SEA GRANT COLLEGES 37 



water resorts will develop where people will drive their submobiles and visit 

 reefs, watch the oceanic wildlife in its natural habitat much the way we do in 

 the wilderness and park areas on land. 



These examples give you something of a vista of what ocean engineering 

 can do in the sea and show you how engineering and technology can bring every- 

 one close to the oceans and develop the sea's resources for everyone's use just 

 as on land. Engineering has provided us with our dams, our fuels, our sky- 

 scrapers, highways, planes, ships, satellites, and the biological engineering 

 which we call agriculture has supplied us with our abundance of good food. I 

 have said that ocean engineering will fill the gap between marine scientists and 

 those who use the sea. But we need a way of bringing the vast body of scientific 

 knowledge about the sea to the people who use it. We need to bring knowledge of 

 the ocean to people other than the scientists who develop it, and not only to the 

 engineers but to all the professions that must be related in a vast world develop- 

 ment of this kind. We need an educational plan far broader than the existing 

 ones that produce excellent marine scientists. There is not a single activity of 

 people that would not be affected by our man-in-the-sea program and there is 

 hardly any facet of man's knowledge and experience that will not be needed to 

 complement the ocean engineering effort. 



Under the land- grant college program, scholars did not disdain to tackle 

 hard practical engineering and biological engineering- -that is, farming- -prob- 

 lems in parallel with basic scientific work. In fact, often the arts of engineering 

 and agriculture outstripped the sciences by building things and growing things 

 better before physics, botany, or zoology quite understood why. Working in par- 

 allel, discoveries in the basic sciences were quickly put to use. So successful 

 was this idea that we would be remiss if we did not use it as a blueprint for our 

 ocean venture. 



The sea-grant colleges not only would concentrate on applications of science 

 to the sea, such as prospecting underwater, mining, developing the food re- 

 sources, marine pharmacology and medicine, shipping and navigation, weather 

 and climate, but they would relate these to the natural sciences which underlie 

 them; to the social sciences, economics, sociology, psychology, politics and law, 

 as they are affected by and, in turn, affect the occupation of the sea. They would 

 also be associated with the liberal arts- -literature, art, and history- -which de- 

 scribe man's relation to the sea and enhance his enjoyment of it. 



Just as the land-grant colleges were given in perpetuity grants of land for 

 their experimental plots, in some cases lands in which mineral resources were 

 found or that grew to be otherwise useful and served to provide income for the 

 ongoing of the total enterprise, so sea-grant colleges should be given grants of 

 seashore or lakeshore, seawater and bottom within territorial limits as their 

 experimental plots to stimulate the development of aqua culture in the waters 

 and the prospecting and ways of exploiting the natural resources of the sea bed. 

 These watery grants would serve the additional purpose of preserving tracts of 

 seashore and open waters from the fiercely competitive pressures due to in- 

 crease of population and industrialization- -preserve them not only as natural 

 habitats for ecological studies but as the important nursery areas for high-sea 

 fish and residences for in- shore food fish and shell fish. The sea-grant col- 

 lege, to do its job, will also need its county agents in hip boots --an Aquacultu- 

 ral Extension Service that takes the findings of the college or university onto the 

 trawlers, drilling rigs, merchant ships, and down to the submotels. The sea- 

 grant college to do its job in aquaculture and ocean engineering will need sea 

 home economics, too. Even if we had abundant protein from the sea today, a 

 selling job would need to be done to remove taste prejudices and taboos, and 

 this is done by such a down-to-earth service, yet one which touches more people 

 than the erudite things we do in universities, as home economics. As we breed 

 and farm fish, we will need to have fish vets, fish pathologists, and experts on 

 the diseases and parasites that may plague our flocks in the sea or our plants. 



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