by Brad Nahill, SEE Turtles President

My first experience with Dr. Wallace J. Nichols (aka J.) was different than most. I didn’t see one of his extraordinary presentations or read one of his numerous books. I was attending the 22nd Annual Sea Turtle Symposium in Miami where Sylvia Earle was giving the keynote address. My daughter Karina, 3 months old at the time, was getting fussy and not giving Her Deepness the respect she deserved. So I took her out to the lobby to calm her down and started chatting with a tall, impossibly good-looking guy, also calming a fussy baby, his daughter Grayce, who Karina would befriend years later. Of course I knew who J. was at the time, he was the ultimate sea turtle celebrity, but I had just barely started my career in this field. But we bonded over being turtle dads.

A few years later, while working at Ocean Conservancy as a grant writer, my hero Marydele Donnelly decided to leave the organization. This was crushing news but when she told me that she was hoping the organization would hire J. as their new sea turtle person, I was thrilled. J. said to me on his first day the organization in 2007, "Hey what about a project where we use tourism as a conservation tool to help communities move away from catching turtles? We'll call it SEE Turtles, like go and SEE them.” He wanted to help the fishing communities in Baja where he had worked for decades earn a living from tourism so they didn’t have to spend time doing the thankless work of fishing, where turtles were getting caught in nets. The fishermen didn’t want to catch turtles but weren’t sure how to reach US travelers.

The idea hit me like a ton of bricks. With my background in ecotourism and field work in Costa Rica and my grant writing skills, I immediately offered to help plan it out. I had been looking for a way to move back into working with turtles and this was the perfect opportunity. J was busy planning the next International Sea Turtle Symposium in Loreto, Baja and generally just being the coolest guy on earth (see above photos), so I took the lead in planning SEE Turtles.

J. and I spent several months planning and fundraising to launch SEE Turtles and it was among the most hopeful times of my life. I was able to move into program work and spend my workdays imagining the amazing things we were going to accomplish. We raised the funds, mostly from donors who respected J’s work, and launched the project in 2008. It became apparent after a few months that the project wasn’t a good fit for the organization, so we moved it to The Ocean Foundation, where the project lived until 2015. Leaving the structure and stability of a large organization was a daunting decision, but with J as my cheerleader, we took the leap.

Grayce (left) and Karina (right) at ISTS

Meanwhile, J. led what was in my opinion the most unique and impactful International Sea Turtle Symposium in Loreto Mexico that I’ve attended (I’ve been to 13 of them so far). No symposium has had a bigger economic impact on a small coastal community than this one, with hundreds of people filling local hotels and restaurants, taking tours, and showing love to this town. The highlight of this ISTS for me was when J.’s daughter Grayce was nominated to be “Queen of the Auction” and cajoled Karina into joining her, they had become fast friends during the week. It was hilarious watching adults try to say no to two adorable six year olds and I believe they raised the most money, even if both were crashed out in our arms by the end of the night.

My favorite J. story took place during a site visit in Costa Rica early on with SEE Turtles. We were scouting potential locations for conservation trips on the remote Osa Peninsula. Back then, there were no bridges over the creeks getting out to the town of Carate, an olive ridley nesting beach and gateway to Corcovado National Park. I had spent some time with my ex-wife working on a small beach on the peninsula a few years earlier and I remembered hearing many stories of cars getting swept downstream of these creeks after big rain storms. We had one more night on the trip, visiting the field station of Osa Conservation and were flying back to San Jose the next day.

As we went to bed, the rain started and the harder it came down, the more my anxiety rose, as we were just on the other side of one of these infamous creeks we would be crossing in the morning. After a sleepless night, we got into our SUV, me deferring to J. to drive as he had much more experience in these conditions. As we started to descend into the creek, he says “you should record this,” so I grabbed my video camera and started to film. The water came up all the way to the window as we slowly moved through the water. About halfway across, the truck shut off. I wish I could find that video now (I think it was a compact CD) to listen to my string of expletives as I freaked out. At one point, I look over at J. and he’s fucking laughing. He reaches over, turns the key, and the truck starts up and he drives the rest of the way through. Funny guy that J., pretending that the truck had stalled. I spent years getting my revenge for this prank with the highlight coming at the end of an ISTS oral presentation (with him coming up next), thanking the “sea turtle community’s most famous Alec Baldwin impersonator” for his support (see below).

A few years into the project, inspiration strikes J, again. "How much does it cost to save a baby turtle?,” he asks. “Can we save a billion of them?" I laughed and rolled my eyes at yet another wild idea (there were many). We started the Billion Baby Turtles project under SEE Turtles in 2013 and it has blossomed into our biggest and most successful program. We now raise and give away hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to local organizations working on 50+ turtle nesting beaches worldwide, saving 13 million so far, just one small part of his huge legacy.

A bigger part of his legacy is the role he played in the return of the black turtle, a sub-species of green turtle found in the Pacific (see above). When J. was in grad school, he wanted to focus on this turtle in Mexico but his advisors told him not to bother, the species was too close to extinction to bother with. But that only motivated him more, and with his good friend Jeff Seminoff, he helped bring together the Grupo Tortuguero, a team of scientists, conservationists, fishermen, and coastal residents across Pacific Mexico, to put this turtle on a path to recovery. The black turtle has now recovered dramatically due to this network and while J. was one small part of a huge team, his hard work and energy was critical.

Over the years, J. shifted to other work, including his groundbreaking and bestselling book Blue Mind and raising awareness about plastic pollution (PluckFastic), shrimp bycatch (ShrimpSucks.com), and other issues, but he stayed involved as a board member and advisor. His imprint is all over the organization, he created our great logo with designer Max Davis, he came up with the name for the Too Rare To Wear tortoiseshell campaign and bringing in our biggest funder after one of his incredible presentations, with our partnering with his former colleagues in Baja for turtle conservation trips, and much more. Our focus on supporting coastal communities along with the turtles was borne of his decades of experience and his compassion for everyone he met (and those he didn’t meet).

I wouldn’t have a career in sea turtle conservation without Dr. Wallace J. Nichols. When I was nominated to join the ISTS Awards Committee, he shamelessly campaigned for me (to the consternation of some in the community, but he didn’t care). He consistently picked me up when my imposter syndrome flared up. He believed in me before I believed in me. Whenever I would confront a challenging situation, a particularly tough time, anytime at all, he would be there with what I needed to hear, whether that was a kind word, advice, a joke, or a distraction (usually basketball related). He stayed up late into the night to watch a live feed from Spain of us winning a big award, texting me jokes leading up to the announcement to keep me from freaking out. And he gave me the key line to use in the acceptance speech.

Even in the worst of times, he was able to bring light to the world. Blue Mind has become a source of healing for millions of people. The Nichols family lost their home to a fire a few years ago and J. wrote a letter to Grayce about the tragedy which was turned into a beautiful and heartbreaking children’s book (see him read it here but have tissues ready). He especially loved his work with Force Blue, an organization that helps special operations veterans learn to dive and volunteer as a way to give back and heal from trauma. He organized a half-day workshop on resilience for the sea turtle community at ISTS and encouraged us to celebrate our failures (which gave us Jesse Senko’s legendary All The Condoms story). He passed out millions of marbles to celebrate people doing good things for the ocean. J. gave to others even when he had nothing to give but his time and love.

J was my inspiration, my big brother, and my biggest cheerleader. I will miss him every day.

We’ll get to that billion my brother, I promise. Only 987,000,000 to go!

Please consider donating the Wallace J. Nichols Memorial Fund to continue his legacy.

Follow us on Facebook for more inspiring stories from J’s life over the next few months.

When I Met J.

Sea Turtles & Plastic Update

May Billion Baby Turtles Update