By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto
A man died recently who was one of my heroes. Inside his big brain lay the secrets of San Francisco Bay. In one sentence he could explain the relationships between the tiny plants drifting aimlessly in the shallows, the muscular salmon leaping upstream, and the health of the planet.
He had a warm smile, a curl to his hair, a ready chuckle. But I did not know this man well. For decades he ran a monthly data gathering cruise between the southern tip of San Francisco Bay and its “headwaters” where two mighty California rivers empty into the blue bowl at the heart of my region. The data they collected — years of salinity and turbidity and water velocity levels, not to mention the number of tiny plants and animals in the water at any given time — helped everyone better understand the estuarine miracle in our midst.
This man was obsessed with plankton. I bet he woke up more than once, in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, dreaming of green gooey stuff. I once asked him if he ever got tired of plankton. “That would be like asking John Muir if he ever got tired of trees,” he said.
This man spent a lot of time explaining complicated science to me. When I asked, as I often did, that he repeat something, he never became impatient. In the years he served as my go-to source on the food webs of the Bay, I must have asked him to explain the relationship between the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, El Nino, and the North Pacific Gyre a half dozen times, but he never blinked. These huge patterns of oceanic and atmospheric change were second nature to his work.
As I wrote my stories, I noticed how much time this man also spent trying to keep the Bay science cruise going so that the data stream it had produced for half a century could remain unbroken. I noticed how he mentored young scientists, raised up women scientists, collaborated with other scientists, to connect the dots. When I called him a “superscientist” in one of my stories, he didn’t like it. It didn’t fit his view of the kind of science he did, the kind that stuck to the methods, the results, the protocols and peer reviews. Certainly his kind of science discouraged superlatives.
So who was this man? His name was Jim Cloern and I admit, I was one of his groupies. I liked to follow him around and write down what he did, as I still follow around half a dozen other superscientists I think of as my heroes. These people regularly dive into, wade through, boat over, fish around in the Bay to figure out what makes it tick. They’re a breed not content to sit behind a desk or google questions or run models. They favor getting wet. Touching stuff. Seeing the changes in our environment for themselves.
Jim Cloern made science that belongs to all of us, as taxpayers that funded the US Geological Survey where he once worked. And now all the truth-telling power of this science, the information necessary to save our species and ecosystem, is being being withdrawn without my permission, or the permission of any of its other owners: the American people.
I grieve this great wounding to science, and the mounting threats to the health of our human nest. And I grieve the backward ways we are looking at the future.
“If I was to keep going for another 10 years, I expect by then I’d be working on something I can’t even imagine right now,” Jim told me when he retired. “I’ll feel comfortable about stopping as soon as the Bay stops changing.”
Ariel Rubissow Okamoto co-authored a book called the Natural History of San Francisco Bay, in which the work of many USGS scientists like Cloern is featured.
JIM CLOERN: The scientist and science I mourn
By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto
He had a warm smile, a curl to his hair, a ready chuckle. But I did not know this man well. For decades he ran a monthly data gathering cruise between the southern tip of San Francisco Bay and its “headwaters” where two mighty California rivers empty into the blue bowl at the heart of my region. The data they collected — years of salinity and turbidity and water velocity levels, not to mention the number of tiny plants and animals in the water at any given time — helped everyone better understand the estuarine miracle in our midst.
This man was obsessed with plankton. I bet he woke up more than once, in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, dreaming of green gooey stuff. I once asked him if he ever got tired of plankton. “That would be like asking John Muir if he ever got tired of trees,” he said.
This man spent a lot of time explaining complicated science to me. When I asked, as I often did, that he repeat something, he never became impatient. In the years he served as my go-to source on the food webs of the Bay, I must have asked him to explain the relationship between the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, El Nino, and the North Pacific Gyre a half dozen times, but he never blinked. These huge patterns of oceanic and atmospheric change were second nature to his work.
As I wrote my stories, I noticed how much time this man also spent trying to keep the Bay science cruise going so that the data stream it had produced for half a century could remain unbroken. I noticed how he mentored young scientists, raised up women scientists, collaborated with other scientists, to connect the dots. When I called him a “superscientist” in one of my stories, he didn’t like it. It didn’t fit his view of the kind of science he did, the kind that stuck to the methods, the results, the protocols and peer reviews. Certainly his kind of science discouraged superlatives.
So who was this man? His name was Jim Cloern and I admit, I was one of his groupies. I liked to follow him around and write down what he did, as I still follow around half a dozen other superscientists I think of as my heroes. These people regularly dive into, wade through, boat over, fish around in the Bay to figure out what makes it tick. They’re a breed not content to sit behind a desk or google questions or run models. They favor getting wet. Touching stuff. Seeing the changes in our environment for themselves.
Jim Cloern made science that belongs to all of us, as taxpayers that funded the US Geological Survey where he once worked. And now all the truth-telling power of this science, the information necessary to save our species and ecosystem, is being being withdrawn without my permission, or the permission of any of its other owners: the American people.
I grieve this great wounding to science, and the mounting threats to the health of our human nest. And I grieve the backward ways we are looking at the future.
“If I was to keep going for another 10 years, I expect by then I’d be working on something I can’t even imagine right now,” Jim told me when he retired. “I’ll feel comfortable about stopping as soon as the Bay stops changing.”
Ariel Rubissow Okamoto co-authored a book called the Natural History of San Francisco Bay, in which the work of many USGS scientists like Cloern is featured.