Hopkins sits on a rocky knob of land jutting out into the water from a much larger knob of land that constitutes the southernmost tip of the Monterey Bay. It is surrounded by cypress trees that, on foggy mornings (as most are), act like sponges, collecting moisture and letting it loose in fat, missilelike drops.
On a recent day the sea and sky are variations of gray, but in his office Steve Palumbi sports a bright coral tropical print shirt. Palumbi is a biologist and the director of Hopkins, an arm of Stanford University, a position he assumed in 2002 after stints at the University of Hawaii and Harvard. He’s a wide-eyed, energetic man sporting a business-in-the-front, party-in-the-back haircut complete with silver ponytail. In a way, it functions as an indication of his approach to work—when he’s not conducting research, Palumbi plays in a band called Sustainable Sole (sample tracks include “The Last Fish Left” and “Ghost of Jacques Cousteau”) and works on a series of sustainability-themed webisodes called “Short Attention Span Science.”
Palumbi studies marine populations—“how they live right now, how they move around the oceans, their relationships with populations in the past, their evolutions”—often using a geneticist’s tools. Normally his work might involve (to take as an example the project on which he recently presented a TED Talk) smuggling a makeshift DNA lab into a Japanese hotel room to prove that meat marketed as whale was actually dolphin—and contained high, potentially toxic, levels of mercury.
His most recent project is a departure from his usual work, and it’s kept him closer to home. Together with co-author Carolyn Sotka, Hopkins’ director has written a history of the exploitation and rehabilitation of Monterey Bay. It’s called The Death and Life of Monterey Bay, and the word order is absolutely intentional. “I go all over the country and all over the world talking about the dangers the oceans have and the problems they’re facing and the threats they’re under,” Palumbi says. “The contrast between going places and telling people how much trouble the ocean is in and then living and working here was a little bit ironic.”
From the spot on which Hopkins Marine Station sits—a postcard-pristine stretch of shoreline from which the tips of thick-roped kelp forests are visible, as are otters snacking on abalone, flocks of seagulls, a passing whale pod—the bay appears an untouched marine wilderness.
Eighty years ago, though, the view—and the smell—were very different. “Monterey Bay, at least this part of it, the southern part, was an industrial hellhole dominated by the world’s biggest fishing processing operation,” Palumbi says, referring to the sardine canneries that once lined the waterfront where the Monterey Bay Aquarium is now located. “The bay had been stripped of a lot of its wildlife, the ecosystem was fundamentally changed, the water was polluted, the air was foul, the economy was under the thrall of a few highly monopolistic interests. It had all the problems that oceans have all over the world. The chief difference was that it got better.”
‘They Demanded Their Stories Be Told’
The project began as a history of the Hopkins Marine Life Refuge, a swath of ocean that stretches from either side of the campus past the intertidal zone, first delineated in 1931. “The idea was that we were putting together a history of the marine protected area out here and it was going to be all about the fish that were there, etc.,” Palumbi says. The scientific paper transformed into a lively history when Palumbi and Sotka discovered the champion of the marine protected area, a woman named Julia Platt.
Platt would go on to become the mayor of Pacific Grove, but when she arrived in town at the beginning of the 20th century a local paper reported: “she had come, unchaperoned, to study zoology.” If Platt’s mere appearance on the scene caused a stir, it was nothing to the one she would cause over the next 35 years.
In The Death and Life of Monterey Bay, Platt is painted as a bit of a hellraiser: she turned six-shooter on her neighbors’ unruly chickens and, after knocking down a fence blocking the public path to a beach, erected a sign (so there was no confusion) that read: “Opened by Julia B. Platt. This entrance to the beach must be left open at all hours when the public might reasonably pass through. I act in the matter because the Council and Police Department of Pacific Grove are men and possibly somewhat timid.”
With the introduction of Platt, the book transformed from a paper fated to be filed and forgotten in the Hopkins archives into a storybook history of the people who made their home on the bay—from the French sea captain who ignited the sea otter fur trade and the Chinese community that sprang up around the abalone and squid fisheries to Ed Ricketts (Cannery Row’s Doc) and the founders of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. “It became pretty clear early on that these characters were driving the story, and this never happens in scientific writing, but in this particular case, the entire project was taken over by this set of characters who demanded their stories were told,” Palumbi says.
The parade of characters marches into the present day, as Palumbi and Sotka recount the creation of Monterey’s most famous landmark, the Aquarium. The bay was beginning to mount its recovery (having received a reprieve with the collapse of the canneries) when the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 happened, an event Palumbi says galvanized Aquarium founders Steve Webster, Chuck Baxter, Nancy Packard Burnett and Robin Burnett. The spill “really focused attention on the need for conservation and preservation of ocean areas as well as land areas. Those two things sort of came together: the exuberance of how wonderful the kelp forest life was here and the rebuilding of the bay going on, plus a need for helping preserve that in the future.”
The creation of the Aquarium, which officially opened in 1984, forged a path to public consciousness regarding the health of the bay. Monterey has become a national leader in marine conservation: the bay was designated a National Marine Sanctuary in 1992 and now hosts the first Marine Protected Areas under the Marine Life Protection Act of 1999—a far cry from an “industrial hellhole.”
Long Line of Crusaders
Maintaining the health of the bay depends on considering the past when debating political issues of the day. Take, for example, a desalination facility like the one currently discussed for Santa Cruz’s Westside; considering new plans, Palumbi takes a page from Ed Ricketts’ book.
“I’ve tried to think, ‘What would Ed Ricketts think about a desalination plant?’ And I conclude that Ed Ricketts would think about it the way that he thought about everything, and that is: everything is connected,” Palumbi explains. “Ed Ricketts would [consider] ocean water in a desal plant and he’d say, ‘Well, the water gets split in two: there’s fresh water over here and brine over there.’ Then he’d follow the fate of the brine and the fresh water—the brine as it went into the ocean, and the fresh water as it went into not the land, but the people that develop the land—and those two streams would then have their own set of consequences. Ed would want to see all of those links, and he would be really interested in all the domino effects along the way.”
In the coming years Palumbi and his colleagues at Hopkins will be tackling challenges presented by a changing climate. The prospect of warming water brings a flood of new questions; Palumbi lists just a few: “What happens when deep-water currents get stronger? What happens when they get weaker? What happens if sea level comes up a meter and essentially washes away the coastline? What happens if warming and acidification mean that a bunch of the animals that live here can’t reproduce?” They are questions Palumbi doesn’t have the answers to yet. In working to find them however, he assumes the mantle of conservation previously worn by Platt and Ricketts—the next colorful character in a story that continues to unfold.
STEVE PALUMBI reads from ‘The Death and Life of Monterey Bay’ on Wednesday, Jan. 19, at 7:30pm at Capitola Book Cafe, 1475 41st Ave., Capitola. Free.
