Blue Mind & Water Wellness - Wallace J Nichols
About Wallace J Nichols
Wallace ‘J’ Nichols is a marine scientist and author. He popularized the term ‘Blue Mind’, the science of why water makes us happier and healthier. He has studied sea turtles and shares lessons from Ocean Revolution, Indigenous youth, and why protecting our emotional resilience is essential to sustaining ocean work. This episode honors his legacy and invites us to keep ‘wishing each other water.’
Building Stronger Leaders Through Nature and Ocean Connection
J talks about his work and explores his connection with the ocean. J has always been emotionally attached to water. He can go way back to his childhood where he remembers always being the first one in the water. He says life on land was fine, but it was complicated and being in the water made him feel at home. He grew up wanting to be a problem solver, someone who wanted to roll up his sleeves and get the work done. In college J went about assembling a problem solver toolkit. And what he learned is that the emotional piece, the human dimension,s so important. He gives examples and says we need to do a much better job working with young people, the people who we’re relying on to solve the problems the tools to stay emotionally, mentally, socially, spiritually strong, to help them succeed. J has found that nature has helped him be connected, to feel awe and wonder and joy and peace and freedom. J believes we need to provide opportunity for young leaders to get in the water, to give them space to restore themselves and be energized to come back and do the work.
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00:00:04 Pam Ferris-Olson Today on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series on womenmindthewater.com, I'm speaking with Wallace J Nichols, an advocate for everything water ranging from wellness and wildlife to the environment. J is the chief evangelist for water in the Blue Mind movement. Among other things, he is recognized for his scientific work with sea turtles. His best-selling book Blue Mind, the surprising science that shows how being near in, on and underwater can make you happier, healthier, more connected, and better at what you do. And he's co-founder of the Plastic Pollution Coalition.
00:00:47 Pam Ferris-Olson The Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast on womenmindthewater.com engages artists in conversation about their work and explores their connection with the ocean. Through their stories, Wo(men) Mind the Water hopes to inspire and encourage action to protect the ocean and her creatures.
00:01:05 Pam Ferris-Olson I am speaking with Wallace J Nichols and authority on many things related to water. He has an extensive list of academic, environmental and author credentials, and he is recognized for having coined the term “blue mind”. His untiring spirit has been featured in magazines as diverse as Time, Animal Planet, Vogue and Surfer. He once took a 112-day hike from Oregon to Mexico with his partner and their four-month old daughter, and more recently he experienced the effects of a massive wildfire on his property in the hills of Central California.
Testament to his indomitable spirit, he’s completed the 700th episode of his Blue Mind Online Book Club. Now he is honoring us by being on Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast.
00:02:00 Pam Ferris-Olson Welcome Jay. I am extremely pleased to have you here. Every one of my guests is amazingly talented and passionate about water, but I don't think any wield as broad a brush or with quite as much energy as you do. What is your origin story about what launched you into the Big Blue?
00:02:22 J Nichols Well, it's an honor to be included on your podcast. This has been a long time coming and I'm really looking forward to our chat. I think, you know I’m like a lot of people, I can go way back to my childhood and think of those watery days where you just, you know, were the first one in and the last one out of whatever the body of water was. I just wanted to be in there doing whatever, whether it was a lake or a river or an ocean or a pool or kiddie pool, even in my bathtub if it was bad winter weather. And actually I can think back and that, that's really what it was. It was a deep love of feeling. Life on land was fine, but it was complicated and I stuttered. I was an introvert. They called us shy back then. And I was adopted. So I had big questions about my life, and life in general, and things like genetics. But in the water I just felt at home.
00:03:28 Pam Ferris-Olson Yeah. Well, it's interesting because you said you're a marine biologist and you didn't start out that way. You went to North Carolina, where you majored in economics and policy. So how did you imagine that the study of economics was going to affect your future?
00:03:44 J Nichols Yeah, I wanted to be a problem solver. And so I studied, as an undergraduate, I studied biology in Spanish and then I got a Master’s degree in Economics and Policy. And then a PhD in Wildlife Ecology and Evolutionary Biology thinking if you put that all together, that's a pretty decent toolkit to be a problem solver rather than just a problem describer or a problem spotter . We need those as well, and that's a lot of people in academia describe the problems, but they don't necessarily roll up their sleeves and get into the, you know, into the mud of things, so to speak. So I wanted to be kind of both and so I kind of went about assembling a problem solver toolkit. And what I've learned and have remedied is that also the emotional piece is so important. The human dimension, they like to call it an academia.
00:04:51 Pam Ferris-Olson
So I was surprised to read that in 1991 you received a fellowship to study sea level rise. And I don't remember there being much awareness or interest back in the 90s about that topic. What do you remember thinking in the 1990s about sea level rise?
00:05:10 J Nichols I remember working on a report as part of a what's called the Bradley Fellowship and that I was one of the fellows. And we worked on a sea level rise report for the state of North Carolina. And I remember when it came out, we thought ‘Wow, this is going to just rock the world, at least the state.” And it didn't. It made a little ripple maybe and there just wasn't a movement to take that work further. It was not the way it is now.
00:05:44 Pam Ferris-Olson And I have to say, when I moved to Maine about eight years ago, sea level rise didn't seem to be a problem but in the past three years the reality has really become evident here in Maine. A recent storm brought quite a lot of rain, wind, coastal flooding and infrastructure damage. And now people are a lot more aware of it, because some of the fishing piers have gone. And I wonder, do you think sea level rise has gotten progressively worse or is it just that people are now paying attention?
00:06:19 J Nichols That's a combination I think. I think several factors: the storms, the surge, the frequency and intensity, sea level rise itself, and then people paying attention and maybe not having as much of a stomach for the destruction. You know as maybe they did in the past. In North Carolina people would get their houses clobbered on the Outer Banks. And then they’d get some insurance money and come back and rebuild in the same spot. And then, lo and behold, a few storms later, and one would hit them right there again. And they might have to rebuild again. And it just was part of the deal. I think insurance companies are sick of that. You know, county planners, government folks are, and it's just the less of an appetite for dealing with the destruction. So it's a combination of all of those things. Certainly a lot more awareness and a giant mountain of science that back in the early 90s, we had some research, but now it's just exploded. You know, we're almost 35 years later. And the tools that we have to study the ocean and the coasts are just so much more impressive. The satellites, the technologies you have, the models, etcetera.
00:07:41 Pam Ferris-Olson Right. Well, there's this conflict between the people who are more concerned about jobs and economics and those who focus on the environmental costs of sea level rise. So how do you balance the people who are more interested in the “well, if you do this, you're going to lose jobs versus well the environment is changing and we have to be more aware of the costs by doing XY or Z for the economic reasons.”
00:08:15 J Nichols Turns out all of that destruction creates jobs. So the conversation has changed so it's not an environment versus jobs but, what are we going to do together to persist, you know, to be resilient, to take care of each other, to keep the things we care about and love somewhat intact? So you know it, the hurricane comes through or wildfire comes through. The one thing it does is it creates jobs. So we have kind of this disaster economy. This is kind of weird.
00:08:52 Pam Ferris-Olson That's a good way to describe it. A disaster economy.
00:08:56 J Nichols Yeah. It's hard to move the buildings. It's hard to move the infrastructure. And so that's going to be a whole bunch of jobs taking down the rubble. And I saw it after the wildfires in California. It employed a whole bunch of people to do the cleanup and then to really rethink how and where we should rebuild. The issue is that we have lobbyists who are holding on tight to a certain kind of job. And they're paid for by that industry to hang on to a certain kind of job. But those jobs will be replaced by a different kind of job, and some of those are going to be fixing what's broken, restoration jobs, clean technology jobs, clean energy jobs and you know aquaculture or different kinds of food services that are more sustainable. So it's just a transition, so the tension usually comes not because of the loss of jobs to the environment, but a certain category of jobs that lobbyists who are paid to defend the that industry usually have big budgets. They make a lot of noise and put up a lot of resistance.
00:10:15 Pam Ferris-Olson So I'd like to talk to you about the Ocean Revolution, an organization that you co-founded. It's an international network, as I understand it, of indigenous youth, ocean advocates and scientists. How are the indigenous youth and scientists connected at Ocean Revolution?
00:10:34 J Nichols There are so many ways of knowing and so many ideas and so many young leaders around the world that weren't. Their voices were not being heard. When we do ocean education generally, we were teaching young people how to be marine biologists and to learn about biology. Maybe some oceanography but we weren't really saying to young people, “You can do anything for the ocean. You can be an ocean artist. You can be an ocean podcaster.
You can be an ocean engineer or an ocean lawyer. You can be an ocean leader who doesn't really care to study biology. And we weren't hearing that. So we kind of set out to reach young people and in particular, indigenous youth, with the message that we need, you know, ocean everythings, everybody's, you know, to get involved. Any job description you can think of, you can put the prefix ocean in front of it and it actually makes sense.
00:11:51 J Nichols Getting out of the way appropriately and as quickly as possible, listening a lot, trying to provide the resources that the young leaders had identified that they needed. And at the time that was another one of those projects that was considered really far out. The message was: “Why are you working with Indigenous youth? Why are you working with youth? We don't have time to educate. I mean, it's too urgent.” Turns out we did. We do have time. There's urgency, of course, but these young people are now running the show and it happens pretty quickly. They move from high school age to postgraduate to young adults and they're in charge. Especially in indigenous communities. that's true. Western visitors with a grant don't last long. People from the community stick around generally, yeah.
00:12:43 Pam Ferris-Olson So what have you learned about indigenous practices related to the ocean that might positively impact your work and the thinking of non-indigenous scientists?
00:12:55 J Nichols Well, I'll give you a really super fascinating example. We work with the Comcaac community. Outsiders called them the Seri Indians in northwestern Mexico and they are a sea turtle culture. They believe that their ancestors are leatherback sea turtles. They have a leatherback ceremony when they encounter a leatherback sea turtle they do a three-day singing, dancing, chanting ceremony that happens spontaneously. But when it comes to the Black Sea turtle, which is a kind of a variety of green sea turtle, they had a dozen different names for the different colors, and, you know, different morphs of a Black Sea turtle. And then when we did the genetics, we found a dozen haplotypes, genetic types that corresponded with their names of these different types. We said, “Hey, look at these results, pretty cool. You guys helped collect the samples, we did the lab work. And their take on that was like “Well, we told you that .”
00:14:21 Why did you? Yeah, we got these fancy tools and genetic science and… But I love when you know, modern tools confirm and reiterate ancient wisdom.
00:14:28 Pam Ferris-Olson I'm curious what you have found are the greatest concerns of the young ocean advocates that you have talked with and worked with.
00:14:38 J Nichols Well, they seem to be concerned about everything a lot and should be to some extent. You know whether it's climate anxiety, extinction anxiety, plastic pollution anxiety.
You know the contaminants that are in the environment. We're finding them every time we look in a new place. My biggest concern for them is the stress and anxiety that they're carrying. These young leaders who are so fired up and so committed. I know from experience that it takes a lot of energy to be empathetic all the time and to have your heart connected to things that get destroyed. It hurts and the pain is very, very real. I want to help them stay strong and stay creative and stay compassionate, and not burn out. And I see very young people burning out.
And, you know, mildly depressed about it, not knowing, you know, if it's worth it. That's heartbreaking. And that's not, that's not OK. It's not OK at all to have young advocates hit the wall, you know, in their early 20s or younger. And so we need to do a much, much better job, not just screaming about the end of the world but giving the people who we’re relying on to solve the problems the tools to stay emotionally, mentally, socially, spiritually strong.
And we're not really doing that.
00:16:41 J Nichols Make sure you jump in the water as much as you can and play. Find joy. Because if you don't you will burn out and then all that education and all that work and all that thinking and all that creativity goes right out the window and that's one of the things we adults can speak with experience from. I've been there. Gone through some tough, tough, you know, sections of the last decade of my life. Nature’s helped me being connected and getting in the water. Feeling awe and wonder and joy and peace and freedom in the water allows me to come back and do the work.
00:17:32 Pam Ferris-Olson So Jay, I'm really thankful for you being here. In our brief time, we’ve touched only the smallest bit of your extensive knowledge. And I will post any links that you recommend on your artivist guest page on womenmindthewater.com. I'm personally grateful for all you do and hope we can collaborate more in the future.
I'd like to remind listeners that I've been speaking with Wallace J Nichols, an advocate for everything water. He's well respected as a scientist and author and an active member of a wide array of nonprofits. J is the latest guest on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast. The series can be viewed on womenmindthewater.com, Museum on Main Street and YouTube. An audio-only version of this podcast is available on womenmindthewater.com, on iTunes, and Spotify. Wo(men) Mind the Water is grateful to Jaine Rice for the use of her song Women of Water. All rights for the Wo(men) Mind the Water name and logo belong to Pam Ferris-Olson. This is Pam Ferris-Olson.
