40 YEARS RHODE ISLAND SEA GRANT 50 YEARS URI ...what Canadian Maritimes writer Alistair MacLeod describes as the profound “lost salt gift of blood.” But we are the benefactors

1A N N I V E R S A RY E D I T I O N 41°N

ANNIVERSARY EDITION

40 YEARS RHODE ISLAND SEA GRANT 50 YEARS URI GRADUATE SCHOOL OF OCEANOGRAPHY

A PUBLICATION OF RHODE ISLAND SEA GRANT& THE COASTAL INSTITUTE ATTHE UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLANDA SEA GRANT INSTITUTION

VOL 6 NO 1 2011

2 A N N I V E R S A RY E D I T I O N41°N

The University of Rhode Island sponsored the first national con-ference where the Sea Grant concept was proposed in 1965, where Senator Claiborne Pell introduced legislation to estab-lish Sea Grant colleges. The University of Rhode Island became home to one of the first four Sea Grant College Programs. Dr. Athelstan Spilhaus proposed the idea of Sea Grant Colleges when he was dean of the University of Minnesota:“I have suggested the establishment of ‘Sea Grant Colleges’ in existing universities that wish to develop oceanic work.

Investing in Marine Science: The Birth of Sea Grant

This year, the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography turns 50, and Rhode Island Sea Grant reaches 40. These milestones provide us with two wonderful reasons to look back across the decades and celebrate the individual and combined accomplishments of these renowned Ocean State institutions. As the husband of a marine biolo-

gist trained at GSO, I particularly understand the value and importance of scientific research and restoration of marine ecosystems. The science GSO and Sea Grant fund and execute has advanced the marine sciences, and your expertise is well known throughout the academic community. This was espe-cially apparent in the months following the Gulf of Mexico oil spill as current and former faculty, staff, and students were called on to study and manage the aftermath. I am proud of your work on the effects of climate change in Nar-ragansett Bay and ecosystems around the world. As we celebrate the success and longevity of GSO and Sea Grant, we should also commit ourselves to further accomplishments in the years ahead, because we need you now more than ever. There is a growing demand for trained scientists, dedicated research funding, and public education and outreach to restore and protect our coasts, and to docu-ment the ecological and economic value of these resources.

—Senator Sheldon Whitehouse

From marine debris to toxic chemicals, from acidifica-tion to species collapse, our oceans and coasts face grave challenges that will require an “all hands on deck” approach from the marine community. Together, GSO and Sea Grant have laid a strong foundation for the work ahead by building an educated and dedicated ocean constituency. Hundreds of scientists, policy fellows, and educators trained at and supported by GSO and Sea Grant are furthering our under-standing of marine ecosystems, promoting the policies that protect them, and revitalizing our fisheries and fishing com-munities. Their interdisciplinary approach to marine science and conservation is exactly what my predecessor Senator Claiborne Pell had in mind when he introduced legislation to create Sea Grant colleges nationwide. In Rhode Island, and around the world, the ocean and coasts are central to our way of life and must be protected. That is why, this Congress, I again introduced the National Endowment for the Oceans, along with Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, to establish a dedicated funding stream for the study, conservation, and restoration of our Nation’s oceans, coasts, and Great Lakes. GSO and Sea Grant are both well positioned to take advantage of such congressio-nal initiatives to ensure that conservation continues to be a high priority for our country. Congratulations to both GSO and Sea Grant on your momentous anniversaries. I look forward to working with you and supporting your work for many years to come. You are proud ambassadors for the Ocean State, and I trust you will continue to produce the solid science and the ocean leaders of tomorrow.

The Sea Grant College would foster attention on ma-rine science, and it would develop strengths in applications of marine science in colleges of aquaculture and oceanic en-gineering. These would be modernized parallels of the great developments in agriculture and the mechanic arts which were occasioned by the Land Grant Act…. Establishment of the Land Grant colleges was one of the best investments this nation has ever made. The same kind of imagination and foresight should be applied to exploration of the sea.”

—Dr. Athelstan Spilhaus, as part of the keynote address at the 93rd Annual Meeting of the American Fisheries Society, September 12, 1963.

3A N N I V E R S A RY E D I T I O N 41°NA N N I V E R S A RY E D I T I O N 41°N

41°NEDITORIAL STAFFMonica Allard Cox, Managing EditorMeredith Haas, Contributing Editor

EDITORIAL BOARDBarry Costa-PierceAlan Desbonnet Judith Swift

DESIGN/ART DIRECTIONDarrell Mcintire

COVER ART FOR THIS ISSUEBrian Jones, Brian Jones Design

About 41°N41°N is published twice per year by the Rhode Island Sea Grant College Program and the Coastal Institute at the University of Rhode Island (URI). The name refers to the latitude at which Rhode Island lies.

Rhode Island Sea Grant is a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and was established to promote the conservation and sustainable development of marine resources for the public benefit through research, outreach, and education.

The URI Coastal Institute works in partnerships to provide a neutral setting where knowledge is advanced, issues discussed, information synthesized, and solutions developed for the sustainable use and management of coastal ecosystems. The Coastal Institute works across and beyond traditional structures to encourage new approaches to problem solving.

Change of address, subscription information, or editorial correspondence: 41°N, Rhode Island Sea Grant, University of Rhode Island, Narragansett Bay Campus, Narragansett, RI 02882-1197. Telephone: (401) 874-6800. Fax: (401) 789-8340. E-mail: 41°[email protected].

Reprinting material from 41°N is encouraged, but we request that you notify us of your intentions, give credit to 41°N and the article’s author(s), and send us a copy of your final publication.

Contents02 The Anniversary Issue, Judith Swift

03 The Third Frontier and the Birth of GSO, Maury Klein

08 Memories of the Bay Campus

10 The Last Great Frontier, Meredith Haas

12 Personal History: Barry Costa-Pierce

14 Culture, Class, and the Pier, Florence E. Coleman

16 Singing in the Parlor with Auntie, Charles Cofone

18 Personal History: Kathleen Castro

20 Rhode Island Sea Grant Alumni Stories

24 Tracking Ecological Changes in Narragansett Bay: A Profile of Ted Smayda, Meredith Haas

25 Beaches, Ann Hood

26 Grant Supports Art About–And In–The Marine Environment, Meredith Haas

28 The Art of Science Paul Hargraves and Fay Darling

29 Modeling the Mystery Out of Fisheries Ecology: A Profile of Jeremy Collie, Alan Desbonnet

30 Personal History: Stephen Olsen

32 Personal History: Pamela Rubinoff

34 Communicating Science: Lessons Learned from an Environmental Crisis, Meredith Haas

36 Reconstructing the Aquatic Environment: A Profile of Scott Nixon, Meredith Haas

38 Personal History: Virginia Lee

40 Celebrating 40 Years of Managing Coastal Resources Julia Wyman

44 A Profile of Jennifer McCann, Sue Kennedy

46 Ocean Policy Alone Not Enough to Tame the Last “Wild West,” Susan Farady

48 A Letter from the Dean

seagrant.gso.uri.edu/41N


The Anniversary IssueThe foundation and the future of the URI Graduate School of Oceanography and Rhode Island Sea Grant

Judith Swift

When people set out to accomplish great things, they may be motivated by a host of driv-ers, but they cannot completely comprehend what they have set in motion. We are fortunate to have chronicled here some of the many speeches, writings, and oral histories honoring the foundation of Rhode Island Sea Grant (1971) and the University of Rhode Island’s Gradu-ate School of Oceanography (1961). We know that the creation of both was motivated by a

Judith Swift is the Director of the

University of Rhode Island Coastal

Institute.

“The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.” Jacques Cousteau

quest for increased knowledge, a profound sense of curiosity, an awareness of the centrality of science to the human condition, and a deep love of the margins where land meets water as well as the vast unexplored depths of the ocean. Visionaries like Senator Claiborne Pell and founding dean

John A. Knauss understood our profound ties to the sea, and created a legacy to ensure our continued study of that place whose bounty, power, and beauty tell the story of the rise and fall of empires and the survival of the lowliest among us. Without such institutions to weave our ties to the oceans, estuaries, and wetlands that feed our souls and bodies, we would know what Canadian Maritimes writer Alistair MacLeod describes as the profound “lost salt gift of blood.” But we are the benefactors of many who turned the trail of exploration into a well-beaten path of knowledge in service of Earth’s oceans. Welcome to this special edition of 41°N — but one tribute to those whose lives are part of the warp and weft of Rhode Island’s center of oceanic excellence. n

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SStar Trek always billed space as the final frontier, but actually there are three great realms of mystery: the vast reaches of outer space, the structure of matter invisible to the na-ked eye, and the deep blue sea that covers 71 percent of the planet. All three have undergone intense explora-tion in modern times. New technologies have spurred the growth of all three, as have major advances in science. All three share a common need for money, lots of it, as well as a corps of dedicated scientists and technicians. For the past 70 years most of that fund-ing has come from the federal government, a development that changed the course of sci-entific research and education in the United States. During the late 19th cen-tury, science and technology converged with each other and with a third force that was reshaping American life: the rise of big business to domi-nate the economy. The new large corporations relied in-creasingly on technology and

therefore needed a growing supply of scientists and engi-neers. Led by the electrical and chemical industries, companies that specialized in technologi-cal products created their own

Most scientific research prior to World War II was underwritten by philanthropists or private corporations.

research laboratories; some of the earliest examples include General Electric, AT&T, Du Pont, Westinghouse, and Stan-dard Oil. To recruit their technical people, companies turned to colleges and universities, the primary source of scientific research facilities. Technical training fought a long-running battle for recognition with classical education at many institutions. A few schools evaded this conflict by start-ing life as technical colleges or universities. MIT was founded as a technical school in 1861 and stressed its close ties to industry; not until the 1930s did it turn more toward basic scientific research. Many uni-versities developed colleges of

The Third Frontier and the Birth of GSOHow war, industry, the Great Depression, the environmental movement, and the federal government helped spur oceanography in the U.S.

Maury Klein

Maury Klein, a retired URI history professor, is the author of numerous books on American history, including three nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. The third volume of his history of the Union Pacific Railroad, Union Pacific: The Reconfiguration, will be published in May. He is currently writing a history of how the U.S. mobilized for World War II.

engineering and came to rely ever more on corporate grants for much of their research work. With few exceptions, most scientific research prior to

World War II was underwritten by philanthropists or private corporations. Not surprisingly, the emphasis was on applied science—developments that could be turned into products of some kind. World War I gave a huge impetus to scientific research and technical train-ing. The seizure of hundreds of German patents helped create three giant firms in the once


The war was like none that had gone before, al-though World War I had shown the way. It was a clash of machines—planes, tanks, ships, trucks, guns of all sizes and types—as well as new technologies like radar, sonar, the proximity fuze, bomb-sights, the atomic bomb, and thousands of smaller but cru-cial innovations provided by scientists and engineers work-ing in tandem. Victory went not to the biggest battalions but to the most efficient in-dustrial organizations, diligent workforces, inventive scientists, and largest pool of critical re-sources such as oil, rubber, and steel. The federal government undertook the gigantic task of organizing and coordinating this effort as well as funding most of it. In the process, it organized the scientific com-munity as well, and became the largest single supporter of its work.

liaison between scientists and the military. A year later it was augmented by a new agency, the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Together these agencies enlisted Ameri-can scientists in dozens of re-search projects, many of them top secret like the most spec-tacular of them all, the Man-hattan Project. As early as mid-1941 an estimated 25 percent of American scientists were at work on defense projects. The war also exerted a profound influence on the dy-namics of higher education. In the past, humanists had always dominated the governance and curriculum of colleges and universities. By 1940, scientists had gained some authority, and the impact of the war on campuses greatly strengthened their position. By the fall, more than 200 colleges and universi-ties offered federally funded programs in science, engineer-ing, and defense industry man-agement. Science departments took up weapons research under government contracts, giving them a level of support and prestige not available to

modest chemical industry: Du Pont (which before the war had only been an explosives company), Union Carbide and Carbon, and Allied Chemical and Dye. The rapid growth of American industry during the 1920s elevated the demand for scientists and engineers as well as raised their prestige in society. During that de-cade, the consumer economy came into existence, spurred largely by the spread of electri-cal power and the stunning growth of the automobile in-dustry to a dominant position in the economy. Then came the Great Depression, which saw unem-ployment average 14 percent for an entire decade. During that ordeal, a new element en-tered American life in the form of a far more active role by the federal government. The New Deal thrust its agencies and influence into more corners of society than ever before,

Modern oceanography traced its roots to World War II and the Navy’s desire to learn more about the oceans to gain military advantages, especially in a period of

intense submarine warfare.

and gave Americans their first taste of big government at a time when many other nations endured a much stronger dose of the same thing in the form of dictatorships. The onset of World War II plunged the world into a nightmare and also triggered a profound shift in the role of science and tech-nology in American life.

During World War II the government tried to mobilize scientists as it did other re-sources. It created a register of anyone with advanced train-ing or experience in science that included more than half a million names. In June 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt created the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), which functioned as the central


humanists. Vannevar Bush, chairman of the NDRC, called it “a war of applied science.” After the war, the rela-tionships forged gradually took on a formal structure. Scientists and engineers had grown ac-customed to working within an institutional framework, be it university, corporation, or government facility. They had also come to depend on outside support to sustain their work; the difference was that to a growing extent this support came from the government. Many of the projects underwrit-ten by federal money remained as large as or larger than the wartime projects, partly be-cause the Cold War fueled the need for ever bigger and more sophisticated weapons systems as well as improvements in conventional arms. From this pattern emerged Big Science, and Big Science needed big bucks on a scale that only the government could provide. In a 1945 report to the president entitled “Sci-ence—the Endless Frontier,” Bush urged that a new agency be created to fund nonmili-tary scientific research for the benefit of society. Five years passed before President Harry Truman signed into existence the National Science Founda-tion (NSF). Two other major institutions oversaw separate fields of endeavor. The Atomic Energy Commission handled nuclear and particle physics while the National Institutes of Health took care of medical research. After a slow start the NSF gained momentum after the Soviet launching of Sputnik

in October 1957. Among its many effects, Sputnik prompted America to put a powerful new emphasis on scientific research, scientific education, and schooling in mathematics and the sciences. It also drew the United States into a space race. NSF felt the impact at once. Its budget of less than $34 million in 1958 soared to $134 million for 1959 and kept climbing. In 1958 the Na-tional Aeronautics and Space Agency was created and given the facilities of a predecessor

from astronaut missions to gi-ant telescopes of many types. Physicists and medical re-searchers were already hard at work on the inner frontier for entirely different reasons. The convergence of yet another trend with these developments helped spur greater interest in exploration of the third frontier. During the 1960s the en-vironmental movement made its appearance, thanks in part to the landmark publication of Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring in 1962. Where the Cold

agency, 8,000 employees, and a budget of $100 million. That same year NSF selected a site near Tucson, Arizona, for the first of several national observatories. The space race funneled huge sums into ex-ploration of the outer frontier and ways to study it, ranging

War sensitized Americans to the fragility of life in the nuclear age, environmental issues alerted them to the fragility of the planet on which all life depended. The first nuclear power plant opened in 1956, and with it a controversy that still rages. Congress passed

For a reseach ship, Knauss finangled a 180-foot Army surplus vessel for $500, which became the Trident.


the Clean Air Act in 1963 and the Clean Water Act in 1972. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created in December 1970 with a mission clearly stated in its title. By then the importance of the oceans as an environment had be-come recognized, and with it a sense of how little was actually known about this third frontier. Two months before the birth of the EPA, Congress cre-ated yet another new agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), to focus on the ocean and atmosphere. President Richard Nixon defined two of its purposes as “a better under-standing of the total environ-ment” and “exploration and development leading to the intelligent use of our marine re-sources.” In the popular culture two figures, Jacques Cousteau and Thor Heyerdahl, aroused widespread public interest in the sea through their exploits. Modern oceanography traced its roots to World War II and the Navy’s desire to learn more about the oceans to gain military advantages, especially in a period of intense submarine warfare. Although a few institutions existed to study the ocean, most notably Scripps (1892) and Woods Hole (1930), oceanography as a field of study and training

In 1970 the Sea Grant program was made part of NOAA, and a year later four universities were designated as the first Sea Grant colleges. URI was one of them, and Sea Grant became an

important part of its program.


did not penetrate higher edu-cation until the 1960s. At the war’s end, Scripps was the only institution that even awarded a degree in oceanography. When the University of Rhode Island launched the Graduate School of Oceanography (GSO) in 1961 and John Knauss arrived in 1962 to become its dean, only a few other schools had degree programs. Most of the program heads, including Knauss, had been trained at Scripps. For a research ship, Knauss finagled a 180-foot Army surplus vessel for $500, which became the Trident. Although a new univer-sity, having just awarded its first Ph.D. in 1960, URI had some key advantages for a program in oceanography: an ideal loca-tion, an energetic president in Francis Horn, who became an ardent supporter of the program, and a growing inter-est in the sea among both the government and the public. In 1963, an inventor named Athelstan Spilhaus first floated the idea of a sea grant college program modeled after the successful land grant schools. Three years later the National Sea Grant College and Pro-gram Act passed Congress. In 1970 the Sea Grant program was made part of NOAA, and a year later four universities were designated as the first Sea

URI became the first institution to offer degree programs and departments in ocean engineering, marine resource economics, and marine affairs.

Grant colleges. URI was one of them, and Sea Grant became an important part of its pro-gram. By 1970, the new rela-tionship between scientists and their bases of support had be-come clearly established. The federal government supported 60 percent of all scientists and engineers engaged in research

the Sea Institute was created in 1965, the New England Marine Resources and Informa-tion Program and Rhode Island Sea Grant in 1968, and the Coastal Resources Center and the National Sea Grant Deposi-tory in 1971. By then GSO and its cluster of programs had emerged as the crown jewel of URI, aided by the growing

and development, most of them through universities. Of an estimated $27.2 billion spent on research and devel-opment that year, the federal government’s share totaled $17.4 billion. In 1968, for ex-ample, NSF funded the begin-ning of the Deep Sea Drilling Project that uncovered con-siderable new evidence about continental drift, sea floor spreading, and other matters. NSF’s budget expanded steadi-ly through the years, reaching $6.43 billion in 2007. URI became known not only for its strong oceanogra-phy program and Sea Grant status, but also for the breadth of its offerings. A Division of Marine Resources had been formed shortly before the GSO was established. The Law of

interest in and study of the third frontier. URI became the first institution to offer degree programs and departments in ocean engineering (1965), marine resource economics (1969), and marine affairs (1969), as well as a two-year training program for commer-cial fishermen (1967). By the 1970s the third frontier had become the quest of thousands of scientists around the world seeking to uncover its mysteries, and GSO had staked a position as one of the leading institutions for pro-moting that work. n


Jennifer Specker Professor of Oceanography

On studying the Bay with colleagues from other disciplines My colleagues have a large number of sensors out in Narragansett Bay, and I know from them how much this Bay has changed, say in the last 100 years. I study some of the life in the Bay, for example flatfish on the bottom of the Bay. And those populations have changed a lot. We know that because we have such a historical record of what’s been going on in this estuary of national significance. I look at the effects of temperature on flatfish. One of the things that we found was that the rise in temperature prevents juvenile flatfish from developing into

females. The environment out there has not reached that temperature yet where there are no females. But as the temperature continues to rise, it will hit a point at which they all develop into males. At that point, they’ll go extinct. So, as a biologist I have worked with physical oceanographers and other colleagues here who have pieced together things that make my career possible; without them I couldn’t have done the work I did.

Grace Klein-MacPhee Associate Marine Research Scientist (Retired)

A scientist’s memories of the mesocosmsMy favorite moments were working in the MERL (Marine Ecosystems Research Labo-ratory) system. Going up to

do the dawn-dusk sampling. You arrive at dawn, there’s nobody there, you go out and you sample in the tanks, and you see the little fishes and all the little things swim-ming around. In the evening you see the sunset, the lights come on in the bridge, and a new set of swimmers come to the surface. And then at the end of the experiment, you get to pull everything up, and you see all these wonderful things that were in the tank that you didn’t see … one year, we had a lot of starfish. And we were work-ing on a project where we had to sample the zooplank-ton and wondered, “What are these little pink worms?” And then they got to be lit-tle pink stars, and so it was the larval form of the starfish, and we just had thousands and thousands, so that was pretty interesting.

Memories of the Bay CampusThese recollections of life at GSO are taken from videotaped interviews gathered as part of the school’s 50th anniversary celebration.

I could remember John Knauss very early on saying, “Rhode Island is Narragansett Bay surrounded by a little bit of land.” —Sara Hickox

Personal History


Sara Hickox Director, Office of Marine Programs at GSO

On outreach The scientists here over the 37 years I’ve been here have really grown in their ability and will-ingness to share what they do. I think the leadership at GSO has been very supportive of trying to share the wealth of what we do here on this campus with the broader audiences. Some of this has been encouraged by the funding agencies, and thus, [the scien-tists have] turned to Sea Grant, Coastal Institute, Office of Ma-rine Programs, and Coastal Resources Center to say, “Help us build an outreach compo-nent into our proposal.” When [John Knauss] first came here, the ideas were that we should be more than just the sci-ence. We really should care about management issues, about policy issues, about en-gineering, about economics, and it was his initiatives that—with the help of Sea Grant and others—helped start the Re-source Economics Program, that helped start the Marine

Affairs Program, that helped start the Law of the Sea Insti-tute [no longer at URI], and then the Marine Affairs De-partment. And it was GSO and John Knauss’s vision to have those other disciplines fully in-tegrated into the academic and cultural life of GSO.

Catalina Martinez Regional Manager, Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, National Oceanic and Atmo-spheric Administration (NOAA)

On the best part of her jobThe most fun part of my job is the outreach education com-ponent. I focus on working with underserved and under-represented students. And that, to me is really special—sharing the excitement of discovery with these kids—it’s really opening doors that would probably otherwise not be open for them, and devel-oping opportunities that might not exist for them otherwise.

On GSOThis is a special place. It’s not just the curriculum, it’s not just

the level of research—and it’s a high level of research here. It’s the opportunities that you’re afforded while you’re a stu-dent and the people that you meet, the networking and the connections. And that’s what helps you become successful as a student and on your jour-ney as a career professional. I see that GSO is on a path to the future with the technology, innovation, and partnerships they’re devel-oping. It’s a place where you can come and look for op-portunity and it’s there.

Candace Oviatt Professor of Oceanography

On working with graduate studentsWhen a lot of them come here, they’re right out of col-lege. They only know course work, but they have such huge potential. And they take a few courses, get buried into the lab and thrown into the field. Pretty soon they emerge and they get the ex-citement of research. And it’s a fabulous experience to work with them. n

I could remember John Knauss very early on saying, “Rhode Island is Narragansett Bay surrounded by a little bit of land.” —Sara Hickox


MMMore complete maps exist for the moon and Mars than for Earth, the majority of which remains largely unexplored. “We have an obsession with space,” said Robert Ballard, professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, during a talk that was part of the 2011 Vetlesen Lectures sponsored by the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography (GSO). Meanwhile “the mid-ocean ridge is the largest mountain range on Earth, accounting for 23 percent of the surface. We went to the moon before we went to the largest feature on Earth.” Ballard, most famous for his 1985 discovery of the Titanic, is a graduate of GSO and is considered one of the world’s leaders in ocean ex-ploration. He has led over 100 expeditions, which in-cluded the first manned

exploration of the mid-ocean ridge, and has discovered hy-drothermal vents, ancient shipwrecks, and John F. Ken-nedy’s PT-109.

Ballard went on his first submersible dive in 1968. New technologies have de-veloped since then, such as autonomous underwater

The Last Great Frontier Meredith Haas

This lecture was presented as part of

the 2011 Vetlesen Lectures: “The State

of Our Oceans” sponsored by the

G. Unger Vetlesen Foundation and the

URI Graduate School of Oceanography. This lecture may be viewed

online at www.uri.edu/vetlesen/.

The State of Our Oceans

We went to the moon before we went to the largest feature on Earth.

“You’ll find more hu-man history in the deep seas than in all the museums in the world combined,” he said, “There are one million ships of antiquity preserved not in shallow but in the deep ocean.” “Most people don’t realize that half of the U.S. is underwater,” he said, “The Exclusive Economic Zone extends 200 miles off the coasts and is 500 times larger than the Louisiana Purchase... There has yet to be a Lewis and Clark expedition of the sea.”

vehicles (AUVs) and remote-ly operated vehicles (ROVs). While AUVs may operate in-dependently from support of a research vessel, ROVs re-quire trained pilots who can operate the vehicle from the surface. Much research in-corporates the simultaneous use of AUVs and ROVs; first the AUV to locate ocean floor features and make prelim-inary surveys and then the ROV—which has strategical-ly located cameras and lights, as well manipulator arms—for detailed inspection and sampling.


These technologies have enabled the discovery of hydrothermal vents, which Ballard described as “my most exciting discovery.” These geysers in the seafloor continuously emit hot, min-eral-rich water that supports unique organisms tolerant of extreme conditions. The U.S. currently oper-ates two ships of exploration: the Okeanos Explorer and the E/V Nautilus, which have in-corporated an even newer technology—telepresence. Using satellites, live feeds are emitted from the ships that allow anyone to partake in the research op-eration online and at various stations around the coun-try. This means that experts needed in any field upon a discovery can be reached within 30 minutes. Such technologies have allowed for greater exploration of the oceans. The “land link” for this technology is housed at the Inner Space Center at GSO, which is open to the public. This technology, Ballard said, is important for devel-oping the next generation of explorers and engaging them “at the moment of discovery.” “There are so many sur-prises for us,” he said. n

Meredith Haas is a research com-munications specialist for Rhode Island Sea Grant. The full version of this article was published in eco-RI news (www.ecori.org).

Why studying the oceans is important

Without the worlds’ oceans, we would not have the atmosphere that allows us to exist. What’s more impor-tant than that, right? And, what’s more important than exploring our own planet! With the majority of the planet covered in water, we have to develop very spe-cialized technology to explore the deepest depths and share the findings as quickly as possible. And, to me, I can’t see anything more exciting than that.

Catalina Martinez


Smokestacks and merit badges I grew up in the late 60s and early 70s, in the hey-day of the environmental movement in a rural town in Massachusetts that was right beside a large indus-trial chemical plant, called Imperial Chemical Incorpo-rated—ICI. My friends and I used to call it the “color works” because the emis-sions from the smokestacks used to color the skies above us and the sides of our hous-es on a regular basis. The nearby Taunton River used to run different colors—red, blue, green—depending on the water pollution from the factory. I joined the Boy Scouts and as I was going through getting my merit badges I realized that the environ-mental issues that everybody was talking about at that time were actually happen-ing to my family, my friends, my neighborhood, and my town. So I got all my Boy Scout friends and we led the first ever environmental dem-onstration in our town. It was quite famous, and was fea-tured on the front page of the local paper. Imagine all these young kids gathered together with elderly folks

and moms with strollers. We marched up and down Main Street in Dighton, Massachu-setts, and protested against ICI’s chemical pollution. So my environmental consciousness and penchant for activism de-veloped at a very young age. I got a scholarship and was the first person ever from the Costa clan to go to col-lege. That was a big deal for all of us. And it was an even bigger deal to go to a private liberal arts school far away in wealthy New Jersey. My par-ents kept saying, “When you get out you’ll come back, get a real good job here, and may-be even work at the chemical plant.” I did a marine science course at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in my sophomore year of college that changed my life. I was amazed to find out that my home state was at the pinnacle of marine science in the world. That was really an eye opener. I knew I didn’t want to be a laboratory scientist; I wanted to be in the field. I also wanted to do something for people like those I grew up with; I wanted to be more around working class or poor people—the disadvantaged. I was very confused for years trying to merge those two parts of my life.

I will never forget in 1975 going to this place in Hatchville, Massachusetts, called the New Alchemy In-stitute, where people were doing aquatic science but with all these twists—inte-grated food systems and ecology and ecosystems de-sign. That was the first I’d heard about how you could apply ecology to grow food and help people in a different way, to do energy in a differ-ent way, to have integrated food and energy systems that were socially responsible, and that you could merge agricul-ture and aquaculture. I found my direction then. I knew that was what I really wanted to do. I applied to a num-ber of graduate schools and got accepted to the Virgin-ia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), lasted about six months, and dropped out because I got stuck in a lab-oratory. On the counsel of one of my VIMS professors, I picked up and moved ev-erything to Vermont, where I hooked up with visionary people at the Institute for Social Ecology of Goddard College, who believed that social sciences and natural sci-ences could be merged for the betterment of people and the planet. Those ideas are

In this interview, Barry Costa-Pierce describes how his

youthful experienc-es growing up in a

working class neigh-borhood helped

shape the non-tradi-tional academic path he took, from pursu-ing multidisciplinary

“field science” as opposed to labo-ratory science, to

seeking out oppor-tunities to combine

his interests in sci-ence with his desire

to address societal problems, to earning

an unusual aqua-culture doctorate in

an oceanography program at the Uni-versity of Hawaii, to

living in Asia, Afri-ca, and six states in

the U.S. Costa-Pierce is now a URI profes-sor of fisheries and

aquaculture and the director of Rhode Is-

land Sea Grant, a position he has held for 10 years. For 13

years he has been one of the four in-ternational science editors for Aquacul-

ture, the top journal in its field.

Barry Costa-PierceDirector Rhode Island Sea Grant

Personal History


so popular now, but in 1977 these were radical thoughts. From there I got a mas-ter’s degree at UVM, decided I missed the ocean, and ap-plied to the University of Hawaii to do a Ph.D. in a ba-sic science oceanography program. My advisors soon saw that while I could do the oceanography, my real call-ing was to do fisheries and aquaculture, so they actually allowed me to do an aquacul-ture degree in a department of oceanography, which was very unusual. I was educated in Ha-waii on the wonders of aquaculture in ancient Ha-waii and Asia, and I knew if there was ever an opportuni-ty when I finished my degree to go to Asia, I would. And that’s what I ended up doing. I had an absolutely wonder-ful career with ICLARM, an international aquaculture and fisheries research center based in the Philippines, and for 10 years I did the most extraor-dinary work in aquaculture in poor rural communities in Asia and Africa. It was a pretty amazing part of my life.

A “checkered career” When my wife and I decided to have a family, we returned to the United States. I had kind of a checkered career by U.S. academic standards, never having a tradition-al academic appointment. I took a lot of short-term po-sitions and consultancies

for the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank, and then landed a one-year appointment at the Universi-ty of California-Irvine. While my students and I were do-ing really wonderful work, I remember one of the facul-ty members looking at my record and saying, “You will never get a tenure-track ap-pointment at the University of California system because you don’t publish in the right journals.” And that real-ly struck me that there was a real difference in the U.S. ac-ademic world between the applied work for direct pub-lic benefits and the “basic knowledge” work, where you get tenure. But when I looked at a lot of my colleagues in the “basic knowledge” world, they really weren’t making as many impacts as I wanted to make. I moved on to the Or-egon Institute of Marine Biology to teach their sum-mer fish biology course, and that was the seminal mo-ment, because I gave a talk there and in the audience was the then-Oregon Sea Grant director, Bob Malouf, and he came up to me and said, “Have you ever been involved in Sea Grant?” It dawned on me then that my Ph.D. in Hawaii was funded by Sea Grant, that I had briefly been a Sea Grant extension agent there, and that Sea Grant formed a bridge between ac-ademia and the real-world impacts that I wanted. Bob

encouraged me to apply for every Sea Grant job that fit. So I started doing that, and eventually became the direc-tor of Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant, which was very com-plex, but a fantastic program.

Returning homeWhen Scott Nixon was retir-ing as Rhode Island Sea Grant director, he came up to me at a meeting and said, “So do you ever think about going home?” I hadn’t been living in New England in 30 plus years, but when he said that, I said to myself, “Wow, I really need to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life.” And of course, when I spoke to my family in New England about it, they said, “You have the opportunity to come home and to keep this incredible job you love with Sea Grant? You must do it.” So now I’ve been here for a decade. Rhode Island has given me the opportuni-ty to work with a wonderful group of people in many dis-ciplines and in all functional areas of research, education, and outreach at Sea Grant. It’s also given me the oppor-tunity to continue to grow professionally through my fac-ulty position in fisheries and aquaculture at URI. I’ve been grateful to Rhode Island Sea Grant and URI for all of these opportunities, but what I rel-ish most of all is working with and mentoring the next gen-eration of coastal leaders. n


Culture, Class, and the PierEarly 20th century Narragansett resident Florence E. Coleman recounts high society life of Dunes Club members and the struggles of the “Natives.”

TThe Dunes ClubPrior to The Stock Market Crash of 1929, the economy was booming. It was during this time that the Dunes Club was built on the Pier Beach facing the ocean. It came to be known as the Club, and was a summer-time playground for those who were called The 400. The Elite 400 were wealthy notables from all over this country and Europe.

After the Crash, the survivors were the heirs of in-dustrialists who had made their fortunes from real es-tate, steel mills, railroads, and shipping. A membership in the Club was highly desirable. The criterion for obtaining this was wealth and “old fam-ily backgrounds” along with impeccable listings in “Who’s Who.”

After the three months of summer ended, the mem-bers hibernated at health spas for a period of rejuvenation. This repaired the ravages of summer’s excesses and pre-pared them for the French and Italian Rivieras, which were visited right after Christ-mas. Return visits to the spas and the baths were made in the spring in preparation for

(Above) The author on the boardwalk in 1939. (Right) Her mother, Mrs. Elsie Coleman, in front of the Pier in 1910.

Art, Culture, & History


a summer’s repeat of par-ties, polo matches, galas of all kinds, and socializing at the Club. There were no strangers among them since, much like flocks of birds, they all migrat-ed to the same watering places for the same periods of time.

The PierNarragansett was simply called the Pier by its inhabitants, who were in turn called the Natives. On cold dreary days in winter, the Pier could be desolate, and was often referred to as “the last shovelful of earth God had and he threw it here.” The ceaseless ebb and flow of the sea—the high tides, low tides, and the moon-tides—all had an effect on life by the sea. The Natives had little in-come, so they depended on

gifts from the sea, especially during the Depression. If a coal barge were to break up during a winter storm, some of the cargo of coal would wash up on the Pier beach. If a wood-en ship didn’t survive a storm, there would be driftwood on the shore. The gifts of coal and wood were picked up by the Natives and put in gunnysacks. Small hand-pulled homemade wagons carried these treasures home to be burned as fuel in the kitchen stove or fireplace. Another gift from the sea was the annual arrival in early October each year of large schools of tiny fish called “bait.” Following right be-hind this bait were schools of whiting, which were called “frostfish” because they ap-peared at the first frost. As the frostfish were trying to

feed on the bait, the waves washed them up on the shore where they lay flapping with their white bellies shining in the moonlight. A full moon at this time of the year al-ways brought these welcome schools of fish. The Depres-sion was a time of deprivation for so many, and especially for the Natives at the Pier. Frost-fish were picked up on the beach every single night they were running. They were put in gunnysacks and taken home to be eaten for breakfast, lunch, and supper. Any fish left over from that day’s catch was salted down in a barrel to be eaten at a later time. The frost-fish had white tender flesh and was highly nutritious. We who lived by the sea were grateful for these gifts of coal, drift-wood, and the frostfish. n

The Dunes Club


Charles Cofone is Director of

Operational Affairs for the Lincoln School and Resident Musical

Director and Sound Designer for the

Gamm Theatre

P

Singing With Auntie in the ParlorCharles Cofone

Parlor music is that body of popular tunes written between the mid 1900s and the Roaring Twenties (some would say even up to World War II). This was a period in American history when musical proficiency was much appreciated and before the radio turned personal musical expression into a passive “audience” experience. This is also the era of the flourishing of great expositions, music halls, burlesque, New York musicals, and Tin Pan Alley. Music was published in sheet music form rather than books, so for a few cents, people could gather considerable collections of songs. Why “parlor” songs? During this period, middle class households set aside a room—the “front room”—more for show than for daily use; children were often forbidden to even enter. In these rooms a family could display its valuable possessions—crystal

vases, crocheted doilies, china figurines, mahogany tables, and perhaps most important of all, the family piano or reed organ that clearly indicated a family of substance—both in terms of financial standing and social stability. It was the presence of this musical treasure that drew people into the parlor for family gatherings ranging from one child struggling through sheet music while a brother or sister sang, to—better yet—an evening when extended families gathered and an aunt sat pounding out song after song and other aunts and uncles and mama and papa joined in full-throated chorus. It was this process that also contributed to songs gaining popularity because it was here that children also learned the songs and carried them to other venues. And so the room lent its name to the music genre. Some songs caught on more than others—for quirky

lyrics or love sentiments, for particularly sing-able tunes, or sometimes for patriotic expressions. Others were reserved for local use only and celebrated the sense of place, most truly home as where the heart lives. In Rhode Island you could sing “Meet Me in St. Louie, Louie,” “Ta-ra-ra-Boom-de-Ay” (a touch naughty for the kiddies) “Daisy Bell,” or “The Grandfather Clock,” but you could also sing “Down in Dear Old Newport Town”—

You can see the stone mill and the palaces on the hill,Down in dear old Newport Town…Spoon along the cliffs at nightBy the moonbeam’s silv’ry lightThen you’ll want to settle down in Dear old Newport Town.

Or the local favorite, touching and inimitable “Nell of Narragansett Bay” drowned at sea—



Toll, toll the bell at early dawn of dayFor lovely Nell, so quickly passed away.Toll, toll the bell, a soft and mournful lay,For the bright-eyed laughing little Nell from Narragansett Bay.

On a lighter note and not quite so local, there was the popular chorus number from the Broadway show, “The Belle of New York.” “On the Beach at Narragansett,” extolled the town’s lively social scene as well as the wildness of the girls of Narragansett who actually dared to venture out into the waves (holding a rope of course). Who could resist lyrics like these?

Meet me on the beach, boys, down at Narragansett,We’ll go out and have a little swim,You’ll find find a merry life, boys, and girls that will enhance it,For the Narragansett girls are full of vim.Oh, they’re always in the state of rapid transit,When you meet them on the beach at Narragansett.

Plump girls, slender girls, solid girls, and tender girls,All sorts of dainty girls going out to dive.When you see the little beauts tripping in their bathing suits,

You’ll be glad it’s Summer, you’ll be glad that you’re alive.

Parlor music was family music, loved and performed by all, actively performed in home after home with some of it surviving into popular culture today, and “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah” that it has. n

Images courtesy of John Hay Library, Brown University.


I went to the University of Cal-ifornia-San Diego and majored in biology. And I worked at Scripps Institute of Oceanogra-phy. I loved the ocean. I loved diving. The first job I got out of college was enough to wake me up to the fact there was another point of view. I worked as a federal inspector at a tuna packing house. And I realized there were fishermen—up until then I had never met a fishermen. And I realized there were people that worked at the factory that depended on fish. I had been your typical biologist, “Save Flipper, love the dolphin.” And here I am hearing about the tuna, and the tuna industry, and that was a real shock for me. There were two sides to the story. So I went into the Peace Corps right after that, and I lived in a fishing village in Chile, and I realized there was a lot more going on than I had ever been taught in school. Even though I studied biology and worked at Scripps and had gone diving and been out on boats, I knew nothing about fisheries. I didn’t know about the gear, I didn’t know about the fishermen—the fish I knew something about but they were different—and that hooked me. I just loved work-ing with fishermen. They live

on the edge of death every day so they are very aware. They’ve very genuine, and they know so much. You get out of school thinking you know something, and you go and spend 10 minutes with a fisherman and realize you know absolutely nothing. But you might know something different than they do, and that’s kind of fun.

Working with the Lobster IndustryWhen I started working on my Ph.D. I wasn’t yet really involved with the local indus-try; I had worked overseas, not locally. So I got hooked up with Bob Smith, one of the older lobstermen, and he said, “Why don’t we go out and I’ll close up my vents and I’ll show you what we catch, what’s out there.” I was just getting into lobster management and understanding, so I said that would be really interesting. Now at the same time I’d been reading all my journals faithfully, and pretty much the journals said that once one lobster got in the pot, it slows the rate of other lob-sters going in. So you never expect to see a saturated trap, because one big lobster will keep others out or chase them out. So I go out with Bob and we cover up the vents, and we go back out there and pull up the traps, and they are so full of lobsters that not

one more lobster could get in. All of a sudden everything you’ve heard — gripes from the lobstermen, the issues about the science not being right, the data’s wrong—became very real to me. We’re seeing different things, and there are reasons we’re seeing different things. But those times I went out with Bob sealed my relationship with the lobster community. Something so simple as saying, “I’ll go out on the boat. I want to see what you see, I want to hear what you’re going to say, and I want to know how I’m going to apply that to what I’m going to do.” And I’ll tell you what a difference that made in having an acceptance, people willing to talk to me, people willing to help me. That’s where a lot of my cooperative research started.

Why Research Can Be “Wrong”The one thing about science that people forget is that all we can do is disprove. We can’t prove anything. So the hypoth-esis on the table when [one re-searcher] looked at it was that the presence of one lobster in the trap will reduce the entry of other lobsters in the trap. And he was able to show it very conclusively with statistics. But there are so many factors there that were not tested. That’s what we have to be so

Personal History

Kathleen Castro

Kathleen Castro is the Rhode Island Sea Grant Extension Co-leader for Fisheries

Programs. She is also an adjunct professor

in the URI Department of Fisheries, Animal and Veterinary Sci-

ences. She has a Ph.D. from URI in biological

sciences on lobster ecology.


careful of in science — doing one experiment and thinking we know the truth. We all as biologists started as naturalists. We went out and we observed what happened in nature, and that’s what attracted us to biology. I would dive and I’d watch and I’d think, “This is neat, this is beautiful, what’s going on?” And then you come into school and you have to write a thesis on one little part of one little piece of this one little thing, and then you’ve forgotten about everything you saw, and everything you’ve heard, and everything you’ve watched. And I think that’s why the fishermen are disregarded by the scientists. Scientists have forgotten the value of the natu-ralist. The challenge is bringing them both together again. Scientific knowledge is one thing, and local knowledge is another. And the only way we can really move forward on un-derstanding the issues and the problems and the solutions is if we can at least see each other’s viewpoints as important.

Changes in Commercial Fisheries in the 1980s–1990sWhen I first started at URI working in the fisheries school, we had reached a point where effort was just too high. We were overcapitalized. Economi-cally fishermen weren’t making much money and they needed

to figure out what to do, and certainly our fish stocks were starting to show signs of stress. So there was a change-over from maximizing catch to selective fishing, new man-agement designs, and along with that came huge shifts in

the next morning: “You know that data you said was weak, what can we do to help?” That started the first tagging program in Rhode Island that was done by the industry in cooperation with URI. You started seeing this huge

You go and spend 10 minutes with a fisherman and realize you know absolutely nothing.

behavior. We realized that in order to get fishermen (and managers) from where they were to where they needed to go they have to change. And they don’t know how. They simply don’t know how to not fish and work endlessly on catching as many fish as they can, and competing with each other. And we realized we’ve really got to start looking at how to do that. And how do you teach fishermen about very complex subjects? They wanted to learn more about stock assessment, they wanted to understand the models, they wanted to start participating in research, they wanted to sit at the manage-ment table. All of a sudden you had fishermen come in and say they wanted to understand the egg pre-recruit model for lobster. And that was our job now, to explain the egg pre-recruit model to lobstermen in simple language and explain where the data was weak. I explained the model to them at one of their meetings, and I got a call from their president

change in attitude and will-ingness to do something new. So that opened up new opportunities for us. So that’s what we’ve been doing for the last 10 years. Bringing in new things, new discussions, bring-ing people together.

Moving ForwardWe each bring our strengths to the table and then have to find a way to combine them. The secret is remembering that we don’t alone represent the truth. Fisheries is not an exact science, and sometimes statisti-cal significance does not mean biological significance. The only way to move forward is to do it together. n


I was fortunate to work on four projects as a Rhode Is-land Sea Grant Law Fellow during the last two years of my law school career. These projects confirmed that ocean policy was a good career path for me to pur-sue. Through my work with Rhode Island Sea Grant I was able to interact and work with individuals in state gov-

Kate Haber was a candidate in the joint-degree program between Roger Williams University School of Law and the Department of Ma-rine Affairs at URI. After receiving her J.D. from RWU and her mas-ter’s degree from URI, Kate began an executive Sea Grant Knauss Fellowship in Washington, D.C., in February 2011.

Kate Haber

Rhode Island Sea Grant Alumni

Sunshine Menezes is Executive Di-rector of the Metcalf Institute for Marine & Environmental Report-ing at URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography. The Metcalf Insti-tute is part of the Office of Marine Programs at URI, which is focused on communicating marine science to public audiences. The Metcalf Institute provides science training for journalists in order to improve the clarity and accuracy of envi-ronmental news coverage.

I first became involved with Sea Grant in 2003, when I re-ceived a National Sea Grant College Program Dean John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fel-lowship. I was a legislative fellow, placed in the U.S. House of Representatives. As someone who had always observed politics from the sidelines, I thought that I had a fairly good understanding of the legislative process be-fore I began the fellowship. I was wrong. The Knauss Fel-lowship provided an amazing learning experience and an unparalleled professional de-velopment opportunity. But I think one of the most impor-tant things that I learned in the fellowship was that I have the skills to learn about any new sort of environmental topic that I wasn’t previous-ly familiar with and translate that for policy makers or

some other public audience. That was a really valuable les-son for me and one that I have put to use ever since. Rhode Island Sea Grant plays an often unrecog-nized—but important—role in our community. The Rhode Island Sea Grant fisheries pro-gram, especially, is very well respected by the fishing com-munity around here, and that’s not a small thing. It’s common knowledge that New England fishermen have struggled in the last sever-al decades, and there is a real sense of animosity between a lot of fishers and manag-ers. I think that Sea Grant has played a critical role in reach-ing out to local fishermen and engaging them in the management and research processes. As someone who partici-pated in the Metro Bay SAMP

Sunshine Menezes

Personal History

process, I am also a big fan of Sea Grant’s role as an objec-tive facilitator and leader in local and regional marine spa-tial planning efforts. I think these various research, man-agement, and outreach efforts make Rhode Island Sea Grant a unique resource whose products are relevant to au-diences far beyond Rhode Island. I hope that Sea Grant’s 40th anniversary will mark a new era of recognition for the great work that they do. n

ernments from Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Maine, as well as professionals in vari-ous ocean and coastal fields including fishermen and mar-itime lawyers. I think the greatest benefit for law stu-dents in this program is the opportunity to pursue topics not covered in the classroom, as well as the ability to take textbook knowledge outside

the academic void and apply it to a practical context. n


Jared Rhodes

In 1994, I began pursuing a master’s degree in communi-ty planning at URI. I saw Sea Grant as presenting a signif-icant opportunity for me to do some work in an area that meant a lot to me personal-ly while also furthering my education. I worked with Vir-ginia Lee and Mark Amaral in the Coastal Resources Center on the Clean Marina Program, which was funded by a grant from the R.I. Department of Environmental Management and Sea Grant, a project to actually go out and install best management practices for pollution reduction in five marinas in the state of Rhode Island. My job was to facili-tate the relationship with the industry, install the BMP im-plementation measures, and track their use over a sin-gle boating season to try and identify the amounts of pol-lutants that were reduced through the implementation. Once that was com-plete, we then took that pollution data and compared it with the cost to imple-ment the tools and looked to identify which ones were cost effective and to devel-op lessons learned that other marinas could use to institute these practices at their facil-ities. Through that work, we eventually produced a guid-ance document that became, with the assistance with the Sea Grant network, a nation-al model in terms of how to

the level of buy-in that they generate among stakehold-ers and the level of long-term commitment towards imple-mentation that they inspire amongst the communities that are most affected. Those are the three key lessons that I took from my Sea Grant experience: the value of sound research and data collection, the impor-tance of public outreach and participation in the decision making process, and the val-ue of demonstration projects in empowering people to move forward once that di-rect outreach has ended. n

Jared Rhodes was a former coastal management extension special-ist with Rhode Island Sea Grant/URI Coastal Resources Center and is currently chief of the Statewide Planning program in the R.I. Divi-sion of Planning.

go about implementing fed-eral requirements in a cost effective manner. Eventual-ly, it formed a rewrite of the state’s regulatory program for nonpoint source pollution control in marinas.

At Statewide Planning I once again connected back up with Sea Grant through the formulation of our joint Rhode Island ports and har-bors inventory project. That project has since had some significant returns and it’s an example of Sea Grant serv-ing in its classic research role of generating solid data on which to base important gov-ernmental resource allocation and policy decisions. In reflecting on my Sea Grant experience I think one of the most important lessons that I learned was the im-portance of public outreach and participation strategies in formulation of policy. It’s something that’s stuck with me for a long time: it’s crit-ical to not only get out and educate stakeholders on the science of various issues, but it’s also extremely important to allow the stakeholders’ ex-pertise to really guide the formulation of proper public responses. The last thing I would add is the value of specif-ic demonstration projects. The projects that Sea Grant funds are tremendous not only in regards to their direct outputs, but also in terms of

Jared Rhodes (left) with Sunshine Menezes (right) and consultant Numi Mitchell work on the Metro Bay Special Area Management Plan.


John King

I’ve been here 26 years. I’m a geologist and I work, these days, primarily on climate projects, paleoenvironmental reconstruction projects, also modern habitat reconstruc-tions. In terms of the habitat reconstructions, that involves

both the geology and a fair amount of biology. We take sediments and run it through the cryogen-ic magnetometer primarily to determine the age. We can compare the magnetic record that we derive from the sed-iments that we run through John King

GSO professor of oceanography

it to dated reference curves. We can do this on time scales of hundreds to thousands of years and also hundreds of thousands to millions of years, based on changes of polarity in the Earth’s mag-netic field. n

Personal History


While we know more today about the seafloor then we did when GSO was founded, we still have a long way to go—even in understanding Narragansett Bay. To better understand the habitat and the sediments of the floor of the Bay and the south shore salt ponds (coastal lagoons), John King, GSO researcher and professor, developed a comprehensive underwater mapping project, BayMap, in 2004 with the support of Rhode Island Sea Grant. BayMap has produced a series of high-resolution seafloor maps that create an environmental habitat baseline for the entire Bay, which has never been done before in such detail. “We’re collecting geological, biological, and cultural resource data that, when complete, will contribute to benthic habitat maps and maps of shipwrecks and other archaeological resources in the Bay,” says Emily Shumchenia, a post-doc at GSO working with King on the BayMap project. “These maps can be used to help manage biological and cultural resources and help design monitoring projects.” “There have been smaller projects done prior to this one, but this is the first comprehensive one that covers 100 percent of the area,” says King. Data on sediment types, geological structures, and biological communities of Narragansett Bay were collected using sophisticated imaging technologies, underwater video, and physical samples. This data helped to establish patterns, says King, that demonstrate how a particular ecosystem or part of the Bay functions. In particular, Quonochontaug Pond, when mapped, turned out to be deeper than most coastal ponds and reflected low oxygen levels. Follow-up studies looking at the chemical, physical, biological, and geological components were conducted to establish a pattern. By establishing a pattern, King says, you can move forward with an ecosystem-based study. “Through BayMap we’ve tried to identify what we call representative areas in the Bay—areas that are either recognized as separate bottom types or separate biological community types,” he says. “We’re trying to study some of those areas in more detail.”

Habitat mapping is a two-part process that involves, first, figuring out what is there and, second, figuring out why it is there, says King, noting that parts of the Bay are now well understood and should inform overall understanding of the whole system and aid in better management decisions. “In order to do any sort of marine spatial planning, the first thing you have to know is what’s there,” he says. “Most of the time, managers are asked to make decisions not knowing what’s there or what processes are important. And that doesn’t lend itself to excellent management.” “A lot of this data and a lot of the skills I’ve acquired by collecting this data feed into national policy issues and marine spatial planning goals for the country moving forward,” says Shumchenia. “It’s a really cool position to be in because we’re on the cutting edge of what national ocean policy is now focused on.”

BayMapUncovering Narragansett Bay


EEvery living creature, whether on land or below the waves, owes its existence to phyto-plankton—microscopic plants that produce half of the Earth’s oxygen supply and are the basis of the ocean food chain. Phytoplankton provide the nutrient currency by which food webs evolve, says Theo-dore Smayda, research profes-sor of oceanography at the Uni-versity of Rhode Island Gradu-ate School of Oceanography. Smayda discussed ecological changes in Narragansett Bay based on a long-term water quality and plankton dataset to colleagues and students at a Rhode Island Sea Grant-sponsored research conference in March 2011. For Smayda, these tiny marine plants have been the

Tracking Ecological Changes in Narragansett BayPhytoplankton’s role in the evolution of marine ecosystems

Meredith Haas

“We’re trying to under-stand what’s going on with various processes, all of which are influences of phytoplank-ton growth,” Smayda said, explaining the complexity of trying to understand a system affected by local and exter-nal variations such as climate change, which in turn impact plankton growth and alter the food chain. “Narragansett Bay is in a state of change with variability en route to a differ-ent equilibrium,” he said. Smayda has been collect-ing water quality and plankton data in Narragansett Bay since his graduate student days in the 1950s. These data docu-ment the Bay’s responses to change from the post-World War II-era through the 1970s, which saw passage of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, and up to today, where nutrient reduction programs and climate change are having an impact on Bay communities. Narragansett Bay, he says, is the perfect place to be to assess climate change because the Bay is a “biogeographi-cal transition zone between temperate and boreal waters.” It’s at these zones where early and sustained changes in the system, particularly primary

productivity (phytoplankton), can be measured. Primary productivity is important to the stability of the food web and function of ecosystems. It has been the focus of much inten-sive research, but previously lacked a long-term time series dataset that allows the analysis of changes over time. Changes in phytoplankton growth and blooms can reveal much about the state of an ecosystem, the current climate, and what the potential impacts may be to fish, which rely on plankton as a food source. Smayda and Borkman’s analysis shows changes in water clarity, salinity, and freshwater input from rivers over time as well as distinct changes in Bay plankton, which have impli-cations up the food web to commercially important preda-tors such as fish, shellfish, and lobster. Smayda hopes others will use this data to improve the understanding and manage-ment of estuarine ecosystems to preserve their integrity given the challenges ahead. “We need an integrative approach to understand base-line conditions and responses to disturbances such as climate change,” he said. n

For more information on the Narragansett phytoplankton data

set, visit www.gso.uri.edu/phytoplankton.

Meredith Haas is a research communica-

tions specialist for Rhode Island Sea

Grant.

Researcher Profile

Narragansett Bay is in a state of change.focus of 50 years of study, which has been the basis of a database considered the oldest in the world for a temperate es-tuary. Smayda and fellow GSO researcher David Borkman have been documenting and trans-lating their collected data to an online resource from hundreds of handwritten notebooks.


As a child growing up in Rhode Island, these names cast a spell over me. Whisper-ing them like an incantation, even in the dead of a chilly New England winter, I could be transported to a place that smelled of Coppertone, clam cakes, salty air. I could almost hear the waves crashing on smooth golden sand, catch a glimpse of a sail catching the wind on the horizon. My mother did not believe in summer camp. Even the one held on the hot asphalt of the local playground, where thirteen-year-old counselors drank Tab and watched the boys playing baseball while littler kids made bracelets out of gimp and played lackadaisi-cal games of frozen tag, was considered a waste of mon-ey and possibly unsafe. No, in my family the only way to spend a summer day was to get in our enormous green Chevy station wagon, fill it with as many cousins we could fit in the way back, scratchy Navy blankets, and a cooler of fried chicken, Ruf-fles potato chips, and fruit, and drive south on Route 1 to one of the beaches with those magical names.

By Ann Hood. . .

Back then I could body surf until I grew dizzy and bruised, bury a boy cous-in or two in the sand, build a castle using Dixie cups and ocean water, walk the length of any beach and back a dozen times, all with-out ever tiring. If I was lucky, the ride back to my hot and stuffy house would include a stop for a Del’s from the truck parked on Route 4, or clam cakes from George’s in Galilee. Luckier still were the nights when my father came home from work, loos-ened his tie, and announced he was taking as back to the beach for a dip. Still sandy, our skin warm from the sun, we put our damp bathing suits on again, piled back into the Chevy, and returned to the now dusk lit beach. My parents stood on the sand and watched as we ran in and out of the water, let-ting cool waves crash on us as the sky darkened. In those days, one of my favorite things to do was stand at the edge of the wa-ter and let my feet sink into the sand as the tide went out. I liked to close my eyes and enjoy the feeling of stay-ing put while the ocean

Ann Hood’s most recent book, the bestseller The Red Thread is just out in paperback. Her novel The Knitting Circle is soon to be an HBO movie starring Katherine Heigl. A 1978 graduate of the University of Rhode Island, she lives in Providence.

Ninigret, Misquamicut, Scarborough. Moonstone, Sand Hill Cove, Narragansett.

BEACHES

pulled at me. Now, as an adult, that sensation takes on greater meaning. In many ways, we all stand still as life swirls around us. Sometimes it even threatens to pull us away, to take us down. But we dig our feet in and try to stay standing. True too, that those magical names still cast their spell on me. In the true chill of winter, and in the met-aphorical ones that come our way, I can still close my eyes and think: Ninigret, Misquamicut, Scarborough. Moonstone, Sand Hill Cove, Narragansett. When I do, there is a warm sun, the smells of summer, the sound of the waves. When I do, I am running along a glori-ous beach on a beautiful day, a day that seems like it will never end.

A N N I V E R S A RY E D I T I O N 41°N 27

Photo ©Kathie Florsheim. All rights reserved.


Meredith Haas is a research

communications specialist for Rhode

Island Sea Grant.

EExploration of the marine world is not only the realm of the scientist. The observations of the artist can also enhance our understanding of our oceans and coasts. Recognizing this, Rhode Island Sea Grant, in collabo-ration with the University of Rhode Island’s Fine Art De-partment, established the Visual Arts Sea Grant program in 1988 to encourage profes-sional artists in New England to address issues concerning marine environments and coastal communities. Through supported artwork, Rhode Is-land Sea Grant hopes to foster dialogue and an appreciation for these environments so that they may be better managed and preserved for future gen-erations. From paintings and photographs to sculptures, sketches, and film, much of the artwork supported by the program over the past two decades incorporates scien-tific observation, maritime culture, the evolving marine landscape, and human inter-actions with the ocean.

Drawing Inspiration from the SeaChristy Georg, a fulltime working artist, is a 2006 Visual Arts Sea Grant re-cipient. Her current work, Nautical Body, is inspired by the sea and incorporates sculpture, performance, and drawings.

Grant Supports Art About–And In –The Marine EnvironmentMeredith Haas

The Visual Arts Sea Grant program is provided annual-

ly in collaboration by Rhode Island Sea

Grant and the Univer-sity of Rhode Island’s Fine Art Department.

For more information, visit www.uri.edu/

artsci/visual_arts_sea_grant.html


“I exhaustively researched maritime history and culture to actualize a modern relationship to stories, lore, and tricks and trades of explorers, pirates, fish-ermen, ‘old salts,’ and sea-steading sailors,” she said, explaining that she worked for one summer in Con-necticut as a schooner sailor aboard the 83-foot Mystic Whaler to learn more about the subject. “This training instilled a rare insight into the dying art of maritime culture, practical techniques, and crafts, which inspire the work.” Since receiving the Visual Arts Sea Grant, George has been awarded eight artist residencies, has shown in numerous art galleries and museums, and currently is showing in the Maine Maritime Museum. “It makes sense to have artwork and maritime culture come together in this way and has merged re-ally well with my body of work,” she said. “The Visual Arts Sea Grant was the first support I got for this work and I really thank Rhode Island Sea Grant for getting it all started.”


2010 funded artists

C.L. Terry GipsRecordings and Memories of the Ocean: A Series of Intimate Observations

Gips focused on high resolution scans of coastal and aquatic plants of the salt waters surrounding Cape Cod. “These plants are often small, slippery, submerged and moving with waves and currents, thus elud-ing the average viewer,” he said. Prints are 10 to 20 times their orig-inal size in sections that pieced together are 3- to 8-feet in each di-mension. “At this scale, every tiny root, stem, leaf, grain of sand, or strand of entangled fishline presents itself in vivid immediacy.”

Nathalie MiebachChanging Waters

Miebach explored the ecological inter-action between weather systems and marine environments within the Gulf of Maine. “My work focuses on the inter-section of art and science and the visual articulation of scientific observations,” she said.

Timothy MurdochTidal Flowers

Murdoch created a temporary in-stallation in the water at Fort Point Channel that feeds into Boston Har-bor. Sculptures made from recycled detergent bottles were designed to open and close with the ebb and flow of the tide. Information regard-ing plastics in the environment was in place at viewing points on near-by walkways and bridges in October 2010.



The Art of ScienceEmeritus Professor of Oceanography Paul Hargraves and artist Fay Darling reveal the majestic diatom formations invisible to the human eye.


WWhy are certain fish found in certain areas? What ecological requirements do they have? These are the types of fisheries and habitat questions Jeremy Collie, professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography (GSO), has focused his research on answering. As Collie, who received his first Rhode Island Sea Grant funding in the early 1990s, uncovered more and more basic information about fisheries ecology, he began to formulate some further questions about how this information might pertain to fisheries management — Are there long-term impacts from bottom-trawl fishing on the benthic ecosystem? How can we use this information to improve fisheries management and foster ecosystem-based management? To answer these deceptively simple questions, Collie dove into the world of complex fish interactions by developing conceptual and computer-based multi-species models that portrayed multiple interactions between multiple species and how change in one part of the food web had

Modeling the Mystery Out of Fisheries Ecology A profile of Jeremy Collie

Alan Desbonnet

ripple effects throughout. While these models can be daunting to develop and use, their outputs provide much more realistic pictures of how coastal and oceanic ecosystems behave, and how they might be influenced by change, such as a warming climate. While Collie’s research has been conducted through-out much of the North Atlantic Ocean region, some of his most startling findings have been with regard to changes in the fish communities found in Narragansett Bay. In looking at changes over time in both the demersal (bottom living) and pelagic (water-column living) fishes that inhabit Narragansett Bay, Collie found that demersal species are being replaced by pelagic species. For instance, there has been a decrease in the numbers of flounder over time, while there has been a commensurate increase in herring and bluefish. Collie sees this as a fundamental shift in the very foundations of the Bay ecosystem, and it seems to be linked to warming water temperatures in the Bay as a result of changing climate.

The bottom line appears to be that pelagic species preferring warmer waters are moving in and replacing cool-water-loving bottom species, though the ecological impacts of this “species swap” are not yet known. Most recently, Collie, in collaboration with John King, also a professor of oceanography at GSO, has been mapping benthic habitats in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island Sound and Block Island Sound by correlating them to geological bottom types that have been identified from high-resolution sonar imaging of the seafloor. This high-tech research will allow for rapid assessment of seafloor bottom to determine its importance in fisheries—knowing benthic habitat allows for interpretation of the types and densities of invertebrates important as foods to fishes—which could help in the decision-making processes both for fisheries management policy and for development of alternative energy sources (wind turbines, for instance) in offshore waters. n

Alan Desbonnet is the assistant director of Rhode Island Sea Grant.

Researcher Profile


This article is taken from an interview

of Stephen Olsen by Chip Young, former

Senior Fellow of the URI Coastal Institute,

on the occasion of the URI Coastal

Resources Center’s 40th anniversary.

Early challenges for the Coastal Resources Center

In the beginning our task was defined as “translating” science so that it would guide plan-ning and decision-making by the newly created R.I. Coast-al Resources Management Council (CRMC) that had been granted a broad mandate and sweeping authorities by the state’s legislature. It took us a while to understand that sim-ply translating the available science had very little impact. But when the available sci-ence was organized so as to better understand issues that society cared about and was combined with a dedication to engagement with all interest-ed parties, and the public, we found a voice and a role for a university-based organization. The emphasis on the participation of all interested parties was an unusual feature of the federal Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972 that a came a year after Rhode Is-land’s legislation. At the time many of those working in state and federal government felt that this emphasis on public engagement was an impo-sition and a waste of time. But the young and idealistic team at CRC took these re-quirements to heart and set about experimenting on how

Stephen Olsen

technical process of assem-bling the Ocean Special Area Management Plan that puts in place a framework for siting facilities offshore—including potentially a major wind farm in Rhode Island Sound.

Milestone moments For me personally one such moment was when I made my first trip Ecuador in 1985. This was the first of three countries in which CRC had agreed to help establish national coast-al management programs. I traveled down a devastated coastline in a Jeep to view a re-cently built but abandoned commercial port complete with dockside cranes and a half-sunk dredger, sprawling illegal settlements of very poor people built along the edges or actually in estuaries prone to dramatic floods, and drove past estuaries in which man-grove wetlands were being bulldozed into shrimp ponds in flagrant disregard of the gov-ernmental permitting process. Clearly, building constituencies for a meaningful planning and permit granting process was going to be a challenge very unlike the one we had faced in Rhode Island.

When CRC began work-ing internationally we soon recognized that all that we had learned had to be re-thought and adapted to the very differ-ent contexts within which we were working. Our experience in the U.S. had already taught us that a process and a poli-cy that worked well in Rhode

best to involve the diversity of stakeholders with an often passionate interest in a giv-en stretch of shoreline and on decisions that had the poten-tial to impact both the state’s economy and the aesthetic qualities of Narragansett Bay. The lessons that we learned in Rhode Island subsequently be-came the foundation for what became known as CRC’s par-ticipatory approach to coastal management worldwide. We found ourselves thinking and assessing the op-tions for answering issues that were of real importance to the people of Rhode Island. What was the future of the Rhode Is-land fishing industry when the 200-mile limit could exclude foreign fishing fleets operat-ing on the grounds of New England? Should re-building be allowed on barrier beach-es that had been swept clean by the 1938 and 1954 hurri-canes? How should the state engage in the permit process for nuclear power plants that had been proposed for Rome Point in Narragansett Bay, then for Charlestown? These were challenging and important questions. Working with state agencies and the public to an-swer them was a creative and exciting—at times exhaust-ing—process. Today CRC continues in its role of convener and in-tegrator of knowledge from many sources when the state faces important issues and choices. Most recently CRC organized the public and

Personal History


Island might not be suitable to the politics and the issues in Texas or California. The dif-ference between states in the U.S., however, was very small compared to the differences between approaches that re-sponded to the drivers of change along the coastlines of Ecuador, Thailand, or Sri Lan-ka. We discovered that it was essential to invest in gaining an appreciation for the history, the culture, and the tradi-tions of governance in each country. One of our most im-portant tasks was to seek out leaders who thoroughly under-stood their context and could work with us to adapt the prin-ciples of an integrating and long-term approach to coast-al development and coastal conservation. Indeed, decades of working in both Rhode Is-land and other countries have taught us that coastal man-agement is as much—at times more—of a social and politi-cal process than a scientific and technical process. In many cas-es the scientific knowledge required to inform decision-making is known and available. The challenges lie in learning how to integrate and apply

such knowledge within an ex-isting, often deeply flawed, governance system.

Addressing the needs of the futureWe have learned a great deal about an approach to coast-al management that addresses both people and their envi-ronment—not just one or the other. This is currently called ecosystem-based manage-ment. We have come a long way and the demand for CRC has never been greater. But we are still at the beginning of a long trail. There is a huge amount of work to be done. I believe that prog-ress on the tangle of issues along coastlines would be helped if there was a network of permanent CRC-like or-ganizations working to build capacity and find workable solutions within their socio- ecological context over the long term in places that represent the full range of coastal conditions. Such a global network of reference sites would document how both the environment and society are changing at each site, how the governance sys-

Stephen Olsen has been with the URI Coastal Resources Center (CRC) since its creation in 1971, and has served as the center’s director since 1975. Stephen led the team that drafted one of the first state coastal management programs to be approved by the federal government in 1976. Since then the R.I. Coastal Resources Manage-ment Program has been widely recognized as a pioneer in what is known today as an “ecosystem approach” that integrates across sectors and disciplines to address the many challenges posed by accelerating societal and envi-ronmental change along coastlines. In 1985 the CRC was invited to lead a program sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development that explored the applicability of U.S. experience in coastal management to similar problems and opportunities along the coastlines of low-income tropical nations. Today the CRC maintains active programs both in Rhode Island and in a growing number of countries worldwide. Stephen has consistently advo-cated for a learning-based, issue-driven approach to the governance of coastal ecosystems. He participates in a number of international fora and continues to travel widely.

Shrimp ponds line the coast in Ecuador.tem is responding to such

changes, and what societal and environmental outcomes are accruing. Indeed this is an idea that John Knauss in-corporated into the famous Stratton Commission report “Our Nation and the Sea” in 1969. He envisioned a net-work of “coastal laboratories” around the United States that would be working to apply the best science, technology, and policy-making to address priority coastal issues in their regions. Today just such a network is urgently needed globally. n


Facing Climate Change Around the Globe

PamelaRubinoffI decided to come here for grad school in marine affairs. In my studies, I was trying to understand how larger policy and guidance could be applied practically at the community level. As a student, I came to CRC and Sea Grant to work on a coastal hazards project, and I did my thesis in 1990 on sea level rise implications for Rhode Island. I worked with CRMC (R.I. Coastal Resources Management Council) and did some GIS modeling about what the implications of future sea level rise would be for the housing stock in southern Rhode Island. After I graduated, I got a job with the Massachusetts Coastal Zone Management Program, where I was the Cape and islands coordinator. There I worked with the Cape

accepted an offer to come work for CRC in 1996. My first day on the job I was on my way to Ecuador to work with the coastal program there. Working with both federal policy folks and local stakeholders, we “exported” some of the R.I. tools. Jon Boothroyd (now URI research professor emeritus of geosciences) worked with them on beach profiling, helping to identify how beaches are changing—a process similar to what he has been doing in Rhode Island for decades. Simultaneously in Rhode Island we started looking at developing plans to reduce flood risks. That was in the early days of doing outreach on hurricane impacts and preparedness, and looking at how communities can incorporate changes into planning for capital improvements and local comprehensive plans. The international and U.S. work I was involved in really started to feed off each other because we were trying to work at local levels in both places. After that, I did international work fulltime, working on a project in Mexico. Similarly, we went there trying to understand the landscape and how coastal processes affected the environment and economy. We characterized the entire shoreline of the state of Quintana Roo, as tourism development was expected to expand beyond Cancun.

a freeboard, an increase in elevation of buildings in certain areas along Cape Cod to address anticipated worsening threats, a policy that was progressive at the time (and still is, in practice). We looked at policy at a state and regional level and provided assistance to communities on how to implement those tools through different plans and zoning schemes. I worked with the National Parks Service, which wanted to restore wetlands degraded by a dike protecting the Provincetown airport. Meanwhile, the town wanted to expand the airport as its critical lifeline, and noted that the airport was flooding more frequently during storms. Predecessors of mine had started building consensus a decade earlier between the town, the federal government, and the state. We said, “This is a problem today that is going

In the following interview, Pam

describes how her work on climate

change and sea level rise has taken her

from Rhode Island to Cape Cod to Ecuador

and back to Rhode Island.

Personal History

This is a problem today that is going to get worse in the future.Cod Commission on how to deal with reducing impacts of hazards as we addressed real-time storm recovery after Hurricane Bob and the No-name storms of 1990. It was a wonderful opportunity to see how a regional planning commission links up to the state and down to the municipality. We were developing their first regional policy, and incorporated a sea level rise component. We included

to get worse in the future (with climate change). How do we solve these problems?” Once again, climate change and coastal hazards were a theme of my work, and the negotiation between the parties was a key element to its success. Two years later, after I left, the airport was expanded, the restoration project was started—a win-win solution.Deciding to return to international development, I


We were trying to identify high-erosion zones and flood-prone areas that should be avoided. We also worked in the Gulf of California, on the western coast of Mexico. We looked at a variety of issues, not only coastal hazards, but zoning ordinances, policies on setbacks and erosion control, and motivating stakeholders to take action. Many policies that we used in Rhode Island, which are now considered good practices, were then transferred to Mexico as we worked with the state and municipal governments as well as the private sector (such as architects and engineers) there. With assistance of other URI partners, we also started a university-based Geographic Information Center (similar to the URI Environmental Data Center), which today is quite successful in both their training and their outreach to the state. After six years, I decided it was time to come back to Rhode Island. I started working on coastal hazards and sea level rise again, and picked up from where I left off in many ways 18 years before with my thesis. We started looking at the potential impacts of sea level rise here in Rhode Island, and with CRMC and URI scientists, developed a state policy on how to address it. Climate change was still not really politically popular in the U.S., but nonetheless, we drafted a policy in 2007. Part of the challenge on the policy was that builders were concerned that if we increased

the building requirements it would be very difficult for them to build. Our outreach program was not as good as it should have been. That was my lesson—that you can’t do just policy if you want people to buy in. Our newest challenge is trying to understand how we can truly change behaviors both of individuals and of society to prepare for climate change impacts. This is a new avenue for us: to take a look at social science components of this because people are resistant to changing. We’ve had floods forever and we’re rebuilding in the same places. So how best can we communicate and outreach to promote change of personal behaviors and societal behaviors? Working locally and taking this to undeveloped countries has been really rewarding. International agencies recognize they must help to solve today’s development issues while adapting to accelerated climate change. With increased support by the United Nations and donors, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) realized that their programs would be more effective if they included climate change aspects. They came to the CRC to ask how people should start to adapt within coastal regions. We developed a seminal document with them in 2007-2008 that talked about how coastal

management tools could address changing climate, and that’s been used as a training tool all over the world for USAID as well as for their partners. Our ideal is getting climate change mainstreamed into coastal management, so our initiatives, whether they are for flood protection or vibrant waterfronts, can be more effective in the long term because they incorporate thinking ahead towards a changed environment with accelerated climate change and all its implications. n Pamela Rubinoff has been a Coastal Management Extension Specialist with the URI Coastal Resources Center (CRC) for the past 15 years, returning to the place she had once worked as a graduate student. Pam has worked for the international program at CRC as well as the U.S. program, where she has been funded by Sea Grant to work locally on coastal hazards, sea level rise, and climate change issues. She is currently a principal investigator on a Rhode Island Sea Grant-funded research project that seeks to apply behavior change techniques drawn from health sciences to climate change adaptation.

Tourism drives development in Quintana Roo, Mexico.


WLessons learned from an environmental crisis

Meredith Haas

Whether fanatical about baseball or not, almost every American has a basic under-standing of how the game works. Unfortunately, says Chris Reddy, the same can-not be said about science. “There’s a certain lan-guage in baseball,” said Reddy, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceano-graphic Institution and an expert on oil spills, dur-ing a talk given at as part of the 2011 Vetlesen Lectures sponsored by the University of Rhode Island’s Gradu-ate School of Oceanography (GSO). He said that base-ball has a unique culture that people learn about through-out their lives through multiple translators. “Sci-ence is not understood in the same way. There aren’t mul-tiple translators or continual learning. You stop learning [science] after high school or college, if you ever embraced science at all.” Reddy, a GSO alumnus, called for improving pub-lic understanding of how science works and the re-sponsibility of scientists to communicate better about their work. The less the pub-lic knows about how science

works, Reddy argued, the less likely society will be to make informed decisions on public policy.

So what are the barriers?Reddy explained that many scientists may complain of inaccurate reporting from journalists and fail to rec-ognize their own failure to

where it is spilled, and the re-sponse of that environment to the oil. One of his challeng-es working in the Gulf was to convey that not all oil spills are the same and should not be compared head-to-head. For example, the Exxon Valdez is not the ultimate scientific reference for oil spill. Another


Meredith Haas is a research

communications specialist for Rhode

Island Sea Grant. The full version of this

article was published in ecoRI news,

www.ecoRInews.com

The less the public knows about how science works, the less likely society will be to make informed decisions on public policy.

This lecture was presented as part of the 2011 Vetlesen Lectures:

“The State of Our Oceans” sponsored by the G. Unger Vetlesen

Foundation and the URI Graduate School

of Oceanography. This lecture may be viewed online at www.uri.edu/

vetlesen.

Communicating Science

provide journalists with good information. Reddy, who has been working on oil spills for 15 years—including the 1996 North Cape spill in Rhode Island, the 2003 spill in Buz-zard’s Bay, the 2007 Hebei Spirit spill in South Korea, and the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico—listed nu-merous quotes from scientists describing the impacts of the Deepwater spill that included phrases such as, “God knows how long,” or “It’s not a pret-ty picture.” These “over-the-top” statements, he said, “dilute good science,” explaining that it’s important to know how much oil is spilled,

was to explain that the underwater plume discovered at the Deepwater Horizon site was a plume of water con-taining hydrocarbons, not a “river of oil.” He called on journalists, in turn, to understand certain things about science—it’s not linear or neat, and while mis-takes happen, unlike a house of cards, “Science is incre-mental. It’s more like a jigsaw puzzle,” he said, “One mis-take doesn’t make it all fall down.” He also emphasized that analysis of data can take years: “To understand the biological impacts of the Deepwater Horizon spill will


take hundreds of people over a long period of time, and we have to accept that we may not get all the answers.” Scientists and journal-ists need to work together, he said, “If not, the science we have is going to be mis-

used, misunderstood, never used, or worse, science will just become a hobby, and the excellent results we have will just be left on bookshelves in libraries.” n

The

New

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Tim

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icay

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WWhat would happen if several gallons or several hundreds of gallons of oil en-tered Narragansett Bay? Or how would increases in water temperature impact estuaries and fish communities? How would you know to what extent any variable, whether it be pollution input, water temperature, or circulation, impacts an ecosystem? In order to answer these questions, Scott Nixon, professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography (GSO), and his colleagues realized they needed to understand the interactions of the whole system, not just one specific species or area. To study the complexity of Narragan-sett Bay and Rhode Island’s coastal estuaries, Nixon, along with other research-ers from various institutions, utilized mesocosms, which are reconstructions of natural aquatic ecosystems, similar to

very large aquariums. In these mesocosms, environmental factors can be manipulated to measure various responses to various inputs, such as increased nutrient loading (pollution), increasing water temperatures (changing climate), or algal blooms (multiple factors). Nixon has written that the process of planning and building the mesocosms “forces us to think in a rigorous and quantitative way about what we think is important in the natural system.” Much of Nixon’s research over the last four decades has been centered on the ecology of coastal salt ponds, watersheds, and Narragansett Bay. In the late 1960s, Nixon worked with URI researchers on a Sea Grant-funded project to develop numerical, or computer simulation, models that integrated social, physi-cal, and ecological models of Narragansett Bay and looked at the whole watershed,

relating economic growth to pollution levels resulting from the expansion of various manufacturing sectors. “It was a remarkable thing then but is common today,” he said. “It was very cutting-edge stuff that Rhode Island Sea Grant was pushing for-ward 40 years ago.” Information from these models aided in the un-derstanding of interactions between various groups of organisms in the Bay, and between nutrient chemistry and productivity, as well as interactions between bot-tom sediments and the water column. But this wasn’t enough, said Nixon. The models allowed for changing dynamics but were limited by scope and breadth of detail and diversity among interac-tions. Inspired by previous work of the famous ecologist H.T. Odum, Nixon, in concert with fellow GSO research scientist Candace Oviatt, con-structed small living models to study such interactions.

Meredith Haas is a research commu-

nications specialist for Rhode Island Sea

Grant.

What mesocosoms can tell us about ecosystems

Meredith Haas

Reconstructing the Aquatic Environment

Researcher Profile


After the Arab oil em-bargo in the 1970s, which triggered as much concern as there is today about ris-ing oil prices and domestic production, the Environmen-tal Protection Agency (EPA) funded GSO to make bigger living models to study the impacts of oil pollution in Rhode Island waters. “If we were going to be shipping more oil up and down the coast we prob-ably needed to worry about the environmental impacts of oil and energy produc-tion activities in general,” Nixon said, explaining the EPA’s rationale. Through this project, hundreds of publica-tions known as MERL (for Marine Ecosystems Research Laboratory) reports were released that set a precedent for scientific experimentation and understanding of coastal ecosystems, particularly Nar-ragansett Bay. Based on this work and previous studies on coastal salt ponds, it became ap-parent to Nixon there was a need to construct coastal salt pond mesocosms. “While it’s good to have these living models of Narra-gansett Bay, which is a phyto-plankton-based system, the shallow-water, lagoon-type coastal salt pond systems are a very different kettle of fish. Here, macrophytes like eelgrass and macroalgae that live on the sediment surface have a much more complex productivity base than Nar-

ragansett Bay,” Nixon said. “A lot of important questions often centered on nutrients from the groundwater in sep-tic systems coming into the salt ponds. Sea Grant-funded work on the salt ponds had identified septic systems as a major source of nutrients to the salt ponds, and that really informed state septic policies and setback requirements.” Nutrient experiments and the construction of salt pond mesocosms were sup-ported by Sea Grant for over a decade along with con-tinued observation of Nar-ragansett Bay in partnership with other state Sea Grant programs. In 2000, Nixon began noticing that the seasonal progressions in the Bay’s biological communities were changing. Measure-ments recorded increased water temperature in the Bay along with changes in fish communities, as well as the timing and magnitude of phytoplankton blooms. With Sea Grant support, Nixon converted the salt pond me-socosms into a living model of Narragansett Bay to study variances in phytoplankton blooms and changes in the sediment. Nixon has since expanded this work in the offshore environment to see how the sediments and water column are interacting in Rhode Island and Block Island Sounds. This and other research is helping to inform the R.I. Ocean Special Area

Management Plan, designed to address issues regard-ing current and future uses, including potential renewable energy development, off the coast of Rhode Island. n

Organisms that live in the mud, silt, and sand of the seabed are growing on the bottom of a MERL tank. Photo by Eric Klos.


Rhode Island Sea Grant is dif-ferent from the other Sea Grant programs in that it has always had a coastal center component in CRC. This has given our program a dedi-cated focus on working with coastal managers and com-munities. Early on, we learned a number of things about creating effective manage-ment plans. We’ve learned to base the management on is-sues people care passionately about so people will engage with them. We’ve learned how to partner well with the private sector, stakeholders, and government agencies. We’ve come to appreciate the university’s best role as neutral negotiator of issues and dis-tributor of solid information.

Ocean ZoningThe idea of ocean zoning was really pioneered by Ste-phen Olsen, CRC director, in the mid-1980s when he and others wrote the first “Red Book” (Rhode Island’s Coastal Resources Management Pro-gram), which condensed and streamlined the state’s coast-al zone program and zoned the uses of the state’s waters, much like communities do with their zoning provisions. While a hugely useful tool, many states didn’t adopt the approach and Rhode Island was one of the few states to zone its tidal waters.

Some of Rhode Island’s most forward-looking com-ponents were based at the time on Sea Grant research, which helped define the man-agement policies. A lot of the policies that were put into place that were groundbreak-ing at the time have actually since become a standard, such as ecosystem-based management, which has been implemented through numer-ous Special Area Management Plans (SAMPs). These became a model for the coastal zone management programs with-in the national network, and ecosystem-based manage-ment is now the norm.

An Event Fosters an Idea Early in the history of CRC, we learned the standard pol-icy process often begins with some event, after which you need to explore what are the salient issues for people. In the 1970s, there were dra-matic changes proposed in the character and use of the coastal waters of the state of Rhode Island, for instance, the threatened construction of a nuclear power plant at the old Navy base in Charles-town. That prompted the citizens to say no, and to say to the state of Rhode Island, “Pay attention to us.” URI and the coastal council re-sponded, and in partnership with Rhode Island Sea Grant, did the issue assessment and an ecological history to fill in the gap between what was

known about the area and what we didn’t know. This further gave us a process to explore and articulate the is-sues on which we could base the research and the manage-ment plan. This became the Salt Ponds SAMP, which was adopted in 1984. That process showed us who the opinion leaders were, so that we could identi-fy a constituency for carrying the work forward. Our work with Salt Pond Watchers, which is now the Salt Ponds Coalition, expanded to work with the Environmental Pro-tection Agency to formalize the idea of volunteer moni-tors for tidal waters, together with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

Developing a Model for Citizen Monitoring of Tidal WatersPrior to the Salt Pond Watch-ers, there had been a lot of stream and lake monitoring but no coastal monitoring. Tidal waters are more com-plex, because you’ve got tidal flushing and you’ve got salt interference with some of the chemistry. You’ve also got some very low levels of con-taminants—levels that are far below freshwater that are still having impacts—and a lot of the water quality measure-ments had to be done using research labs at the time. And everything’s moving: the shoreline’s rolling back, the tide’s moving in and out, the grass beds are shifting over

Virginia Lee

Virginia Lee joined the Coastal Resources Center (CRC) in 1979,

where she led the Rhode Island Sea Grant

Coastal Management Extension Program. Early in her career,

Virginia helped lead a major interdisciplinary research project on R.I.

coastal lagoons (“salt ponds”) and barrier

systems that yielded an early national model for

coastal management. At the request of the R.I.

Office of the Attorney General, Virginia led

an effort to compile 20 years’ worth of research

for the state’s argu-ment in a precedent-

setting tidal wetlands case before the U.S.

Supreme Court: Palaz-zolo v. Rhode Island.

While currently leading CRC’s Capacity Building

program, Virginia also serves on a Rhode Is-

land Sea Grant-funded collaborative research project linking behav-ioral science with cli-

mate change research.

Personal History


seasons, the fish are migrating in and out, and that doesn’t happen in a streambed. That launched into, with cooperation from a lot of people, the first guidance for volunteer monitoring of tidal waters, and a series of national meetings and a na-tional newsletter that have gone on to this day. And we used their data for research and for poli-cy decisions, and for surveys to see where the sources of contamination, such as dis-charges from septic systems, might be and to fix them. We even used it to try to take a look at climate change and water temperature trends. They monitored for years with us, and now with URI Watershed Watch and Co-operative Extension they continue monitoring.

The Public ProcessWe learned early on that you couldn’t affect public policy by simply saying, “Come to our website, and come to our public meetings.” Through all of the SAMPs—which man-age a variety of coastal areas, from the coastal lagoons of the Salt Ponds SAMP to the urban area of Providence Har-bor to the fjord-like Narrow River—we engaged the pub-lic in the process. We’d go to the chamber of commerce and the historical society and the marine trades association and give a talk about it and get their input. In parallel with that, we went to every

municipal government to see how the plan would fit with their policies and what their concerns were. Prior to the 1970s, real-ly none of this existed—there was no coastal program, there was no fisheries legisla-tion, there was no Sea Grant, and there really wasn’t any capacity to deal with gigan-tic decisions and changes. So we’ve gone really from noth-ing to a lot more capacity to deal now with big issues. And now, there are no more pro-posals for giant nuclear power plants or oil refineries—it’s suburban development and all these tiny houses and all these little lots. So we had to ad-just to what is the cumulative impact of numerous smaller, local decisions.

Applying Lessons Learned to Climate Change Climate change also could also be considered a giant cumulative impact from mil-lions of small decisions, and even now people are not ful-ly aware of its consequences. Not enough people are aware of even recent trends in Nar-ragansett Bay, with rising temperature, increasing pre-cipitation, and reduced wind, as well as shifts in the benthic and pelagic species. So as we look forward, I think we will need to develop mechanisms for a cohesive management program for the nation, as we have done at the state level.

I think that above all, we need to continue to work on communicating our research, to help people understand what is happen-ing—and their role in it—in the context of longer-term trends. We need to develop the next generation as true “citizen stewards.” n

Top: The Coastal Resources Center’s first home on the Bay Campus.

Bottom: The 1984 dedication of the Marine Resources Building, where CRC now resides.


AAs Rhode Island Sea Grant celebrates its 40th anniversary, another 40th milestone is just around the corner: that of the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA). Since its pas-sage in 1972, the CZMA has been the foundation of coastal management throughout the United States, shaping coastal law and policy state by state. A federal-state partnership, the CZMA, administered un-der the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, enables coastal states to adopt federally approved coastal

coasts for future generations to enjoy. While it may be the small-est state in the nation, all of Rhode Island is in the coastal zone, positioning the state on the forefront of coastal law and policy (however, the CMP’s inland regulatory authority extends 200 feet inland from coastal features). One of the critical ways Rhode Island has managed its coast through the CMP is through Special Area Management Plans (SAMPs). Within the CZMA, SAMPs are broadly defined as “plans

One of the first SAMPs, the Salt Pond Region SAMP, was adopted by CRMC in 1984. The Salt Pond SAMP responded to 1977 concerns raised throughout the state about apparent degradation of water quality in the salt ponds. CRMC held a public workshop in Charlestown to explore ideas for state policies and regula-tions to protect and manage coastal areas. To examine the issues raised in the meeting, CRMC and Rhode Island Sea Grant funded a major four-year interdisciplinary project. The project looked holistically at the interrelated coastal issues in the state, focusing on the entire ecosystem. Now commonly known as ecosystem-based management, the project ex-plored numerous issues such as decline of fish stock, decrease of safe access to the ocean due to rapid sedimentation within the salt ponds, nonpoint source pollution, increased threat to human life and prop-erty from coastal storms, and increase in conflicts due to new competing uses such as aquaculture. The project was the foundation for the SAMP, and the concept of ecosystem-based management continues to be a thread throughout all of the Rhode Island SAMPs.

Celebrating 40 Years of Managing Coastal ResourcesJulia Wyman

While it may be the smallest state in the nation, all of Rhode Island is in the coastal zone, positioning the

state on the forefront of coastal law and policy.

management plans (CMPs). These CMPs protect coastal re-sources, support smart growth and development, and reduce conflicts over land and water uses in the coastal zone. Rhode Island approved its first CMP in 1978. The Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC), which was created by the Coastal Resources Manage-ment Act of 1971 (another 40th!), oversees Rhode Island’s CMP. Since 1978, the CZMA has helped Rhode Island pre-serve, protect, and develop its

which provide for increased specificity in protecting sig-nificant natural resources, reasonable coastal-dependent economic growth, improved protection of life and property in hazardous areas, including those areas likely to be af-fected by land subsidence, sea level rise, or fluctuating water levels of the Great Lakes, and improved predictability in gov-ernmental decision making.” Rhode Island has successfully planned and implemented nu-merous SAMPS.

Julia Wyman is the staff attorney for the Marine Affairs Insti-

tute at Roger Williams University School of

Law and the Rhode Is-land Sea Grant Legal

Program


The Metro Bay SAMP in Narragansett Bay brought Rhode Island Sea Grant, CRMC, and the University of Rhode Island’s Coastal Resourc-es Center (CRC) together with Cranston, East Providence, Pawtucket, and Providence to improve the resources of the working waterfront, creating a dynamic and prosperous area where Rhode Island’s environment and economy can simultaneously thrive. The Greenwich Bay SAMP exam-ines public access, hazard miti-gation, water quality, econom-

ics, recreation, and cultural re-sources of Greenwich Bay, as-suring that future generations of Rhode Islanders can enjoy a productive and beautiful bay. Most recently, the R.I. Ocean SAMP is working to plan for future uses of Rhode Island’s ocean waters, including renew-able energy and other offshore development. Using a research and planning process integrat-ing the best available science and open public input, Rhode Island, through the SAMPs un-der the CZMA, is literally map-ping a successful and thriving

future Rhode Island. In addition to protect-ing its resources through the SAMPs, Rhode Island pro-tects its estuarine resources through Section 307A of the CZMA, Coastal and Estuarine Land Conservation Program. Through the National Estuarine Research Reserve System, the R.I. Department of Environ-mental Management protects 4, 259 acres of estuarine habitats critical to a successful ecosystem, including coastal grasslands, shrubland, mari-time forests, coastal marshes,

Point Judith Pond is one of the south shore coastal lagoons included in the Salt Pond Region SAMP.


lowland streams, cobble and rocky shores, and muddy bot-toms. Through a competitive grant process, the reserve in Narragansett Bay is monitored and conserved, and serves as a valuable education for a vari-ety of audiences, from coastal decision-makers to school-aged children. Another integral part of the CZMA is federal consisten-cy, Section 307. Under a feder-ally approved CMP, such as in

CZMA, but no law has been passed. Due to the numerous uses of the coastal zones in the nation, conflicting stakeholder interests have thwarted at-tempts at reauthorization of language, whether that lan-guage is similar to what exists now or creates great change in the CZMA. As with most things turn-ing 40, both Rhode Island Sea Grant and the CZMA are works in progress. There have been

Rhode Island, through SAMPs under CZMA, is literally mapping a successful and thriving future Rhode Island.

Rhode Island, federal agency activities that “have reasonably foreseeable effects on any land or water use or natural resource of the coastal zone … must be consistent to the maximum extent practicable with the enforceable policies of a coastal state’s federally approved coast-al management program.” Federal consistency allows for a balancing of federal and state needs in the coastal zone. In-deed, federal consistency has led to many policy debates and litigation, in Rhode Island and other coastal states. The CZMA has been reau-thorized eight times since it was enacted in 1972. The last reau-thorization took place in 1996 and expired in 1999; Congress has continued to fund the pro-gram since 1999. Since 1996, numerous legislation has been introduced in both the House and Senate to reauthorize the

challenges along the way, but with all great challenges, the opportunities to examine his-tory, learn, and apply sound thinking to future actions have been plentiful. As coastal states across the nation face new threats and opportunities, such as climate change and alterna-tive energy development, the ability to adapt to these threats and opportunities using the knowledge gained from past experiences will be crucial. Rhode Island Sea Grant is gracefully leaping toward the future under the CZMA while simultaneously benefiting from the past; the Ocean SAMP is just one example of this. The next 40 years will undoubted-ly see continued advancement of coastal management and the CZMA, and Rhode Island Sea Grant is poised to con-tinue to grow stronger with its evolution. n



Sue Kennedy is a coastal management communications spe-

cialist for the URI Coastal Resources Center and Rhode

Island Sea Grant

To Jennifer McCann, trust is one of the key defining fea-tures of a top-notch extension project. “Trust is everything,” says McCann. “Getting peo-ple to engage is critical for a project to be successful—and we have shown over and over that building trust is the way to ensure people engage.” She has tested this tech-nique consistently during her 15 years as a coastal manag-er for Rhode Island Sea Grant and the University of Rhode Island Coastal Resources Cen-ter (CRC). Her efforts focus on helping coastal commu-nities apply sound science to the decisions they make about their economic, environmen-tal, and social resources. The mix of issues—food supplies, wind energy, and public ac-cess, for example—may vary from place to coastal place, but the planning approach re-mains dependable, replicable, and successful. “It’s about gaining trust and ensuring people have both access to and influence

A Profile of Jennifer McCann “Trust is everything.”

Sue Kennedy

over the process,” says Mc-Cann, whose coastal planning work took her to Washington, D.C., the Dominican Repub-lic, and Mexico before leading her back to her home state of Rhode Island. “We listen to the people of the place, we provide them with the tools and science to answer their concerns, and it’s through these transparent public pro-cesses that we have come to be recognized as the go-to people for these efforts.” McCann has led many of these public processes over the past decade in New Eng-land. Most of the initiatives have been couched with-in Special Area Management Plans (SAMPs), the signature, place-specific coastal manage-ment tools of Rhode Island’s coastal regulator, the R.I. Coastal Resources Manage-ment Council (CRMC). The plans enable collaborators—the government, community groups, the private sector, and citizens—to work together to implement and revisit prac-

tical policies and approaches for protecting and enhancing a region’s or area’s unique set of coastal assets. CRC and Rhode Is-land Sea Grant developed the SAMP framework for CRMC more than 30 years ago, and McCann herself has helped CRMC lead the develop-ment of several SAMPs: The Metro Bay SAMP for the ur-ban region of Providence; the Aquidneck Island SAMP for the municipalities of Newport, Middletown, and Portsmouth; and, most recently, the groundbreaking R.I. Ocean SAMP for the state. It is the Ocean SAMP, a CRMC effort to create a plan to manage the myriad re-sources and uses of Rhode Island’s state ocean waters, which challenged McCann in 2008 to take her coastal plan-ning expertise to a new level. Although this SAMP, like pre-vious plans, remained true to the tenets of sound science, transparency, and public process, it presented new,

T

Extension Profile


if difficult, opportunities: a largely unstudied ocean area, the prospect of offshore re-newable energy siting, and the potential for complex negotiations among resourc-es users, including boaters, commercial and recreation-al fishermen, marine bird and wildlife advocates, and ener-gy developers. Thinking back, Mc-Cann says she first took a deep breath, and then she took it in stride. “This was the chance to really push the envelope, to take our knowledge here at URI and our technical expertise with SAMPs, and make this a valu-able tool for Rhode Island and beyond,” she says, add-ing that the state required the plan to be completed in a two-year timeframe, and that “normally, a SAMP can take three, four, or five years.” The Ocean SAMP was adopted in October 2010, and is now being implement-ed. There have been several major achievements, says McCann, who was respon-sible for a team of dozens of direct reports, and hun-dreds of other project staff. The SAMP now serves as a national model for coastal and marine spatial planning techniques. It illustrates how collaboration between sci-ence and extension can result in deeper learning across a broader array of topics, and it shows, once again, that trust building is critical to planning success. “I am very

proud of the process we established to provide fisher-men access and appropriate influence on the policies de-veloped for the Ocean SAMP. I am proud that this SAMP was the first one to officially reflect the perspective of the Narragansett Indian Tribe, said McCann. “Because of what we have done, bringing people together to under-stand the science and create appropriate policies, we are being looked at from all over. People are saying, ‘How did you do that? We want to do that.’” Because of this demand, McCann has concentrated considerable effort on train-ing other coastal managers and regulators in the process-es that were undertaken to develop the SAMP. She says the trainings are important, and are part of what Sea Grant and CRC are all about. “We are all about transfer-ring the knowledge to others, so they can achieve in their special places what we are achieving in ours,” she says. But it won’t be long before McCann, a Tiverton native who holds a master’s degree from URI’s Marine Af-fairs program, will turn her mind and her team toward other coastal management matters: McCann, who heads up the U.S Coastal Program for CRC, will also head up the Sea Grant/CRC team that is helping Rhode Island to develop statewide siting stan-dards for wind turbines.

She looks forward to the new challenges ahead—she says climate change, sea level rise, and growing coast-al populations are putting increasing pressures on our coast—but is also relishing other aspects of her already full life. “I’m a mother first and foremost,” said McCann, referring to her daughter, Sal-ly, age 11, and her son, Theo, age 6. McCann and her hus-band, Armand Michaud, are raising their family in Rich-mond, R.I., and enjoy a range of outdoor activities, includ-ing swimming and skiing. “I love spending time with them on Narragansett Bay, where I grew up sailing, and it’s because of them that I take my job and its responsi-bilities so seriously.” McCann says that it’s one part family and one part dedication to making the world a better place that will continue to drive her ef-forts in coastal planning. “We all have choices. We can sit back and complain, or we can make the choice to do something about it,” said McCann. “My choice is to do something about it—and the more we can engage people in efforts that enable them to make these choices, the bet-ter off we’ll all be.” n

You can learn more about McCann’s programs at seagrant.gso.uri.edu or contact her at [email protected] or (401) 874-6127.


In many ways, our oceans are the last “wild west.” More peo-ple moving into a previously wild landscape and using more natural resources means in-creased human conflicts over space and use, greater envi-ronmental impacts, and corre-sponding needs for government to regulate access, resolve con-flicts, and manage resources. Imagine what happened dur-ing the settling of the Ameri-can West, where government evolved in response to human uses, from undertaking ini-tial explorations and surveys of land available for settlers to dol-ing out homestead sites, which led to establishing a one-sher-iff frontier outpost, and finally led to fully settled municipali-ties, replete with town councils, fire departments, school buses, and dog catchers. States were established, and state and feder-al entities further divvied up the land, setting aside public lands for recreational uses such as hik-ing or camping, commercial use for access to timber, mineral or grazing resources, and protect-ed “legacy” sites such as nation-al parks or wilderness areas. We are witnessing a simi-lar evolution in expanding uses and governance of the ocean. Our technological ability to ac-cess ocean resources increased

Ocean Policy Alone Not Enough to Tame the Last ‘Wild West’Susan Farady

exponentially during World War II with the advent of larg-er diesel-fueled engines and en-hanced navigation such as sonar and radar. Following the war, an exploding world population with increasing appetites for pe-troleum and seafood drove ex-ploitation to record-high levels in previously unexplored areas. Government began to respond by allocating sites for offshore petroleum access. In 1969, Pres-ident Lyndon Johnson commis-sioned a study of U.S. ocean uses and governance needs by an elite group of commission-ers. This “Stratton Commission” noted the importance of marine resources and related commerce to the American economy, and a need for dedicated gov-ernment agencies to manage ocean resources. One result of this commission was the for-mation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (“NOAA”) in 1970. In the years following NOAA’s establishment, ocean governance increased as a num-ber of laws were passed, many in response to concerns about environmental degradation at land as well as at sea, and allo-cating access to natural resourc-es, such as the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endan-gered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the

Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Con-servation Act. As uses increased and laws were passed, an unin-tended consequence occurred: ocean governance was spread across numerous agencies and laws, with no central nation-al ocean law or policy to guide them and no formal mechanism to coordinate different agen-cy actions to reduce duplication and ensure coordinated man-agement. Over the past 30 years, our human footprint upon the ocean has continued to in-crease. More than half the U.S. population lives along the coast and an estimated 25 million people will do so by 2015. As we’ve confronted increasing hu-man impacts on marine resourc-es, we’ve also faced a growing recognition that a fragment-ed governance system is in-adequate to deal with these management issues. In response to these events, ocean scientists and conservation advocates be-gan calling for different man-agement actions, including the siting of marine protected areas (or “MPAs”), places in the ocean where human activity is highly restricted or even prohibited to further conservation objectives. Another concept gained trac-tion, that of calling for a more comprehensive ecosystem-based approach to manage-

ISusan Farady is the director of the Marine

Affairs Institute at the Roger Williams

University School of Law and the Rhode

Island Sea Grant Legal Program.



ment (or “EBM”), as opposed to previous single species or single use management. Congress began consid-ering revisiting the work of the 1969 Stratton Commission dur-ing the 1990s. An “Oceans Act,“ calling for a new exami-nation of the state of America’s oceans and ocean governance, was repeatedly introduced in Congress throughout the 1990s before final passage in 2001. Just before Congress passed this act, a private foundation, the Pew Foundation, initiat-ed its own process by forming the Pew Oceans Commission. These two commissions began their work to assess the state of U.S. ocean health, use, and management within one year of each other. The Pew Com-mission concluded its report in 2003, while the Congressionally mandated U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy delivered its rec-ommendations to Congress in 2004. Despite their very differ-ent origins, these two commis-sions came to remarkably similar conclusions, specifically that our ocean and coastal resourc-es are very important to the U.S. economy and community iden-tity, that these resources are at risk, and our current piecemeal, fragmented system of sever-al agencies and numerous laws governing oceans is not up to the task of managing our re-sources for current use and fu-ture generations. Both commissions recog-nized a need for a more coor-dinated system of governance, including strengthening NOAA

and adopting an overarching national ocean policy. Despite several attempts in both the House and the Senate over the past seven years, few of the commissions’ recommenda-tions have been acted upon to change law. Simultaneously, particular-ly in the New England region, we have witnessed the advent of a brand new ocean use, off-shore wind energy generation, along with state efforts to pro-actively plan for uses off their coasts, and increased regional coordination. This confluence of events has further revealed the clumsiness of the current frag-mented federal legal regime to respond to current manage-ment questions, and led to calls for application of area-based “marine spatial planning” tech-niques to better manage human access to ocean resources while protecting marine ecosystems. In 2009, President Obama formed an interagency Ocean Task Force to once again ex-amine the state of ocean gov-ernance. In response to its final recommendations, he signed an Executive Order in 2010 de-claring a national ocean policy, establishing a National Ocean Council, and calling for specif-ic action to be taken in apply-ing marine spatial planning at a regional scale. If anything, the need for a reformed ocean gov-ernance system to respond to urgent management questions is greater now than ever before, and these efforts are laudable. Yet how far can these efforts go, when agencies responsible for

public trust ocean resources are still required to apply existing laws, laws that are untouched by policy initiatives?

Ocean Governance a “Broken Machine”Looking forward into our ocean governance future, we can say a few things with certainty:

1. Our use of ocean resources, and corresponding impacts, will continue to increase;

2. Innovations in governance and management will occur most quickly through largely non-legislative means at the state and regional level;

3. State and regional governance innovations will inevitably bump up against the restraints of feder-al laws applicable to specific spe-cies or specific uses.

There’s a saying that watch-ing a legislature at work to pass laws is like watching a sau-sage being made: the process may be ugly but you get an at-tractive end product. A refine-ment on that saying may be that watching current ocean gover-nance at work is like a broken sausage machine, it’s a clumsy process that produces an imper-fect product that nobody is very satisfied with but is palatable enough that it’s awfully hard to get the momentum needed to get a new machine. We need to insist on the laws that our com-plex ocean ecosystems, and our desire to use them, require in or-der to maintain sustainable re-sources and thriving coastal communities. n


For the past decade, Dean David Farmer has been at the helm of the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography. Prior to becoming GSO dean, he was a senior scientist and head of the Acoustical Oceanography Group—which he created—at the Institute of Ocean Sci-ences in Sidney, British Columbia. Farmer is a recipient of the Rosenstiel Award for Marine Sci-ence, The Oceanography Society’s Walter Munk Award, and The Canadian Oceanographic and Meteorological Society’s President’s Prize. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the world’s most distinguished scientific academy. Dean Farmer is retiring in June 2011, leaving him more time to pursue his interest in nature photography, when he is not busy with his internationally renowned research on the breaking of surface waves, bubble formation, and nonlinear internal waves in the South China Sea.

Ocean science is undergoing a period of rapid evolution. Global changes, from the abundance and diversity of marine life to large-scale shifts in climate, are becoming more apparent. At the same time, our ability to measure and explore the ocean is developing rapidly. Opportunities are increasing in new observational platforms; remote sensing; innovative sensors; ways of using ships; underwater cabled systems; and innovative acoustical, optical, and other sensors. Our ability to interpret our findings is changing fast, too, with advances in data handling, laboratory fluid dynamic modeling, computer modeling, molecular biology and the increasing sophistication of analytical techniques.

Society is coming to recognize that ocean science matters greatly. The decimation of fish stocks and the impact of human activities on climate are just two issues that have global ramifications. Such issues can only be tackled by bold political leadership informed by highly accomplished scientific analysis. Graduate School of Oceanography is ready to participate in these endeavors through its research and education.

GSO is playing a key role in the development of ocean science and is at the cutting edge of a wide range of technical developments from tracking the ever changing characteristics of ocean currents and air-sea interaction to the migration of fish, measuring the transport and dispersion of pollut-ants, exploring plankton through molecular biology and microphotography, and studying the impact of the ocean on our evolving shorelines. We monitor earthquakes, undertake deep-sea exploration, and analyze ocean sediments to learn more about ancient climates. Our outreach programs work to expand the knowledge of everyone from local schoolchildren to coastal stakeholders in developing countries around the world.

As a founding Sea Grant institution, we recognize our responsibility to ensure that our science is not only intellectually rewarding, but also of long-term benefit to society. Ocean science belongs to all of us. —David Farmer

A letter from the Dean


A GSO 50th Anniversary Quilt unveiled in June 2011 high-lights GSO’s research in Narragansett Bay and throughout the world’s oceans. A team of skillful volunteers designed, stitched, and assembled the colorful 10’x 8’ art quilt. This block, crafted by Quilt Committee Chair Rose White, features views of a Rhode Island salt pond above and below the surface.


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40 YEARS RHODE ISLAND SEA GRANT 50 YEARS URI ...what Canadian Maritimes writer Alistair MacLeod describes as the profound “lost salt gift of blood.” But we are the benefactors