OUTSIDE MAGAZINE, DECEMBER 2011
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 08, 2011
THE TOUCHY-FEELY (BUT TOTALLY SCIENTIFIC!) METHODS OF WALLACE J. NICHOLS
How does a visionary marine biologist convince brain researchers to help him revolutionize ocean conservation? With lots of hugs, a million blue marbles, and one very unorthodox conference.
By: MICHAEL ROBERTSPhotographer: JEFF LIPSKY
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Wallace J. Nichols Photo: Jeff Lipsky
During one lecture at Stanford, Nichols implored graduate students to remember that, as conservation- ists, "we have the power of happiness on our side."
THE PHILIPPINE coral reef tank inside the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco is 25 feet deep and holds 212,000 gallons of water, making it one of the largest exhibits of living coral anywhere in the world. It is the centerpiece of the academy’s Steinhart Aquarium and hosts hundreds of coral species, a couple thousand colorful fish, plus sharks, stingrays, and numerous smaller creatures, like sea anemones and snails. There are five windows affording looks inside, the biggest of which, at 16 and a half feet tall and almost 30 feet wide, makes a sweeping arc in front of a dimly lit standing area backed by several rows of benches. It was designed to offer visitors a panoramic, theater-like view of life in the tank and is among the museum’s most popular attractions. It’s Wallace J. Nichols’s favorite spot in the building.
Nichols, 44, is a biologist and research associate at the academy who made a name for himself in the mid-1990s when he tracked a loggerhead turtle that swam from Baja, Mexico, to Japan, the first time anyone had recorded an animal swimming an entire ocean. He has done fieldwork in waters around the globe and spends most of his waking hours thinking and talking about the ocean, but when he’s in front of that big window at the aquarium, he doesn’t watch the fish. He watches the people.
“Whether it’s a 92-year-old or a two-year-old, when they come into that blue space, something happens,” Nichols says. They grow quiet and calm, but there’s more to it than that. When couples walk in, they frequently start holding hands. He says that if you ask people here what they’re feeling, they’ll struggle for words. Nichols finds this fascinating. He also believes that if we can understand what really happens to us in the presence of the ocean—which brain processes underlie our emotional reactions—it could bring about a radical shift in conservation efforts. If we learn precisely why we love the ocean, his thinking goes, we’ll have an immensely powerful new tool to protect it.
Not surprisingly, this theory can strike many of his peers as soft. “ ‘You must be from California.’ That’s the first response,” Nichols says. (He lives north of Santa Cruz, though he was raised in New Jersey.) But Nichols’s credibility as a scientist, along with his charm and passion, have enabled him to rally excitement for his ideas among a diverse constituency of researchers and activists. In the past couple of years, he’s become a sought-after speaker, giving dozens of presentations at a wide mix of venues, from TEDx to adventure-travel trade shows to environmental symposiums. His pitch: More data on rising sea temperatures or plastic pollution or disappearing creatures won’t do anything for ocean conservation. Instead, we need to study our own minds.
Nichols envisions cognitive neuroscientists constructing detailed models of brain activity for experiences like sitting on a beach, then using their findings to drive public policy. “If I walk into a meeting of a coastal zoning commission and say, ‘I think people listening to the ocean is good for them,’ you’d see all the eyeballs in the room rolling,” says Nichols. “But if I walk in and say, ‘This is my friend the Stanford neuroscientist, and his research using brain scans shows that sitting by the ocean has the same calming effects as meditation on reducing stress,’ suddenly access to the coast becomes a public-health issue.”
It’s a viable fantasy that derives from the fact that Nichols himself isn’t a neuroscientist. Unable to test his hypotheses, he’s launched a campaign to create a new field of study he calls neuro-conservation. His hope is to inspire cognitive scientists to examine these fundamental questions. As he sees it, it’s a ripe invitation: Who wants to know what happens when our most complex organ meets the planet’s largest feature?
“My role is to be the catalyst and cheerleader,” he says. “But the question is, How do you turn this big idea into a movement?”
THE FIRST time I met Nichols, he gave me a blue marble. It was sort of awkward. “Hold it at arm’s length,” he said. “That’s what the Earth looks like from a million miles away—a water planet. Now hold it up to your eye and look at the sun. If water were inside, it would contain virtually every element. Now think of someone who’s doing good work for the ocean. Hold it to your heart: think of how it would feel to you and to them if you randomly gave them this marble as a way of saying thank you.”
We were seated outside the Academy of Sciences on a late-winter afternoon. Nichols, who goes by J., was dressed in a casual button-down blue shirt, brown cords, and leather boots and wearing a perfectly manicured salt-and-pepper stubble beard. He looked directly into my eyes, speaking in a slow, even canter that was mildly hypnotic, the vestige of a stutter he overcame 25 years ago by forcing himself to make turtle presentations to school groups.
The marble shtick may have made me uncomfortable, but the last line stuck with me; I imagined myself giving the marble to an old friend. Turns out I’m not the only one to fall under this spell. Nichols tried it out for the first time in 2009, during a talk at the New England Aquarium in Boston, and the audience response was overwhelming. He figured he was on to something, so he set up a simple website, BlueMarbles.org, and decided “to try and see how big we could make this thing with no budget or strategic plan.” Nichols now estimates that there are as many as a million of his blue marbles in circulation around the planet. They have made it into the hands of Jane Goodall, Harrison Ford, James Cameron, E. O. Wilson, and four-time Iditarod champion Lance Mackey, who carried one during this year’s race.
Nichols’s success at reaching large numbers of people on an emotional level both underscores the premise of his theories and makes it harder to dismiss him as a left-coast flake. Several times over the past six months, I watched him captivate audiences with a clever Trojan-horse narrative: I’m a scientist, but—surprise!—I want to talk about how much we all love the ocean. During one lecture at Stanford, he implored graduate students to remember that, as conservationists, “we have the power of happiness on our side.”
For environmentalists struggling to find a message with staying power, Nichols’s feel-good approach offers a compelling alternative to the usual tactic of scaring people into action with bad news about extinctions or global warming. “Hell, we’ve tried everything else,” says Nature Conservancy scientist M. Sanjayan. “We’ve tried to price nature. We’ve tried to stand and protest. We’ve tried every way we know to get people to see what we’ve seen, and we’ve been failing.”
Nichols blames these failures on the detached way scientists gather and share information. When he was studying Baja’s sea turtles as a doctoral student at the University of Arizona in the mid-1990s, he hired fishermen and former turtle poachers to help collect data. The research was interesting, but Nichols was even more intrigued by the intense and often conflicting feelings locals had for the animals. He convened a gathering of everyone—“turtle lovers, turtle eaters, biologists, NGOs”—and they formed an activist network called Grupo Tortuguero.
Nichols was energized, but his academic advisers were skeptical. “‘You’re organizing fishermen—where’s the biology?” they asked. He was told to avoid the human element in his thesis. “It made no sense,” says Nichols. “The changes happening in the ocean and with those turtles were driven by humans.”
He was similarly progressive in his research methods. Early on in Baja, he tagged a female turtle his team had named Adelita with a GPS transponder and posted her coordinates online as she made a never-before-recorded crossing of the Pacific to Japan. His colleagues were horrified. “‘They said, ‘Someone could steal your data!’ ” Nichols laughs. “My response was: ‘And do what with it? Save turtles?’ ”
TODAY, NICHOLS applies this same open-source spirit to what he calls his “fluid” career. He’s spent most of the past decade “hopping between grants” while continuing to publish research on turtles, often coauthored by graduate students he advises. He works with a number of environmental groups and recently created SeetheWild.org, a nonprofit that connects adventure travelers with conservation projects in exotic locations. His office, a 1954 Airstream trailer parked at a friend’s organic strawberry farm off California’s Highway 1, is also the headquarters for Slowcoast, an initiative he recently helped launch to draw tourists to the mostly empty stretch between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz, with future revenue supporting local public-school lunch reform.
In 2009, Nichols applied for a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts to fund a year of neuroscience classes at Harvard and MIT as a way to kick-start his neuroconservation campaign. He posted his 12-page proposal on his website the day he submitted it. “I just put it out there,” says Nichols. “I was basically saying, Somebody do this, please.” Pew turned him down. “They didn’t get it,” he says. “Which was not a surprise; there’s a reason this research hasn’t been done.”
Indeed, it’s one thing to get forward-thinking scientists excited about a hypothesis, but it’s another to get institutions to dedicate dollars to test it. Back in 1984, E. O. Wilson popularized the termbiophilia to describe what he considers humans’ inherent attraction to “life and lifelike processes.” It became a popular theory but wasn’t something Wilson or anyone else initially sought to prove. Now cognitive researchers are investigating what—exactly—nature does to our minds, with studies showing improved attention span and memory, and reduced stress, among other benefits. (See “You Need a Braincation”) Designing experiments to study how our brains react to the ocean wouldn’t be especially difficult, Nichols says. (Among other ideas, he envisions immersing lab subjects in ocean sounds and images while taking brain scans.) But by focusing so explicitly on feelings, Nichols is emanating the kind of New Age vibes that many neuroscientists reflexively avoid. Environmentalists, on the other hand, are prone to question the conservation value of any data such studies might produce. Knowing that something is good for us won’t necessarily change our actions (see: exercise, diet, sleep). Plus, what if studies show that a polluted, depleted ocean calms our minds as much as a vibrant one does?
Nichols remains convinced that a researcher will take up his cause soon. Meanwhile, with no regular salary (he isn’t paid by the California Academy of Sciences), he has struggled to support his wife, Dana, who manages Slowcoast, and their two grade-school-age daughters while marshaling his neuro-conservation drive. His solution is 100BlueAngels.org, a site he established earlier this year that asks people to support him with monthly contributions. Recently, he was on pace to bring in what would amount to a $43,000 salary. He supplements this with modeling gigs, which he’s taken since college (look for his mug in Gap stores during the holidays), but has had to borrow against his home and take a $10,000 loan from his father.
“People ask me, ‘Why don’t you sock this idea away until you can get the money and do the research yourself—be the pioneering guy and get all the credit?’ ” Nichols says. “That’s just not as interesting to me. I’d rather hang it out there. Throw a conference. Create the chatter. And hopefully inspire some neuroscientists to ask some of these questions.”
NICHOLS DOES THROW a hell of a conference. This past June, for his Bluemind Summit, which he billed as a gathering that would “forever link the studies of mind and ocean,” Nichols wrangled a remarkably eclectic mix of neuro-nerds, greens, adventurers, futurists, artists, a video-game inventor, a high-end realtor, and one very gnarly big-wave surfer to the Academy of Sciences for a marathon day of presentations. The lineup alone demonstrated Nichols’s flair for making science both relevant and accessible.
Early on, Eric Johnson, a nattily attired realtor with Sotheby’s, cited the premium people are willing to pay for a water view. “We can see the storms or pirates approaching,” said Johnson, noting that wealthy owners of high-rise apartments are automatic environmentalists because “clean, clear water keeps property values up.” Marcus Eriksen, a marine scientist known for a 2008 crossing of the Pacific in his Junk, a raft made primarily of plastic debris, discussed our basic biological reasons for living on the seashore: lots of food and few predators. Ocean activist Fabien Cousteau noted that humans and whales share the mammalian reflex, which allows us to stay underwater for long periods without breathing, while Maverick’s surfer Jeff Clark talked about his learned ability to sense things like the presence of sharks. “Listening to the feedback that the ocean provides will keep you surfing for years,” he concluded.
There were some lighter touches. A cellist kicked things off with a medley “full of ocean-ness”—a Nichols request—and each presenter was introduced with a six-word bio (“passion, teacher, vegetables…”). At one point, Jaimal Yogis, author of Salt-water Buddha, about his quest to find Zen through surfing, led everyone in meditation. Hugs happened.