May 2007 – Dr. James Baker
May 2007 – Dr. James Baker former administrator of NOAA and member of the CoML Scientific Steering Committee
Heather Mannix: How did you originally get involved with the Census of Marine Life?
James Baker: In the late 1990s, when I was the Administrator of NOAA, I was approached by Jesse Ausubel and Fred Grassle who talked with me about their idea of a Census of the Fishes. I was intrigued by the idea and thought it had real merit, having had a long history with developing large cooperative programs in oceanography, and with a special interest in fishery management because of my NOAA job. As I recall, the leadership of the National Marine Fisheries Service was less enthusiastic than were their fisheries scientists. But they all took it under advisement and came along as the community developed the program into a Census of Marine Life. I stayed involved, and after I left NOAA, my colleague Sue Fruchter and I helped Fred Grassle as he developed the OBIS concept. Later I joined the international steering committee.
HM: You have an illustrious career working for the oceans, JOI, NOAA, GOOS, etc. What originally attracted you to the ocean and marine life?
JB: I grew up in Long Beach, California with sea captains living on either side of our house and spent a lot of time at the beach – so I knew something of the world of the sea from an early age. But I didn’t get really involved until I was in graduate school in physics at Cornell, and my roommate’s brother got a summer fellowship at Scripps to “go to the South Seas.” That sounded like fun – so I arranged for one, too. We didn’t go to the South Seas, just south of San Diego. But I was fascinated with the world of science at sea – especially the interdisciplinary aspect where we all worked together catching and preserving specimens, titrating sea water samples, and making echo soundings. I stayed with it after graduate school and ended up making measurements of ocean currents all around the world from Harvard and the University of Washington. In the early 1980s I moved to Washington, D.C., to head up Joint Oceanographic Institutions Inc. to get more involved in establishing and promoting large scale programs – like ocean satellites and the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS). I helped get some more funding for some of these programs when I was head of NOAA. Now, in addition to my Census of Marine Life assignments, I am consulting for UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission in Paris on GOOS and related projects, and strengthening ties to the Census and to the Global Earth Observation (GEO) program. So I’ve kept up the global aspect of my interests.
HM: What do you think is the Census of Marine Life’s greatest accomplishment to date? What still needs to be done before 2010?
JB: The Census has brought the marine life community together in a way never before achieved. Biology in general is a field where broad synthesis has not been rewarded as much as intellectual depth in a specific topic. The Census has succeeded in enabling scientists to cooperate on a large scale, and to pull out the deep science at the same time so that relationships as well as detail are examined. I’m also impressed with the overall structure, which was put in place in the beginning, with a focus on past, present, and future. The striking results from the history reconstructions, and the sobering conclusions of the future studies give the Census a depth not seen in most scientific programs. Yet there is much to be done, particularly in synthesizing results. A focus on synthesis and laying the groundwork for post-2010 will be important in the next two or three years.
HM: A priority of the US National Committee is planning for CoML after 2010, what is your vision of CoML in the future?
JB: Just as the Ocean Drilling Program has transformed itself every 15 years or so, the Census will do the same, and the new program will build on what has been discovered in the past. I expect that the tagging programs will show us much new information that will guide future programs. I’m also intrigued by the marine microbiology – as the famous physicist Richard Feynman once said, “there’s plenty of room at the bottom,” referring to the “nano” world, the same could be said of marine microbiology. I’m pleased with the links to DNA bar coding which will expand the scope of studies. I also see a major connection building with climate change – the role of ocean biology in climate change is clearly important, but little understood. The new Census will have to take on this challenge.
HM: What advice would you have for CoML project leaders and scientists to help better educate the public on CoML research?
JB: The Census has used traditional media well, and taken advantage of new technology to get the message out. But still, the competition for attention gets stronger each year, and the more attention we can pay to outreach the better. At a recent Partnership for Observations of the Global Ocean (POGO) meeting, I suggested that we spend as much for outreach in ocean programs as we spend for ships. That may be exaggerated, but is not too far off the mark in today’s distracted world. I’m impressed with what Al Gore has done for the issue of global climate change. He has followed the film An Inconvenient Truth by a book for the general public, a book for children, and a training program so that the message is conveyed widely by many people. This is a good example to follow. I’d also like to see us use the Census as a way to introduce science into school classes around the world.
HM: Federal funding for NOAA has dropped over the last few years. As a former administrator of NOAA, is there anything NOAA or the ocean community can do to improve the situation?
JB: The current administration has not been kind to NOAA, and the lack of funds only emphasizes all the things that are not being done. When I came to NOAA in 1993, I said that it was an agency with a $4 billion mission stuffed into a $2 billion budget. And during the Clinton Administration we were able to raise the budget from below $2 billion to well over $3 billion. But it’s not nearly enough. As I look at the challenges as outlined by the two recent ocean commissions, I would say that NOAA needs more like $10 billion to do the jobs assigned to it. And other ocean-related programs are similarly squeezed. The ocean commissions and the follow up now in Congress are very effective in making the point that more funding is needed for oceans programs in general. But we are constrained by the overall federal budget – I expect that funding for research and development in general will not change much from the about 10% of the discretionary budget that it has been for the last 30 years. The only way to break out of this constraint is to find new sources of funding. Today there is enormous wealth in the private sector, which has not been tapped for oceanography. The medical community has done well in bringing in private money – we need to think about how we can do this in oceanography.
HM: Is there any new ocean technology or movement that you are most interested in or you think has a lot of promise?
JB: There are two areas of technology that excite me – satellites and communications. Satellites give us a global coverage not available any other way, and we are far from exploiting their capabilities. Sadly, even when we have shown what they can do, as with altimetry and scatterometry, we haven’t found a way to continue these measurements for the indefinite future. So there is much to be done there. I’m impressed with the progress of the Venus and Neptune programs as they begin to wire up the sea floor for data transmission – that plus robotic and animal carried instruments is leading us towards a fully observed ocean. I’m also intrigued by the new internet-based means of communication from Wiki sites to ocean data-rich Google-like systems to interactive video games. We’ve really just begun to scratch the surface of this transformative technology.
