Turning Back the Tide

MacArthur fellow is on a quest to save the world’s oceans

A small chalkboard hangs on one wall of Edith Widder’s laboratory here, listing three “to do” items. The first — “let the paint dry” — was checked off

in May, when the nonprofit group Ms. Widder heads, the Ocean Research & Conservation Association, moved from temporary quarters in her home to a new facility overlooking the sleepy Indian River lagoon.

The second — “win a national award” — was checked off last month when the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awarded Ms. Widder one of its prestigious $500,000 “genius” fellowships, lauding her use of innovative technology to reverse the steady degradation of the oceans and other marine environments.

Although the past few months have been productive for Ms. Widder and her year-old organization, it will take more time to accomplish the third item on the list: “save the world’s oceans.”

While the oceans have long been considered limitless resources, it’s becoming abundantly clear that human behavior has had “horrendous impacts” on them, she says.

Ms. Widder, a marine biologist and deep-sea explorer, points to major reports published in the past three years — one each by the Pew Oceans Commission, the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, and the United Nations-led Millennium Ecosystem Assessment — that identify the steady deterioration of the oceans as one of the planet’s most pressing environmental crises.

“Reversing this trend is the biggest challenge humanity has faced yet,” she says, “and we have the capacity to deal with it — we have the technology, as they say — but we’re not using it.”

Making a Leap of Faith

It was this sense of urgency that led Ms. Widder, 55, to leave her job as senior scientist at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, also in Fort Pierce, last year to establish the Ocean Research & Conservation Association.

She says that it took a leap of faith to strike out on a wholly new venture after 16 years at Harbor Branch.

But she was increasingly frustrated by the lack of response from many marine biologists and other scientists when it came to stemming coastal development, habitat destruction, climate change, pollution from agricultural runoff and other sources, and other trends that have been damaging the environment.

“We are trained as rigorous scientists to want to do very controlled experiments,” says Ms. Widder. “But when you’re dealing with conservation, you don’t have that luxury, because these are such complex, interactive ecosystems.”

She says the situation is exacerbated by the fact that scientists tend to shy away from politics and potential controversy that could affect their chances of getting research grants or tenure.

While at Harbor Branch, Ms. Widder met Keith Paglen, who had been a marketing and communications executive at Canon U.S.A. for the bulk of his career, directing the company’s recycling and other environmental campaigns and creating the Canon National Parks Science Scholars Program.

One day the two had “a passionate conversation” about the state of marine conservation that led to the creation of the ocean-research group. Mr. Paglen now serves as its chief executive officer, one of eight full-time employees.

“The basic hope is that the two of us together could create a new type of organization,” says Mr. Paglen, “one that has the scientific credibility of a major research institution — Edie and her colleagues and the people we’re going to attract — plus the marketing and public-policy sophistication of a major conservation organization.”

The undertaking has involved some financial trade-offs.

When she left Harbor Branch, Ms. Widder was making $130,000 and says that she’s now making about half that amount, while Mr. Paglen says he is making about 25 percent of his former salary at Harbor Branch.

Ms. Widder’s husband, David Smith, a computer engineer, and Mr. Paglen’s wife, Christin, a lawyer, gave up their own jobs to serve as de facto full-time volunteers, with Ms. Paglen heading the group’s fledgling fund-raising department.

And Ms. Widder and her colleagues face an undeniable challenge in raising money. According to the 2003 Pew Commission on the Oceans report, for the past decade less than 4 percent of the nation’s annual expenditures for basic science research were dedicated to study the oceans.

Mr. Paglen says that the lack of money for marine conservation also holds true in the nonprofit world. He cites a 1999 report commissioned by several U.S. foundations that found that less than 1 percent of all money and resources spent on conservation in the United States by nonprofit groups was directed toward marine conservation. Even if that figure has grown in the past few years, he says, it’s still dwarfed by the amount of money that finances land and animal conservation.

Ellen K. Pikitch, executive director of the Pew Institute for Ocean Science, in New York, says that Ms. Widder is “truly a pioneer in ocean exploration” and hopes that more private foundations will step into the breach and support her work and that of others in marine conservation. Ms. Pikitch says that although awareness of the perils facing the oceans has grown in recent years, money available for research and conservation efforts are still “far less than what’s needed.”

‘A Sick Patient’

One consequence of the small amount of money going into marine conservation is that very little reliable monitoring of the state of the oceans is currently being done, says Ms. Widder. “I use the analogy of a sick patient. Of course you’d immediately put monitors all over them to track their vital symptoms, to find out what makes them better or worse. But that hasn’t been happening.”

To help meet this need, Ms. Widder and her colleagues are developing high-tech devices and communications systems that can identify the presence of marine organisms and plants and measure ocean salinity, water clarity, and other factors crucial to evaluating the overall health of marine ecosystems.

One major project involves finishing the prototype of Kilroy, an instrument named after the ubiquitous graffiti tag left behind by American soldiers during World War II that uses wireless technology to record such data.

Mr. Paglen says that his group has a fund-raising goal for the Kilroy project of approximately $10-million over the next five years, estimating a cost of $3.5-million to install Kilroys in three sites.

The group envisions ultimately installing similar networks of 30 to 50 Kilroys in locales nationwide as part of comprehensive water-monitoring efforts. But it will choose carefully where it works.

Ms. Widder says that one of her concerns is creating a “brand” and degree of accountability with the Kilroy instrument and the group’s overall conservation strategy.

“It’s something that scientists ignore and it’s why a lot of our work gets ignored,” she says. “We don’t want to walk into some hornet’s nest of local political upheaval where everybody’s going to be unhappy because they think we’re going to be pointing fingers at them.”

To help prevent this, Mr. Paglen says that his group will be very sensitive to establishing community “buy-in” wherever it works by collaborating with local foundations, groups, educational institutions, and citizens.

Michael Hirshfield, senior vice president for North America and chief scientist at Oceana, a marine-conservation organization in Washington, praises Ms. Widder’s efforts.

“What she’s done is rare in that she hasn’t gone all the way to being a pure advocate,” he says. Mr. Hirschfield says that advocacy groups like his have limited time and resources and depend on conservation-minded scientists to provide them with reliable data.

Need for New Technologies

Ms. Widder’s development of the Kilroys is part of her long history of creating technologically advanced research tools.

Ms. Widder says the lack of appropriate technology has been a key reason that only 5 percent of the nation’s oceans have been explored.

“For centuries, marine science has depended on dragging nets behind ships to bring the animals up into our environment and count them,” she says. “I defy you to name one other branch of science that’s dependent on centuries-old technology.”

The only way to explore the deep sea, she says, has involved using scuba gear and submersibles. “But all these things are noisy, with big lights,” she says. “So how many things are there in the ocean that we don’t know about, because we’ve scared them away?”

Most of the tools Ms. Widder has developed are related to her research specialty — bioluminescence, or the light emissions chemically produced by many marine organisms. Organisms don’t expend that much energy for no reason, she says, but rather use light to find food, attract mates, even blind their predators with photon-like blasts.

Ms. Widder says that bioluminescence is one of the most important — and common — biological processes, and that analyzing the phenomenon is crucial to understanding marine ecosystems, including discerning how many and what types of deep-sea creatures exist, how they behave, and where they are located.

To produce quantifiable ways to measure the phenomenon, she helped develop the Hidex, a meter that measures the bioluminescence produced by many marine organisms, and LoLAR, an ultrasensitive light meter.

Ms. Widder’s newest design, a remotely operated camera dubbed the “Eye in the Sea,” sits on the ocean floor, enabling her and other scientists to unobtrusively observe the number and types of marine animals, as well as their behavior.

The camera system paid off the very first time it was deployed in the Gulf of Mexico, using an electronic lure that imitates the bioluminescent display of a jellyfish’s call for help.

“Exactly 86 seconds after we turned it on, we recorded a 6-foot-long squid that’s so new to science it can’t even be placed in any known family. I couldn’t have asked for a better proof of concept,” says Ms. Widder.

Kids as Marine Explorers

Ms. Widder says that she’s always had an innate curiosity about how things worked, and a passion for understanding animals. And she credits her father, who taught in Harvard University’s mathematics department for many years, and her mother, who was a mathematics professor at Tufts University, as being strong proponents of women’s advancement in the sciences.

“While other kids recited poetry for guests, I recited the definition of a logarithm,” Ms. Widder says, then proceeds to recount it verbatim.

When she was 11, her family traveled to Australia on sabbatical and, on the way home, stopped in Fiji. Ms. Widder says that when she saw the giant clams, blue starfish, and other exotic creatures on the coral reefs, she was instantly hooked. From then on, she knew she wanted to be a marine biologist, inspired by the careers of people like Jacques Cousteau.

Now Ms. Widder hopes to spark an interest in the science of the ocean among the nation’s schoolchildren.

Her group plans to encourage students to become “marine explorers” as they analyze footage streaming from an Eye in the Sea camera placed in the miles-deep Monterey Canyon, off the California coast.

Children will use the Web and electronic journals to communicate with Ms. Widder and her colleagues, and the exercise will have the practical aspect of helping them analyze the gigabytes of data that Eye in the Sea will be recording.

Ms. Widder says that it will help the children learn observational skills, and that they’ll be given guides to the types of “critters” they may see. It’s also possible they will discover new forms of life. “Can you imagine if a kid actually made a discovery that nobody had ever seen before?” says Ms. Widder.

Ms. Widder has long been interested in how art can be used to make science more appealing. She has written two children’s books — The Bioluminescence Coloring Book and Lucinda’s Lamps: A Mermaid’s Guide to Lights in the Sea — and Mr. Paglen hopes he can find a nonprofit publisher that will allow most or all of the books’ proceeds to benefit the research group.

One of the teachers Ms. Widder has sought advice from suggested creating a musical based on Lucinda’s Lamps that could harness students’ creative energies while teaching them about the myriad bioluminescent and other creatures in the sea.

Ms. Widder hopes that these and other educational projects based on her work will instill a sense of conservation among children that they’ll retain as they grow older.

“You don’t protect what you don’t love,” she says.

‘Time to Give Back’

To date, 75 percent of the group’s $1-million annual budget has come from the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation and 25 percent from individuals, including a handful of major benefactors.

However, Ms. Widder and Mr. Paglen are working to diversify their sources of revenue. They are submitting several grant proposals to large, private foundations, and getting ready to solicit planned gifts and make direct-mail appeals.

Mr. Paglen also hopes that as the charity grows, it will attract corporate sponsors.

Meanwhile, Ms. Widder is pondering how best to spend the MacArthur money to advance her group’s objectives.

“The money is nice,” she says, “but it’s nothing compared to the doors this is opening. It’s a clear endorsement of this new endeavor, and it’s accelerating our organizational plan because we’re now going to be heard and listened to so much more readily.”

“I’m so elated to come to this place every day,” says Ms. Widder. “I’ve had kids tell me I have the best job in the world, and I think they’re right. The animals I’ve seen, the discoveries we’ve been able to make, it’s just been nothing but fun. But now it’s time to give back. I’ve been having a good time, but the oceans really need some help now.”