Borderless Blue

Julie Packard may share a name with the Packard Foundation, but she prefers to wear the hat of aquarium director, a post she’s held since its founding. She also sits on the MBARI board and has served on the Pew Oceans Commission. Now, she’s taking an active hand in preparing a home for Ocean Solutions.

A key trait for the center’s success is adaptive management, Packard explains. Programs should be flexible enough to respond to unpredictable changes in science and society. “We really see our role in being not so much generating the science to develop solutions,” she says, “but linking the information up with policymakers and bringing it to the next step.”

That might not sound radical, but it’s a big departure from standard academia. Colleges usually don’t teach scientists to engage in public process or economists to wrap their heads around natural science. “The system doesn’t reward interdisciplinary work,” Packard says.

Ocean Solutions, on the other hand, aims to deal in unlikely alliances, allowing students to take classes at an array of local schools – including Stanford, University of California-Santa Cruz, California State University-Monterey Bay, the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey Peninsula College and Monterey Institute of International Studies. “The object is to cut out the barriers for students to move between institutions,” Caldwell says. “We want to make sure we cast a broad net.”

That’ll require some adapting on the part of Monterey Bay’s marine institutes, each of which has its niche in the local research community. But just as estuaries flow into kelp forests, the institutes share liquid borders. Students from Hopkins and the Marine Labs have gone on to employment at MBARI, the Sanctuary and UC Santa Cruz. The MBARI board is stacked with leaders from the Aquarium, Hopkins, UCSC and NPS. MBARI shares the Marine Labs’ library and provides dock space for its research vessel.

The Sanctuary lends its ship – which pulls a “camera sled” behind it, like an aquatic Santa sleigh – to regional scientists. It also operates the Sanctuary Integrated Monitoring Network (SIMoN), which merges data from dozens of regional marine research institutes to keep a mechanical eye on marine ecosystems. The U.S. Navy’s Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center in Monterey provides MBARI with models, and MBARI lends Fleet Numerical sensors for its data collection. A research panel of local scientists meets regularly to swap thoughts and share research.

“Using the [1998] National Ocean Conference as a catalyst, we have been using the last 10 years to act as a community,” says MBARI CEO and Standford geophysics professor Marcia McNutt. Outside her office window, seagulls mob the harbor – a good omen for fishermen, even if it means MBARI employees will need to hose off their cars. “Collectively, we are as large as the major oceanographic institutions.”

“People talk about survival of the planet. The planet’s gonna survive just fine. It’s the survival of the human race—that’s what we’re talking about here.”

No doubt, the informal collaborations have produced what McNutt calls “fabulous science and totally cool tools.” But it hasn’t slowed the deterioration of the sea. “We’ve got good ideas of how we can fix these problems, and yet we lack the wherewithal to get them into a bigger arena,” she says. “Ocean Solutions is going to be that vehicle that is going to get these good minds and good ideas out the door and into that social and economic arena where they’re going to do the most good for the most people, and in time to make a difference.”

That’s critical not only for sea experts, but for all humans, McNutt stresses. “If photosynthesis is severely curtailed, do you think you can live with half as much oxygen?” she asks pointedly. “People talk about survival of the planet. The planet’s gonna survive just fine. It’s the survival of the human race – that’s what we’re talking about here. The microbes will inherit the oceans, and they will love it. The earth will survive. But it might not be us who inherit the earth.”