Rose George: Inside the secret shipping industry

257,646 views ・ 2013-12-13

TED


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00:12
A couple of years ago,
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Harvard Business School chose
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the best business model of that year.
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It chose Somali piracy.
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Pretty much around the same time,
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I discovered that there were 544 seafarers
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being held hostage on ships,
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often anchored just off the Somali coast
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in plain sight.
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And I learned these two facts, and I thought,
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what's going on in shipping?
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And I thought, would that happen in any other industry?
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Would we see 544 airline pilots
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held captive in their jumbo jets
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on a runway for months, or a year?
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Would we see 544 Greyhound bus drivers?
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It wouldn't happen.
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So I started to get intrigued.
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And I discovered another fact,
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which to me was more astonishing
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almost for the fact that I hadn't known it before
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at the age of 42, 43.
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That is how fundamentally we still depend on shipping.
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Because perhaps the general public
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thinks of shipping as an old-fashioned industry,
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something brought by sailboat
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with Moby Dicks and Jack Sparrows.
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But shipping isn't that.
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Shipping is as crucial to us as it has ever been.
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Shipping brings us 90 percent of world trade.
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Shipping has quadrupled in size since 1970.
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We are more dependent on it now than ever.
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And yet, for such an enormous industry --
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there are a 100,000 working vessels on the sea —
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it's become pretty much invisible.
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Now that sounds absurd in Singapore to say that,
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because here shipping is so present
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that you stuck a ship on top of a hotel.
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(Laughter)
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But elsewhere in the world,
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if you ask the general public what they know
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about shipping and how much trade is carried by sea,
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you will get essentially a blank face.
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You will ask someone on the street
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if they've heard of Microsoft.
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I should think they'll say yes,
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because they'll know that they make software
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that goes on computers,
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and occasionally works.
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But if you ask them if they've heard of Maersk,
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I doubt you'd get the same response,
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even though Maersk,
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which is just one shipping company amongst many,
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has revenues pretty much on a par with Microsoft.
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[$60.2 billion]
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Now why is this?
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A few years ago,
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the first sea lord of the British admiralty --
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he is called the first sea lord,
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although the chief of the army is not called a land lord —
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he said that we, and he meant
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in the industrialized nations in the West,
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that we suffer from sea blindness.
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We are blind to the sea
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as a place of industry or of work.
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It's just something we fly over,
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a patch of blue on an airline map.
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Nothing to see, move along.
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So I wanted to open my own eyes
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to my own sea blindness,
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so I ran away to sea.
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A couple of years ago, I took a passage
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on the Maersk Kendal,
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a mid-sized container ship
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carrying nearly 7,000 boxes,
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and I departed from Felixstowe,
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on the south coast of England,
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and I ended up right here in Singapore
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five weeks later,
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considerably less jet-lagged than I am right now.
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And it was a revelation.
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We traveled through five seas,
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two oceans, nine ports,
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and I learned a lot about shipping.
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And one of the first things that surprised me
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when I got on board Kendal
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was, where are all the people?
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I have friends in the Navy who tell me
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they sail with 1,000 sailors at a time,
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but on Kendal there were only 21 crew.
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Now that's because shipping is very efficient.
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Containerization has made it very efficient.
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Ships have automation now.
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They can operate with small crews.
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But it also means that, in the words
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of a port chaplain I once met,
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the average seafarer you're going to find
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on a container ship is either tired or exhausted,
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because the pace of modern shipping
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is quite punishing for what the shipping calls
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its human element,
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a strange phrase which they don't seem to realize
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sounds a little bit inhuman.
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So most seafarers now working on container ships
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often have less than two hours in port at a time.
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They don't have time to relax.
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They're at sea for months at a time,
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and even when they're on board,
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they don't have access to what
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a five-year-old would take for granted, the Internet.
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And another thing that surprised me when I got on board Kendal
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was who I was sitting next to --
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Not the queen; I can't imagine why they put me underneath her portrait --
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But around that dining table in the officer's saloon,
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I was sitting next to a Burmese guy,
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I was opposite a Romanian, a Moldavian, an Indian.
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On the next table was a Chinese guy,
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and in the crew room, it was entirely Filipinos.
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So that was a normal working ship.
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Now how is that possible?
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Because the biggest dramatic change
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in shipping over the last 60 years,
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when most of the general public stopped noticing it,
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was something called an open registry,
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or a flag of convenience.
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Ships can now fly the flag of any nation
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that provides a flag registry.
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You can get a flag from the landlocked nation
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of Bolivia, or Mongolia,
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or North Korea, though that's not very popular.
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(Laughter)
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So we have these very multinational,
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global, mobile crews on ships.
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And that was a surprise to me.
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And when we got to pirate waters,
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down the Bab-el-Mandeb strait and into the Indian Ocean,
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the ship changed.
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And that was also shocking, because suddenly,
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I realized, as the captain said to me,
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that I had been crazy to choose to go
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through pirate waters on a container ship.
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We were no longer allowed on deck.
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There were double pirate watches.
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And at that time, there were those 544 seafarers being held hostage,
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and some of them were held hostage for years
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because of the nature of shipping and the flag of convenience.
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Not all of them, but some of them were,
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because for the minority of unscrupulous ship owners,
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it can be easy to hide behind
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the anonymity offered by some flags of convenience.
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What else does our sea blindness mask?
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Well, if you go out to sea on a ship
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or on a cruise ship, and look up to the funnel,
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you'll see very black smoke.
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And that's because shipping
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has very tight margins, and they want cheap fuel,
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so they use something called bunker fuel,
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which was described to me by someone in the tanker industry
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as the dregs of the refinery,
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or just one step up from asphalt.
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And shipping is the greenest method of transport.
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In terms of carbon emissions per ton per mile,
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it emits about a thousandth of aviation
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and about a tenth of trucking.
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But it's not benign, because there's so much of it.
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So shipping emissions are about three to four percent,
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almost the same as aviation's.
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And if you put shipping emissions
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on a list of the countries' carbon emissions,
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it would come in about sixth,
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somewhere near Germany.
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It was calculated in 2009 that the 15 largest ships
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pollute in terms of particles and soot
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and noxious gases
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as much as all the cars in the world.
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And the good news is that
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people are now talking about sustainable shipping.
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There are interesting initiatives going on.
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But why has it taken so long?
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When are we going to start talking and thinking
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about shipping miles as well as air miles?
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I also traveled to Cape Cod to look
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at the plight of the North Atlantic right whale,
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because this to me was one of the most surprising things
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about my time at sea,
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and what it made me think about.
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We know about man's impact on the ocean
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in terms of fishing and overfishing,
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but we don't really know much about
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what's happening underneath the water.
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And in fact, shipping has a role to play here,
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because shipping noise has contributed
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to damaging the acoustic habitats of ocean creatures.
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Light doesn't penetrate beneath the surface of the water,
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so ocean creatures like whales and dolphins
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and even 800 species of fish
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communicate by sound.
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And a North Atlantic right whale
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can transmit across hundreds of miles.
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A humpback can transmit a sound
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across a whole ocean.
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But a supertanker can also be heard
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coming across a whole ocean,
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and because the noise that propellers make underwater
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is sometimes at the same frequency that whales use,
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then it can damage their acoustic habitat,
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and they need this for breeding,
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for finding feeding grounds,
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for finding mates.
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And the acoustic habitat of the North Atlantic right whale
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has been reduced by up to 90 percent.
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But there are no laws governing acoustic pollution yet.
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And when I arrived in Singapore,
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and I apologize for this, but I didn't want to get off my ship.
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I'd really loved being on board Kendal.
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I'd been well treated by the crew,
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I'd had a garrulous and entertaining captain,
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and I would happily have signed up for another five weeks,
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something that the captain also said
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I was crazy to think about.
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But I wasn't there for nine months at a time
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like the Filipino seafarers,
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who, when I asked them to describe their job to me,
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called it "dollar for homesickness."
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They had good salaries,
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but theirs is still an isolating and difficult life
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in a dangerous and often difficult element.
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But when I get to this part, I'm in two minds,
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because I want to salute those seafarers
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who bring us 90 percent of everything
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and get very little thanks or recognition for it.
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I want to salute the 100,000 ships
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that are at sea
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that are doing that work, coming in and out
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every day, bringing us what we need.
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But I also want to see shipping,
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and us, the general public, who know so little about it,
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to have a bit more scrutiny,
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to be a bit more transparent,
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to have 90 percent transparency.
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Because I think we could all benefit
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from doing something very simple,
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which is learning to see the sea.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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