If you'd told me ten or fifteen years ago that I'd one day become an acclaimed creator of estuarine media, I think my first question would have been "what does estuarine mean?" (Relating to, or formed in, an estuary.) But even after you'd cleared that part up, I'd still be surprised.
First of all, I've never cared much for the water. I'm not a strong swimmer -- even standing at chest-depth makes me very anxious. Second of all, I'm no scientist. I'm interested--passionate about the environment, even--but inept. I don't have the analytical discipline necessary for the scientific method; I can't even follow a recipe. But it turns out there are ways in which having a limited understanding of something can actually assist in the service of a given cause -- that's kind of the seat from which I pilot my entire career. I like to tell people that I'm good at asking stupid questions. But I'm also good at learning backwards.
Earlier this year, I was interviewing the comedian Max Silvestri about a cooking competition show he once hosted. It was a light parody of shows like Top Chef and Chopped, but at the time I'd never seen any of those shows. I liked Max's show anyway, and it eventually led me backwards to the cooking shows it was taking inspiration from, which I now watch constantly (I binged 11 seasons of Top Chef this year). Max was not particularly surprised to hear this -- we'd both grown up watching shows like The Simpsons make references to movies and historical events we'd only see or learn about later. I also grew up admiring my Gen X uncles, imitating their pop cultural tastes and affectations before I really had the context for any of it. In a lot of ways, I feel like I am still gathering context for things I saw as a kid, adding layers of understanding.
I'll also credit my higher education and early corporate years for sharpening my teeth on this -- at Boston University I studied Political Science, which ultimately granted me less wisdom about politics than about academic frameworks. The thing about Poli Sci is that it's not really a science -- check my "Bachelor of the Arts" degree for confirmation. It adopts a scientific patois to garner legitimacy, and it's an awkward fit, but that awkward fit allows you to see under the hood of academic frameworks more easily than you'd be able to if you had to also focus on, you know, actual science. So you end up learning more about how things are thought of and organized than you learn about any one real thing.
Later, I got my professional start as a temp at a federal contractor. When a member of my team with a full-time role abruptly left, I took over his assignment and skipped past the training phase of the job, building slowly on the limited understanding I'd built as a temp. I was good at that. I was doing everything right based mostly on a sense of what I probably should be doing. There were fairly essentially pieces of my job that I didn't fully grasp or understand the reasoning behind for almost a year -- sometimes I'd speak out loud a revelation that was so basic it would startle my bosses-- "Zac, you're only just getting this NOW?!" But over time, my understanding got much, much deeper and broader than it might have become any other way. Somewhat ironically, I then became a full-time trainer, taking new hires through the 8-week curriculum I'd never technically gone through myself.
It's a great skill to have--this learning backwards thing. Drop me in the middle of a process and I can muddle my way through until I gradually understand how it all works, pretty much every time. And that hard-won understanding really sticks. It's exciting, and very freeing, to start from a place of little-to-no understanding. Socrates has that whole riff about not being wise except in that he's aware of his own lack of wisdom -- and that knowing what you don't know is in fact the height of wisdom -- and that always resonated with me (in philosophy class Freshman year, where, you know, I didn't understand much else).
I put this "learning backwards" skill to the particular test in 2019, when I joined my town's Stormwater Committee. I volunteered to help out with the town out of a general sense of civic pride and obligation, and happily accepted an assignment to Stormwater despite having literally no idea what "Stormwater" was supposed to mean. When I attended my first meeting, I filled several notebook pages with words I wanted to look up later, ("Culvert?" "Outflow?" "MS4-- maybe some kind of gang?") and didn't say much of anything.
Eventually, I figured a lot of it out, enlisting the help of some actual scientists from the Piscataqua Region Estuaries Partnership along the way. And to both document and solidify my own understanding, I made a podcast episode out of it. It's called "A Balanced System" and it might be my favorite of the 70-something episodes I've produced.
The episode explains concepts like runoff and municipal stormwater systems in as basic a language as I could manage, frequently doubling back to explain it again and again from different angles. I was extremely gratified when my town chose to highlight the episode in their annual newsletter and on their website, and to include it in Stormwater compliance documentation submitted to the EPA.
I left the Stormwater Committee in 2021, mostly because when the state's emergency order expired, we were required to resume meeting in person and as a parent of young children it didn't seem worth the risk. But I'm excited to have a lingering legacy there -- a flier I wrote about, of all things, the ecological importance of cleaning up after your dog, is sent out to all of the down's dog owners every spring. You can read it here. It has a lot of Frasier references, because I am nothing if not a man of the people.
Having a passing understanding of estuarine systems and ecology has oddly served me well in my professional career. Now employed by a bank that does a lot of charitable work in the region, I get along well with environmental groups who are, by nature of our particular geography, almost always concerned with the coast. I love to highlight the bank's environmental projects because I love spending time around, and learning from, people who work in this space.
One of my favorite places in Maine is the Wells Reserve at Laudholm, a former farm near the beach that is now an solar-powered estuarine research lab, as well as a stellar wedding venue. I first visited in 2021, creating a "nonprofit spotlight" video that allowed me to hang out in their lab and learn about much more than I could actually fit in the video (in fact I'm still hanging on to a clip about tracking devices on green crabs that I'm trying to work in somewhere in a future project).
I returned with my kids to hike around on my birthday this spring, but I've also been lucky enough to spend several work and volunteer days there since. This summer, when my employer funded the purchase of an all-terrain electric golf cart to help with accessibility at the Reserve, I not only insisted on documenting the project, but also respectfully demanded we finally purchase a GoPro to do so. My request was happily approved.
Fun video, right? It went over well on social media, and that was that. Until a few weeks ago, when Nik, the president at Laudholm, casually let me know he wanted to submit our video to an estuarine film festival. An estuarine film festival? Naturally, I was surprised.
It turns out that NERRA, the National Estuarine Research Reserve Association, holds a film festival every year at their annual conference. I think that is so cool. I'm a person who strongly believes in the power of storytelling and video to educate people, but it's always exciting to see that belief reflected in all sorts of unexpected places. And anyway, it turns out that this video took home an award at this year's NERRA conference. Specifically, and delightfully, the "Grackle Award" for Entertaining Educational Content.
I will be honest: I am absurdly proud of this win -- again because of my belief in how important telling these kinds of stories, in precisely this kind of wacky way, really is. It is the single thing that I think I am best at. And as surprised as I am to find myself having success in this particular issue area, when I think about learning backwards, and how I've always done well in places where I clearly understood that my own understanding was very limited, I suppose there's nothing surprising about it at all.
