Rising Tide #33 – Jeremy Jackson’s Blue World View

[Music] the oans are rising and so are we welcome to the 33rd episode of rising Tod the ocean podcast I'm David helvar here with my co-host Vicky Nichols Goldstein well hello there and today we're talking with renowned ecologist and marine scientist Dr Jeremy Jackson some sometimes known as the MC Jagger of marine biology for his engaging public appearances his Ted Talk on the ocean for example has been viewed over half a million times along with Awards honors and Publications he's done major work for scripts institution of oceanography the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History so uh Jeremy regarding your latest book breakpoint Reckoning with America's environmental crisis that you co-authored with a mutual friend of ours uh Elizabeth Colbert of the New Yorker calls your book ultimately hopeful so let's start there are you in fact hopeful for the future of our Blue Planet I I'm I'm worried as hell but I'm also hopeful I see a lot happening which is encouraging to me and I also think we underestimate the ability of natural uh systems to respond to perturbations and we're just the latest in many perturbations my original education is as a geologist um geologists take a Long View I'm incredibly encouraged by a lot of things that are going on in particular in terms of renewable energy which I think is now taking a hold faster than I I thought it ever was going to and you know this isn't the first time that there's been fairly quick climate change in terms of thinking about Carl Reef I'm very taken by a paper that was published 10 years ago that uh demonstrated that in the um last interglacial uh was we we've known this for a while Earth was a lot warmer than it was say 50 years ago on Earth um sea level was three meters higher you can tell that from All The Terraces that ring islands like Jamaica that where the highways run on the tops of the old ref flats and um the only way that sea level could have risen that much more would have been that there was that much more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and so it's pretty pretty clear that temperatures 25,000 years ago were as bad as they become now with the global warming we've seen so far and what's really interesting is Carls just moved North you know the um the peak of diversity of reef Carl was actually at the top of the the subtropical Zone instead of in the tropics so there is this kind of ability for organisms to move around the planet and at least in the ocean where there aren't any uh really really bad barriers and so from an ocean scientist perspective I think the oceans are going to do just fine how well we'll do is is another question um as witnessed by all the hell that's going on out where you live I mean as the West runs out of water which it is doing and and as the temperatures rise and the fires burn and and all that sort of and our bread basket or not so much our Bread Basket but vegetable basket and and so much of our food comes from the watering of a desert which of course was insane to begin with so in terms of the impact on us and our civilization as we know it we're in for a really bad ride and the sooner we get our act together about it the better but as an ecologist and as a person who loves biodiversity I'm concerned I'm very very concerned but I think it's all going to come out sort of okay what you're basically saying is well we're going to suffer wildfires and intensified hurricanes and tornadoes that really what we've done to the atmosphere is no worse than what it was 125,000 years ago well in the ocean I don't know so much about the land I would say on the land it's a lot worse because of our Folly you know I mean the oceans are harder to screw up than the land and so you know when you cut down all the trees or when you destroy the top soil in the Midwest and you guarantee another Dust Bowl is on the way or you pump out all the groundwater like an idiot because you want to produce milk in California instead of Wisconsin where they have plenty of rain and plenty of hay but you can do it for a few cents cheaper a gallon and and so you wipe out the dairy industry in Wisconsin and now you pay the price I suppose California will wake up and destroy all its Agriculture and then you'll have plenty of water for people but you won't be able to grow you know rice in a desert which was pretty stupid to begin with so we'll adapt or at least countries with the wealth and the resources to adapt are going to just go through a lot of pain and come out on the other side Northern Africa the Sahel the the sea level rise uh for Bangladesh and large parts of India those things are horrific and it's even getting to the point where a few Tiny Places on Earth the combination of the temperature and the humidity literally makes them uninhabitable and you know Doha they're already air conditioning the outdoors in some of the oil states in the in the Middle East well that's sort of a shortterm solution and and I don't know how long people are going to want to stay there I think the mass migrations of people are going to be very disruptive so I've gone into my Doom and Gloom mode but but as far I'm a lot less worried about about biodiversity than I am about the state of humanity because we we seem to be so slow and and realizing the magnitude of the threat to the way we live so Jeremy we definitely got the Doom and Gloom and it's overwhelming and David and I certainly agree we're not in disagreement at all but to change the conversation a little bit once you know the problem you can begin to address it so what would you say are some of the priority things that we need to do to get on top of this and protect our ocean uh to protect our ocean specifically to protect anything we've got to get real about renewable energy that's the one two three to or A to Z of the the first step and I'm really excited about things I see I see this country of all things moving to electric vehicles and I see solar and wind are cheaper than new oil or gas powered power plants and Money Talks in America money talks and capitalist societies so I really do see the energy transformation happening rapidly and you know countries like Norway that don't have a lot of sun they have a lot of wind they also have a lot of oil which they're going to have to figure out how to exist without selling but more than half of all the cars in Norway are electric this is something that can happen very quickly we got to worry about the batteries and we don't want to mine the deep sea to make the batteries a little bit cheaper but there's there's enough of the the minerals we need on land to to make all those batteries and the technology is improving so the energy sector I think is going in the right direction and if Joe Biden gets reelected or another Democrat gets elected uh that will be enough time for that transformation to really become irreversible okay the ocean we sure as hell have got to stop over fishing in a lot of places uh if for no other reason that we actually want to eat fish I'm very encouraged by the the research that has gone into the notion of closing the high seas because although the numbers vary from person to person the expert opinion is that somewhere between about one one and a half per and less than 5% of all the food fish food we eat comes from the high seas and it tends to be the fancy expensive stuff which is why a few rich countries can afford to go out and get the last gluin tuna but um the vast majority of what we eat that comes from the ocean comes from the exclusive economic zones and closing the high seas is something that is now being seriously discussed at the United Nations in some version it's going to happen um I think because the big countries with the power to say you will do this are converging on some sort of agreement about how to get there it's not going to happen overnight but it it's probably going to happen in 5 to 10 years at least partially and that's going to make an enormous difference as the world's largest Marine protected area and since most of the species that are in the exclusive economic zones also occur in the high seas it becomes a breeding population for the the coastal Fisheries of the world and again just for people who don't know uh the exclusive economic zones are 200 nautical miles off of coastal States coastal Nations uh it really got going in the 1980s it now covers about a third of the world's Ocean and the irony of course is it they were created because of things like the Cod Wars and the Russian fleets off of the coast of Canada and the United States and they were set up so that the United States could destroy its own Fisheries instead of Russia doing it for them right and that's an important thing for us Americans that's right but you know the the we have wisened up um I never thought I'd say this 10 years ago but I think the national Marine fishery service really is trying very very hard to rationalize us fisheries and I think there are a lot of very smart people working on trying to improve regulations and do all of that but I think the fact that we can have this conversation and that these things are going on is a sign of a major shift in attitudes that the environment has risen to being a major issue top of the agenda in economic matters across the country that's the sound of a coastal Wetland wetlands and salt marshes provide vital habitat and nurseries for fish birds and other Wildlife they act as filters and sponges to clean and store groundwater and protect us from storm surge and wind damage unfortunately unwise development and sea level rise have put coastal wetlands at risk that's why the Sierra Club Marine team supports proposals like the ocean-based climate Solutions act that would invest in restoring natural Coastal systems in order to protect our communities while providing needed jobs the Sierra Club Marine team because 71% of our environment is salty tell us a little about your background how you came first to the ocean and then to from geology to ecology to studying coral reefs in the Caribbean so I was going to college at night and until my senior year all the way through night and the same year I took the paleontology class I took an oceanography class taught by somebody from The Office of Naval Research from 9 to 12 on Saturday mornings and I all year and I swear to God I didn't miss a single class because the guy was good and I was fascinated and I so I and my father was a sea captain I mean so I grew up with great interest in the oceans but I actually fell in love with the oceans as a scientist as a function of the combination of the paleontology and the oceanography which you learn I got a masters in geology then I went to Yale I did a PhD in geology and biology and I got a job in the department of Earth and planetary Sciences at John Hopkins straight out of graduate school you could do that then and I was there for 13 years and I taught the course principles of ecology and that was the most important intellectual thing I ever did in my life because I went from having this sort of narrow focus on what I done for my PhD um having been educated by Evelyn Hutchinson and a lot of other people in ecology but still you know having a somewhat narrow View and then boom I have to teach all these smartass kids I worked for a year to put together a course that I taught for 11 of the 13 years I was at Hopkins and principles of ecology and that just broadened my perspective on how the natural world works or worked past hands and at the same time I embarked on a research program on car reefs mostly in Jamaica and I became very well known from that work I did competition on Carl reefs and how species interact but but all very academic stuff and you know I wasn't really worried about the environment I was living in the pool's Paradise that all ecologists were still living in who worked in the ocean and then we had a hurricane hurricane Allen in Jamaica and what the year was that 1980 and it was a category five and it devastated the reefs of the North Coast of Jamaica where the Discovery Bay Marine Lab was where I had done all my work and so had like 50 other people so the best studied Carl Reef in the world I mean now those are Australian reefs in the' 6070s into the early 80s the best studied reefs in the world were in the Caribbean and Jamaican reefs were the best studied of any reefs in the Caribbean and so we had all this before data and so I and a couple of other people got permission to divert some grant money and we brought people back and we did this intensive study of the damage caused by the AR and we published that paper in science about 20 of us and in that paper we predicted how the reefs would cover because you know we were smartass best and brightest we knew how the reefs work and of course they didn't recover and the reason they didn't recover was because of people and the fact that the reefs had been overfished and that you know and then there was a disease of the searin which was the last Grazer and I won't go into all the Gory details but we had disrupted the Natural Balance bance the reefs you know climate change starts to kick in top of this Tropic imbalance and that's what turned me into a doom and gloomer you know I mean because I loved Carl Reeves I'd spent all my professional career studying Carl Reeves and when you watch something you love die it sort of makes you angry and it was a wakeup call and I uh actually I'm working on a book right now on this I'm writing a book called hot countries and it's sort of a series of all the things I've worked on in my life and the first section is about Carl Reef so it starts out with all the scientific wonder you know just first of all Discovery Bay and the people I met and then the fact that there's so many species and then the sort of nature red and toos and Claw interaction how do all those species coexist but then the fourth chapter is called hurricanes and oil spill because you know that's what happened to my life there were the Hurricanes that wiped out Jamaica and then there was the oil spill that wiped out Panama and in both cases natural recovery didn't happen because of all the other stuff we've done so I guess what I'm trying to say for Carl reefs is it's going to be bad and yes lots of reefs are going to die but Carl species aren't going extinct and they're moving you know there's a lesson from what happened in forest in North America there's a a guy gosh I'm trying to remember his first name is terrible I know him well is but his last name is Jackson like mine and he's a a Paleo ecologist of forests and he demonstrated in a series of really important studies that as the ice sheets retreated and forests developed further and further north the individual tree species migrated at vastly different rates and so he describes what he calls non analog communities of forests where you get mixes of trees you'd never find together now and that was because they were moving North as the ice retreated at different rates so I can see the possibility of that happening in higher latitudes for Carls um whether or not those Carls will F form anything as magnificent as the Great Barrier Reef or the BCE Barrier Reef um probably not but who knows you know I I'm hearing you and and what you're saying is we're going to have significant changes and we've already seen them um but some of the species are a little bit more rigorous some will move around and we'll have still have an intact ocean but we really do need to reduce so many of the other impacts like over fishing and pollution plastic pollution the whole range and then really supporting Marine protected areas and I the idea of the high seas in addition to other nations and even States putting together some type of high level protection could really help counter some of the impact is actually starting to make a difference not could and that I think is you know um my dear wife Nancy Nolton has become M Earth optimism and people love her for it and she's had a big effect on me although I still think she wears rosecolor glasses a little too often but um her stick her her message which is is getting a lot of traction is some things are working even amid all the other stuff there are a lot of things that are working and that's what she's doing is reminding people of it and you know one of her really funny examples is we were all together at an oil spill post oil spill meeting on the Gulf Coast and she get got up to give her optimistic talk and during that talk she said so how many of you people know about the restoration of Tampa Bay you probably heard her say tell the story nobody in that audience we were meeting in Tampa St Petersburg and nobody in the audience knew that the people of Tampa had become in St Petersburg had become disgusted by the slime that was Tampa Bay and they cleaned up their sewage and the seagrass had not would recover had already recovered to the same level that it had in the 1950s before they over polluted Tampa Bay and you know NY said what's wrong with you people don't you read the literature I mean don't you know that right here where you are is an enormous success story and the brought the Turtles back which brought the hammerheads so Tampa Bay once again is not shark infested but shark enhanced because of that you tell you could tell us tell us who Nancy is since we've we've interviewed her on the show before but you're mentioning your wife The Optimist my wife Discovery Bay she was a uh hot young gorgeous woman from University of California at Berkeley uh who promptly demonstrated that I did not understand modern evolutionary theory and a huge argument we had and I had to eat crow and uh we had a very tumultuous relationship but we finally decided we could stand each other and we permanently and we got back together because there's a long story there in 1980 and got married in 883 and we moved to Panama from me at Johns Hopkins and Nancy at Yale so we could be together best thing we ever did living in the tropics and I think one of the best things you ever did I wrote about it in my book blue Frontiers you and Nancy kind of reintroduced ecology to the scripts institution of oceanography more than bringing ecology to scripts we brought formalization of conservation biology to Scripts but um you know Nancy prevailed in creating the center and then she got this amazing Urt Grant which would pay for two years of people's education so they didn't have to work for some professor as a slave they could do their own project so naturally we attracted really really good people and and um I created a summer course that combined ecology governance and ethic and all that kind of stuff and and reek did his great work in in the Gulf of California and that synergism was what changed the nature of the ecological research that was done at scripts I loved my time at scripts you know I left earlier than I wanted to because my mother was failing otherwise I would have been there a few more years it's an extraordinary place and you know that the science we all need is what is is it's sort of um it's Earth system science it's G life the science we all need is the intersection of physics and chemistry and geology and biology it's the intersection of the atmosphere and the ocean and the land it's the intersection elements and molecules moving from system to system that we have the capability of screwing up and to put humpy Dumpty back together again with a lot of Bandit we're going to need to uh really Ure our ability to use all these different perspectives I just want to thank you so much for spending time with us you're one of my ocean Heroes and it's been a real pleasure to talk with you and hear more about your background and your thoughts and just thank you so much for being with us thank you for joining us on Rising tide Jeremy yeah it was great Rising tide is a production of bluefront here with hosts David helvar and Vicky Nichols Goldstein and with the support of Natasha Benjamin and Ellie kurlo Rising Tides editing services and additional technical support are provided by Studio Cape May of San Diego California the theme song is written and performed by Ethan kenar you can find Rising TI the ocean podcast at www. bluefront dorg or download at anytime from Apple Google or Spotify off and salty ocean off where the waves R free the sparkling water rises then crashes to the Sea out amongst the breakers you'll have no need to fear it's true it's the blue froner dear off in the salty ocean off to the blue Frontier Sparky come here buddy Sparky there you are good boy Sparky