McCarthy agreed.
“If I think about the future, I very much like the position that Jane advocates: We cannot ignore the ocean. It’s essential we think about the ocean in all these future plans,” McCarthy said. “I think the hopeful message is that it is something … that is absolutely essential.”
Daniel Schrag, Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology and director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, which sponsored the event, said one of the great benefits of working at Harvard is great colleagues, and McCarthy, who served as a mentor to him, was one of his first and foremost.
“There are many days when I feel like the luckiest person in the world, and the reason is I have spectacular colleagues,” Schrag said. “I am incredibly fortunate to be part of this community … but Jim McCarthy is dear and special to me. My entire time at Harvard he has been a mentor and a steady presence.”
Several of the speakers reflected on shared experiences and the impact McCarthy had on their careers, providing a nudge that landed one at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and another in the top chair at the New England Aquarium. McCarthy, who sat on a panel during the event’s second half, said he was “extremely honored” by the gathering and said in reviewing the list of speakers, it was clear that each felt an obligation to not only conduct science, but a responsibility to communicate what they found to policymakers. McCarthy himself chaired a working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2001 report and served in leadership positions, among others, for the Union of Concerned Scientists and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Other speakers addressed an array of ocean-centric topics, but in each case highlighted existing opportunities to engage with the problems of today. Overfishing, which is rampant in the world’s oceans, can be addressed by effective regulation. Aquaculture has the promise of boosting the availability of seafood even as free-swimming stocks decline. Even something as difficult as coral bleaching, a phenomenon prompted by warmer than normal water that has some predicting the doom of the world’s reefs, has been shown to be less deadly on reefs that are otherwise healthy and protected from pollution and overfishing, according to Jeremy Jackson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
“There’s a really dangerous arrogance to the notion of hopelessness,” Jackson said. “Total hopelessness assumes that we know everything there is to know. … When we think we know everything, we preclude opportunity.”