Kate Wing's Blog
A Room with a View
August 3, 2007
Posted by Kate Wing in Reviving the World's Oceans
Many people believe the life of a senior ocean policy analyst is a glamorous one. Sure, sometimes I get to snorkel or sail and call it "outreach." But most of the time when I'm in scenic places like Big Sur or Point Reyes or La Jolla, I'm sitting in a windowless conference room for eight hours. I think conference rooms look about the same everywhere, though I hear that at Google they project a giant ticking clock on the wall to speed things along. There are certainly times when I could have used a giant clock, but I'm digressing. The upshot is that I often get my best views in the plane flying in and out of beautiful places, rather than during the work itself.
Yesterday was an interesting exception, since I had the pleasure of being part of a group at NCEAS, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, in Santa Barbara. Here's the view out of their 2nd floor window:
Not exactly the Pacific Ocean, but much nicer than a bunch of air conditioner ducts. After four hours of discussing the finer points of data-limited stock assessments (aka, how do we count fish when we can't afford to dive in and count each one) we could all stretch and describe which ones looked like giant clams or sea anemones or sea serpents. You can take us away from the sea, but we still see it everywhere.
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