Hello, everyone, and welcome to a special live stream edition of Beyond Vizcaya. My name is Oldine Monestime and I’ll be your presenter for today’s episode. Now, Beyond Vizcaya is a community storytelling series that tells the stories of those that live and grew up in Miami. In our first season, we covered labor, migration, and cultural identity. This season, we will focus on climate change and the natural environment. Now, before we get into our program for today, you may have noticed that we are recording from Vizcaya’s courtyard, which provides a great view of Miami’s Biscayne Bay. Biscayne Bay is a shallow inlet of the Atlantic Ocean and the mangrove, shoreline, and sea grasses provide habitat for fish, shellfish, sea turtles, and manatees. These are just a couple of ecosystems found here in Florida that we will talk a little bit more about in today’s conversation.

(07:06)
And so again, we are excited to have a guest with us today, and I want to tell you a little bit more about him before we introduce him. We have with us Mr. Evan B. Forde. Mr. Forde is an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Before we get into hearing about him, like I said, I just want to tell you a little bit more about him. He’s done a lot of great work in his field. He’s from Miami, and in 1979, he was recognized by NOAA as the first African American scientist to explore the deep ocean. I think that’s pretty cool. He remains one of only a handful of African American oceanographers in the U.S. His current research includes using satellite sensors to improve hurricane forecasting, and we know that’s important.

(07:55)
He also became a science educator, created and taught graduate-level courses at the University of Miami, and taught an oceanography course for middle school students that featured in national periodicals. Mr. Forde also created a severe weather poster for NOAA that was distributed to 50,000 teachers. I know he’s very proud of that, and he will tell us a little bit more about it later. And he’s just an overall leader having received various recognition and awards from his contributions to science and the community. Now, if you can just give us a brief moment while we bring our guests in. Thank you all.

(08:28)
So thank you so much for being with us.

It’s my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

Yes. All right. And so as I previously mentioned in our open with regards to the theme that we have going on for this season, which is climate change and the natural environment, I wanted to get your thoughts on what we just took a look at outside, which were a couple of the ecosystems. We looked at the Biscayne Bay and the mangroves. So just wanted to from a scientific standpoint… Okay. All right. I’m understanding that we will be one more brief break and then we will continue with our conversation.

(10:17)
All right. Thank you all for remaining with us during our technical difficulty. We understand that these things happen, but that didn’t get in the way of our program for today. And so again, Mr. Forde, thank you for being with us. So just kind of your thoughts. I want to know what you can maybe tell us about the ecosystems that we just took a look at outside.

Well, rather than getting specific into those ecosystems, I grew up near here… Well, I actually learned to swim at Virginia Key Beach, which was the only place a young Black kid could learn to swim back during the day. And I’ve heard quite a bit of emphasis on mangroves, and mangroves in an extremely important plant around places of the ocean and waterways, because the roots are above ground, so they trap soil. Mangroves actually make little islands, and if you look around from the air, you can see here and on Virginia Key and even the pond that’s underneath our laboratory on Virginia Key, you’ll see that the mangroves eventually begin to take over. They do trap soil, they create islands, and they filter phosphates and nitrates out of the water, helping to purify it. So it is an extremely important plant to any aquatic ecosystem, and it is responsible for building a lot of the areas that you see near bodies of water in South Florida.

Wow. Wow. Lots of information that I wasn’t aware of. Lots of useful information, and thank you for that. I think maybe now we can kind of specifically get into what it is that you do in your field. Can you kind of tell us maybe in the beginning how you got into oceanography? What sparked your interest?

I’m so glad you asked me that because I hadn’t thought about it before now, but from the time I was about three or four years old, my parents were bringing me out here to Virginia Key. I actually took swimming lessons here when I was three or four years old, but we were only about 500 yards away from a canal, and know there’s a canal system throughout south Florida, and a lot of it was built to not just control water, the floods that come from Lake Okeechobee, but it’s also then for many of us a source of recreation, and in the case of my family, which wasn’t doing that great financially in the beginning, my dad and I would go fishing almost every day at the canal. So it’s freshwater fish.

(13:25)
And it wasn’t that long… My dad claims… My dad was a science teacher, by the way, and he said that when I was at that stage of four or five years old when a child will ask hundreds of questions a day, that I was asking even more, but being a science teacher, he went to Florida A&M University where a biology major, chemistry minor became a public school teacher, science teacher. But he said that when I’d ask the questions, he could answer them. For example, one day I brought some soil to him in one hand and a rock in another. I said, ‘Dad, do the soil submit together and become rocks or do rocks break down and become soil?” And he said, “Well, both actually.”

(14:23)
But getting back to the little almost daily fishing trips. So I became adept at fishing, but it wasn’t that long that I noticed that my dad had a habit of, even though we were only 10 minute walk from home, my dad would do everything in his power to keep the fish that we caught alive until we got home and got ready to prepare them for our meal, and this kind of spilled over onto me because I wanted to keep them alive longer. And I noticed that he create a source of oxygen for them. He said, “Well, you see these things,” when he was dissecting the fish, well, skinning it, gutting it. “These are gills. This is how they breathe oxygen out of the water. There is oxygen in the water, just not as much oxygen as surrounds us.”

(15:28)
And then one day he opened the fish and I noticed the heart was still beating and I wanted to keep it alive, and so we put it in saline solution, and it got to be that the fishing trips were not just about dinner anymore, but I was trying to keep the fish we caught alive. And when we started doing saltwater fishing, I began to learn that there was salt in the fresh water, we had a pump at home, and about how much salt I need to put it in to extend the life of the fish along with some source of oxygen.

You were learning a lot of science there.

There was a lot of science, and I was just fascinated and had somebody who could answer the questions.

Awesome. And then moving or transitioning to today, can you tell us a little bit of what your work consists of now?

Okay, so we’re kind of far from me going fishing and trying to keep the fish alive, but by the time I was in the third grade, I had a microscope, a telescope, my own chart of the skies, and a chemistry set, by the way. So my dad went through great pains to try to make sure there was nothing in my little chemistry set because by the way, in elementary school, I wasn’t reading on grade level. As a matter of fact, I never made an A until I was in middle school. So that’s one of my messages to kids is your past is not equal your future, and if things can start out so great, they could improve.

(17:22)
But my dad wanted to make sure there was nothing in the chemistry set that I could use to create an explosion, but I did it anyway. Every single time he bought me a chemistry set, he was like, “What did you do?” But wasn’t a great note-taker, didn’t know how to write down my observations and all that sort of thing. But I had a great interest in the world around me, even though I was making, dare I say, D’s, C’s and F’s in school. I had a younger brother, five years younger than me who could read the entire Miami Herald by the time he was five years old. And the question in my family was, why can’t little Evan read?

(18:09)
But I want to say, so I had a lot of curiosity about the natural world and actually finished my chemistry and biology and was actually taking a course at Miami Herald City High School called Environmental Oceanography when recruiters from some of the colleges came to speak to me. And when the one from Columbia University asked me what I wanted to major in, I asked him if they had any oceanography, and he got on the phone, made a collect call, and found out that they did. He said, “I understand we have one of the best oceanography schools in the world.” So that’s sort of… But for most young scientists and people who have mentors… So my father was a mentor in many ways, but I of course began to follow my professors and I studied geology and enjoyed it, which is the history of the earth. And I’ll share a little bit about that a little bit later, but I originally wanted to be a marine biologist.

(19:29)
I used to watch the Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau on television, and I thought, “Wow. If I’m good enough, if I study hard enough, I’ll go to work, I’ll have my briefcase in one hand and my scuba gear in the other, and at lunch time I’ll feed Flipper.” But I found out there were no jobs in marine biology at that time. So I switched to marine geology and geophysics at the same time when scientists were discovering that the continents had all been together in one big continent, Pangaea, and that they were spreading apart at about the width of my fingernail per year or about my height in my lifetime. So sea floor spreading.

(20:16)
And some of the professors who proved that to the world taught me in college and graduate school. And so I didn’t want to study the fish, I wanted to study… You know there are canyons underwater larger than the Grand Canyon? And you may have heard that I did some dives in these little mini-submarines. They’re called submersibles, but that was my big thing, I became one of the world’s experts on the formation, history and evolution of submarine canyons because there are over a hundred of them off of the east coast of the United States between Cape Hatteras and Nova Scotia.

I’m glad that you just mentioned some of the research that you’ve done in the submersible and how previously, as was mentioned, we talked about you being the first African American scientists to explore the deep ocean in the submersible. What does that mean personally for you to have received that recognition?

Well, first I will be honest with the audience and let them know that I’ve got sort of a daring personality, and I’m not fearless, but I’m not very fearful either, but when I did the first submersible dive in 1979 in a little yellow submarine that I could barely fit into, I was afraid because it was a small space, and by the way, somebody had died in an accident in that sub, which you don’t want to hear that 45 minutes before you crawled into it to do your first dive. And I had no idea that I was the first Black to do dives in the submersible. So the next year… Oh, by the way, when I was in that sub, the sub got caught in some underwater lobster pots that traps that very strong line that they used to put the crab pots and lobster pots down, and we were trapped underwater for about five hours during that dive, and-

Oh my goodness. Was it during the first trip?

That was my very first submersible. Okay, so there were other dives. We didn’t get to much science in that dive because we lost communications with the surface and all that. But the next year I did dives in a little submersible, which is the most famous one in the world called Alvin. So you’ve probably possibly seen pictures of the Titanic and this little mini submarine going down it. I’ve been in that submersible also. I was also the first Black to do dives in that sub and also in submarine canyons. So this became my thing. But while I was on my third dive in Alvin, we were about two miles down in a submarine canyon. I asked the pilot to use the mechanical arm to get a sample from the side of the canyon, and he was having trouble, he couldn’t get it. And I said, “That’s okay, let’s move on,” and he said, “One more try,” and he created an underwater landslide on top of the sub.

(23:54)
And so we were trapped two miles down, and I said to the pilot, “Are we covered by two feet of mud or 200 feet mud?” Because we no longer had communications with the surface and all that. So that was that series of dives. And then the next year I did dives in a little submersible called the Johnson-Sea-Link, and that one was without incident, but they taught us how to even grace us up during an emergency. But all three of those expeditions were in submarine canyons. So it was at least 10, 12 years later that I found out that I was the first Black scientist to ever do that. I had no idea.

And we know that… We mentioned earlier what contributed to you getting to the point that you’ve gotten today were just having mentors in your life, kind of having your father support your interests and different things like that, and kind of what I want to shift to here is what you’re doing or what you have done in the lives of young people and students that they may have an interest in science as well. So I kind of want to know how you probably got into science education or how you got into this area of being a mentor to young people.

I’m so glad that you asked that question and in the way that you did, because it reminds me, I had a boss at NOAA who was asking me to go out into the community, and I just didn’t understand the purpose. I said, “I’m very busy. I have lots of work to do. Go talk to some elementary school kids, are you kidding me?” And he asked me if I enjoyed my job and the beautiful view and the wonderful office I had, and I wanted to continue doing that, and I got the impression that he met that I was going to go. One of the interesting things that happened was on my very first trip to a class, the teacher came to me as I was leaving and told me that there was a young man in the class who had been very disruptive to her class, and he was fascinated by every word I was saying and asked if she could teach more about what I was talking about, and that he became a straight-A student.

(26:32)
So in conjunction with that, I’m not sure what the exact number is now, but the number of South Florida school kids I’ve spoken to on career days and other trips to school is approaching about a hundred thousand. I know I can officially account for about 80,000. And I recall at one point my father was my biggest fan as a scientist. I’d come back from the expeditions… And by the way, I’ve spent almost two years at sea on research cruises on the NOAA ships, some of them pretty big ships, like 300 feet long. But when you’re at sea for five weeks in a row and not land, or we had no telecommunications, there was no cell phones and all that, you have to really be focused on your work.

(27:29)
But my dad would pick me up from the airport, and my nickname was Flash, and, “Flash, tell me all about your adventures.” And he was certainly my biggest fan. And at the point where I began to work for NOAA and got to do the submersible dives and began to publish some papers in scientific journals, he asked me one day, “Are you grateful for the Dade County Public School system that provided you with an education, Bunche Park, Rainbow Park Elementary, North Dade Middle School, Carol City Senior High School, that got you into an Ivy League University, one of the best schools in the world, and allowing you to live your life’s dream of being a scientist? Are you grateful for that education, public education?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Well, you might want to consider working to make that same education available for every child.”

(28:44)
And he said, “You were kind of slow progressing, but that’s why we can’t as teachers…” He was a teacher and my mom was a teacher. “… We can’t ever give up. We never know when there’s somebody who’s just going to be a late bloomer like you were.” And so he challenged me. That was the challenge, make that available for everybody. So I heard about, for those of you who have been in Florida for a while, we had the state assessment test, the FCAT, Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. Right. Well, one of… And there was a picture earlier of a group of students in a course that I created. By the way, I wrote that curriculum from scratch.

The oceans course?

The oceans course. And by the way, I copyrighted it. That’s in addition to… You were alluding earlier to the science experiments I wrote for Ebony Junior Magazine for three and a half years, but I created each one of those experiments too, and I copyrighted them. But there was a woman to this one side of that picture, she was president of an organization called the Friends of the North Miami Public Library, and she told me that kids in the inner city in South Florida weren’t getting a chance to reach their potential in terms of science not just because of a lack of exposure, but there is this test called FCAT, and it has a science component, and kids in the inner city schools are doing particularly bad on it. And she challenged me to figure out a way to improve this course. So I had to get some copies of the tests, the FCAT, and I saw that there were basic things. Can you identify the difference between a beaker and a test tube? How salty is the ocean? Which one of these is a telescope, which is a microscope?

(31:10)
And there was also a math component on the science FCAT, which nobody had ever identified. So I created a course that had marine biology… Because everybody knows oceanography includes marine biology, they think of Flipper. Excuse my Flipper voice, and the creature from a 10,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and sharks and killer whales. Well, it had marine biology, it had marine geology and geophysics. So I could teach about how the continents were together, but were moving apart. It had a part about ocean chemistry. For example, did you know that every element that’s on earth is present in seawater? Every one, okay? Okay, so that brings me to, and the last thing was physical oceanography, the currents. Did you know that every drop of water, that if you go to that Biscayne Bay, which we saw on the live shot and throw in a pitcher of water, eventually it might take a thousand years, but that parcel of water is going to go around the entire globe and come back here.

(32:38)
So it’s kind of chilling to think of how awesome the earth is, but that’s why our oceans and our atmospheres have such a dynamic impact on our climate. And so one of the nicknames for Miami is the Magic City. What makes Miami the Magic City, part of it is that we have this body of water, an ocean within the ocean called the Gulf Stream, a very strong current, which is right off of the coast. That’s when it passes by South Florida is going from south to north, and that water is warmer than the air, and the air becomes the same temperature as the ocean, and that’s what keeps us from getting too cold during the winter or too hot during the summer, and that’s part of what makes Miami the Magic City.

And we know that just this subject about climate change, it’s very important, and maybe that’s partially why you find it of great value to make sure that our young ones, our students are involved in learning about all of these things as well. And it just kind of reminds me of something that I found in the History Makers piece that was produced. It was a quote that you shared with regards to the children. You mentioned that one of the greater speeches that you’ve ever given was to children at a library. Not sure if you remember the speech that’s being referred to, but my question was what was it about that speech and being in that room with the students? Because I was curious if you could share that.

Well, the thing is that when I’m given the great privilege of speaking to some young people, it’s my job to touch, move, and inspire them if possible. A lot of times I do that by telling my story, not being a good student, getting a goal and becoming a better student, because that’s what drove me to work harder. But I’m not sure about… You can imagine if I’m telling you that I’ve spoken to tens of thousands of kids, I’m not sure, and the History Makers piece, which I recommend to anybody, they did seven hours of tape of me, by the way, and it’s been a few years ago. But the thing is that I try to teach when I have a chance to speak to any group of young people. So I’m not talking about the oceans course, where I’ve got a curriculum that’s going to have geology, physical oceanography, ocean chemistry, and marine biology.

(35:45)
But I say that there’s three main lessons about life I want you to understand today that I’ve learned personally. First of all, I was a poor student, but your past does not equal your future. So if things have not started out so great, there’s hope. You just have to find a goal or find something you’re interested in and stick with it. The second thing I teach them or share with them is that I went to an Ivy League school. Ivy League schools do not give athletic scholarships, by the way. So I went to Columbia on an academic scholarship.

And you say that for a reason. I know in a conversation outside of this, you talked about the need for a lot of inner city students to understand that they cannot depend on this dream of being an entertainer or an athlete.

Although when I was interviewed by the Miami Herald, when I was a senior at Carol City, there is a picture of me in front of the trophy case at Carol City High School, and it says, “For a career, Forde would like to be either be an astronomer or a professional football player.” It was a dream.

Okay. There was something else that I wanted to take note of, and hopefully this is something that you remember saying. It was still with History Makers. You described your hopes and concerns for the African American community, and then you also ended it by saying it never dawned on you to think that you could not be like Cousteau because you are Black. Was there something in particular you meant when you said you wanted to describe your hopes and dreams in general for the African American community?

Well, I wanted to make sure… Oh, so I mentioned two of the things. Oh, so I mentioned the first thing I said, “Your past is not equal to your future.” The second thing is that the competition is always greater on the next higher level. So I was one of the best athletes in South Florida when I was in high school. But when I went to Columbia University and tried out for the freshman football team, there were 12 all-county running backs all there on academic scholarship. And so everybody was… Since they were all males, everybody was the man where they came from, and I was just not used to that level of competition, and I not only found it on the athletic field, but I found it in the classrooms where it seemed like every child or student in my class had a genius IQ and a photographic memory.

(39:10)
The competition was tremendous, and I’ll tell this, it’s very corny, but my dad used to tell family members that the true reason that I became an oceanographer is that my grades were so poor my freshman year, and I was adjusting to being away from home and all of the competition, but he said that so many of my grades were below C level, and that’s why I became an oceanographer. Okay.

That’s funny.

So that’s lesson number two, the competition’s always greater on the next higher level. And I found it when I began to work for NOAA. Everybody was on the Dean’s list at their college or university and all that. But the third thing that I say that’s really important is the young Evan Forde who wasn’t doing well in school, who was interested in my little chemistry set and telescope and microscope and all that, there was nothing I was working towards. So the least fortunate people in the world are not those people who don’t have a lot of money or big houses or cars or whatever, but they’re those people who don’t have a dream because it was my dream of becoming a scientist that drove me to study harder when it seemed impossible to me. And so those are the three lessons. And so for anybody who can send in, what, a postcard email to-

Oh, are you referring to the-

Yeah, I’m going to… Yes.

Before we get into that, you did share with us some resources that we didn’t get a chance to talk about. I think we can probably share them on screen. For example, the science poster. If you can kind of speak a little bit about that.

De acuerdo.

Okay. Do we have it? Okay, yes. All right.

No, that’s a science experiment in Ebony Junior Magazine.

Okay. We’ll get to the poster because I know you mentioned that’s one of your proudest accomplishments.

That poster, that’s the front of the poster, and I was back… 20, 25 years ago, I was chairman of NOAA’s education committee, and for projects, I thought that it was so important that if you look at that poster, you see severe weather, you see tornadoes, you see hurricanes, you see flash floods, and you see lightning. It was very important to me to not just have an attractive poster to get kids’ attention, but on the back side of that poster, the science and safety for each one of those events is on there. I got the undersecretary of Commerce, who is the NOAA administrator, he funded me making that poster. He actually paid for me to make 70,000 copies. I designed it with the help of some associates who I list on there. I wrote every word, but had them edit what I had written.

(42:38)
And the National Science Teacher Association, I convinced… They have journals that they send every year to elementary school teachers, middle school teachers, and senior high school teachers, I thought this was on the level of the middle school and senior high. I wrote an article and we mailed that poster to 50,000 teachers in North America one year. And so doing the math, let’s say it got to six teachers who had 25 students a day. So you multiply that and we estimate that poster was being seen by approximately 8 million kids every single day. As a matter of fact, I was mentioning to somebody recently that people as far away as South Africa and Sweden have met me and said, “I’ve seen your poster.”

(43:46)
But the front is made to be visually attractive. And also, the other thing about that was I studied National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, because every time I went to an education conference, NASA was far surpassing us in a number of kids. They were far surpassing NOAA. I’d have to tell people, “NOAA stands for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We are an agency who studies your oceans and atmospheres the way NASA, those guys study space because nobody knew what NOAA was.” But I also studied the design of their posters, and that’s what I came back to NOAA with. I want to be able to compete with a NASA poster.

And you sure did. You sure did. All right, and so we want to give our audience some time now to ask some questions that they may have after having heard some of your story, and so for those of you that are tuning in, if you have any questions, please feel free and we will try to read them and provide you a response. All right. So our first one is, what features of the ocean remain a mystery to you and an equal challenge to learn more about and explore?

So the first thing that was a big revelation to me, and it still is to many of the audiences I speak to, is that they look at the ocean and they have no idea that there’s mountain ranges, canyons larger than the Grand Canyon, the deepest part of the ocean, Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean is seven miles deep. And so little of the ocean floor is explored because the water is a barrier to our being able to see. That’s why we have to go under these very expensive, sometimes dangerous submersibles that can withstand the pressure. When I said that I was trapped temporarily two miles down, the pressure down in that canyon, two miles down off the coast of Delaware, New Jersey was over 4,000 pounds per square inch. Imagine that type of pressure.

(46:21)
So to have machines that can go down and image it… Look, we were very close to finding the Titanic years before we actually found it. I want to say we were within two miles of finding the Titanic three or four years before we actually found it. We couldn’t see it. They had to use sound to map the ocean floor. And we have deep code side-scan sonar using sound waves, but not just a single beam, but when we got to the point where we could use technology to interpret it, that’s how they found it. And I was very interested in finding the Titanic myself because I had many ideas about the mystery surrounding it and how does an unsinkable ship sink and all that sort of thing, which I talk about in my oceans class quite a bit, by the way.

Amazing. All right. So next question, I think. What’s your opinion on the industrialization of fishing and the impact it has on our ocean? That’s from Julian.

Well, my agency, NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has a special division that just does fisheries. So we’re looking at actual sea life, and one of the things that they do is they look at… By the way, in the oceans class, one of the things I teach is the diversity in the ocean and how there are some creatures in the ocean that are microscopic. Some of the microscopic creatures called plankton are plants and some are animals, but I go all the way to what’s at the top of the food chain. And when I first asked that question, people say, “Oh, I know. The shark.” No, it’s not. It’s the killer whale.

I would’ve guessed right then.

You would’ve guessed right? Okay. We have film of killer whales eating great white sharks and playing with them like little toys. There’s the name. Look up the name the Orca for killer whale, and you’ll know why they’re called killers. Although I am not going to get into how I feel about some of those magnificent creatures from the ocean being at attractions and all that sort of thing, because the educational impact is tremendous and working across the street from the Seaquarium, I’ve seen the Seaquarium save many hundreds of dolphins and even whales and all that sort of thing. But the question was…

Your opinion on the industrialization.

The industrialization. So one of the things that NOAA does is that for each type of fish or crab or lobster or shrimp or shellfish that’s collected from the ocean for commercial purposes, that means people aren’t just getting something for their own dinner, they’re trying to sell it et sea markets and all that sort of thing, they have a number of how many you can take from the ocean every year, and that population would be able to sustain itself.

Okay, so there are limits.

So it’s called maximum sustainable yield, and that’s really important, and I truly, truly believe in that because I would like future generations to have the same abundance of sea life and for recreational purposes, for seeing and as a food source as we had. But there is grave danger for those, I want to say countries or organizations that are not following the rules that NOAA sets about how many of a given type of fish you can take and how do you treat it after you get it.

Okay. So we’ll probably do one more-

Excellent question, by the way.

I’m sorry?

Excellent question.

We’ll probably take one more because I know you have a question for them as well.

I have a dozen questions.

Oh, okay. So our next question is from Jeff. What emerging research in your fields are you particularly excited about?

My training, so my bachelor’s is in marine geology with a specialty in oceanography. My advanced degrees are in marine geology and geophysics. I have begun to do, as she said in my earlier bio… I had a great idea after studying the ocean and seeing how the ocean interacts with the atmosphere that the ocean sea, the sea-air interaction was having a larger impact on our weather than people had been attributing to it. So one of the things that severe weather posts are… So you’re wondering what’s an oceanographer doing producing that? Well, as I began to understand weather better, and I was teaching a course to teachers, Miami-Dade County public school teachers for graduate level courses for the University of Miami on tropical meteorology, and I had to read a number of meteorology or weather textbooks.

(52:49)
So here is what I came up with. When the teacher asked me, “Well, what is weather?” I said, “What do you say weather is?” And so the definition I came up with is that the earth… You know the ocean, you know that’s a fluid, you can see it. You can’t see the atmosphere. You can see the clouds in it, right? Okay, but that very thin atmosphere that covers the earth, that allows us to breathe oxygen and have not just life forms, but human life forms, that that atmosphere wants to be in balance. The air just above us wants to be the same temperature, the same humidity, and have the same wind speed and direction as the air over Senegal or over the equator. We have a few problems with that. We’re on a globe that’s tilted 23 and a half degrees. We’re spinning. There’s continents. The water on earth is running into the continents, it’s got currents. We’ve got unequal sunlight. It’s burning up at the equator with very high humidity, it’s cold as heck at the poles, very low humidity.

(54:28)
And so I’m going to change direction here. So I say my definition of weather is weather is Earth’s atmosphere never-ending struggle to get itself into equilibrium or balance, and having giving you that… So I’m going to say it one more time. The air above us wants to be the same temperature, same humidity, same wind speed everywhere on earth, but it can’t, and so we have weather. The weather is a manifestation of that.

I’ve never heard that before-

I know. That’s something I sat down with my thinking cap. So to whoever can answer this question because it’s going to require a little thinking, but it’s very much related to if weather is really a result of the Earth’s atmosphere trying to get into balance, what positive impacts could come to the Earth’s atmosphere and the globe from a hurricane?

You might want to repeat that question for anybody that might be interested in answering.

Okay. So I’m going to tell you that first of all, yes, there are some positive impacts. One of them hitting your house, your neighborhood, your state, your country is not one of them, but what positive benefits to helping the Earth’s atmosphere get itself in balance could be created by a hurricane?

Okay, I don’t know if anyone would like to take that on right now, but we will also have that on our pages for those that may want to try.

If you get it right, I’m going to give your class a big map. So you can plot the course of hurricanes every year with dry markers. And I’m going to give your class two of my severe weather posters.

De acuerdo.

Okay. Okay, and I have one more question. I don’t know how much more time you have.

I think we’re wrapping up. We can do maybe one more.

One more question. Okay. So I mentioned the oceans course, marine biology, marine geology, and geophysics, physical oceanography, ocean chemistry, and we mentioned that what’s at the top of the food chain is the killer whale, orca. All right, so biology has as this major unifying theme, the idea that living things evolve. In physics, there’s basic laws. If you drop something, it’s going to fall. Gravity. Marine geology or geology, that the earth… So these concepts, you can explain most of what you see around you now in the present through some kind of unifying concept. For geology or the earth, the earth’s continents were once together in one big continent, it’s been spreading apart, sea floor spreading, continental drift.

(58:33)
So you’re going to answer one of two questions. Instead of the one I was going to, I’m going to just ask you this: Whoever can write, and you’re going to be on the honor system, in one minute, if you had a little mini-aquarium, what things in that aquarium with a living fish in it, write down in 60 seconds, what things would that fish need to survive? If you can do that, we’ll get in touch with you. I will leave a little mini-aquarium here for the first person who can answer that question successfully.

Can I be a part of that?

No, you can’t.

Okay. All right. That’s okay. Well, Mr. Forde, we want to thank you again for your time and for just sharing with us a little bit about your journey and how you’ve contributed to science education and just all that you were able to share with us today. It’s much appreciated. We also want to thank our viewers for tuning in and asking your very thoughtful questions. Hopefully you’ll be able to answer Mr. Forde’s questions and get your prize. We will be looking out for that. We just want to ask that you would continue to follow us and the content that we share on beyondvizcaya.org, and we do have a special treat for you. We hope that you will enjoy this preview of the great content to come. Thank you, everyone.

The most impactful disaster of my horticulture career was with Hurricane Irma. My most stressful and most poignant memory of that whole period was walking through the gardens before the storm was to hit, and realizing that within a day and a half, 10 years of my work would be blown apart.