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| How I Got Started
I fell in love with nature, plants, and animals at an early age. I knew even when I was a small child that I wanted to be whatever it was that would let me work with plants and animals. I later learned that it was a biologist, a scientist. My family used to go to the shore of New Jersey for vacations, and that’s where I met the ocean and some of the creatures that live there. I found life in the ocean irresistible. My parents did not discourage my curiosity, but rather let me explore. Now I work at the National Geographic Society. I’m presently working on a project called the Sustainable Seas Expeditions, a five-year study of the national marine sanctuaries. The fish know all about them. The whales are very familiar with them, but people aren’t. We’ve established them as protected areas, but there is still much to learn from the 12 locations along the coastal waters of the United States. My vision is to try to get to know them better because they are still largely unexplored. I want to explore them, and I want to engage my fellow scientists, my fellow citizens, and youngsters from all over the country to get to know their own aquatic back yard. Where My Interests Take Me I had a project some years ago that involved getting acquainted with a wild dolphin. It was so incredible that I wanted to share it with my children. But it meant taking them out of school for a while, so they had some catching up to do when they got back. But they had a special experience in the ocean. And that’s happened to them off and on during their life. For me it’s a special gift to be able to share time with them and to look at fish and whales and the ocean through their eyes. It enriches my experience enormously to be able to share it with my children and now with my grandchildren as well. And I hope that children all over the country…all over the world…will understand the ocean and how it works and that our youngsters will go see it for themselves. I recently asked a number of important people to say what they thought about the ocean and I put their remarks in the book called Wild Ocean. Amazing kinds of responses came in. Robin Williams, who is well known as an actor and comedian, loves dolphins and loves the ocean. And he contributed a few remarks and thoughts about his experiences with dolphins. That has a huge impact on the way people think of dolphins or think of the ocean because they can hear his voice. And your voice is really important as well. Don’t think you don’t have power. You do. The point is having the courage to use that power in whatever way you are motivated to make that power known. The Adventure People sometimes think that the scariest things that happen to a marine biologist must have something to do with sharks. That’s not true. Sharks mind their own business most of the time. It’s really not as frightening as some people might imagine, plunging beneath the surface of the ocean down into the deep, dark sea. In fact, it’s beautiful. And if you plan what you do, it’s very safe. I recently went to Hawaii to prepare for the upcoming Sustainable Seas Expedition. Out on the water, I got into this little submarine that I was going to test. A crane lowered me over the side of the boat into the ocean. They removed the hook attached to the submarine, and right away I plunged down to about 200 feet below the surface. I could see a slope that went off into deeper water, and I asked the people on the boat if I might go a little bit deeper. They said, “Sure, follow it on down.” I followed the slope, and finally I was nearly a thousand feet underwater. I was deep enough to see the sparkle, flash, and glow of little creatures as they used their bioluminescence. It’s like falling into the galaxy, like diving into the Fourth of July, with fireworks going off all around you. You drive along in what you think would be darkness, but it’s not really dark. You see creatures looking back at you through the darkness. I would have been happy to stay overnight and just keep flying through the ocean. And I suspect so would any of you. It’s there for you to do; it’s there for me do. And I hope to do a lot more of it in the years I have ahead. It’s one of the great joys of coming along at this point in history. There are so many tools that I have at my disposal, and that you have at yours, to see the aquatic part of the world. Discoveries in the Field I hope the most important discoveries that I will make in my lifetime are still out there to be done. There are such rich areas for basic exploration and discovery. But it isn’t just naming things or finding new kinds of things. It’s understanding how the ocean really works. When you realize that less than 5 percent of the oceans have been seen for the first time, that most of this planet is aquatic and most of it is yet to be explored, that the greatest era of exploration is out there in the time ahead of us, not behind us, then anybody can look forward to a future action-packed with new discoveries. Most of the ocean—surely, most of life on Earth—has yet to be understood in terms of how it all fits together and what our role is. We’re a part of nature; we’re not apart from it.
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| Photo Credits. Top: Al Giddings. Right: Natalie Forbes. © 2000 National Geographic Society. All rights reserved. |
