A Monterey Bay Aquarium founder asks, What would Steinbeck and Ricketts say?

In addition to co-founding the 30-plus-year-old Monterey Bay Aquarium, Julie Packard serves as its executive director and vice chair of its board of trustees, and her parents, David and Lucile, bankrolled the joint with a $55 million dollar gift.

So if you think Julie Packard = Aquarium, it’s justified. But the idea of the aquarium came from four others: Dr. Chuck Baxter, Dr. Steve Webster, Nancy Packard Burnett and Robin Burnett. They all taught and studied (and partied) at the Stanford Hopkins Marine Lab in the late 1970s.

Today you can catch Steve Webster narrating Aquarium auditorium programs, giving lectures and educating guides. But this Sunday he’ll be in Salinas at the Steinbeck Center, bringing his favorite topic, the ocean, with him in a talk titled “What would Steinbeck and Ricketts say about climate change?”

“The four of us early planners… all owned and thoroughly digested Ed Ricketts’ book, Between Pacific Tides,” Webster writes by email. “Ed organized his chapters by habitat, and that, we believe, is where the habitat plan at the aquarium originated.”

He’ll use a scientific approach and scholarly guesswork to extrapolate what Steinbeck and Ricketts might think about climate change, a topic Webster admits they and the scientific community knew “virtually nothing” about.

“They did understand cyclical shifts in temperature (what we now term El Niño and Decadal Oscillations). But the slow creep upward of average ocean temperatures was not yet recognized.”

He says that Steinbeck and Ricketts were “careful observers” and “excellent naturalists,” but also realizes the phenomenon of climate change is still not recognized by certain quarters, including by some elected politicians. Webster doesn’t so much try to persuade them otherwise, as much as he just asks them to apply scientific inquiry to the matter.

“Do you believe the Earth is flat, or spherical? Have you seen for yourself?” he asks. “No. You take it based on the best possible science – centuries of it. Do you really believe the 2,000 climate scientists who comprise the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] could perpetrate a hoax of this magnitude, even if they had reason to want to?”

Some people’s answers might confound even the weight of all that science, observation and reason. As Steinbeck wrote in The Log from the Sea of Cortez, published 75 years ago: “A man looking at reality brings his own limitations to the world.”

Steven Webster speaks 3-4:30pm Sunday June 5 at National Steinbeck Center, 1 Main St., Salinas. Free. 775-4721, www.Steinbeck.org.

Editor's note: This story has been corrected to accurately reflect Julie Packard's role. The original version identified her as one of the four founder of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. She was involved very early on, but was not one of the four who conceived of it.