The Monmouth University Institute for Global Understanding (IGU) and Urban Coast Institute (UCI) will kick off the second season of their joint Global Ocean Governance Lecture Series on Oct. 13 with a panel discussion of international issues and challenges concerning the protection of whales.

The discussion will be moderated by Professor Randall Abate, director of the IGU, and include the following presentations and speakers:

• “Modernizing the International Whaling Commission’s Approach to Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling,” University of Alberta (Canada) Associate Professor of Law Cameron Jefferies
• “Saving the Critically Endangered North Atlantic Right Whale: Challenges and Opportunities,” Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Staff Scientist Francine Kershaw
• “Ensuring the Continuing Recovery: Protecting the Great Whales in the Context of 21st Century Challenges,” Wildlife Conservation Society Ocean Giants Program Director Howard Rosenbaum

The virtual discussion is free and open to the public and will take place from noon to 1:15 p.m. A Zoom link will be provided upon registration. Scroll below for descriptions of the presentations and speaker bios.

Abstracts & Bios

Modernizing the International Whaling Commission’s Approach to Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling

ABSTRACT: Over the past three decades, the primary conflict at the International Whaling Commission (IWC) has centered around the future of internationally sanctioned commercial whaling. In the aftermath of the International Court of Justice’s Whaling in the Antarctic decision, Japan has ceased ‘Special Permit’ whaling in the Southern Ocean, has withdrawn from the IWC, and has stated its intention to only whale within its Exclusive Economic Zone. Other whaling nations, including Iceland, have reported a declining demand for whale meat and are looking towards a post-commercial whaling world. The next challenge that is positioned to come to the forefront of international whale management is the IWC’s approach to Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling (AWS). The IWC has, at least to a certain extent, recognized the cultural, nutritional and social importance of whaling for many of the world’s Indigenous peoples since its inception. The IWC’s current ASW procedure requires Contracting Governments to submit “needs statements” on behalf of Indigenous communities to the IWC for scientific scrutiny and, ultimately, Commission approval. This process does not afford Indigenous peoples the opportunity to participate in decision-making nor does it account for Indigenous rights from international (e.g., United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) or domestic legal orders. Canada withdrew from the IWC in 1981 citing, in part, concerns that the IWC’s ASW process failed to discharge Canada’s constitutional obligation to protect marine mammal harvesting rights for Indigenous peoples and this talk will use Canadian experience to explore the shortcomings of the IWC’s AWC process and the need for modernization.

BIO: Cameron S.G. Jefferies, B.Sc., LL.B., LL.M., S.J.D., is an associate professor of law at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, where he specializes in international and domestic environmental law and energy law. He currently teaches Environmental Law, International Environmental Law, Basic Oil and Gas Law, and Oceans Law and Policy. He was admitted to the Law Society of Alberta in 2010. He completed his graduate degrees at the University of Virginia, School of Law, where he studied as a Fulbright Scholar. Before entering academia, Dr. Jefferies practiced at Field LLP in Edmonton, Alberta, and worked as a research associate at the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta. He has published several book chapters and articles in Canadian and U.S. law journals, including the Energy Law Journal and the Journal of Environmental Law and Practice. He is the author of Marine Mammal Conservation and the Law of the Sea (OUP, 2016), co-author of Tort Law, 6th ed. (Carswell, 2017), and co-editor of Global Environmental Change and Innovation in International Environmental Law (CUP, 2018). He is an award-winning teacher and researcher and has been an invited speaker to a number of national and international conferences. In addition to his academic and professional curiosity in environmental law, oceans law, and wildlife conservation, Dr. Jefferies maintains a keen interest in public interest advocacy and remains active in promoting local environmental law reform.

Saving the Critically Endangered North Atlantic Right Whale: Challenges and Opportunities

ABSTRACT: After making a painstaking recovery from the impacts of industrialized whaling, the North Atlantic right whale is once again declining rapidly towards extinction. As climate change alters the distribution of their main prey, right whales – in hot pursuit – are moving into new areas and spending more time in habitats where they were once seasonal migrants. The result: shocking levels of mortality, morbidity, and reproductive decline resulting from entanglement in commercial fishing gear and vessel strikes. The fight to save the right whale from these impacts is further complicated by the need to advance offshore wind energy at a commercial scale in a way that will not introduce additional risk to the species. This presentation will speak to the challenges of reducing risk of entanglements in a dynamic ocean where fisheries reign, and the tightrope of considerations when advancing a new ocean industry in what are now some of the right whale’s most important habitats.  We will then explore opportunities presented by technological innovations to both save the right whale and improve our resilience to climate change.

BIO: Dr. Francine Kershaw uses the best available scientific information to advocate for improved protections for marine mammals related to a variety of issues, including ocean noise, ship strikes, and bycatch. She currently leads NRDC’s work to end large whale entanglements and dedicates a large part of her portfolio to advancing responsible offshore wind development. Still a whale population geneticist at heart, in her spare time she also advocates for improved uptake of genetic information into conservation policy decisions. Kershaw is an active member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Marine Mammal Protected Area Task Force, the Global Ocean Biodiversity Initiative, and the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network Genetic Composition Working Group, and an associate member of the Indian Ocean Network for Cetacean Research. She holds a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Columbia University and is currently based in Greenville, South Carolina.

Ensuring the Continuing Recovery:  Protecting the Great Whales in the Context of 21^st Century Challenges

ABSTRACT: Whales and other marine life face many 21^st century challenges, including bycatch (incidental entanglement in fishing gear), ship strikes, increasing levels of anthropogenic ocean noise, coastal development in essential habitats; and the impacts of oil spills and other ocean pollutants. The impacts from a changing climate also loom, and range from potentially shifting the abundance and distribution of essential prey species to exposing whales to more human activity in previously inaccessible places such as the Arctic. Dr. Rosenbaum will speak about how science, technology, and innovative approaches helps inform decision-making to better protect and minimize impacts to whales in the New York Bight and Arctic Beringia.

BIO: Dr. Howard Rosenbaum is a senior conservation scientist and director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS) Ocean Giants Program, which aims to secure the future of whales, dolphins, and other marine species. He is a senior scientist at the American Museum of Natural History, core faculty member at Columbia University, a member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Cetacean Specialist Group and Important Marine Mammal Area Task Force, and the International Whaling Commission’s Scientific Committee. Rosenbaum has led marine mammal conservation projects around the world, including the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans and the Arctic. For more than 30 years, Rosenbaum’s innovative science has helped protect marine species from current and emerging threats in their most important habitats. In the New York Bight, Rosenbaum leads WCS’s efforts for research and conservation of marine mammals, which includes a collaborative effort to use state-of-the-art near real-time acoustic monitoring and other technologies to study whales and ocean noise. Rosenbaum is a member of New York’s (NYSERDA) Environmental Technical Working Group and on the Specialist Committee for Best Management Practices related to Offshore Wind Development.  Rosenbaum has also been a subject matter expert for two past Bureau of Ocean Energy Management workshops related to marine mammals and offshore wind development, and recently served on IUCN’s panel on Mitigating Biodiversity Impacts to Wind Energy Development. He has authored 95 peer-reviewed publications, co-edited a book on genomics, and his work has been featured widely in many popular media outlets. Rosenbaum grew up on Long Island and earned his Ph.D. from Yale University.

UCI Communications Director Karl Vilacoba moderated and presented on a Sept. 14 edition of the Mid-Atlantic Ocean Data Portal’s “How Tuesday” webinar series that provided updates on a series of U.S. Coast Guard Port Access Route Studies (PARS) focused on major East Coast ports. The session was hosted by the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council on the Ocean in partnership with the Coast Guard and Northeast Regional Ocean Council.

Coast Guard personnel presented information on findings, public comment opportunities and next steps for studies concentrated on the Northern New York Bight and New Jersey Coast/Delaware Bay areas and participated in a Q&A session with attendees. In addition, demonstrations were provided for Coast Guard GIS web tools and map data on the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast ocean data portals that can be used to explore the studies and their recommendations in further depth.

The Monmouth University School of Science Summer Research Program Symposium returned to its traditional home at Erlanger Gardens on Aug. 12 with in-person poster presentations by over 40 students. The annual event is the culmination of 10 weeks of collaborative research in biology, chemistry, mathematics, computer software and engineering topics by students and faculty mentors.

Each year the Urban Coast Institute provides Heidi Lynn Sculthorpe Scholars grants for several summer research projects that support its mission. Scroll below to watch some of the student researchers discuss their work. A book of abstracts from the symposium can be found here.

eDNA As a Tool for Monitoring Turtle Species In Coastal Lakes

Delaney Mestey-Jones

Exploring Salt Tolerances of Lichens in New Jersey Coastal Ecosystems

Emily Vasquez

Evaluation of Coastal Lakes as Turtle Habitat in Monmouth County, New Jersey

Megan Malaty

Female Labor Force Participation Rates vs. Childcare Availability in New Jersey

James Allan

Geospatial Representation of Lower Hudson-Raritan Estuary Water Quality

Nicholas Box

The UCI has created a new web page for Monmouth University students listing paid and unpaid internship and research opportunities in marine and environmental fields. The page contains recent openings shared with the UCI and Marine and Environmental Biology and Policy (MEBP) program faculty, links to job/internship pages and websites maintained by our partner organizations, and a list of staff mentors who may be contacted for additional help and information.

The page can be found in the “Offices & Services” dropdown menu in the MyMU Portal (Monmouth University sign-in credentials required). For questions about the page or inquiries about listing a position, please email uci@monmouth.edu.

To a tourist visiting the Asbury Park beachfront, it really could seem like a paradise. The boutique hotels and luxury high-rises blended among century-old Beaux Arts buildings and legendary music halls. The energy of diverse crowds splashing in the waves and mingling along the restaurant-lined boardwalk.

And therein lies the paradox. With the passing of each day and ribbon-cutting for every redevelopment project, Asbury Park’s history with racial discrimination and civil unrest fades further from collective memory and becomes harder to believe for the unacquainted.

A team of Monmouth University researchers is working to preserve that history through the “Paradoxical Paradise” project, led by Associate Professor of African American History Hettie V. Williams of the Department of History and Anthropology. The group has assembled a growing online library of archival documents and photos, newly compiled GIS maps, oral histories, podcasts and other multimedia, all of which are publicly accessible at paradoxicalparadise.com.

Photo by Hettie V. Williams

Williams said New Jersey is “the Georgia of the North” in terms of the depth of its history with civil rights issues and observed that Asbury Park offers a unique case study within the state due to past segregation at its beaches and tourist businesses. Although some attention has been given to racial issues through the lens of Asbury Park’s music culture, Williams said little research has sought a broader understanding of the community.

“It hasn’t been studied by a lot of scholars,” Williams said. “The riots haven’t even been studied a great deal, and they were one of the largest in the state, if not the country.”

The website contains several news articles and photos from the time of the city’s 1970 riots, but some of the most unique insights come from the personal records of Joseph F. Mattice, the mayor of that era. With the support of a UCI grant, Williams was able to access archival documents, letters, photos and other resources related to the riots from Mattice’s collection and has been working with students to add excerpts online. The original materials are housed at Duke University.

“They bought them on eBay for about $450,” Williams recalled. “When I learned that I said to myself, those archives should be at Monmouth.”

Williams encourages any community members with historic documents that can add to the project to contact the team. Materials can be stored on campus or scanned and returned to their owners.

COVID-19 Impacts

The chief focus of the work funded by the UCI grant was the pandemic’s impacts on the city’s African American community. Elements of that work include:

• Specialist Professor of Public History Melissa Ziobro led students Gillian Demetriou, Kelly Dender, and Vincent Sauchelli in conducting nine interviews with residents, business owners, nonprofit representatives and others to record their perspectives on the pandemic. Transcripts of these oral histories will be added to the website in the fall.
• GIS Program Director Geoffrey Fouad and student Lissette Peña produced interactive maps depicting percentages of Black and white residents by Census tract in Monmouth County who are uninsured and below the poverty level. Both factors could contribute to disparities in infection rates or treatments.
• Williams conducted three episodes of the Black and African Diaspora Forum United (BADFU) “This Week in Black History, Society and Culture” podcast series with guests who shared their stories on COVID-19’s impacts in the Black community. The podcasts were produced by student Max Adolph.

Among the standout moments from the podcasts, Williams said, was a discussion with longtime resident and community activist Felicia Simmons on the gaps the pandemic created in educational quality for low-income families who struggled to adjust to virtual schooling.

“The school’s first response was to create ditto packets to give to parents. When they finally got tablets for them, there were no instructions for how to work the technology,” Williams said. “We assume everyone has a cellphone, everyone has a tablet, but that’s not the case if you can’t afford it.”

The team plans to seek additional grants to continue building the website. Among the content currently planned or underway are interactive story maps that show stops in Asbury Park that appeared in “The Green Book” and journal articles based on the information gathered through the project.

The UCI grant also funded the work of Michelle Lippman and Justin Montana, both students in the graduate program in history at Monmouth. Montana worked with Williams to sort through the more than 200 files from the Duke collection add excerpts to the website and authored a blog post on the Asbury Park riots. Lippman assisted with research and authored a blog post on the history of Asbury Park.

For more information on Paradoxical Paradise, email hwilliam@monmouth.edu. Twitter users can also follow @ParadoxicalPar2 for project updates.

Monmouth University student Johanna Vonderhorst recently completed a paper titled “Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction: A Need to Improve Governing Frameworks and Enhance a Global Commitment to Conservation” as part of her work as a spring intern at the Global Ocean Forum (GOF). In it, Vonderhorst contends that the high seas “are home to a wealth of ocean resources that are taken for granted” and deserve greater legal protections.

The internship gave Vonderhorst, a NOAA Hollings Scholar and former UCI research assistant, the opportunity to earn university credits while conducting external research on ocean policy. The senior majoring in chemistry and political science plans to continue her internship with the GOF in the fall. Read below to learn more about the issues explored in her paper.

Q: Your paper focuses on the need for greater protections for Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ) – typically deep-sea zones that fall outside of the governance of any national entities. Why are these areas so important and what are some of the threats they face?

ABNJ are extremely important not only because they house major fisheries that feed millions worldwide, but also because they provide shipping and transportation routes, seabed for laying telephone cables, and resources used in medicine and scientific research. They also provide vital ecosystem services, acting as carbon sinks to regulate climate change impacts and generating over half of the world’s oxygen. Some of the biggest threats to ABNJ are overfishing, resource overexploitation, plastic and oil pollution, and climate change, which exacerbates all other threats to the health of ABNJ.

Q: You highlight some of the international frameworks that have been initiated to guide human activities in ABNJ, notably the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which calls for nations to cooperate on issues such as the exploitation of marine resources and the management of fisheries. Why do you believe UNCLOS and other existing initiatives are inadequate?

UNCLOS and other regulatory frameworks are inadequate primarily because they provide no mechanism for global enforcement and create no international entity to punish violators of their terms. UNCLOS is also anthropocentric, advocating for preservation of marine resources in ABNJ only to the extent that it benefits humans and not for the sake of the environment in its own right. Additionally, under UNCLOS, each member state is responsible for gathering its own scientific information regarding the condition of fisheries and other ABNJ resources and for creating and implementing policies in line with its findings and the terms of UNCLOS, resulting in fragmented governance.

Q: What steps do you think should be taken for the international community to better address the challenges for ABNJ?

A new framework under UNCLOS is currently being negotiated to improve cross-sectoral and transnational communication and build equivalent scientific capacity and information-sharing networks among party states, and this is a great place to start. The creation of an international enforcement body under this new framework would also be an important step forward. Increased support and funding for initiatives like the Deep Seas Project and the Common Oceans ABNJ Project, as well as regional projects such as the Global Ocean Forum’s efforts to enhance capacity-building and cross-sectoral communication, would also be beneficial.