Name: Charlie Cloud

Social Justice Group: 2018-2019, Ocean Health

Date of Fieldwork: January 7, 2019

Name of Organization: New York Aquarium

Person (people) with whom I met and their job titles: Noah Chesnin and Edward Perri, docents at the New York Aquarium

Type of Fieldwork: Tour of Organization

What I did:

We went to the New York Aquarium to have a tour of one of the most recent exhibits, the shark exhibit, and go behind the scenes of the aquarium to see all the life support and filtration systems for the aquarium.

What I learned:

I learned that there are a lot of work and expenses that go into keeping an aquarium running. First of all you have to mimic the ocean environment of hundreds of different fish species inside of a small area. There were around 30-40 sand filtration machines working away under the boardwalk and a multiple big rooms used for other machines. The goal they seemed to have after keeping the fish safe and healthy was to make everything as automated as possible.

What I learned about Social Justice “work” and/or Civil and Human rights “work” from this fieldwork:

During the fieldwork I learned that a lot of different species of ocean life, from fish to coral, have to live in very stable environments. The Aquarium has to do a bunch of different things to keep the fish alive. Everything from the temperature of the water, the amount of food given, the salinity, and more. If someone where to screw with one of these many things the entire ecosystem could die. The same thing would apply to our oceans. If you changed the water temperature by 2 or 3 degrees you could kill a lot of coral and fish life. Fortunately the ocean is so big that it is harder to make it unstable compared to a small fish tank, but because of the massive amount of air and water pollution we are well on our way to making this nightmare a reality.