Tag Archives: Brock Bernstein

In Memory of Dr. Brock B. Bernstein

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A Tribute to a Great Mind

Dr. Brock B. Bernstein served as President of the Board of the National Fisheries Conservation Center (the parent organization of the Global Ocean Health program) for 25 years. A marine ecologist and oceanographer, Brock was a sought-after facilitator in efforts to tackle complex marine science and policy problems.

Suzanne Iudicello, another founding board member, recalls: “Brock was not just brilliant in rare and breathtaking ways, across disciplines, interests, and sectors. He was magical in that he could call forth knowledge, analysis, empathy, and insight in everyone around him. The world, especially the ocean, is better because of Brock.”

Brock’s crowning accomplishments were collaborative efforts that transformed the way scientists and agencies monitor the health of waters: instead of isolated studies of narrow patches of coast, he successfully cajoled, inspired and taught researchers to link efforts in order to answer bigger questions that urgently confront us all: Can these waters keep making abundant seafood and life? Is it safe to swim? Is it safe to drink? He drew scientists, policy leaders, fishermen, and even surfers together to forge robust and reliable systems for prioritizing and tackling the really important problems first. The results: cleaner and more abundant waters, and stronger stewardship of coastal and marine resources.

In honor of Brock’s work, we founded the Brock Bernstein Memorial Fund for the Oceans in May 2018, to honor our friend, colleague, and founding member who passed away in January of that year. The fund will support the mission of NFCC’s flagship Global Ocean health program: to protect seafood at the source. The fund allows us the freedom to pursue projects and opportunities we otherwise couldn’t.

Brock leaves behind a wife and two children, as well as innumerable colleagues and friends. He was a treasured member of our team and we will continue to honor his example of kind, patient, and wise collaborative problem-solving.

— the team at National Fisheries Conservation Center

Let’s Look at Past Successes to Encourage the Vision of a Brighter Environmental Future

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Too often the tone of environmental discourse —Crisis! Dire failure!—promotes hopelessness and paralysis. Brock Bernstein, President of the National Fisheries Conservation Center (Global Ocean Health is a program of NFCC), takes a different view. He was recently asked to write a blog entry for the journal Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management, and we think it’s an important message.

By Dr. Brock B. Bernstein

Pervasive doom and gloom dominates much of the popular news about the environment. Global warming, sea level rise, ocean acidification, drought, wildfires, overfishing, or overpopulation—it all contributes to a feeling of despair and hopelessness, particularly among young people. This struck home for me on a personal level during a recent conversation with my college-aged son and a few of his friends—they felt they were “totally screwed” because of the inevitable impacts of climate change.

Cuyahoga River fire, 1952. Courtesy clevelandmemory.org

One value of getting older is that you’ve seen more and have a longer history to draw on. I grew up in southern California from the 1950s through the 1970s when environmental problems were severe and visible – air pollution (I remember frequent episodes of eye-burning smog that caused incessant coughing fits during water polo practice) and sewage contamination that led much of Santa Monica Bay’s beaches to be permanently closed to swimming (1,2). While I was in graduate school, I visited a colleague in Cleveland in the late 1960s, just a couple of years after the Cuyahoga River caught on fire again, because it was so polluted that, as Time Magazine put it, the river “oozes rather than flows” (Time, August 1, 1969).

Los Angeles smog

Smog over Los Angeles basin. Credit: Al Pavangkanan, CC BY 2.0.

And yet, we’ve solved many of these and other problems that seemed so overwhelming at the time, and we’ve made major progress on newer ones such as the ozone hole. One useful thing about getting older is that it provides some protection against the shifting baseline phenomenon in which our perceptions are dominated by more recent information while the past recedes in our collective memory and is not part of our current awareness. For good reason, environmental advocates typically focus on shifting baselines that cause us to see current, degraded conditions as normal. For example, the average size of top-of-the-food chain fish, such as swordfish, has declined substantially since the 1800s (3), to the extent that most people cannot even imagine a 400-pound swordfish. Yet shifting baselines also diminish our awareness of past successes and the effort that went into them. My son and his friends were only vaguely aware of southern California’s decades-long battle against air and water (2) pollution. As a result, they have no experience of hard-won success to draw on as they consider what their future holds. And because they’re not in the engineering facilities and meeting rooms where solutions to California’s current extreme drought and likely drier future are being crafted and implemented, they—and much of the rest of the public—don’t appreciate the stunning speed with which solutions such as stormwater capture and the potable reuse of treated wastewater are being developed and implemented.

Read more here