Beyond Monterey Bay and Our Splendid Isolation
Michael L. Weber
Senior author, "The Wealth of Oceans"
Formerly special assistant
to the Director of the National Marine
Fisheries Service and Vice President
for Programs of the Center
for Marine Conservation in Washington, D.C.
Mike Weber was keynote speaker for the Monterey Bay National
Marine Sanctuary Symposium, "Sanctuary Currents '96 - Building Community
Connections In Science, Education, and Conservation, " 9 March 1996;
his speech preceded the MBNMS Research Symposium.
Before I begin my prepared remarks, I would like to say how moved I was
by yesterday evening's award ceremony, by the enthusiastic support and involvement
of this community in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. For me,
it was a particularly gratifying event: Seventeen years ago, I testified
at a California Coastal Commission hearing in support of a proposed Monterey
Bay National Marine Sanctuary. We have come a long way.
You have so much to be proud of here; your community spirit and creativity
are inspiring. I only hope you will share your creativity and energy with
other sanctuary sites and other areas of the country. You have a lot to
offer. Please share it.
My principal theme today is the isolation we have imposed upon ourselves
as marine scientists, educators, conservationists, National Marine Sanctuary
Program supporters, and Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary supporters.
In promoting marine conservation and science, the National Marine Sanctuary
Program, or Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, we often emphasize how
different these concerns are from conservation and science on land, not
to mention economics, literature, art, mass media. I once thought that emphasizing
these differences might lift marine science and conservation out of its
relative obscurity. Now, I believe that emphasizing differences rather than
linkages has isolated us and marine conservation and science from the life
and aspirations of society at large.
Today, I want to share with you some of the links I have found in my own
efforts to break out of this isolation, and to encourage you to do some
barrier-breaking today yourselves.
Let me begin with a familiar example: the National Marine Sanctuary Program.
People inside and outside the United States often criticize the National
Marine Sanctuary program for not being more effective than it is, for not
having fulfilled its potential. I could give a number of reasons for people
adopting this view, such as the poor record of funding for the program,
confusion in the United States over just how protective we want to get with
things marine, and so on. But, I want to focus upon one obstacle to the
program's achieving its potential. And that is the program's isolation within
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The sanctuary program sits at the bottom of a very long chain of command,
which often is more interested in its own preservation than in tapping the
excitement that the sanctuary program generates outside Washington and outside
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As a result, the national
program does not routinely draw upon the extraordinary resources and capabilities
of other programs in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
from satellite remote sensing to fisheries oceanography. Nor does it draw
upon other Federal and state agencies, whose land, water, and wildlife management
programs can profoundly influence the waters and wildlife of sanctuaries.
The program is isolated, and its isolation is a strategic handicap.
This kind of isolation is not unique to the sanctuary program, to NOAA,
or to government. Specialization is a way of life in government and in private
society. Competition rather than collaboration is the rule for getting ahead.
Opening doors, building bridges, breaking down barriers between academic
disciplines, agency programs, citizens groups, and legislative committees
is the exception rather than the rule.
In recent years, a lot of hard work has brought oceans and coasts more attention
and support than they have received since the 1960s, when Vice President
Hubert Humphrey was a passionate advocate for oceans in the White House.
But our concern for the oceans now competes with many more concerns as worthy
and as urgent as our own. And too often, we find ourselves working in isolation
or competition with others whose agenda is slightly different, but complimentary
if we stop to think about it.
As an example, agriculture can have a profound effect on the quantity and
quality of water entering coastal and estuarine areas, and upon upstream
habitat critical to anadromous fishes. This linkage has not been recently
discovered; it has been known for many years. Yet, the importance of the
linkage is not matched by collaboration among those promoting sustainable
agriculture and those promoting coastal water quality and wildlife. The
same may be said for logging practices or dam operations.
Some of our most powerful potential allies are among the general public.
But despite excellent, valuable efforts, we ocean scientists, educators,
and conservationists are not getting our message through. Let me give you
some evidence for saying this.
The Chesapeake Bay, my home watershed for sixteen years, has been the focus
of a multi-million dollar state and Federal program of research and education
stretching back almost two decades. More is known about the links between
land and water in this watershed and bay than just about any other place
on Earth. This research led to restrictions on major industrial and municipal
sources of pollution, and there have been signs of improvement.
But for some time now, Bay scientists, activists, and many government leaders
have realized that the future of the bay will depend mostly on the behavior
of increasing numbers of commuters, homeowners, farmers, and others. For
more than a decade, governmental and nongovernmental groups have carried
out imaginative education programs informing the public about the linkages
between their activities and the condition of the bay, about ways they can
make their contribution to the bay's restoration. But by almost any standard,
the message hasn't gotten through to most people.
In 1994, the Chesapeake Bay Program released a survey of public attitudes
in the 64,000 square mile Chesapeake Bay watershed. Among other things,
the survey found that 85 percent of watershed residents who were interviewed
expressed concern about pollution in the bay. This was hardly surprising
given the massive education and media campaign of the previous decades.
But less than ten percent saw any connection between their own activities
and the state of the bay.
I found this latter result very depressing, because it pointed toward a
future of increasing pollution and habitat loss in one of this country's
truly spectacular coastal areas. It also told me that the notions I shared
with others about promoting public awareness needed a critical review and
possibly a complete overhaul.
Two other reports led me in the direction of a possible solution for this
problem.
In promoting understanding of global change, the Environmental Protection
Agency mounted a large public information program about global warming,
carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, fossil fuel combustion--the whole
enchilada. In evaluating the program, EPA found some problems, one of which
was a strategic error of the first order. Only after the program was launched
did EPA learn that many people associated global warming with ozone depletion,
not fossil fuel combustion. As a result, many people did not really hear
EPA's message about greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane.
The lesson I drew from EPA's experience was that we who are so eager to
enthuse and enroll the public in our crusades need to listen more closely
to our public. Or, in the words of community organizer Saul Alinksy: You
gotta take people where they are, not where you would like them to be.
The second revelation came from the work of a Mexican soap-opera producer
by the name of Miguel Sabido. For more than a decade, Sabido has been tapping
the popularity of soap operas to promote public awareness about the benefits
of family planning. Miguel Sabido has taken an issue that can be deadly
with numbers and abstraction, and has cast it in the kind of human, dramatic
terms that people immediately understand and identify with. Surveys of Sabido's
audiences have found that his programs not only create interest and understanding
about family planning, but they change behavior.
An important challenge and opportunity, then, is to dramatize what we know
about the oceans and the threats to their diversity, abundance, and beauty,
to dramatize our ocean world in human terms.
In researching my book, The Wealth of Oceans, I read more than I ever imagined
I would read about things that I had hardly imagined I would read about.
Attempting a comprehensive review of the oceans meant entering a lot of
new territory, overcoming my own isolation, reading and talking with a lot
of people, whose language and concerns were different from my own.
I found ocean research and technology particularly revealing, though very
difficult at times for a liberal arts major like myself. As interesting
as the scientific revelations, however, were the people doing the revealing.
For instance, during my reading, I encountered Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian