call. I answer the phone. He says, this is Lyman Thorstonson. I'm from the National Biological Survey, which was a government program in the 90s

that aimed to catalog and describe ecosystems throughout the country. And I swear to God, this is what he said. He said, if you had money for research, what would you do? Which is not how science usually works. Nobody. Nobody calls and says I have money. It's the other way around. It's a very Dickensian kind of thing. It's like you're the little beggar boy. You come over and you go like,

please, could I have $100,000? Please. Love thought about how to answer this surprise question. And he landed on something that had been nagging him since he first came to Santa Barbara. Back in his 20s, love used to collect fish for a local aquarium, and one day he and his fishing partner took their little Boston whaler out to the oil platforms and started fishing around them.

There was like fish up the wazoo, and we could have filled up the aquarium with all the fish we caught. Ever since then he had wondered what was going on down there. And so here's this dude like offering me money and I said well I'm really interested in these oil platforms off here. They're large structures I'd like to know the role that they play as habitat for fishes and he said oh that sounds interesting. And so, funding in hand, Milton Love got a team together, rented a small submarine, and began to study the platforms. The first dive I made in the submersible was a platform

of Hidalgo, which is located just barely into central California. It sits in about 450 feet of water. He took the submersible all the way to the bottom, where the pylons reached the sea bed. I was like blown away. I didn't actually know what to expect, and there was a lot of fish. In particular, schools of adult rock fish were swirling around the base of the platform. And as he started making his way up the structure, he saw a lot of smaller juvenile fish.

And we're talking hundreds of thousands of these young fish. Then the metal itself was covered with colorful invertebrates, sea stars, muscles, sponges, and these little crabs walking all over the struts. I remember coming back on deck to the research vessel and the hatch pops and everybody's, you know, all the lab is there and the crew of the boats there and they're waiting for me to say something and I said, yeah, this was like, I said, this is like an amazing place. That platform dive was the first of many that Milton Love and the other scientists at

the Love Lab would do over the next 15 years. Love remembers one dive in particular from this period, around a platform called Gilda. One of his colleagues went down first, and when she came back up, she said, basically, that was unbelievable. The scientist always videotaped these dives to show people who didn't believe them, and so she played them the recording right there on the boat. She put it in there and we're going like, oh my god, that's the most fish we've ever seen around a platform. Not every trip down was like that.

All platforms are different, love says. Some don't have a lot of fish, and it always varies year to year. But often love found that these oil platforms were like little oasis of marine life. The ocean is a big, empty place, and animals tend to concentrate around stuff. The only reason they're there is they like to hang out with stuff. Many invertebrates need a physical object to latch onto, and rockfish want to hide in nooks and crannies, or just be around anything with a little structure to it. They don't care what the structure is made out of, it can be a pipe, it can be a platform,

it can be a tire, it can be a rock. Oil platforms are particularly popular structures with the fishes because they have a lot of surface area and complexity, and they extend hundreds of feet through the water column like a marine skyscraper. Rockfish live at different depths throughout their life cycle, making the oil platform this incredible home for fish of all ages. Younger fish tend to live higher up the platform, and time after time love was finding lots of them. There were so many that I started thinking like, what does this mean biologically?

Like, okay, so we're seeing a lot of juvenile fish, but how important are these platforms really in terms of the overall ecosystem? To try and get to the bottom of that, love and his team looked at one particular species of rockfish, the Bacaccio. Yeah, it's got a big mouth. That's what it means in Italian. Bacaccio means big mouth. The Bacaccio are heavily fished around Santa Barbara, and around this time the stock was so depleted that the government closed the fishery. But when love did a survey of seven different oil platforms, there's all these baby Bacaccio, and I mean we're talking a lot of them. About 450,000.

To put that number in context, love called up a scientist at the National Marine Fisheries Service, who was responsible for counting all the Baccaccio on the Pacific coast. His name was Alex. So I said, Alex, we estimated that there were 450,000 baby Baccaccio at these seven platforms. Is that important? Because maybe it's not. I didn't know. So he had a model that he used. So he plugged that in and he came back a couple weeks later and he said, well, on an average year, that's 20%. Of all the baby bubukaccio on the entire Pacific coast, we're at those seven platforms. And babies are particularly important to rebuilding the overall population. So I'm going like, you know what? That seems like those platforms were important

for rebuilding that particular species. Still, as love's results were coming in, a lot of people were skeptical. Like, maybe the rigs were just luring fish away from natural habitats. Love says that's a totally valid concern and it does happen with a lot of artificial reefs. But after years of studying these oil platforms, he feels confident that at least for some species of fish, the platforms are giving the overall population a boost. The preponderance of evidence is that for eight or ten or maybe twelve species of rockfish, there are more of them in California because of all these platforms

than would be here if the platforms were not here. And some scientists would go even further. A few years ago, someone else tried to calculate just how biologically productive the platforms were. The most productive habitats are places like rainforests, coral reefs, but when the scientists ran the numbers, he found that these platforms are the most productive habitats in the world ocean, anywhere in the world. Now, we should take that with the grain of salt

there are tons of habitats that scientists haven't studied in this way. But the point is... These are fully functioning reefs. They contain all the animals that you would expect to see on a myriad of natural reefs, which begs the question, is it in the interests of the people of California to blow up a fully functioning reef and destroy it. In 2010, the California legislature decided it wasn't and they passed AB 2503,

a bill known as Riggs to Reefs, which allow the oil companies to leave an oil platform in place if it could be shown to have a net benefit on the marine environment. The oil companies would still need to plug the wells and lop off the top of the platforms that boats could travel over it, but they would be allowed to leave some of the structure in place. So far, though, no one has made use of this bill, and the future of California's offshore platforms is still very much up in the air. And a lot of environmentalists aren't sold on the idea of turning rigs into reefs.

They have concerns about liability and the potential for future leaks. And the original lease agreement specified that the platforms would be fully removed when the oil ran out. There wasn't a loophole that said they could stay if they turned into beautiful fish habitat. To me it's breaking a promise. This is Carla Frisk again from Go. The promise was, these would go away and now they don't want them to go away. To tell a community, don't worry, we're going to clean up our garbage after we're gone.

And then it's like, well, we're going to mean that. And even if you love fish and I really do love fish. Her frustration is understandable. Environmental activists in Santa Barbara have had to deal with oil in their backyard for the last 50 years. In 2015, an oil pipeline, a few miles north of Santa Barbara, started leaking right into the ocean. It was a horrible reminder of the 69th spill, and the dangers of living with oil infrastructure. And now, the oil companies are saying, hey, these giant structures in the ocean that cause you all these problems? No, they're actually good for the environment.

Look at the research, they're habitat. It's not about habitat. Carla is not convinced that oil executives support rigs to reefs because of their concern for the rockfish. My feeling is that they're motivated by saving money. I can't save a whole lot of money by not pulling those out. The rigs off Santa Barbara

are massive pieces of infrastructure, some of the largest oil platforms in the world. Fully removing them would be extremely difficult and avoiding those costs could save the oil companies millions of dollars. Under the 2010 rigs to Reef's Bill, those savings would be split with a state, but still, a lot of environmental groups don't love signing off on a policy

that feels like a handout to the oil industry. Especially because environmental groups are currently fighting new offshore oil development. The Trump administration has indicated that they want to issue new offshore oil and gas leases off California. California has resisted the plan, but environmental groups worry that if the costs of decommissioning go down and the oil companies can argue that these structures are actually good for wildlife, they could have an easier time building new oil platforms. And new offshore oil drilling is the worst case scenario that all environmental groups want to avoid, not just because of the risk of future spills,

but because if we want to stop the worst impacts of climate change, we're going to have to start leaving fossil fuels in the ground. Milton Love agrees that climate change is one of the biggest threats to the world's oceans. And so I asked him what he thinks about the fact that the oil industry probably likes his research? I have tended to avoid dealing with the oil industry to the extent I can, but obviously they read my my papers. You know, they like it. I guess. I mean, I've never had a CEO call me up and go like, this is great stuff, man. I loved your stuff and thank you thank you thank I'm never anybody do that. But his findings have definitely helped oil companies make their argument. To the extent that my findings bolster the oil companies

positions that's just what happens with facts. The facts of Milton Love's research don't mean that oil infrastructure is good for wildlife that usually isn't. They just mean that in a few instances off the Southern California coast, oil platforms have become useful habitat for a few different species of fish. Love is not in favor of building new offshore oil platforms, or even building lots of new artificial reefs. But in this situation, the artificial reef is already there. My view is once you put something in the ocean,

and it becomes habitat for animals, I don't think you should pull it out, because like, why should we punish those animals? Just because they have the misfortune of settling out on a piece of steel rather than on a rock. After all, rockfish are just looking for a little structure in their lives. They don't care if it's a rocky outcrop or a shipwreck or an oil platform. Special thanks to Kristen Hyslop of the Environmental Defense Center who also spoke to us for this story, and also a big thank you to Janet Bridgers from Earth Alert for kindly letting us use audio from her interview with Bud Bottoms. Coming up, taking what we learned from offshore oil platforms and applying it to offshore wind

farms. After this. So one of the things about doing a story like this, where we talk about the accidental benefits of humans putting stuff in the ocean, is that you could possibly come away with the idea that this is necessarily a good thing all the time, and we should just dump stuff in the ocean. And so I'm in the studio here with Emmett Fitzgerald who reported that piece to address this issue head on.

Yeah, I know it was something I was a little nervous about with the piece. You could kind of draw the wrong conclusion, conclusion or take the conclusion of the piece too far. If you start to think fish together around stuff, then let's just... What a bunch of stuff in. Into the water. The crazy thing is that we have done this. We have built artificial reefs a lot in the past. And people have thrown all kinds of things into the ocean thinking that this was going to be beneficial.

There's been old washing machines or subway cars. They even sunk an old aircraft carrier ones off the floor to Panhandle. It became known as the great carrier reef. That's clever. And the results are mixed often when you put structure into the water, it does attract fish. And as a result, actually, one of the constituencies of the people that have tended to support

these sorts of projects, artificial reefing are fishermen because it concentrates all the fish in one place and makes them easier to catch. And so an argument against artificial reefs is that they lead to or can exacerbate overfishing. And that's totally a real concern. And there's also, you know, I mean, one of the more egregious examples of a misguided artificial reefing attempt that I came across, you know, happened in the 1970s, where people dumped half a million tires, automobile tires into the ocean off Fort Lauderdale, ostensibly, you know, in an effort to create an artificial reef. That seems like the worst possible substrate

to build a reef upon. Yeah, like it's like not conducing to life at all. Completely, and it was an abject failure. It's like a 30, it's like a 30 acre dead zone around there now, and not only that, but like the tires leached stuff that was detrimental to a natural coral reef Right and fish haven't come back. You know, it's sort of the worst case scenario of taking this idea and going too far with it So the lesson is we should not just fill the ocean with our stuff

Absolutely not do not take that lesson away from the story But we are going to put human infrastructure into the ocean. As humans, we're going to put things out in the marine environment. We're building break waters around harbours. We're building bridges. We're building, we have been building a lot of oil platforms. Moving the future, we're probably going to be building a lot of renewable energy, you know, wind platform for offshore wind. So, this is Jeremy Klase. He's a professor of marine biology at Cal Poly Pomona.

And he was actually the scientist that ran the numbers and quantified how biologically productive the California oil rigs are if you remember that from the story. And Jeremy's argument is basically that, you know, with all of this infrastructure, we should be thinking about the impact that it will have on the marine environment and seeing if there are ways that we could design the structure before it goes in the water so that it, you know, has a chance to become beneficial habitat. So in the oil platform story, it was a total accident that these structures became reefs, but he's saying that maybe we can actually do some of this intentionally or maybe even do it better with some intention. Right. If we think about, you know, how we could design human infrastructure to maximize its habitat benefits, basically.

And he's particularly focused on the question of offshore wind, which to me is this really interesting example because unlike oil platforms which are problematic when it comes to climate change, offshore wind is this climate solution and this potentially really important climate solution. Now, we know that we're going to need to build a lot of these structures in the coming decades. If we want to avoid the worst case scenarios when it comes to climate change, we're going to need some offshore wind. And hopefully, these offshore wind platforms

thought can be put into designing them. And then once they're put out there, we can study them and understand, you know, the positive and negatives that's going on and try to revise those over time. And do the best we can with all this stuff we're putting out into the marine environment. So is this happening anywhere yet?

Or is it anyone actively designing wind platforms with biological life as a priority? Yeah, we're kind of at the beginning of this, but the place right now in the world with the most offshore wind is the North Sea in Europe. And there are a lot of wind turbines there that are just, they're basically just attached to the seabed by a single

pole. And it doesn't have a lot of complexity that structure. And one of the things that's really great about offshore oil platforms is that they've got some of that structural complexity that fish tend to like. And so in the North Sea, one thing that people are doing is starting to think about like, how can we add a little bit of structural complexity to these wind turbines. In Europe and the North Sea, they're doing things to increase the complexity down at the base. There's opportunities to create more complex habitat surrounding it with quarry rock or different structures to try to improve the habitat for fish living down there.

But off-California, the situation is actually really different. The ocean floor, as you go out to sea on California, drops off really quickly and gets really deep. And so offshore wind turbines in California, if they do come, are actually going to need to be designed to float. So there's a whole set of new challenges in terms of deploying these floating structures, but a lot of them, the part that's going to be underwater, is very similar sorts of structure to the top part that's underwater of these offshore oil platforms.

So kind of where we're at right now is trying to study the fish living on these offshore oil platforms as kind of a proxy for what you would expect the fish are going to experience living off these floating wind platforms. So Jeremy is hoping that his research can inform the design of these structures if and when offshore wind becomes a reality in California. But you know, it was interesting talking to Jeremy. He's like, he's a marine biologist and is obviously focused on fish. There are huge engineering challenges and design challenges with offshore wind. And so like getting these people to care about fish

is not necessarily, he doesn't think it's gonna necessarily be the easiest. I think the economic and engineering challenges are pretty great with these structures. So initially at least it's probably hard to come in and say, well, let's think about how these are going to be good for the fish. But ultimately, I think that's what we should be doing.

At the end of the day, we still, we shouldn't get too carried away with these ideas or think that we can design perfect habitats and at the expense of natural ones. I think that anytime we put a big piece of infrastructure into the water, it's going to be disruptive on some level. And that's always true. And we always need to be thinking about how to mitigate the negative impacts that a big piece of human infrastructure is going to have.

With offshore wind, a thing that people are obviously very concerned about is seabirds. That's a whole other set of design challenges. How do you build these structures in a way where they don't disrupt seabird habitat? But I think the first step is how do we mitigate disruption and damage? And then you can start thinking about what are ways in which we could maybe actually have small benefits. Right. Design should never replace the concept of conservation. Totally.

By conservation and impact design should go hand in hand. And even though we can make a nice habitat on the bottom of a wind platform, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't be protecting the natural reefs and environment just as much as we always should. You know, like, it doesn't replace it at all. Completely. There's no, there's nothing you're going to design is better than what's... And leaving nature alone. Exactly. To be good.

Right. Completely. And some of the most interesting work that's being done in terms of artificial reefs that I think people do support is, do support is thinking about habitat restoration. You know, a place where we've done a lot of damage with some other kind of development, is there a way that we can intervene again with some kind of design solution,

but for the purposes of trying to rehabilitate something that was already there? Right, and then maybe also have future policies in which we don't disrupt reefs to begin with. Yeah, that's, that's, yeah. That begin with. Yeah, that's the nice too. That's the ultimate goal. 99% of visible's impact design coverage is supported by Autodesk.

The Autodesk Foundation supports the design and creation of innovative solutions to the world's most pressing social and environmental challenges, like coral reef conservation and restoration. Seacore is a non-profit global network of scientists and other interested parties that is creating ceramic seating units, some which look like little ninja throwing stars, that are covered in coral larvae and are dropped off of boats, and take hold in the nooks and crannies of damaged reefs and repopulate the ecosystem. They're using 3D printing and rapid prototyping to determine the best material and design combination

for the seating units. For example, they learned that it has to be rough enough for the corals to settle on an attach, but smooth enough that it's not a good location for other organisms like sponges and algae that can take over and crowd out the coral. Learn more about that project from Autodesk's Redshift, which tells the stories about the future of making things across architecture, engineering, construction, infrastructure, and manufacturing at Autodesk.com slash Redshift. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Emmett Fitzgerald. Mix and Tech Production by Sheree Fusef, Music by Sean Riel. Katie Mingle is the senior producer. Kurt Colstead is the digital director.

The rest of the team includes senior editor Delaney Hall, Avery Trouffman, Taren Mazza, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Lee, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% of visible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, an independent collective of the most innovative shows

in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show in joint discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI orc, or on Instagram, Tumblr and Reddit too. But if you're thinking this episode would be even better if I was looking at pretty pictures of rockfish, well we've got you covered at nettynipi.org. From PRX.