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Growing human needs are straining the ocean’s living systems, imperiling the ocean’s ability to provide humanity with essential benefits and services. But aquariums are well positioned to lend their trusted voices to help turn the tide. Some are moving from informing people to mobilizing them, and a few, including the Monterey Bay Aquarium, are taking direct action to promote changes. This chapter discusses the ways in which the Monterey Bay Aquarium is pursuing its mission “to inspire conservation of the ocean”—including (and going beyond) its visitor programs, education initiatives, and scientific research. The aquarium’s Conservation and Science division is expanding, integrating its research with its growing influence in ocean policy and its work to reshape the global seafood supply chain. The organization’s ultimate goal is to build a constituency that will work to protect and restore the world’s life-sustaining aquatic ecosystems. With global ecosystems in decline, there is no time to lose. By understanding their audiences, aquariums can craft meaningful ways to speak to their interests and help them be part of sustainable solutions.

Why do we need marine historical ecology and conservation? The fact is that since Darwin's On the Origin of Species, we have become quite good at inferring what existed—in terms of animals and plants—if only because we have (a) fossils and (b) a powerful theory which allows, nay demands, that we interpolate between the forms we know existed, because we have fossils, and the forms for which we have no direct evidence but which we can link to present forms, including us humans. The Earth's ecosystems have all been modified by human activities, and this applies also to essentially all marine ecosystems, which whaling and hunting of other marine mammals, and later fishing, have reduced to shadows of their former selves in terms of the larger organisms they now support and the benefits they can provide us. Some of these ecosystem modifications were unavoidable, but to a large extent, the depredations that we have imposed on the oceans have been entirely gratuitous. It is perfectly reasonable to ask ourselves how we could prevent such catastrophes in the future and whether we can rebuild now depleted populations of marine organisms so as to reduce the risk of this occurring again, and to have more to enjoy. This is what marine historical ecology in conservation is for: to inform us about what these populations have been in the past, and under which conditions these populations could flourish so that we can start helping them do so.