Ocean Studies Bring Global Adventures

Marine conservationist Johanna Polsenberg, EMBA ’07, never stays in one place for long. She has traveled through Asia and lived in the Bahamas, Alaska and Gabon on the Atlantic Coast of Central Africa. She now raises sheep with her family in Vermont, where she teaches skiing and middle school science. She also runs a consulting firm focused on corporate governance.

“I’m curiosity driven,” says Polsenberg, who has a PhD in biology and ecosystem ecology from Stanford University. “I don’t want to do anything for more than three or four years, which means I will never have seniority in any field. But my education and background let me make lateral moves to places like Africa when I want to experience Africa.”

Her expatriate assignment in Gabon gave her a new perspective on the challenge of water scarcity. She says people who can’t afford many luxuries pay premium prices for filtered water in the developing country. Public utilities sell the vital resource for less at the tap, but families travel instead to buy bottled water and haul it back to their houses.

“Dirty water may be cheaper up front,” Polsenberg says. “But you pay later with illnesses. That’s the true cost of water.”

Her own family made major adjustments when she moved from the United States with her husband and two boys. “We would go days without fresh water. Days. And this was in the capital city, a mile from the capitol building,” she says.

Conditions improved when the Gabonese government started working with a French company to modernize water infrastructure. But Polsenberg says the plastic containers remained a common sight. Due to inadequate waste management systems, she says the bottles often ended up in rivers and then flowed downstream to the coast.

“As a marine conservationist, I’m looking upstream with my hands on my hips going, ‘Come on, guys! Don’t send all this junk down the river,’” Polsenberg says.

Once pollution reaches the ocean, she says different problems emerge beyond public health risks. “Talking about clean ocean water is talking about fish and food,” Polsenberg says. “It’s talking about jobs, tourism, climate change and becoming more resilient to oil shock.”

Polsenberg, who worked at the time as senior director of governance and policy at Conservation International’s Center for Oceans, remembers exploring the marketplaces and seeing the potential for business solutions.

“Everybody has something they’re selling — a little blanket where they’re selling a handful of onions,” she says. “There’s got to be a way that we can supply filtered water using local sources and reusable vessels.”

Corruption remains a problem in many places, but multinational firms like Unilever and Coca-Cola have proved that ethical business models can work at the bottom of the social pyramid. “The private sector controls the levers in most of the developing world,” Polsenberg says. “They have the financial incentives. We should be able to crack this nut.”

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