Dr. Nancy Knowlton
After graduating from college in 1971, I worked for a year as an assistant to the pioneering Dr. Ruth Turner, the first woman scientist to go down in the submersible Alvin. She was of the generation when being a woman in science was far harder than it is today, and I watched in horror as she daily suffered the insults of male colleagues. For her, even getting onto an oceanographic research ship had been a challenge. Yet I wasn’t discouraged, and my first dive without an instructor was a cold Massachusetts fall day in her much too small wetsuit. Despite the hail, I loved it – I still remember the meadow of Metridium anemones growing on the rocks off Nahant.
A few years later, my scientific career started in earnest, diving on the coral reefs of the north coast of Jamaica. The corals were so lush that we took the reefs for granted, and like many scientists back then, I worked on the organisms that lived on reefs rather than the corals themselves. But in 1980 Hurricane Allen struck, pulverizing the corals. With Judy Lang, my once teacher and now collaborator, I worked on what we thought would be their recovery, tagging hundreds of staghorn coral fragments, only to watch them die. Not long afterwards, the reefs were effectively gone, the victim of diseases and most importantly the lack of fish, which without our realizing it had eroded the resilience of the reefs and made them invisibly vulnerable.
This was a powerful early lesson on the fragility of ocean ecosystems, and it stimulated my interest in how reefs could flip from a coral-dominated to a seaweed-dominated state in an ecological blink of an eye. Nevertheless, conservation didn’t replace all my other research interests, which by then had moved from sociobiology to biodiversity.
Some scientists have research trajectories that are relatively linear, but spending your career under water nearly guarantees that natural events will shape your interests. By the 1990’s, coral bleaching had reared its ugly white head, and once again dramatically shifted my focus. What started as a study of cryptic species in corals morphed into the discovery of multiple algal symbionts living in different parts of a single coral colony. When some part of colonies bleached and others didn’t, the different sensitivities of the symbionts to warming temperatures was revealed, launching a whole new phase of coral research for me and many others.
By the time I got to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the uncertain future of reefs, and many other ocean ecosystems, had become obvious. I became the founding director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation, a kind of medical school for the ocean. Thanks to the students there, I started to appreciate what social scientists have known for decades, namely that big problems without solutions can lead to despair and apathy rather than action.
This realization resulted in a series of gatherings called “Beyond the Obituaries: Success Stories in Ocean Conservation” (the name inspired by the fact that students don’t learn to write obituaries in medical school). When planning a day-long event at the Smithsonian as a prelude to the first International Marine Conservation Congress, I was initially told that there weren’t enough successes to fill a day. In the end we limited everyone to six minutes so that we could fit all the success stories in.
As it turned out, the notion of focusing on success rather than doom and gloom was not mine alone. One day, Elin Kelsey, an ocean activist and author, called me up to say that she too was committed to creating a more positive narrative. That call led to a collaboration between me, Elin, Heather Koldewey, and Elisabeth Whitebread, resulting in a small weekend workshop of like-minded souls. Not long afterwards, #OceanOptimism was born as a twitter campaign to celebrate World Oceans Day 2014. Since then the hashtag has been used by over 40,000 twitter accounts and remains one of the best ways to keep track of what is working in ocean conservation.
Fast forward to 2017, and the success of #OceanOptimism was the inspiration for a global series of Earth Optimism Summits and related events. In Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian hosted more than 240 presentations over Earth Day weekend (which you can watch at EarthOptimism.si.edu) focused on what’s working, why, and how to scale it up. Numerous ocean examples were joined by others on topics ranging from lion conservation to renewable energy. 2020, which is also the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, promises to be another big year for Earth Optimism.
When I look back on my career, I realize there were times when being a woman required me to work harder for support, and I have certainly seen other women struggle more than they should have to. Nearly three decades ago I wrote an editorial for the Bulletin of the British Ecological Society entitled “Where are the Women in British Ecology” after attending a meeting where female scientists seemed to be seen but not heard. Even with the #MeToo movement, far more serious obstacles than I have ever faced continue to derail or impede the careers of women in science.
Nevertheless, as with the marine environment itself, I find it more constructive to learn about and encourage positive developments than to dwell on the bad news.
In writing this short piece, I was reminded of the many women I have worked with and helped to train, too numerous to name individually. Indeed, women outnumber men among the younger generations in marine conservation. This fact alone will not solve all the problems that remain for women working on marine environmental issues, but it is definitely also a cause for ocean optimism.
Other articles in the Women’s Aquatic Network December series:
- A Woman, a Vision, a Network: The Rise of WAN in Washington and the Importance of Women in Marine and Coastal Affairs, By Katy Lackey
- From Wrecked Reefs to Ocean Optimism, By Dr. Nancy Knowlton
- Becoming a Miami Waterkeeper, By Dana Tricarico
- SmallScaleOA: A Win-Win for Academia, Industry, Community, and Conservation, By Katharine (Kat) Leigh
- Diving Dreams and Solo Travel, By Victoria Bell
- Why the Women Around You Are the Network You Need, By Dana Rollison
Dr. Nancy Knowlton, the Smithsonian Institution’s Sant Chair for Marine Science, is an accomplished coral reef scientist known for her research on biodiversity, for which she was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Knowlton founded the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She is the author of Citizens of the Sea, was Editor-in-Chief of the Ocean Portal, helped launch #OceanOptimism, and co-hosted the Smithsonian’s Earth Optimism Summit. In December 2018, she is being honored as WAN’s Woman of the Year. Headshot photo credit: Christian Ziegler
Note: Views expressed in this article are the author’s own. They do not necessarily represent WAN or the author’s employer.