Deep Pockets

The ocean is the primary source of the world’s oxygen and a major regulator of its climate. The churning sea houses more animals and plants than the land. It also cycles nutrients, treats waste, and gives us shrimp cocktails. But human activities are putting all of those benefits at stake.

For more than a century, institutes in the Monterey Bay area have been cataloging the changes by sampling, probing and analyzing the sea. The first was Hopkins Marine Station, founded in 1892, just one year after its parent university. Ninety miles south of Stanford’s bucolic main campus, Hopkins sits on prime biological real estate along Pacific Grove’s coast.

Waves of marine institutes, as if pulled by the moon’s gravity, have since moved into the neighborhood.

In 1977, a group of scientists with connections to Hopkins Marine Station – including marine biologist and Stanford alum Nancy Packard Burnett – dreamed up the Monterey Bay Aquarium as a place to inspire ocean conservation. Burnett’s sister, UC-Santa Cruz-educated marine biologist Julie Packard, also got behind the idea.

The sisters made the pitch to their parents, and their father embraced the cause. David Packard – a loyal Stanford alum, Hewlett-Packard co-founder, Silicon Valley sire and former Nixon deputy defense secretary – realized how little the federal government knew about the deep sea compared with outer space. He saw a worthy investment.

With start-up money and brain power from the Packards, the aquarium opened its doors between Hopkins and Cannery Row in 1984. Three years later, David Packard founded MBARI to develop ocean exploration technology – a sort of NASA for the deep blue.

Though David Packard is now deceased, the 44-year-old, Palo Alto-based David and Lucile Packard Foundation continues to buoy much of the Monterey Bay area’s ocean research. Since 2005, the foundation has awarded more than $108 million to MBARI, more than $12 million to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation, $70,000 to Friends of Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, and more than $5 million to Big Sur Land Trust, whose acquisitions of coastal property help protect ocean resources. The foundation also has granted almost $2 million to blue activist group Oceana, more than $900,000 to the Elkhorn Slough Foundation, $75,000 to Friends of Monterey Academy of Oceanographic Science, almost $140,000 to the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation and more than $1 million to Cannery Row-based film company Sea Studios. And now, the Packard Foundation has provided $25 million in start-up funds for Ocean Solutions.