In the next ten minutes, we will immerse ourselves in an amazing and beautiful marine world that's very often overlooked.
I'd like to take you on a journey into the sea, looking at it from the perspective of its smallest inhabitants: the microbes.
My goal is that after this short journey, you'll share my amazement at how deeply connected our lives are to these microscopic creatures and also perhaps my concern that these relationships are often neglected when it comes to making decisions and policies about our oceans.
When you look out on a clear blue ocean, you're actually gazing at a microbial soup full of vibrant life.
What you see here are marine bacteria buzzing about and exploring other members of the marine food web.
To emphasize how small this world really is, I've added a white line to most of my slides that shows you the thickness of a single strand of human hair -- very tiny.
An average teaspoon of clean seawater has five million bacteria and 50 million viruses in it.
If I were to scoop up two gallons of seawater, there would be more bacteria in those two gallons than there are people on this planet.
Take just a moment and think about how many gallons might make up an ocean.
Or maybe I've already made your stomach turn, as you think of all of the seawater we've each accidentally swallowed over the years.
But luckily, we rarely get sick from that seawater, because most marine microbes are working for us, not against us.
One of my favorite examples is that they provide half of the oxygen we breathe.
In middle school, we all learn to thank the trees.
And admittedly, they may be more huggable than the microbes.
But it turns out that land plants only create a quarter of the oxygen we breathe.
Another quarter comes from macroalgae like kelp and a full 50% from the microbes.
Take a deep breath in.
Thank the trees.
Take another deep breath in.
Thank the macroalgae.
Your next two breaths -- tip your hats to the microbes.
This picture is of a bacterium that happens to be the single most abundant photosynthesizer on our planet.
It's called, "Prochlorococcus," and this is oceans' oxygen-producing powerhouse and, I might argue, one of the most amazing discoveries of recent marine microbiology.
We didn't know it existed until 1988.
All of human history has depended on this little microbe for the oxygen they breathe every day, no matter where or when they lived.
And we've only been aware of that relationship for a mere 24 years.
I find that astounding.
How many more critical relationships are out there that we have yet to discover?
I see our relationship with marine microbes as parallel in many ways to the relationship we have with microbes in our gut.
We've all experienced the wrath of unhappy gut microbes at one point or another, perhaps food poisoning or tainted water.
But we may be less aware of the connection we have with marine microbes and the physical discomforts we can feel when those communities change.
As an extreme example: the disease cholera is caused by a bacterium that thrives in the ocean.
So while most marine microbes are indeed helping us, there do remain plenty that are not.
Our relationship with the ocean, much like our gut, is dependent on the right balance of microbes.
The old phrase, "You are what you eat" applies to our ocean microbes as well.
To give you a sense of what an overfed ocean may look like, here are two examples of me sampling seawater.
On your left, it's a clean coral reef, and on your right is a nearly dead coral reef that has a very intense fish farming operation in the waters there.
You'll notice I'm only smiling in one of these two pictures, and in the other one my dive buddy had to be a whole lot closer to capture that image.
So if we were to take a drop of seawater from each of these samples and put it under the microscope, this is what the bacteria and viral communities would look like.
So again, clean reef on your left, fish farm reef on your right.
As we all have had a feeling of discomfort from imbalanced gut microbes, a fish swimming through a part of the ocean that has been overfed in this way -- in this case, by intense aquaculture, but it could be a sewage spill or fertilizer runoff or any number of other sources -- that fish will feel the physical discomforts of the ocean microbes being out of whack.
There may be less oxygen present, there may be more pathogens there, and there may be toxins produced by some of these microbes.
The bottom line is that from their tiny-scale existence, these tiny microbes have a very large-scale power to control how our ocean smells, how it tastes, how it feels and how it looks.
If you take one idea away from my talk today, let it be this: we have an incredibly important relationship with these marine microbes that have very large-scale consequences, and we're just barely beginning to understand what that relationship looks like and how it may be changing.
Just as a physician will have trouble curing a disease of unknown cause, we will have similar trouble restoring ocean health without understanding the microbes better.
They are the invisible engineers that control the chemistry of the ocean and therefore, what creatures can live there, whether or not it's safe for us to swim there and all of the other characteristics we sense with our eyes, noses and taste buds.
And the more we pay attention to these small but very numerous members of the ocean, the more we're learning they do indeed respond to human actions, such as in this fish farm example.
Now, as the past few slides about coral reefs may have suggested, I do indeed spend much of my time as a researcher thinking about human-microbe interactions, specifically on coral reefs.
It turns out, we're not alone in having our own protective community of microbes.
Corals, along with most other organisms on this planet, have their own protective communities as well.
However, rather than keeping theirs on the inside as we do in our gut, they keep theirs on the outside, to protect them from their surroundings So what you're seeing here is a three-dimensional image of a live spot on a living coral with all of its living bacteria, that I took with some exciting technology -- a high-speed laser-scanning confocal microscope.
All of the red circles are the symbiotic algae that live inside the coral tissue, turning sunlight and into sugars they both can use, and all of the little blue dots are the protective bacteria.
So when I use image analysis software to highlight the outer layer of the coral in white, you can see that there are still some tiny little blue dots above that layer.
And those bacteria are sitting in a mucus layer, which is also part of the coral's protective layer.
From the bigger perspective, I spend my time thinking about these relationships, because too many reefs are going from looking like the picture on your left to the picture on your right.
Believe it or not, the picture on your right remains a very popular tourist snorkeling spot on the island of Maui, even though it's lost most of its coral cover over the past decade or so.
Corals are getting sick all around the globe at alarming rates, and we really don't know how or why.
I see the microbes on the coral reefs, both the good ones and the bad ones, trying to link their micro-scale behaviors to this big picture of: How do we help the reef that looks like the right back towards something that looks more like the left?
Or: How do we stop coral disease from spreading?
Just over a year ago, no one had ever seen a view like this.
This video is a prime example of making the invisible visible.
We're looking at a side view of the same coral as before, where the protective layer meets the seawater; so, seawater on your right, coral on your left.
It's incredibly exciting to me that we can finally see these bacteria in real life, in real time, at their micro scale, and learn how they interact with the world around them.
Ecologists all over the world are used to being able to grab a pair of binoculars and go out and observe what their study creatures do each day.
But microbial ecologists have desperately needed breakthroughs in technology, such as with this fast confocal, to make similar observations.
I work to find ways that cutting-edge technologies like this can help make the unseen seeable, to see marine bacteria in action and learn how they behave.
In doing so, we can learn how they respond to our actions and our behaviors and the environment around them in ways that will help us better manage our oceans.
Another example of how I'm doing this is by using microfluidics to study specifically how pathogens behave in the ocean.
The basic idea behind microfluidics is that you can use nanofabrication techniques to recreate or mimic the conditions bacteria experience at their own tiny scale in the ocean.
What you see here is a microfluidic chamber on a microscope slide with a microscope lens underneath it.
We use high-speed video microscopy to record bacteria behavior.
The colored tubing is where bacteria and seawater flow in and out of the device.
And it's using a device like this that I recently discovered that a known coral pathogen actually has the ability to sniff around the seawater and hunt for corals.
Here's the video of in action.
You'll see all of the pathogens which are the tiny green dots on the left start detecting the coral mucus I put on the right side of the channel, and they swim quickly over in that direction and stay there.
Up until now, it was thought that a pathogen would need some good luck to find its host in the ocean.
But simply by watching and observing, we can learn that these bacteria are very well adapted to seeking out their victims.
These micro-channels are bringing us closer than ever before to understanding how bacteria navigate that big blue ocean.
It turns out that this pathogen can even detect the coral mucus when I dilute it 20,000 fold.
So these bacteria are very well adapted to hunting down these corals.
I'm currently testing different environmental conditions to see what scenarios make this pathogen more or less capable of hunting corals.
By learning more about what triggers the hunt, we should be able to find ways to help slow down or prevent this disease.
There's also some evidence that the healthy microbes on the coral can fight off the pathogen if the conditions are right.
So, one final image of a coral and its healthy bacteria.
I hope you've enjoyed this short journey into our microbial oceans and that the next time you look out at the sea, you'll take in a deep breath of fresh ocean air and wonder: What else are all of the unseen microbes doing to keep us and our oceans healthy?
Thank you.
So, we all have bad seasons in life.
And I had one in 2013.
My marriage had just ended, and I was humiliated by that failed commitment.
My kids had left home for college or were leaving.
I grew up mostly in the conservative movement, but conservatism had changed, so I lost a lot of those friends, too.
And so what I did is, I lived alone in an apartment, and I just worked.
If you opened the kitchen drawers where there should have been utensils, there were Post-it notes.
If you opened the other drawers where there should have been plates, I had envelopes.
I had work friends, weekday friends, but I didn't have weekend friends.
And so my weekends were these long, howling silences.
And I was lonely.
And loneliness, unexpectedly, came to me in the form of -- it felt like fear, a burning in my stomach.
And it felt a little like drunkenness, just making bad decisions, just fluidity, lack of solidity.
And the painful part of that moment was the awareness that the emptiness in my apartment was just reflective of the emptiness in myself, and that I had fallen for some of the lies that our culture tells us.
The first lie is that career success is fulfilling.
I've had a fair bit of career success, and I've found that it helps me avoid the shame I would feel if I felt myself a failure, but it hasn't given me any positive good.
The second lie is I can make myself happy, that if I just win one more victory, lose 15 pounds, do a little more yoga, I'll get happy.
And that's the lie of self-sufficiency.
But as anybody on their deathbed will tell you, the things that make people happy is the deep relationships of life, the losing of self-sufficiency.
The third lie is the lie of the meritocracy.
The message of the meritocracy is you are what you accomplish.
The myth of the meritocracy is you can earn dignity by attaching yourself to prestigious brands.
The emotion of the meritocracy is conditional love, you can "earn" your way to love.
The anthropology of the meritocracy is you're not a soul to be purified, you're a set of skills to be maximized.
And the evil of the meritocracy is that people who've achieved a little more than others are actually worth a little more than others.
And so the wages of sin are sin.
And my sins were the sins of omission-- not reaching out, failing to show up for my friends, evasion, avoiding conflict.
And the weird thing was that as I was falling into the valley -- it was a valley of disconnection -- a lot of other people were doing that, too.
And that's sort of the secret to my career; a lot of the things that happen to me are always happening to a lot of other people.
I'm a very average person with above average communication skills.
(Laughter) And so I was detached.
And at the same time, a lot of other people were detached and isolated and fragmented from each other.
Thirty-five percent of Americans over 45 are chronically lonely.
Only eight percent of Americans report having meaningful conversation with their neighbors.
Only 32 percent of Americans say they trust their neighbors, and only 18 percent of millennials.
The fastest-growing political party is unaffiliated.
The fastest-growing religious movement is unaffiliated.
Depression rates are rising, mental health problems are rising.
The suicide rate has risen 30 percent since 1999.
For teen suicides over the last several years, the suicide rate has risen by 70 percent.
Forty-five thousand Americans kill themselves every year; 72,000 die from opioid addictions; life expectancy is falling, not rising.
So what I mean to tell you, I flew out here to say that we have an economic crisis, we have environmental crisis, we have a political crisis.
We also have a social and relational crisis; we're in the valley.
We're fragmented from each other, we've got cascades of lies coming out of Washington ...
We're in the valley.
And so I've spent the last five years -- how do you get out of a valley?
The Greeks used to say, "You suffer your way to wisdom."
And from that dark period where I started, I've had a few realizations.
The first is, freedom sucks.
Economic freedom is OK, political freedom is great, social freedom sucks.
The unrooted man is the adrift man.
The unrooted man is the unremembered man, because he's uncommitted to things.
Freedom is not an ocean you want to swim in, it's a river you want to get across, so you can commit and plant yourself on the other side.
The second thing I learned is that when you have one of those bad moments in life, you can either be broken, or you can be broken open.
And we all know people who are broken.
They've endured some pain or grief, they get smaller, they get angrier, resentful, they lash out.
As the saying is, "Pain that is not transformed gets transmitted."
But other people are broken open.
Suffering's great power is that it's an interruption of life.
It reminds you you're not the person you thought you were.
The theologian Paul Tillich said what suffering does is it carves through what you thought was the floor of the basement of your soul, and it carves through that, revealing a cavity below, and it carves through that, revealing a cavity below.
You realize there are depths of yourself you never anticipated, and only spiritual and relational food will fill those depths.
And when you get down there, you get out of the head of the ego and you get into the heart, the desiring heart.
The idea that what we really yearn for is longing and love for another, the kind of thing that Louis de Bernières described in his book, "Captain Corelli's Mandolin."
He had an old guy talking to his daughter about his relationship with his late wife, and the old guy says, "Love itself is whatever is leftover when being in love is burned away.
And this is both an art and a fortunate accident.
Your mother and I had it.
We had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches, we discovered that we are one tree and not two."
That's what the heart yearns for.
The second thing you discover is your soul.
Now, I don't ask you to believe in God or not believe in God, but I do ask you to believe that there's a piece of you that has no shape, size, color or weight, but that gives you infinite dignity and value.
Rich and successful people don't have more of this than less successful people.
Slavery is wrong because it's an obliteration of another soul.
Rape is not just an attack on a bunch of physical molecules, it's an attempt to insult another person's soul.
And what the soul does is it yearns for righteousness.
The heart yearns for fusion with another, the soul yearns for righteousness.
And that led to my third realization, which I borrowed from Einstein: "The problem you have is not going to be solved at the level of consciousness on which you created it.
You have to expand to a different level of consciousness."
So what do you do?
Well, the first thing you do is you throw yourself on your friends and you have deeper conversations that you ever had before.
But the second thing you do, you have to go out alone into the wilderness.
You go out into that place where there's nobody there to perform, and the ego has nothing to do, and it crumbles, and only then are you capable of being loved.
I have a friend who said that when her daughter was born, she realized that she loved her more than evolution required.
(Laughter) And I've always loved that.
(Applause) Because it talks about the peace that's at the deep of ourself, our inexplicable care for one another.
And when you touch that spot, you're ready to be rescued.
The hard thing about when you're in the valley is that you can't climb out; somebody has to reach in and pull you out.
It happened to me.
I got, luckily, invited over to a house by a couple named Kathy and David, and they were -- They had a kid in the DC public school, his name's Santi.
Santi had a friend who needed a place to stay because his mom had some health issues.
And then that kid had a friend and that kid had a friend.
When I went to their house six years ago, I walk in the door, there's like 25 around the kitchen table, a whole bunch sleeping downstairs in the basement.
I reach out to introduce myself to a kid, and he says, "We don't really shake hands here.
We just hug here."
And I'm not the huggiest guy on the face of the earth, but I've been going back to that home every Thursday night when I'm in town, and just hugging all those kids.
They demand intimacy.
They demand that you behave in a way where you're showing all the way up.
And they teach you a new way to live, which is the cure for all the ills of our culture which is a way of direct -- really putting relationship first, not just as a word, but as a reality.
And the beautiful thing is, these communities are everywhere.
I started something at the Aspen Institute called "Weave: The Social Fabric."
This is our logo here.
And we plop into a place and we find weavers anywhere, everywhere.
We find people like Asiaha Butler, who grew up in -- who lived in Chicago, in Englewood, in a tough neighborhood.
And she was about to move because it was so dangerous, and she looked across the street and she saw two little girls playing in an empty lot with broken bottles, and she turned to her husband and she said, "We're not leaving.
We're not going to be just another family that abandon that."
And she Googled "volunteer in Englewood," and now she runs R.A.G.E., the big community organization there.
Some of these people have had tough valleys.
I met a woman named Sarah in Ohio who came home from an antiquing trip and found that her husband had killed himself and their two kids.
She now runs a free pharmacy, she volunteers in the community, she helps women cope with violence, she teaches.
She told me, "I grew from this experience because I was angry.
I was going to fight back against what he tried to do to me by making a difference in the world.
See, he didn't kill me.
My response to him is, 'Whatever you meant to do to me, screw you, you're not going to do it.'"
These weavers are not living an individualistic life, they're living a relationist life, they have a different set of values.
They have moral motivations.
They have vocational certitude, they have planted themselves down.
I met a guy in Youngstown, Ohio, who just held up a sign in the town square, "Defend Youngstown."
They have radical mutuality, and they are housetimothy@example.com.
There's a woman named Mary Gordon who runs something called Roots of Empathy.
And what they do is they take a bunch of kids, an eighth grade class, they put a mom and an infant, and then the students have to guess what the infant is thinking, to teach empathy.
There was one kid in a class who was bigger than the rest because he'd been held back, been through the foster care system, seen his mom get killed.
And he wanted to hold the baby.
And the mom was nervous because he looked big and scary.
But she let this kid, Darren, hold the baby.
He held it, and he was great with it.
He gave the baby back and started asking questions about parenthood.
And his final question was, "If nobody has ever loved you, do you think you can be a good father?"
And so what Roots of Empathy does is they reach down and they grab people out of the valley.
And that's what weavers are doing.
Some of them switch jobs.
Some of them stay in their same jobs.
But one thing is, they have an intensity to them.
I read this -- E.O. Wilson wrote a great book called "Naturalist," about his childhood.
When he was seven, his parents were divorcing.
And they sent him to Paradise Beach in North Florida.
And he'd never seen the ocean before.
And he'd never seen a jellyfish before.
He wrote, "The creature was astonishing.
It existed beyond my imagination."
He was sitting on the dock one day and he saw a stingray float beneath his feet.
And at that moment, a naturalist was born in the awe and wonder.
And he makes this observation: that when you're a child, you see animals at twice the size as you do as an adult.
And that has always impressed me, because what we want as kids is that moral intensity, to be totally given ourselves over to something and to find that level of vocation.
And when you are around these weavers, they see other people at twice the size as normal people.
They see deeper into them.
And what they see is joy.
On the first mountain of our life, when we're shooting for our career, we shoot for happiness.
And happiness is good, it's the expansion of self.
You win a victory, you get a promotion, your team wins the Super Bowl, you're happy.
Joy is not the expansion of self, it's the dissolving of self.
It's the moment when the skin barrier disappears between a mother and her child, it's the moment when a naturalist feels just free in nature.
It's the moment where you're so lost in your work or a cause, you have totally self-forgotten.
And joy is a better thing to aim for than happiness.
I collect passages of joy, of people when they lose it.
One of my favorite is from Zadie Smith.
In 1999, she was in a London nightclub, looking for her friends, wondering where her handbag was.
And suddenly, as she writes, "... a rail-thin man with enormous eyes reached across a sea of bodies for my hand.
He kept asking me the same thing over and over, 'Are you feeling it?'
My ridiculous heels were killing me, I was terrified that I might die, yet I felt simultaneously overwhelmed with delight that 'Can I Kick It?' should happen to be playing on this precise moment in the history of the world on the sound system, and it was now morphing into 'Teen Spirit.'
I took the man's hand, the top of my head blew away, we danced, we danced, we gave ourselves up to joy."
And so what I'm trying to describe is two different life mindsets.
The first mountain mindset, which is about individual happiness and career success.
And it's a good mindset, I have nothing against it.
But we're in a national valley, because we don't have the other mindset to balance it.
We no longer feel good about ourselves as a people, we've lost our defining faith in our future, we don't see each other deeply, we don't treat each other as well.
And we need a lot of changes.
We need an economic change and environmental change.
But we also need a cultural and relational revolution.
We need to name the language of a recovered society.
And to me, the weavers have found that language.
My theory of social change is that society changes when a small group of people find a better way to live, and the rest of us copy them.
And these weavers have found a better way to live.
And you don't have to theorize about it.
They are out there as community builders all around the country.
We just have to shift our lives a little, so we can say, "I'm a weaver, we're a weaver."
And if we do that, the hole inside ourselves gets filled, but more important, the social unity gets repaired.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)