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Interview: Philip Kramer
The Nature Conservancy’s director of Caribbean conservation talks about creating new marine parks, exploring the great unknown and wrestling with conscience at the fish market.
—By Courtney Leatherman
Nature Conservancy: I’ve never heard of marine geology, your specialty. What do you do?
Philip Kramer: It’s big-picture stuff. A biologist looks at a short time scale, but a geologist looks at how ecosystems evolve through time. I have to figure out how it all fits together in time and space. I take The Nature Conservancy’s work over the past 50 years and put it into a 1,000-, 10,000-, 250-million-year perspective.
Nature Conservancy: Why is the long view important?
Philip Kramer: It’s an interesting perspective to bring to our work, particularly on climate change. We’ve gone through 22 climatic cycles. This one is unprecedented, in terms of rapid climate change, but we can learn a lot in terms of preparing ourselves for those changes.
Nature Conservancy: Do you ever wonder, Why bother? Aren’t a lot of places in the Caribbean going to go glug glug?
Philip Kramer: They will go glug glug eventually. We know that just from sea-level records. It’s not a question of, Are we going there? We are going there. Again, it’s a time-scale thing. Most people don’t think beyond their lifetimes, and those shorter time frames are worth doing something about. I think we can slow down the rate of climate change by dealing with it, and many future generations of people and animals will benefit from that.
Nature Conservancy: Before you got big-picture perspective, you were quite focused. You did your dissertation on hydro-geochemistry, which you researched alone, on an island of lime mud in Florida Bay, 25 miles from anywhere. And you were attracted to this project because … ?
Philip Kramer: I’ve always had a propensity for extreme conditions. I like being the only one to work in remote places, the first one in.
Nature Conservancy: Why?
Philip Kramer: Maybe I’m a little out of my time, from 100 years ago when people were out and exploring new places and seeing how they work and putting it all together. Like Darwin. One reason I got into marine science was I always felt it was our unknown territory, an explorer’s paradise. I was never really interested in space, because I thought we had a lot more to do here.
Nature Conservancy: So what are some of the unknowns?
Philip Kramer: Andros Island [in the Bahamas]. In my mind, the waters off Andros represent one of the last great wilderness places in the western Atlantic. It’s a huge area that’s never really been described. There are a lot of Androses out there.
Nature Conservancy: Last year you led a boatload of marine scientists on a survey of Andros, partly to encourage the Bahamian government to expand the current protected area. Tell me about that.
Philip Kramer: We found lots of cool stuff—a lot of sharks, including endangered saw fish, huge numbers of sea turtles and one of the biggest recorded examples of bonefish nurseries. I think that is going to help us address some of the protection gaps.
Nature Conservancy: With your help, the British Virgin Islands recently announced plans to create marine parks for about a third of its nearshore waters. Why is that a big deal?
Philip Kramer: They are one of the first in the Caribbean to create a network of parks. The Conservancy is pushing for these networks because they do a good job of reducing an array of threats—like land-based pollution, overfishing—that harm reefs.
Nature Conservancy: Speaking of overfishing, I’m curious, do marine scientists eat sushi?
Philip Kramer: Sure.
Nature Conservancy: Do you?
Philip Kramer: I do. We have sustainable wild-caught tuna in the Caribbean. Fishermen go out in a small boat and troll for small tuna and bring them back to sell in the fish market. When I’m in a place like that, I tend to partake and have sushi I’ve made myself.
Nature Conservancy: What kind of seafood would you typically order at a restaurant?
Philip Kramer: I’ll order things I think of as sustainable, such as mahi-mahi and yellowtail snapper and lobster. I try not to order things that are poorly managed.
Nature Conservancy: Me either. But, boy, when I see fatty tuna on the menu, it’s hard to pass up. Is there a fish that’s too tempting even for you?
Philip Kramer: It’s probably more when I go to the fish market and see a particularly fresh-looking grouper compared to a six-day-old piece of mahi-mahi. Which am I going to buy? That probably gives me more cause for dealing with conscience versus appetite. It’s a tough call.
Nature picture credits: Photo © Maggie Steber
