SEA GRANT COLLEGES 47 



two: how to wrest a living from the ocean, and how to keep the land-people from 

 stealing it all. I was not a foreigner. For this purpose I was one of the sea- 

 people, and the Japanese captains wanted to know how I and my people dealt with 

 these key proble.-^is, as we wanted to know their experiences. 



I have bat through two all-nation conferences on the law of the sea when 

 the fishery people of all these countries came rather quickly to an agreement on 

 the wide areas of mutual sea problems they could agree upon, and then absolutely 

 confounded their diplomatic and military delegation leaders by quite refusing to 

 let them agree to things the fish people did not want agreed to. The chanceries 

 and Pentagons of the world still have no clear understanding of what happened 

 to their objectives at the UN Law of the Sea Conferences in 1958 and 1960. Del- 

 egation leaders were unable to understand why, at the confusing end of the 1960 

 conference, fishery and Navy delegation members got together for a roaring 

 drunk to celebrate their magnificent defeat. 



Sea-people are different than land-people and I think it is the selective ac- 

 tion of the ocean that creates and augments the differentiation. The older ones 

 are worse than the younger ones, but the differentiation sets in pretty early. I 

 think that what we are about, in considering the concept of the sea-grant college, 

 is the education of these sea-people following the general precepts of the land- 

 grant college concept which did such a good job of doing the same thing for the 

 farm and village country people who are, again, much different than the city 

 people but required, during the last century, almost as sophisticated an academic 

 background to deal with their land problems as the city people did to deal with 

 their social problems, and as the sea-people now need to deal with their ocean 

 problems. 



Every aspect of human activity or thinking that the ocean touches suffers 

 a sea-change into something rich and strange. Whether this is the gathering of 

 food, the conduct of hostilities, the transportation of things, jurisprudence, the 

 moulding of character and attitudes, the outfall of literature, mucis and the arts, 

 or whatever, the sea molds the product and producer away from the land mold. 

 A court-musician of central Europe who has not heard a storm in the rigging 

 could never write tempest music as did the Finn, Sibelius. A novelist from the 

 hog- corn belt could never recapture the effect of storm and wave on the moulding 

 of human character and action as did the Polish sailing nmaster in THE NIGER 

 OF THE NARCISSUS. Wheat ranchers and apple knockers do not make very 

 good tuna or halibut skippers, or destroyer squadron fighters, unless you catch 

 them pretty young and let the ocean weed out the ones it wants to train. 



For the same reason oceajiography, the subject occupying so much public 

 discussion just now, is not a science at all. It is a place where science is done. 

 It is a frame of m.ind --a preoccupation, a dealing with the ocean from the view- 

 point of science. 



This is, in my view, what we are talking about in the concept of the sea- 

 grant college --a better means of bringing to the sea-people the possibility for 

 them to receive a more sophisticated academic background so that they can deal 

 with ocean dominated problems of all natures in a better way than we have done 

 heretofore. 



Since my field is the food harvesting end I wish to talk some about those 

 particular problems. In doing so I do not wish in any degree to imply that the 

 sea- grant college should be dominated by the problems of harvesting food from 

 the ocean. Give us bright graduates who are of the sea-persuasion and well 

 educated in the sciences and humanities, with a sea-slant, and the ocean will 

 help us weed out from among them those who will be the leaders in the next 

 generation of the sea-people, 



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