KEY TOPICS:
Marine megafauna bycatch in small-scale fisheries
Systems Thinking
Interview-based Rapid Bycatch Assessments
Examples of "solutions" gone awry
The need for meaningful support for fully integrated, participatory conservation processes
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello all, and welcome to Conservation Realist! This episode is another monologue, and I will be waxing poetic on the topic of bycatch. Bycatch is a topic that has really shaped my career in fundamental ways. And I stubbornly can't let go of it. Even as my career has shifted away from being full-time in conservation, even as I have grown more disillusioned with mainstream conservation (yes, I realize that makes me sound like a fringe conspiracy theorist when I call it the "mainstream"), even through all of that, I want to figure out a way to make the study and mitigation of bycatch more productive, somehow.
When I say "bycatch," I am referring to marine megafauna bycatch. So that is the accidental capture of large, charismatic, beautiful marine animals in fishing gears. That includes marine mammals, marine turtles, seabirds, and sharks and rays, and most of my experience is with marine mammals and some with marine turtles, and I've only tangentially touched upon reports of bycatch of rays and sharks.
Bycatch was really my gateway into the kind of research I do know. I started off as someone doing research of the behavioral ecology of animals - mainly terrestrial animals, actually - and it was a grand ol' time. I loved spending the day in the forest, following monkeys, and just seeing what they got up to. But I knew that I really needed to conduct research that I felt was more productive in terms of informing and supporting conservation of the animals I was studying.
So my PhD advisor Dr. Lisa Ballance, who is a fabulous example of a fantastic leader (I'll be speaking more about leadership in a future episode), introduced me to the issue of marine megafauna bycatch. She very insightfully thought, "This seems to check all of Tara's boxes in terms of what she's looking for in a research topic."
So I found myself quite hooked or enmeshed (yes, I'm playing quite liberally with the bycatch puns) by the topic of bycatch. And, speaking of puns, I initially admonished myself to not use the word "tangled" or "entanglement" in this episode title, because that is such a tired old pun that so many bycatch researchers have used (certainly not me) (I have... I have used it). But then I decided to really lean into it, and so we have the title: Tangled in Entanglements. And that's because it's just a perfect word - "tangled" doesn't refer only to the animal being tangled in fishing gear. It also refers to the remarkably, intricately complicated web in which this bycatch occurs.
In speaking about bycatch, I want to address in a little more length than I have in previous episodes the idea of systems thinking. And I will have a newsletter out soon on this, hopefully with some illustrative figures and guidelines on how to use this approach when looking at any complex situation. It involves a highly technical skill that I refer to as "doodling." Yes, I do believe that just doodles can do a lot to help conservation. Please keep your eyes out for that.
So systems thinking: this is the idea that we try to map out what's happening in the context of a given topic that we're studying. So you can imagine you have this interaction between fishing gear and an animal, or animals. What was that fishing boat fishing for in the first place? Why was there an overlap between the fishing boat and the animals? You can think about, what are the characteristics of the gear that made it more likely that the animals got caught in it, in terms of the materials it's made of, where it's set, how deep in the water it is, how long it's left in the water.
But then we get into the more social side of things. Why are those fishers out fishing? What are the needs they need to fulfill through fishing? Is it just income, is it food for subsistence, is it a way of life, is it a tradition, are there no other options for work? Who is creating the demand for that product that they're out there fishing? Who else benefits from them being out fishing? In many cases there are women who do fish processing, so they gain a livelihood from that. There are fish buyers or fish collectors, anyone who's involved in the market chain will benefit from that fishery.
And then thinking: okay, what's going on with these fisheries? Are they sustainable? Are they thriving or are they struggling? Is there overfishing, is there competition with industrial fisheries?
Let me take a step back and clarify: the type of fisheries that I have expertise in and experience studying bycatch in is small-scale fisheries (SSF) - industrial fisheries are a different situation altogether. But I'm referring to small-scale fisheries - these are relatively low-tech, smaller vessels, generally fishing closer to shore, in many cases run by smaller companies or families, although that's not always the case, maybe it is connected to a larger company - there's all sorts of variants that one can find. There's going to be everything from people fishing independently for their family needs up to fleets of small-scale boats that are contracted to a given company.
One thing that can be generally said about a lot of small-scale fisheries in the world, particularly in the Global South, is that they tend to be among the most marginalized communities. They are generally poor. There are often cycles of debt as they take out loans to pay for gear or boats or fuel, example. They are very sensitive to impacts from climate change, an example being extreme weather events. They have limited access to fairly basic but very important services and facilities and infrastructure, such as education, healthcare, markets, etc.
They're often not represented in decision-making processes at all. Not only are they vulnerable, they also don't have access in many cases to their rights to lobby, advocate, and shape change in their situation. They are often harmed by coastal development, by external industrial concerns that have an impact on the environment, by privatization of natural resources (Blue Economy, I'm looking at you!).
We are looking at communities that are vulnerable. They're not your typical villain in a Ferngully (I'm dating myself) or Avatar-type movie. This is not some evil corporate overlord who wants to destroy rainforests for his own personal gain. We're looking at this very incidental, accidental interaction between fishing gears and animals that a lot of us happen to think are pretty neat. Unfortunately, the people who are involved in that bycatch - they're not meaning to do it - they don't really have a whole lot of options for changing what they're doing it, and they don't have a lot of access to platforms where they can be an active part of contributing to and shaping solutions to issues like bycatch.
Unfortunately, this bycatch in SSF is a major threat to marine megafauna around the world. It is the main threat for some of the most endangered marine mammals, for example. And again, it's a really tough situation where in most cases there's no obvious "bad guy." Unfortunately, I think that the prevailing narrative in conservation for so long has been to reduce it to this oversimplified view of: oh, there's an animal that's endangered? Someone, somewhere, must be doing something bad, and they must be doing it maliciously, and they're the villains and we need to stop this.
And this is a much more nuanced situation where there are a lot of factors that are, again, all tangled together.
So let's imagine - this is a *really* out there idea (sarcasm) - that you decide to fix the problem by saying: you know what? That kind of fishing that you're doing, that's catching those animals? You can't do it anymore. There you go - problem solved! Dust your hands off, call yourself a conservation hero, take a bow.
...It doesn't work like that. A comparable conservation approach is often described by the label of "fences and fines," and in a similar vein is the idea of "fortress conservation."
First of all, this kind of bycatch in SSF that we're talking about often occurs in contexts where there are inadequate resources for that kind of blanket conservation enforcement. There are inadequate resources for fisheries monitoring, let alone managing those fisheries, and when you're talking about restricting a kind of fishing practice, that really is a fisheries management issue, though there is an overlap with conservation interests. We're talking about inadequate resources to do this kind of enforcement, let alone the fact that this kind of enforcement of such a ban raises some serious ethical questions (I direct you to the previous episode with Doc Jom where we talk about human collateral damage of conservation).
So, this approach: let's say you undertake it regardless of the many caveats I just mentioned. Okay, what happens? First of all, who's going to be impacted? It's going to the be fishers - they can't go out fishing the way they're used to. So, do you provide them with an alternative way of fishing, and is that going to be as productive for them? Are they going to earn the same amount of money? Are they going to have to work harder? Are they going to have to put themselves more at risk through, say, longer fishing trips? If they shift fishing grounds, are they going to run into conflicts with people who are already fishing there? And what happens to everyone else in that market chain, if the demand is now for a different fisheries product? Okay, people processing it might have to learn how to process differently, and there might be an entirely different consumer base for it.
So there are those kinds of things to consider. And if there's no acceptable alternative given to the fishers, what happens to their families? I've studied the case of the vaquita in Mexico - it's the most endangered marine mammal in the world, it's a little porpoise. It's very complicated, maybe I'll at some point post some of the presentations I've done on it. But in simple terms, what I found was that a ban on gillnets resulted in increased food insecurity. The local food bank said that they had a lot more demand for their food from fishing families. There were also reports of increases in depression and anxiety. Of course, there are many other things that could increase depression and anxiety in a community, but for many people, their perspective was that this fishing ban really contributed to that. These are people's lives. These are real impacts. So your quick and easy solution turns out to not have been so quick and easy. It actually ended up being quite harmful.
So in developing this approach to "fixing" bycatch, conservationists - because yes, this is not a hypothetical example, this is (okay) a bit of an oversimplified version of what people have tried - they're looking at the problem through a very narrow viewfinder or lens. They're just looking at that immediate, that very proximate issue, of: animals are getting caught in this gear, so let's get this gear out of the water.
Whereas, in reality, they've kind of tugged on one line of this tangled web, and ended up making a much bigger mess. Like, you know when you're trying to untangle something and you accidentally pull something wrong way, like you pull a string the wrong way, you end up with a more intractable knot. And that is what indeed happens in certain cases (I would say in many cases).
It's important to note that this massive entangled web that we're working with, it's not just social-ecological drivers, it's not just what's going on with the economics or the politics of it all. There are also human interactions involved, and issues of conflict and history and trust - and those are very complex. If you're intensifying the kind of conflict that communities perceive between their well-being and conservation, you're really harming conservation long-term, because they're never again (probably) going to see conservation as being something that they want to engage in.
And again, if you're operating in a situation where you don't have perfect enforcement, you really need local people to be on board, because they're the ones who are going to be implementing that conservation solution. So, as mentioned in the previous episode, these end up being counterproductive conservation pathways.
By not developing solutions from the start that actively include communities members and their concerns and considerations, and also their experience and expertise, you risk coming up with solutions that are far too narrow, that harm communities, that reduce their trust in conservation and reduce the likelihood that they'll collaborate, cooperate, coordinate with conservation in the future. You find yourself in a situation where implementation of your conservation action is just not going to happen. And so, the animal that you're trying to protect actually ends up less protected. You've actually made the situation worse. (I don't know why I laughed there... it's not funny, it's just my reaction to distress - to laugh plaintively).
Learning from these situations, learning from the various bycatch case studies that I've look at, I found that it was so instrumental for me to literally doodle out what was going on. And this is a case where coming into a site with a sort of natural scientist viewpoint of "I have to have a hypothesis and that will structure my entire train of inquiry here" - it just doesn't fit at this scope and scale and stage of inquiry. Hypothesis-driven thinking is important - it does have a role - but when we're thinking about these really complex situations that span different disciplinary concerns, you need to go in with a much more open mind and kind of observe what's going on. But have some system for organizing those observations.
For me, those are my trusty boxes and arrows that I use to map out various components of what might be happening, and different considerations, be it as concrete as "this animal is being caught by this kind of fishing gear in this location, and this is a fishery for a given species that goes to XYZ city to be sold" - that's a pretty concrete thing to document - to things as abstract as the history of conflict between different stakeholder types and how that might be influencing how they perceive each other and their willingness (or lack thereof) to work together in the present and in the future.
At the risk of becoming fairly boring, and presuming that I haven't been boring so far, I do want to go a little bit into how we even study bycatch to start with. With industrial fisheries, at least those that fall within the management mandates of some kind of regulatory body, be that national or international, in most cases there would be cases for an observer to be on board. That observer documents various things that are going on with what that fishing boat does, including bycatch of Species of Special Interest, Endangered Threatened and Protected species, and that's considered the gold standard of understanding how much bycatch is happening in those fisheries.
This is really not applicable to small-scale fisheries, right? In a certain portion of the cases, the boats are literally too small to accommodate an extra person on them. And small-scale fisheries, compared to industrial fisheries, we're talking about a lot of small boats that are very dispersed. And if we're talking about a relatively rare animal, the bycatch of that animal might, again, be a relatively rare occurrence in the fishery. Let's say you're dealing with a very endangered population. How are you going to have the coverage with observers that you need - how are you going to ensure that enough boats have that inconvenient extra person sitting in them to document bycatch on enough fishing trips to ensure that they are able to witness this relatively rare event?
That's just impossible, right? It's just not going to happen in that context.
So the next best thing that's been settled upon is interview-based research. So we are literally asking fishermen about how much bycatch they are experiencing. The numbers we're trying to get at with this research, at its very core: we want to know how many animals of a given species or population are caught in a given fishery per year. That can be a function of understanding how many animals are caught per boat per year, and then if you know how many boats are operating in a more or less similar way with the same fishing gear, and you feel like you have sampled a representative sample of boats: so you've interviewed, I don't know, 10 boats out of a fleet of 100, and you feel like they're all more or less the same, and out of those 10 boats, you got reports of "oh, we caught 5 animals in the past year" out of those 10 boats. So that's 10% of the fleet, and to extrapolate you can say that 5 extrapolates to 50 - this fishery is catching 50 animals per year.
That's the idea. You need to know how many animals are caught per year in the sample of boats that you're talking to. You also need to know how many boats are going out, so what is the total effort that's happening. Through interviews, you get estimates for how many animals are caught for a given number of boats, and you multiply that times the total number of boats. Voila!
Unfortunately, it is never so simple. First of all, getting at the number of boats in a fleet: this is one way of measuring fishing effort. Basically, how much fishing is happening? The number of active boats in a fleet is a fairly imperfect measure, but it works and it's relatively easy to collect. The problem is, even though it's relatively easy to collect, there's still a lot of uncertainty. One would imagine that local fisheries offices would have a reliable record of the number of registered vessels, and some of them do, but a lot of the vessels are not registered. And a lot of the offices I've visited had wildly inaccurate numbers for the number of registered vessels. It's almost kind of an accepted, sad, plaintive-laughing-at truth among people studying small-scale fisheries, that these records must be taken with a very large grain of salt.
In one case, I was on an island in the Philippines, in one village or barangay, and it was one of my first days conducting interviews. I'd gone to the fisheries office and looked at the records, and "oh, okay, there's like 82 boats in this barangay, but I'll double check with the barangay captain in case anything's changed since the last time the fisheries office collected these records."
And I meet with him: "Oh, I understand that there are around 80 fishing boats using XYZ gear in this barangay" and he just started laughing at me: "Oh, no. No no no. We have like 16."
So, it turns out what had happened was that there had been an oil spill some years prior, and that the oil company had to reimburse fishing families for the impact to the ecosystem - fair enough. And this is, I think, an extremely fair gaming of the system by which families were registering their children as owning boats so they could collect more reimbursement.
That's probably the most extreme example I've come across, but generally, those numbers from the fisheries office are going to need to be ground truthed. So we often ask people who are heads of fisher associations or just knowledgeable old salts in the communities: "Okay, what are the main gears are used in this village? Roughly how many boats are using each gear?" And we ask several people this and see what their numbers converge to.
The tricky thing is many boats use multiple kinds of gears, different types of gears have different fishing seasons... there's a lot of complexity. Even people using the same gears will use them in somewhat different ways or in somewhat different places. It's really variable. It's maddeningly variable. Whenever it comes to measuring fishing effort, I kind of internally groan.
So, that's one of the most basic metrics we need to get at, and it's actually quite complex. And then there is the uncertainty in the information you're getting about the animals that are getting caught. That is largely because bycatch of these animals is illegal. These charismatic marine megafauna species are protected in many countries by law. Causing any harm to them, even if it's completely accidental, puts one at risk for fines certainly, possibly even jail time in some cases. So why would anyone willingly share that information with you, especially if there's any concern that the information will make its way to enforcement authorities?
Now, in many cases, the enforcement authorities are not sufficiently resourced to enforce such rules, but there is still that fear of being caught doing something illegal.
So the assumption is that when you're interviewing people about bycatch, there's going to be underreporting. Basically, what's told to you is just a portion of the actual bycatch that's happening.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that there's a lot of "squishiness" to this data. Every parameter that we're measuring has a lot of squishiness to it. And it's a tough situation because the decisions you want to make on this might affect people's livelihoods. At the same time, if you don't effectively protect the species or population, you very well might lose them, because bycatch is a major threat - in some cases, the major threat - to these populations. So it's just very tricky.
I will say that getting reliable information on bycatch would be much more feasible if there were a context where fishers could share that information without fear of being penalized. So it would be really helpful, for example, if the local fisheries agency would agree to some kind of amnesty while research and efforts to mitigate bycatch are ongoing. Because, as mentioned in the previous episode with Doc Jom, if you have that atmosphere of fear and strict enforcement, you're just going to push that problem underground. It's still going to happen; you're just not going to be able to study it.
And let me have a vulnerable moment of candor with you: I am severely overwhelmed by work and other commitments in my life at the moment, and I'm not thinking the most clearly and it's actually quite late in the evening and I'm very tired. I don't have a clear sense of how coherent this episode has been, and I hope that some valuable insight has been shed on bycatch.
But I want to share a vignette from my research on the vaquita, the critically endangered porpoise in Mexico which is threatened by bycatch. I don't want to share too much here now, because I very well might devote a future episode or newsletter to it in the future, there's a lot of things to learn from it. But this really touched my heart, really hurt my heart. We were interviewing this lovely fisherman about the vaquita conservation process by which many community members felt they'd been harmed. And he brought out this folder that was just full of different papers. He was so proud of this folder, and it was all these different certificates of participation to different workshops with different conservation groups and groups working on fisheries management. He was so proud and so glad that he had been included in these opportunities to learn, to share his own expertise. And he was so sad that he hadn't felt that there were opportunities for him to be more involved in the decisions shaping the vaquita's conservation or the alternatives gears that were being proposed to the fishers.
And I felt, first of all, personally sad for him: that's just terrible, that he had this interest and this passion, he was really into it, and just didn't have the opportunity to exercise that in this case. And it also made me feel sad, like: what a lost opportunity, right? (I've been using the word "right?" a lot - I'm from Southern California). It was just sad on so many levels. I just wanted to share that here as a poignant reminder that these fishermen, they're the experts on how they fish and where they fish and what's happening there. Sure, there's some variation - some don't pay very much attention to what they're doing or they're new or not very mindful, but I'd say a lot of them are paying attention to what they're doing and they do notice what's happening and they do care about their local environment.
So, to undertake any kind of plan to mitigate bycatch without these experts at the table is a huge misstep (as an understatement).
I find the bycatch issue so instructive, albeit perhaps in a depressing way, for learning about how conservation functions and how it needs to change. It's an issue where the normal, I would say perhaps sometimes lazy, platitudes about how to approach conservation very clearly fall short. You know, saying "oh, we'll do ecotourism!" Okay, what if the species that you're trying to save is actually quite shy of boats? Or what if there are so few of them left that it's really not going to be a reliable source of sightings for tourists? What if there's no infrastructure for tourism in the village? How do you ensure that the people who are able to make a living from tourism are the same ones who will lose their living from limitations on their fishing, for example?
Then there's the "we will educate the communities!" Okay, that's fine, and I've definitely been to communities where they don't actually know a whole lot about the biology or ecology of, let's say, the dolphins, and they do seem to enjoy learning. But informing the community without also ensuring that they somehow have power to do something with that information is not necessarily going to get you very far, especially if those educational activities are fairly limited in their duration and scope.
Another classic is: okay, we'll just boycott products from that fishery. Again, it's like okay, that's fine. But what does that do and who does that impact on the ground? It hurts the people who are already vulnerable and marginalized and don't have other alternatives. And maybe they'll find another market for that fisheries product, in which case your boycott's really doing nothing, it's actually removing any lever you might have had as a consumer from your involvement in that conservation issue.
I'm not saying not to boycott things - I know boycotts can be very effective - but I would like to urge a little more mindfulness when we are formulating what this kind of boycott strategy will play out as.
There's a couple of examples from my main field site for my dissertation, which was Malampaya Sound in the Philippines, and I was studying bycatch of Irrawaddy dolphins. And I'd gone into it very optimistic, thinking: you know what? Wouldn't it be fantastic if I could find that the gears that are catching the dolphins are also viewed negatively by the communities for other reasons? Maybe they're seen as unsustainable, maybe they're harming the fish stocks and then people using other gears don't like these "bad gears" and then we'll have community support for switching those people to other gears.
That was an absolute dream. Totally didn't happen that way. Instead, what happened is one of the two main gears that catch the dolphins are the local crab pots. These are little straw traps, essentially, for crabs. And yes, when I first heard about them, I did initially think "how do the dolphins get caught in those tiny traps?"... they get caught in the lines connecting the traps as the traps are set at the bottom of the water, and I'm so glad I didn't ask that question loudly and in front of a lot of people.
But yes, those traps are made by local Indigenous Peoples who do make some income from selling those traps. Those traps are also used by some of the lower income fishers in the area. So one could say that fishing gear we needed to get rid of to help the dolphins was also one on which some of the most marginalized people in that area relied upon. So there was no easy win-win, feel-good fix that one could suggest in that case.
On a similar note, I was told by a good friend who has many many more years of experience working in that province and has been involved and knowledgeable about conservation efforts in Malampaya Sound said there was a gear buyback program at one point. So basically, if you want people to stop fishing with a certain gear, you offer to give them money if they bring in that gear. You're buying back their gear. The problem was that fishers were like, "Oh! I'll get money for bringing in this gear." So they kept making new gear and bringing it to sell, and also continued using that gear. That didn't quite go as planned, either.
There was another little example from the Philippines with sea turtles. Some local fisheries offices had given an incentive for people to bring in any sea turtles that they'd accidentally caught, so that the turtles could be tagged and information collected on them. And for their participation in this, fishers would be given something like, say, a bag of rice. So that's the opposite of making people feel scared for reporting their bycatch.
The issue was, according to some of the people I interviewed in fisheries offices: this might have incentivized particularly pro-active fishers to go out of their way to catch turtles and bring them in so they could collect their rice reward.
Another solution that is used, and this is one that Doc Jom alluded to in the previous episode: the idea of compensation and providing financial support. So, we're stopping you from fishing in a certain way, so here's a certain amount of financial support as well as other support in terms of technical or other resources, other capacity support to help you transition to a different livelihood. These are all lovely things to promise. They are quite a bit more complex and involved to deliver on in an effective way.
In the case of the vaquita, for example, the fishers were promised compensation. I was conducting my research about a year after the gillnet ban had been implemented. There was this long line of people waiting to enter an information session on how to claim their compensation. It was a year out, and these folks still hadn't been given a clear pathway to getting their fair compensation that had been promised to them.
Not all of these ideas are inherently faulty, but they require really careful, thought-out, coordinated implementation. That's what is often missing. I don't want to entirely blame conservationists for being careless. Conservation operates in this atmosphere of limited time, limited resources, a funding structure that doesn't support that kind of long-term investment and development of relationships, and (as Dr. Ruth Brennan mentioned in Episode 7) the messiness of the process of really working in a participatory way with communities. So... [dramatically impassioned voice] "the system is broken!!!!"
I feel like we really do need to examine, in a fundamental way, how conservation endeavors are supported, and really create an enabling environment for these more well thought-out, inclusive, collaborative, and effective processes.
And I really don't have a sense of what I've covered in this episode so far. I think I'm going to have to start scripting these a little more - I appreciate your patience with me. But I do want to add here some resounding final thoughts for the episode.
So, one reason I stay involved and so invested in bycatch of marine megafauna in small-scale fisheries is - I'm not trying to toot my own horn here - I am one of the experts in this field. That also speaks to how the field is actually fairly limited, right? So I know there are a lot of bright minds out there with possibly some innovative ideas that haven't been brought in to thinking about the bycatch in small-scale fisheries issue. So I would love for bycatch to be more widely studied. I have hope that there many bright people out there who haven't thought about this yet, and maybe once they are brought into the issue a bit more, can offer a bit of perspective that's been maybe missing so far. That does include fishers and people in coastal communities.
I also find that bycatch is almost a problem that takes pleasure in shooting down tropes about conservation solutions, as I mentioned earlier. I feel that for most of the cases I've seen, there's no magical solution that gets around the fact that you have to engage very deeply and meaningfully and, as mentioned in the episode with Dr. Ruth Brennan, endure the messiness of the process of really collaborating with stakeholders, with communities. I think that this is such a powerful thought experiment for students working in conservation to work though.
And: systems thinking. It's important, it's useful, I encourage you to learn more about it. I'll be offering some more information from how I happen to use it myself.
My final point is kind of one of my favorite talking points: there is this kind of bottleneck where we have a lot of people trying to get a grasp of what I call the proximate details of the problem: how many animals are being caught, in what fisheries, and how?
We don't have nearly as much effort going into farther along in the process: how do we engage with communities in a more effective way? How do we creatively work with communities and work in ways that can benefit from their own creativity, their own ideas, their own expertise, to develop solution? How do we make conservation a more integrated and holistic process, where people's well-being is really part of what we're working for. Because I challenge anyone to think about any of these bycatch situations, and come up with a situation where you don't need to think about those issues.
And there are experts in the world on questions like that. There are plenty of people in the world who work on those kinds of interpersonal relationships and organizational management or leadership development. So I'm hopeful that there's a lot of potential approaches that haven't been tried yet.
But I also recognize how daunting this issue is, and how fundamentally conservation needs to change if it hopes to fix this problem in any meaningful way at all.
So, on that somewhat sobering note, I want to thank you once again for listening to me jabber on. In case I neglected to do this earlier, allow me to pester you to like, share, review, comment, and may I be so bold as to suggest: donate, if you have the means and motivation.
I really appreciate you listening along or reading along (or both). This really isn't as polished of a product - this whole endeavor - as I'd like if I had a situation where I had no other demands on my time or energy. But, as a recovering overachiever, I'm actually quite happy with this being... good enough! I'm pleased that I'm able to get some ideas out there that I feel are important. I'm very pleased that people seem to be listening and I hope you continue to listen.
Alright, here is the beautiful song The Green Touch by Soe Moe Twin, Zyan Htet, and Min Min in Myanmar. I hope you all take care, and you'll hear from me soon!
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