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JULIA PARRISH: One is wonder. I love, I love marine biology.
I'm, I'm Jacques Cousteau, I'm diving underwater. I'm watching
those fish swim in a coral reef. It's just, it's mesmerizing.
It's beautiful. And everybody should have a chance to see
something like that. I also am watching the marine environment,
like all of our environments, erode just because of the
pressures of humanity. It's not that anybody wants to mess up
the oceans. It's just that all of the things that we do put
pressure on the oceans. And so that sense of worry or concern,
also inspire me to action.
I was a tom-girl-bookworm. So I was
out collecting things and bringing them in and letting
them go in my house, which didn't inspire
my parents tremendously. But also I read and I read
and I read and I read and I read and I read.
When I started COASST, my thought was,
great. I'm going to get a whole bunch of people out there on the
beaches, collecting information about birds that wash in on the
tide and I'm going to use that information in my science. So
it's a great, great way for me to get lots and lots of data
that I can't go out and get myself. And I've changed my
view. I mean I still think that and boy are they good at being
data collectors. But I think much more about those people.
And I think about science literacy and I think most people
in the world don't want to be scientists, which is probably a
good idea. They want to be involved in science, they want
to be a part of science and so that's what COASST does. COASST
gives lots and lots and lots of coastal citizens, from age seven
to about age 93 or 94, the chance to go out and collect
really rigorous information that we can put into large piles in
space and time and resolve a pattern of. And that pattern
allows us to know when things are right and when things are
going wrong with the marine environment. COASST is about
data collection. It's not about pointing fingers and that's
because it's really, really important that the entire
community be involved, right. So it's not a left leaning or a
right leaning thing, COASST teaches people that with more
information about what's going on in your local environment,
you're more in the driver's seat as an individual, as a community
member, as a community, in taking charge about what's going
on with your local resourses.
Locally, along the West Coast
and up into Alaska, we provide one source of information that
gives us an indicator, an index of the health of the coastal
marine environment. This is one that comes from collection by
citizens and so it's trusted by citizens.
Starting COASST. I,
there's not a day that goes by where I don't hear from one of
our volunteers who's just come off the beach, who went out for
the first time with their grandkid, who met their spouse
on a beached bird survey who's calling to say, “Oh my gosh,
there's some new huge piece of Japanese debris. Do something
right now.” Who's calling to say “I'm knee-deep in share
waters and you need to know this is going on.” And just the fact
that there are that many people that are out there, hundreds of
people that are out there collecting data and they know,
they know the baseline. They know what's normal and thus they
know what's abnormal. Their level of science literacy is so
high and that's just, I'm really proud of that.
Go slow and be in it for the long term.
Getting turned down for my first big grant, in
education as I was moving into citizen science was
a huge, huge letdown for me because at the time I thought,
wow, I've got this growing program and people are really
jazzed by it and on the West Coast it's really wonderful. And
we've been going for a few years, we've proved that we
could do it. And I just couldn't even get in the door of the
funder. And part of me thought, well, maybe I'm not that good.
Maybe the program is not that good. And a little voice in the
back of my brain said “What are you talking about, just do it.
Pull yourself up, get back in the game and go talk to them and
figure out why they weren't impressed with what you're
proposing to do.” And that's exactly what I did and now
they're really big funders.
I have a vision of coastal communities that
are filled with people where everybody is
collecting different data. They're all doing it rigorously,
it's all standardized, it's all checked, it's all going online.
And at every grocery store and every coffee shop and every
Walgreen's, people are running into each other and saying
things like “Well what's going on with the water chemistry?
Aren't you a water chemistry person? Well what's going on
with the marine debris? Well how are those birds doing? What's
going on with the fisheries?” That communities figure out,
find out that they can collect the information and allow
scientists to put it together in a larger pattern so they can
also see, is what's happening in my community the same as is
happening up or down the coast. Is this a local, unique thing,
or is this a broad, regional pattern. And what should I do
about it. I think that there are all sorts of ways that
communities can take control of what's going on locally and push
for the preservation or the change that they want. And do
that based on great, great data. That's science.