TED Radio Hour - Audacious Solutions

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

Original broadcast date: June 30, 2023. Big problems need audacious solutions. This hour, TED speakers use data and common sense to make laws more effective, reform the foster care system and hold environmental offenders accountable. Guests include criminal justice reform activist Sheena Meade, child welfare advocates Sixto Cancel and Marquan Teetz, and ocean monitoring expert Tony Long. TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at: plus.npr.org/ted See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading.

From TED and NPR. I'm Manusse Zamorodi. In 2004, I was newly a single mom trying to raise four children. This is Sheena Mead. Sheena was living in Florida, and life was hectic. We had just moved into a new home. I was on Section 8 and just trying to get myself together. My children at that time were all under the age of seven.

I was on government assistance, and I was just trying to make ends meet. Sheena remembers an afternoon that started off like any other. Her kids were playing, running around. There were cartoons blaring in the background. And there was two knocks at the door, and it was a police officer with another police officer. And so the kids were like, Mom and the police had the door. I'm like, okay, so I'm looking at them confused. And I'm like, they're like, are you Sheena?

And I'm like, yes. Because I didn't have anything to be worried about. I didn't think. I kind of was hesitant, but I was just like, they're probably at the wrong door. So what did they tell you? And they're like, we're serving you in a warrant for a worthless check. You know, basically, like, you passed a check that got returned with no funds. And the company decided to prosecute.

And so that check was for $87. $1 to 26 cents, a check that I had at that time written for groceries for my children. You know, at this time, this is when people were writing checks. My paycheck comes in on Friday. I'm going to write the check on a Wednesday. It takes a day to get the check from the grocery store to the check gets there. I was trying to calculate and thinking that it would be okay, and it wasn't. I mean, honestly, I don't think I realize that you could be arrested for bouncing a check. I guess I knew it was illegal, but that the police would show up and put you in handcuffs.

They put you in handcuffs, right? Yes. And this is how green I am, you know. I'm like, so let me go find somebody to get the children. They're like, we don't have time for that. I'm like, well, can you meet me around the corner so you can't arrest me in front of the children? I got arrested. I went to jail that day in front of my children.

Here's Sheena Mead on the TED stage. Luckily, I was able to come home pretty quickly because it was. was my first defense. And I promised the first thing I did when I got home, I borrowed some money so I could pay that check back. And then I had to borrow some more money to pay back the fees for getting arrested and going to jail because, of course, I was loading the cash because I was this young mom with four kids bouncing $87 checks. And I just knew that chapter of my life was closed, except it wasn't because, see, that arrest and that conviction, it remained on my record. And at that moment, I realized that my true sentence had just begun because, you know what,

I was no longer allowed to volunteer at my children's school. I can no longer rent where I want to rent because it is legal for landlords to discriminate against a person with a record. I even face barriers trying to go to college. And still to this day, I am excluded from certain certifications and occupational license. All I could keep asking myself, What's damn? When were my sentence in? So even if you've paid the money, you've paid the bill, you've done your time, it still sticks with you. Yes, they tried to define you by your record and not who you are, yes.

Let me tell you, so we were taking a field trip to SeaWorld, and in order for me to go on the field trip, I had to go online to fill out a chaperone application. And then part of that application, it asks me, have you ever been arrested? And when I went to go to apply for school, I had to check the box just to get my higher education. Seeking employment, people maybe not want to employ you because of an arrest. And then there's being able to rent a home in other communities. You know, I have to mark off that I've been arrested. So faced with all those limitations, Sheena found workarounds.

I worked in places where the box was banned. I worked for the labor movement. I worked in more progressive organizations. I did a lot of community organizing. I lived in places where I was very upfront with the landlord. I didn't live in apartments because I knew that's where it gets flagged. But then it was just a few years ago where I went to go try to get a rental place. And we got denied.

It's like, when would I ever be free is the question. Sheenamede made a mistake, one that's cast a shadow over her entire life. And every day we hear about struggles people need to overcome, problems that we all need to live with or work around. But what if there actually is a fix? Today on the show, simple yet audacious solutions. Three TED speakers combining their frontline experience with lots of data and a little common sense. To make laws more effective, care better for foster children, and hold environmental offenders accountable.

And so back to Sheena Mead. For a long time, money was tight. She had trouble clearing other checks. But she managed to turn things around. She raised her kids, got a degree, and worked her way up the ladder at nonprofits. And then she learned about something called a clean slate law. I truly believe that America is a nation of second chances.

And I say that because just about every state has laws on a book that allow a person to get their record cleared once they're eligible. And right now, there are more than 30 million people who are eligible to get their record cleared. But this is where it gets a little crazy. Less than 10% of those people actually get it done. They don't know about it. Or if they do, the process is so bureaucratic, costly, and full of red tape, for instance, in some states, people have to wait just, just a way, just about five to ten years just to even qualify to get the record clear. Then you have to appear in person to petition.

That means you need to take time off work and let's keep it real. It was hard enough to find a job in the first place. You have to file a mountain of paperwork. And then sometimes you have to pay processing fees up to $500 per charge. So that means if your crime was being poor like mine, record clearance is not even accessible. So almost every state has a law on the books that would allow people to get their record cleared once they're eligible. Can you explain, like, who is eligible and what is that process? Yes. So it's not just a cookie cutter policy that every state has the same policy.

Some are very much more restrictive. Some are much more, like, quick to the point. Once you've been crime free for a certain amount of time, for certain offenses, you're already eligible. But the burden's on the person. They have to go initiate it. You have to know when that clock hits, then you have to go file a petition, then you may have to pay the fees that's associated with filing petition, then you have to wait for sign off. It could be backlogs, and then you may be able to get it sealed or sponge or clear. And now you are actually the CEO of a group called the Clean Slate Initiative that is trying to help people who are eligible to do all that. In part, though, by changing the law state by state. Tell me more about exactly what you're doing. Yeah. So with the Clean Slate Initiative, what we're trying to do is just cut through all that red tape, that the burden is no longer on the person. The burden is on the government to say, look, you said that we're eligible to get our record cleared for certain types of offenses once we're crying free for a certain amount of time. When that time comes up, we're asking you to just automatically clear that record. You have 30 million people that's eligible right now to get the record clear. But again, how do you scale that passing Clean Slate automation? If we're truly a nation of second, chances, we don't need to, like, put barriers in to, like, get people reinterrating into

society. How many people have had their records cleared by a law in their own state? You know, in April, Michigan went into implementation where they started to clear records since they passed on a clean slate. Over a million people got their records cleared. Wow. And we have, have assisted in three million people having no records clear so far. So your organization has helped pass clean slate laws in six states. I mean, how hard was it to do? Or is this something that people on both sides of the aisle understand is good because it means more people can go on with their lives.

They can get jobs. They won't be homeless. Yes, so we have helped six states pass clean slate laws, and there are 10 states that have enacted clean slate policies across the country. In many states, they're not even moving this legislation as a criminal justice issue. more so like a workforce issue because people cannot get back to work if a record is holding them back. And we have a lot of employers and a lot of businesses that are coming into the fold saying, how do we create a pathway for people to come back into the workforce?

When we think about one and three people who have been arrested or convicted of a offense, that means a lot of us know someone who's been impacted. I do want to ask you, are there people who think, you know, tough luck? You made a mistake. You got to live with it. Or do you find that people are pretty sympathetic or on board with the Clean Slate Initiative? Yeah, you know, I'll tell them, like, yes, I made a decision. And I did the time that the law says I needed to do.

That should not define me for the rest of my life. If the law is saying that this should no longer be a barrier, then we need to make sure that it's not. Our plan is to be able to go into states to get them all on the pathway to clean slate automation. All of them. All of them. Over the next six years.

We're looking to be able to get over 14 million people having new records automatically cleared and get all 50 states on a pathway to automation. I mean, it's pretty historic what you and the Clean Slate Initiative want. I mean, it's about changing the way we here in the United States think of punishment and crime. Is it radical to you, too? Do I think that this is radical? I think it's just common sense. I think that when you talk to people, it's just common sense.

And like when we talk about redemption, second chance and forgiveness, I think most folks, when you have a conversation with folks and you bring the human element to it, folks are in agreement. We all have been given a second chance. And I think for most of us, we all have asked for a second chance, whether it was from our parents, our teachers, our spouses, our loved ones, even our kids, our communities. And so we talk about second chances. We talk about reentry, but yet we sit up all this red tape.

And we got to cut the red tape. If you could talk to her again, what would you tell your 20-something self after she got arrested? You know, it's a lot of things I can say to the 20-something-year-old Sheena. I'm telling you a lot of things. A lot of things she should have done, you know. But that public pain that I had that day getting arrested in front of my neighbors or front of my children, that made public record, it's going to be turned into a passion

that's going to fuel my purpose to help millions of people across the country to realize that they're going to be able to have a second chance and that this thing's going to turn around. She probably won't believe me. She'd be like, yeah, okay. But I would just tell her to just keep persevering, keep pushing. That's Sheena Mead, CEO of the Clean Slate Initiative.

You can see her full talk. at ted.com. And by the way, the latest date to pass a clean slate law is New York. On the show today, audacious solutions. I'm Manus Shomerodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. Friends, before we get back to the show, I want to let you know about TED Radio Hour Plus. When you become a plus listener, you get bonus episodes made just for you, with more ideas from TED speakers, and you'll go behind the scenes with our producers. What you won't get, though, are those sponsor messages interrupting the show. And that's because you are directly supporting our work at NPR.

So if you'd like to show your support, learn more and subscribe at plus.npr. org slash TED, or write in the Apple Podcasts app. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zamoroti. On the show today, audacious solutions, bold ideas to solve some of today's most complex problems. And our next speaker knows his issue intimately. It's the foster care system in the U.S. A note before we begin, we briefly discuss child abuse and trauma.

You know, all my life, I was always told that, you know, there's no placement for me. There's no family members you can live with. Six-do Cancel doesn't remember a time when his family all lived together. Foster care for me started as an 11-month-old baby. My mother struggled with substance abuse and poverty-related issues, and, you know, I was placed in the system. My mother had eight children, including me. My other brother and sisters, they all ended up in different families. Sixto was in and out of different homes.

When he was nine, he was placed with a foster mother who ended up. up adopting him. I remember being nine years old and being at the courthouse and the judge asking me if I wanted to be adopted. And in that moment, I knew that the answer that I was supposed to say out loud was yes. But in my head, I had always been a foster kid. You know, from being a baby and being grown up in the system, I didn't even have an idea of what it truly meant to say, well, oh, here's now your new forever family. But I said yes. And at that point, it's when I started to do. And I started to experience more and more of the abuse until I was 13. I then ended up couch surfing because the abuse was so severe. So did you leave your family? Did you run away? There were times where

I would just be locked out of the house for weeks at a time. And so that's how the couch surfing started. So I had to find a place to go while I was being locked out. And that was like her beginning forms of punishment. And so I just kept calling the child welfare system asking them to take me back. But unfortunately, they kept saying that what I was saying wasn't substantiated, which means that we didn't have enough evidence for them to realize that I was telling the truth about what was happening. Wait, so you're a preteen and you're calling and saying, I'm in a terrible situation, and that wasn't good enough, the fact that you were calling yourself to advocate for yourself?

Not only was I calling, but my school system was calling, my dance teacher and after-school programs were calling. I mean, there were several open and closed investigations. She would tell the police or she would tell the investigator that I was just acting up, that it literally took me having to, like, tape over a quarter to my chest with clear tape and start documenting what I was going through. And that's when I had enough evidence to start saying, hey, here's what's actually happening to me. Sixtho's teenage years were even more chaotic.

At one point, he was in touch with his siblings, and they came up with a plan to live together. My older brother, you know, we had met when I was 14, and he was saving money so that he can get an apartment to get me and my other brother out of foster care. I see. And unfortunately one day, he was killed due to gun violence. Oh, gosh. And so, like, that was the day where, like, all hope of family kind of died for me. Here's 6-0 cancel on the TED stage. Even without abuse, foster care is a tough experience.

You don't know what's actually going to happen to you. You're placed with a stranger and you're expected to become family. But if you don't fit in, if you act up a little bit too much, you will find yourself in a new home with new school, new rules, new everything. When I was placed back in foster care at 15, I thought that that was the end of my storm. But it was just the beginning of the next storm. Went to a few different homes.

But unlike many, I was placed in a nonprofit program where I got ready to live on my own. The false care system is not doing a good job of raising children. Unsupported foster youth are two to three times more likely to have negative outcomes related to homelessness, incarceration, being sexually trafficked. The mental toll is severe. Foster youth are two times more likely than war veterans to experience and suffer from PTSD. Okay, so obviously these are really, really tough situations, stressful situations that these kids are put into.

How many kids are we talking about here? Yeah, sometimes people think it's a very small issue in the United States because the number of kids that are removed from their homes for either neglect or abuse is about 400,000 people every single year. But what most people don't realize is that foster care begins with a knock on your home. door by a social worker who comes in and asks you a series of questions. And they check your cabinets. They check the refrigerator. And if you answer those questions incorrectly or there's not enough food in those cabinets or refrigerator, then your child can be removed. There are seven million children a year that are involved in a child abuse report. And so that means about 10% of all children in the United States are actually being touched by a child welfare system. I think it's very hard when you see a

child who, you know, maybe mom is sleeping in the car, right? And you're trying to get that third grader to school. And what are you doing that situation when our current other systems have failed, right? When you look at the housing programs across the country, sometimes there's too much of a waiting list. Shelters sometimes are packed out. And so what has happened is that when we don't have interventions for certain situations, then we default to the child welfare system to intervene. And so that's why child welfare has become one of the big responders to what I see as a lot of poverty issues. I do want to get back to you and the wonderful part of your story. Let's go to you in college when you came up with the idea for your organization.

Think of us. What were you thinking? Were you like, okay, you know what? I am exactly the right person to switch things up here. So when I was in college, I didn't think that I was like the perfect person to like start an organization and then run with it. I kept bringing this idea of how young people can have voice and choice and choice and what's happening to them in foster care. How can they do some goal settings to kind of make sure that they transition into adulthood with the supports that they need? And what I realize is that, oh, the system is much more flawed by design.

This is why I started to think of us. because this is the current result of the foster care system. It's designed wrong. I want to give you an example. We overwhelmingly heard from teenage foster youth that they were being misplaced in group homes. The system was acting like they have nowhere to place these children, turned around, we sent our researchers out,

and what they were able to reveal was that the majority of those children actually had extended family members that they could have lived with. So you've explained why kids are usually separated from their families. But what is it that you are reimagining? Yeah. So imagine this.

Imagine that, unfortunately, you have to come into foster care. But instead of immediately being placed with a foster parent, imagine that your worker is pulling up social media and looking through the adults who are in your life and saying, which one of these adults do you want us to explore you living with? Which one of these are your uncle, cousin, grandparents, and being able to call those folks and say, you know what, on day one, I'm going to place you with, you know, family members that you already know.

Sixo calls this approach kinship care. Kinship care is when a child goes head and is able to live with an extended family member or an adult that they have already known. An adult who loves them, that adult can be a church member, a close family friend. And what we now know is that research is showing that when children are placed with kin, they fear way better from mental health to stability to graduating high school on time. And yet, only 35% of young people in the foster care system are actually placed with kin. But it doesn't have to be this way.

In one state, in partnership, right, we went in and we implemented some simple solutions, like, let's ask young people which adults in their family they should live with. I wish I told you something better. That is one solution. We went ahead and require social workers to get extra approvals if they're going to place you outside of kin. The result? The initial placement with young people in the foster care system

in a situation where they were living with kin rose from 3% to over 40% in just. just two years. In another state, we looked at a county. They were able to figure out how to place over 80% of those children with kin. So the idea that young people don't have adults in their life who can step up is not true. Every single year, hundreds of thousands of children are entering the foster care system and they're not being placed with family. The system spends over $30 billion on less than one million families a year. That is more than enough to make sure we find family, we support them,

and that every child is living in a loving family situation. Right now, there's a big systems change opportunity, a federal decision that would make it super easy to have people who are related to a child step up and say, I'm willing to do this and get that support. If approved, we would see $3 billion shift from traditional foster care to kinship care. So when we work on these crazy ideas like let's make kinship care the norm, it is actually possible. In your talk, you say that you're working on policy to make it easier for relatives to step up, to be foster parents. But what do you mean by that? What makes it easier?

Like we're going to do simple things like help the state just ask the young person, who are the adults that you know? Then have a streamlined process that quickly gets that child placed there. Do the background check quickly. Turn around and do the home study quickly. But maybe we don't have to, on day one, start the 10 hours of traditional foster parenting classes. Maybe the child can be placed there and you do the classes while the child's already living with you. So we're going to streamline that process. and then make sure that all the barriers that are coming up,

we're going to continue to tell Congress, the White House, and the federal agencies about what are those challenges? For now, those challenges mostly remain in place. Mark Juan Teets is a good example of just how hard it is to place kids with family, even when there are loved ones who want to step in. We go to the front office and we see our great-grandmother there. Mark Juan and his brother were in a foster group home when they were tracked down by their great-grandmother.

The moment she sees us, she just burst into tears, like burst crying. She said, I have been looking for you. I've been looking for you. But his great-grandmother wasn't a government-approved foster parent, so she couldn't get government assistance to raise them. They ended up back in that group home. Until a couple years later, when they finally went to live with a great-aunt who qualified. We didn't even know we had great-unties.

We just found out, and next thing we know, we moved in with her. and then she starts showing us pictures of our mom, showing us pictures of all of the family that we've never met. And we started having the family environment again, though. The fact that I did get to live with my auntie for all those years, it helped me prepare, though, because while I was there, I got to build a savings account. So I built my savings account.

While I was there, I got to buy my first vehicle. I bought a truck. While I was there, I worked. So I was able just to get more on my feet. And because it was my auntie who actually generally cared for me and wasn't trying to take nothing from me, I got to build a lot better than what I would have built if I would have been going from house to house to house

or living with complete strangers. Now Marquan works at Think of Us with Sixto, who as an adult made his own surprising discovery about his extended family. Just a couple of years ago, I was in New York City and I got a phone call for my sister that there was a family reunion happening. I didn't know them and they didn't know me. And when I was able to meet them, the biggest shocker for me was that I had these four uncles and aunts who were foster adoptive parents.

So here were people in my own family who were blood related to me who had been approved by the state to not just foster, but to go through the full process of actually adopting a sibling son. And yet here I was for my entire life going from foster home to foster home or at one point being adopted by a very abusive parent. Did you have this conversation when you got to chat with your aunts and uncles who you hadn't known? Did you talk about this? Honestly, no. I think for me, I was just so numb in that moment that the number one thing I, you know, the thing that I did immediately was like pull out my phone GPS to my last foster home, which was 58 miles away. And then I just try to manage the numbness that came from that moment because when you've spent your whole life with this constant narrative of there's no place for you, there's no family for you, we can't place you with anyone. And then all of a sudden that gets disrupted.

It was like hard for me to believe like, wow, I've been lied to my entire life. And that's where a real grief came in because I've started to grieve what could have been. Oh, that just feels shameful. I think it's the biggest representation of how broken and flawed by design our system is. The reality is we need a system that does protect children, but if you're going to remove a child, how do you do your due diligence to make sure that children are being placed with family members and that we're making sure people are getting the support that they need? So this kinship care model, what do you have to do next to make it sort of the default

when a child comes into the foster care system? So number one, what we have right now are regulations that would enable states to set up their own specific process for family members or people that already know the child. And as a part of that, they would be able to be able to draw down federal dollars. This will be historic if these regulations passed because what it will do, it would transfer $3 billion out of the traditional $11 billion from like traditional foster care to kinship care over a five year period. So it's a huge shift. So the first thing is to say for states to raise their hand and say, number one, I want to go ahead and be a kinship care for a system and draw down these dollars and make sure that my departments are structured to find family, to make sure that families get the same monthly check, the same health care for the child that any foster parent would get, right? And charge the federal government or leverage the federal government's money to be able to do that. Number two, people are going to have to innovate and think differently about how do you do that?

Like, what is that kin-specific process? And so right now, we're working with a group of people to do some research around how far does that background check need to go. What does that house inspection need to do? I'm wondering what your skeptics say is upending this whole way that a system that's been in place for decades. Do you get people saying, like, all right, six-to, that's nice, but I don't know if this is really possible. So we definitely, this is very ambitious. The timeline is extremely ambitious. And so I think the most critiques around what we want to accomplish is the idea that we can do this type of push in five to seven years. However, people are starting to believe in kin. 20 years ago, it would not have been a conversation to say grandma should take her grandchildren in because a lot of people would say the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree. And the reality is that people do say that today, but not at the same rate. And then, that we see certain counties in the country that have been able to get over 80% of their children

placed with a family member or someone that that child already knew. So we have evidence that now it's possible. I'll say this. I truly believe we're at this pivot point and that if we push just a little bit harder in this very moment, that we can actually live in a new reality

where when children have to come into the foster care system, that the first thing that is looked at is extended family, people that they know. And if we are able to achieve that, we will literally be able to ensure that millions of children will come off of that school bus, go into their homes, look at family members, people that they know, and say, I am loved. Thank you. That was Six-O-Cansel. He's the CEO of the nonprofit, Think of Us. You can watch his full talk at ted.com. On the show today, Audacious Solutions. I'm Anou.

Zameroody and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Minnuch Zomeroidi. On the show today, audacious solutions, daring and bold ideas to address some of the biggest problems of our time. And you can't get much bigger than the ocean, specifically protecting it from damage caused by humans. I've sailed the seven seas, as they say. You know, there's only one ocean, but there's seven seas. This is Tony Long. For decades, he was a member of the British Royal Navy.

Yeah, and I was only 17. Join the battalional naval college, straight in as an officer. His job was scouring the ocean, surveying via helicopter and radar to keep trade routes secure for the UK and its allies, safe from pirates and criminals. as well as to detect and deter illegal fishing. What's called maritime domain awareness.

You want to know what's happening around the fleet and beyond the horizon, and that way you can give the fleet advance notice of what they're approaching. But surveying the seas had limitations. Let's say you spotted a fishing vessel off in the distance. Quite often the fishing fleets of the world, they're not really clearly marked. You could see there were a fleet from a country,

you could see that they were fishing, but you really couldn't work out whether they'd been authorized or not and who'd authorize them and what they were actually fishing. It's a real challenge. Tony spent decades feeling frustrated by just how little information he could collect and how little he could do to stop illegal fishing. Sometimes I'd wake up surrounded in a fishing fleet that despite having powerful technology and my fingertips, I didn't really know who they were or what they've been doing. Here's Tony Long on the TED stage. It is a wild west out there, and rogue fishes are disobeying the laws that we put in place to protect our ocean and its resources. And they're pillaging colossal amounts of fish. One fifth of seafood is thought to be caught illegally or is simply unreported.

And that's a crime worth up to $23.5 billion. And it's a crime that skews the science. So it affects the sustainability of our fisheries. It threatens the health of our roe. and the well-being of millions of people, mainly in poorer countries. And it's not just pirate fishing that's threatened in the future of our ocean. Out at sea, all spills are going on detected and therefore unpunished. There's a massive, unmonitored growth in shipping, oil and gas, exploration, and aquaculture,

as I mentioned just a few. And this is piling pressure on a notion that's already stressed by climate change. The straightforward fact is if you can't see it, you can't manage it and I know from experience you can't monitor the whole ocean from the decks of ships So you decide to leave the military

and you decide that it's time for you to take on this problem that you had witnessed all those years sailing the ocean Yeah, so I left the Navy back in 2012 I mean having been in the Navy nearly 30 years It's actually quite a significant choice to leave I mean, I loved my career. It's not that I wanted to leave.

I just felt drawn to doing something different. I've learned an awful lot in the Navy. I'd developed as a person. And I wanted to take what I've learned and apply it in a way that I really, really could feel as if I'd contributed something to the planet and the preservation. Can you just lay out for me plainly what it is that you wanted to get done,

what you saw as your mission? So what's really clear is overfishing and illegal fishing is a huge problem. Fishing is the biggest activity that humanity takes up on the ocean. And overfishing is now driving fish stocks towards collapse. Like a third of the world's fisheries are overfished. If you add to that illegal fishing, then you're starting to really skew the system.

I mean, I guess, you know, me listening to this, I'm like, oh, well, that's a problem in, you know, the South Pacific thousands of miles away from here. But I guess anyone who goes out to eat in a restaurant, or goes to the fish counter at their local grocery store, is impacted by this? Everybody's impacted, and it's a complex situation. So in the most straightforward terms,

if we allow illegal fishing to continue, somewhere down the line will suffer. But if fish stocks start to collapse, then you're obviously also impacted on the food chain, which means significant biodiversity effects start to happen. It's providing the food and resource that probably 3 billion people rely on. In your talk, you use the term pirate fishers.

Yeah, and it tends to be called illegal and regulated and unreported fishing. What does that actually mean? It means that people are scamming the system. So they're doing something that is illegal, like fishing without authority, or they're fishing with something that is damaging, like drift nets or trawls where it's been banned. Or they're simply not reporting their catch. people are taking advantage of the lack of governments to their own end. It's piracy to what most people know.

I mean, the ocean, no one is in charge of the ocean, right? So is everyone just trying to skirt certain other government's jurisdiction? They're just trying to make a living by going wherever they need to go? Yes. So the high seas are the commons. That's everybody's responsibility. It's for the common good. And it should really be common knowledge about what's happening out on those high seas.

but the economic zones that countries are responsible for are their own jurisdiction and they can put rules in place and enforce under their own national rules. So you'd get some countries that have got quite strong mechanisms for implementing regulations and rules, but then alongside them they've got countries that haven't. And therefore the system starts to break up because it becomes patchy in response. And we needed some kind of global system of surveillance, global system, of enforcement. So countries have their own ways

of regulating their waters and doing surveillance. But around 2017, several countries decided to make their data openly available. And this created an opportunity for Tony and the organization he now heads, Global Fishing Watch. Once that proprietary information

was suddenly in the public, it broke a glass ceiling. Up there right now, there's thousands of satellites beaming back an enormous amount of data from the remotest parts of our ocean. What if we could harness that data, make it useful and available to people who care about the ocean? Well, thanks to rapid advances in technology and AI, we can do that. Using GPS location data and machine learning, Global Fishing Watch built the first ever live stream map

to monitor the industrial fishing fleet. At the moment we see some 70,000 vessels. We've made this information public and freely available to the world. But technology moves on. Thank you. Technology moves on rapidly. There's new and emerging technology that we need to embrace in order to give this picture to everybody who needs it.

Today, any of you can click on the internet to explore roads and buildings on land. Why can't we do the same for the ocean? We need to create a dynamic, complete map of all industrial activity out at sea and make it available to everybody for free. We're going to do that. Using GPS location data and millions of gigabytes of satellite imagery,

we'll use AI to map and monitor more than a million ocean-going vessels. We'll monitor the entire industrial fishing fleet and those dark vessels. We'll add in hundreds of thousands of cargo vessels, tens of thousands of oil and gas structures, conservationists will have the information they need to protect critical habitats, like National Geographic Pristine Seas.

They're using our data now to help work with governments and communities to protect critical habitats in seven marine parks with a combined area of more than twice that of California. And we're going to give researchers the data they need to advance ocean science, and we're going to give the media,

campaigners and the public powerful knowledge about human activity out at sea. Okay, I am just opening up right now the global fishing watch map. And I am seeing now the whole globe and there are different shades of greens and blues going on the oceans all over the place. What broadly am I seeing? So the colors that you'll see out on the ocean is fishing activity. It's the global footprint of fishing is the easy way to think about it.

If you wanted to look at one particular vessel's activity, you could click it, open up the screen for maybe six years of activity, and you'll literally watch the track evolve around the globe as that vessels moved around. And if it's turned off its trackers at any stage, you'll see that it's turned them off, and there'll be clear flags that he's gone missing.

It could be that they're in port, it could be that they've turned it off for nefarious reasons. But that's what we're trying to do, make it so easy to understand what you're looking at. So I'm looking at this one region sort of off the coast of China, and it says that there have been, over the last few months, 593 encounter events for carriers and fishing vessels. What is that describing? So encounters is the description we use for when vessels meet at sea, when they rendezvous at sea. So the fishing vessels carry on fishing, they're drawing out everything they can, and they literally pass the fish to a cargo vessel who then takes the fish to port. So those encounters are really important because it's entirely legal if authorized, but it's entirely not if they're not.

So we need to understand where they're happening. Do you remember the first time you saw the map light up? I mean, it must have been magical. It's changing how we can even see the ocean. Yes, so less than a decade ago, building this sort of system just wasn't possible. It's the advances in AII and the increase in the number of satellites that are orbiting the Earth that are making it possible. And a big moment was the North Korea report, as we call it. We looked into North Korean waters using all of the different data sets that we had and put together,

our report that exposed over 1,000 vessels fishing illegally in North Green Waters against the UN sanctions. That was a turning point because people then realized what the power of the data could do. We call them dark vessels, and generally dark vessels are up to no good. So we had to turn to other sources of data. We looked at satellite-based radar and optical imagery, and we lit that region up. we revealed a martyr of almost a thousand vessels, pillaging more than half a billion dollars worth a squid each year. It's one of the largest cases of illegal fishing ever seen,

with this huge human impact too. Tragedy. Because the smaller, more rickety North Korean boats could not compete with that vast fleet, they were pushed further and further out to sea. And as a result, hundreds of them would be capsized to be washed ashore in Japan with the country. crew either starving or dead.

We made our findings public and as a result, we compelled the authorities to take action. Illegal fishing that region has dropped by 75% and we're not seeing hundreds of vessels now washing ashore in Japan. It turns out that China was behind those vessels that were fishing illegally in North Korean waters. But can you even hold them or any other country accountable for their actions? Yes, you can hold countries to account. And it starts with providing them with that information. So if we use the example of North Korea, the Republic of Korea and Japan peer-reviewed what we'd found, and then they took it multilaterally to the Chinese and demonstrated clearly what was going wrong. So the Chinese government could not deny it. It was there. So that was one level of pressure. But we also, worked with Inabina, who published in NBC online, and it's a beautiful story that went global,

and therefore there was a huge public pressure to see a response. We ourselves, Global Fish and Watch, have had no direct contact with the Chinese. It was done through the government, Republic of Korea and Japan, and through open investigative journalism, and what we've seen is a drop in the amount of illegal fishing in that area as a result. So you bring pressure to bear in different ways. Can I just ask you what ideally that would look like? Like give me an example of what you would love to see happen. Yeah, so what is the ideal?

So what I would like to see is every country not be afraid of sharing information to realize that the information shared is far more powerful than the information retained in this situation. And therefore, whenever a country is talking about becoming transparent through Global Fishing Watch, they are encouraged to work with the industry and with the local fishermen to make sure they understand that this data is not going to be used inappropriately. Yeah, because the word surveillance, I mean, that rings a lot of alarm bells for people. A lot of alarm bells. And, of course, there's all of the conversations around words like artificial intelligence

and the ethics of the data. So we're very conscious of that. And we're also very clear about personal information, knowing the fishermen themselves do not want their personal information shared. it doesn't get shared. It's about the vessel. What goes public is just enough to show that that country is involved in transparency and that most of the important data is retained behind the scenes by the country who owns the data. And we've got 12 countries now committed to sharing their data with us, which may not seem many,

but there is no global treaty on transparency. There's nothing for us to hang our hat on other than working well with people and talking them through the story and making them understand why it's beneficial and then seeing them get on board. The fact that transparency in open data is now talked about in every forum, at every Congress,

at every conference, tells me that people have started to realize that this is an important way of understanding what's happening out on the ocean. The beautiful thing about Global Fishing Watch is that it doesn't have to be Global Fishing Watch that does it. We can have everyone else using our data in order to assist.

Tony, it's nice to hear good news about the environment for once, that there's something happening. It is. There is a lot happening. I think people have started to realize that the ocean is not just the fish or just what's inside the ocean. Actually, it's people on land that depend on the ocean. That was Tony Long. He's the CEO of Global Fishing Watch.

You can see Tony's full talk at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show about audacious solutions. It was inspired by the Audacious Project, a funding initiative organized by TED that connects philanthropists with organizations and people working to solve some of the world's biggest problems. You can find out more about all the projects you heard on this episode and many others at audaciousproject. This episode was produced by Harsha Nahada, Lane Kaplan Levinson, Fiona Gehrin, and Andrea Gutierrez. It was edited by Sanaz-Meshkampore, Rachel Faulkner White, and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Matthew Cloutier, James Delahousie, and Katie Montalione.

Beth Donovan is our executive producer. Our audio engineers were Josh Newell and Quasi Lee. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablewey, our partners at TED, are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balezzo. I'm Anoush Zameroidi, and you've been listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.