Interview with Laura Swihart Thacker - Member of Alaska Sealife Center

We’re back with another interview with a member of an amazing environmental nonprofit! The Alaska Sealife Center is a truly unique organization, and I was lucky enough to be able to talk to Laura Swihart Thacker, an incredible member of this operation, to get a better understanding of their ideals.

Laura Swihart Thacker is the Development and Guest Services Supervisor at the Alaska Sealife Center, one of the only organizations in the state of Alaska dedicated to the protection and research of the region’s marine animals.

*This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity

Q: What is Alaska Sealife Center’s mission, and what steps does it take to execute that mission?

A: Our mission is to generate and share scientific knowledge to promote the understanding and stewardship of Alaska's marine ecosystems. Basically, we exist first and foremost as a science center. We try to be the gateway to marine science in Alaska. Seward used to be a mile zero of the Alaska railroad, and where I am sitting right now used to be the Alaska railroad terminal. So everything that came to Alaska, to the interior, came through Seward. In 1964, there was a magnitude nine earthquake, which washed away everything on the shore. After that, the town of Seward really had lost all of its heavy industry and had to rethink what we wanted to be. And there was a group of citizens who really wanted to make us the center for Marine Science in Alaska and started really campaigning for that to try to be a place where anyone who wanted to come and study Arctic Marine ecosystems or Arctic ecosystems could come and be based out of the Sea Life Center and do that research.

Then in 1989, the Exxon Valdez ran aground and spilled a bunch of oil into the Gulf of Alaska. So there were a lot of animals that needed rehab and to be cleaned of oil, and there was really not an infrastructure in Alaska at that point in time to do that work. So we ended up getting all of the otters that had been oiled up, and we had a sea otter rehabilitation center up at the head of Resurrection Bay. And because we already had this movement to be a science center, we already had a capital campaign going. And then we were able to get the funding to build this building, the aquarium, and it opened in 1998. We are a public aquarium, and that's probably what we're most well known as in the state. But that aquarium is really just our educational outreach for our other mission, which is science and research. We exist, as our mission says, to generate and share scientific knowledge to promote understanding and stewardship of the ecosystem at large. Everything we do here is about learning and building things so that we can do something for the ecosystem.

Q: How did you get started at your organization? Did you have a passion for the environment when you were younger?

A: I got started with the Sea Life Center actually as a tourist on a one week vacation. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so super far away from the ocean. But I visited the Sea Life Center, and I did a marine-mammal encounter tour, and I had an up-close encounter with Harbor Seal, and that just burned into my brain as a core memory for all time. But as I got into high school, I started to notice that I was really good at social studies and economics, and I wasn't so interested in the hard sciences. Memorization just didn't really work for my brain. So I decided that probably science wasn't for me, and I majored in economics. But then over the course of my college career I realized that I wanted to do good in the world. When I went into college I majored in economics, and I thought I was going to make a bunch of money, and then do good things in the world because I was to be a powerful person. But very quickly through college, I realized that the world is not about money, and the world is not about material things, and that I got a lot of value out of having a meaningful connection to the environment around me.

I did a summer job in Alaska, but then when I went back to college, and all I could see was pollution and materialism and the absence of nature. By the time I graduated from college, I was pretty sure that I wanted to work in the nonprofit world or in an environmental organization, but not having a hard science brain. I wasn't exactly sure how to do that. I definitely didn't know about philanthropy or development. And I ended up in guest services just because I got to connect people to nature and deal with their money, so it's using my degree. It wasn't until I was really actually in that role in the development department that I actually learned what development was and realized that places like the Sealife Center exist because there is a whole community of people who love it enough to support it. I just totally fell in love with the concept that I didn't have to be doing the science myself to make this impact happen. I can use the skillset that I have to bridge that gap and connect people to the science without having to know every single scientific name of every fish in the aquarium, because that's just not how my brain is wired, even though every fish is really cool, and I want people to think they're as cool as I do.

Q: How could a $10 donation help your organization? $20? $50? $100?

A: For $10 a day you can feed a mated pair of birds in our aviary. It costs about $5 a day to feed the birds, so $10 feeds one of our mated pairs. $25 can buy a pound of salmon, which our sea lions sometimes eat up to 60 to 70 pounds of fish a day. So you can think about the price tag on that and climb. $50 could buy food for baby walrus calf for a day. That's awesome. And not $100, but just as a different price point for you, it costs $1,135 a day to take care of an otter pup. Otters are so expensive. They require 24 hour care from all of their human people. But in addition to that, they don't have any blubber. All of their homeostasis comes from grooming their fur and eating food, and they have the most expensive taste buds. They really like clams and mussels and all of the really expensive high-end foods. Because of a variety of groups, everything that we feed every one of our animals has to be restaurant quality. So we're buying this from commercial seafood institutions. All of our people who are processing the fish in the mornings, they're cutting out all the little bruised parts. Everything you eat, if you were going to eat herring and capelin at a restaurant, you could eat ours. We feed all of our animals different sizes of fish. The smallest fish is going to cost a dollar a herring, but that does stack up pretty fast.

Q: What are Alaska Sealife Center's most urgent needs, in terms of supplies, support, etc?

A: Right now, the biggest urgent need for us is actually a new research boat. That's on everybody's minds. The price tag on that is about $300,000 for a new research vessel. But we need that to continue with our science and be able to continue to do more advanced science. Right now, we have one boat, a little skiff. It's a tiny little boat that they take out to the sea lions to update the batteries and change all the wires to do the cameras. That boat has been our boat since we opened in 1998. It’s in need of repair. And we have several other research projects that we would love to do, but in order to do that in a scientifically robust way, we need to be confident that we would have a boat that would be able to take us out to these locations regardless of weather. Right now, our boat just isn't what we need to be able to do those more advanced research projects.

Otherwise, I want to say something like ‘We need fish for the animals,’ because that's really marketable; $5 gets you a fish to feed the animal. But especially for us being an aquarium in a cold water facility like this, a huge amount of our expense are things that are really only covered by unrestricted revenue. We have insane utility bills because we have to pump tons and tons of freezing cold water through the building 100 % of the time. We have to have backup generators so that all of the filtration systems don't go dead if there's a power bump. We are a 25-year-old organization at this point, so a lot of our urgent needs are a lot of the less glamorous things like roof repair and electricity. But definitely that research boat is going to be that thing that we're focused on right now, is our urgent need.

Q: How are individuals, especially kids and younger people, able to help or engage in your organization without donating money?

A: We exist to build that respect and empathy for the marine ecosystem. So really, it’s just carrying a mindset of conservation, of environmentalism, recycling, not putting your plastic in the water supply to get put out in the ocean is a huge, huge thing. Caring and asking curious questions, having valid follow-up questions, thinking of the ocean as a living place and a vibrant ecosystem instead of a big, vast expanse to send shipping boats through. Keeping sustainability in mind, prioritizing that is very important. In the day to day, doing beach cleanups, doing those little things, picking up the garbage, knowing your local stranding hotline. I know in Alaska, we are the place to have that stranding number in your phone so that you can call if you do see a marine-stranded animal, but there are similar organizations all across the country. I didn't know what to do if I found an injured wild animal when I lived in DC or when I lived in Pittsburgh. It was only when I came here to Alaska that I started to have that awareness, but I now realize that there are those organizations in those places as well that could have used that support.

As for specifically things that we do, we have a Small Fry School and Virtual Small Fry School for the little ones, which is a free program that we put on to try to be accessible to everyone. It has printouts and little videos, and they actually just revamped that program We also do distance learning programs for all ages. So no matter where you are, you can reach out to our education team, and we'll zoom into the classroom and do a whole education program about marine science for kids there. You can also engage in our social media, following us on social media. But to help, honestly, anything that protects the local marine ecosystems, the local ecosystems where you are locally and building that empathy for the environment, that is how you help.

Q: How does Alaska Sealife Center involve and engage with the local community?

A: We host a lot of community events, we do the community holiday party, and we just like to be a good community space. But specifically, we have the Seabird program, which is super, super cool. One of our Seabird researchers has an ongoing Seabird monitoring project where we basically just try to keep tabs on the populations of seabirds in Resurrection Bay where we live and out further in the Gulf. Part of that is that the seabird researcher partners with the Marine Biology class at the local high school. So every other week, they go on a field trip to the beach and they do a seabird count. So it's really cool because on one hand, these high schoolers are getting to work with an actual professional seabird researcher. They're doing actual science. I got to watch a presentation at the end of that class, and it was just incredible. It is super, super cool, because they're contributing to the real body of science. We're using this data in our analysis of what's happening with these ecosystems.

We’re a member of the Coral Partnership, which is Community Organized Restoration And Learning. We have a variety of partners. Center for Coastal Alaskan Studies, Prince William Sound Science Center, the Alutiiq Museum Archeological Repository, and the Alaska Native Heritage Center. All to say, it's a diverse group of people who are all interested in the coastal health and ecology, and it’s very driven by the Indigenous communities here in Seward, the Kutuchi Native tribe, because all of these intertidal ecosystems that we are studying in this very scientific way have been sustaining these communities for thousands of years. They have intimate knowledge and indigenous knowledge of all of these animals and ecosystems. And so trying to figure out how to be partners and how to learn together and how to conserve together and really be inclusive and equitable when we're talking about conservation. We do local beach cleanups and wildlife response. We have high school internships where the local high schoolers will come and work with us for a couple of weeks during the school year, and we have an ancillary program in the summer, trying to get people in to learn skills, to get whatever job experience they can.

Q: What’s an environmentally-conscious gift you love to receive and/or give?

A: I really enjoy getting memberships to places that are cool, because that is a material benefit to me in some degree, but it's not something I have to store, and it supports the cause that I want to support. Definitely memberships are a great way to do that. Reusable shopping totes are good things for me because I'm the person who always forgets my bag in the car, but then I'm in the store. I always love a reusable shopping tote. As for giving, I'd definitely say memberships, or doing art for people. I'll repurpose or hand-make something. I don't usually go out and buy a bunch of new things for my friends, but that's because they also don't want new things because we all have so much clutter in our lives.

Q: What advice would you give to a young person who wants to work in your field?

A: If you want to work with animals in the environment, the best thing I can possibly say in terms of practical career advice is to volunteer at your local animal shelter, because they always need help. It's a great way to build those skills and to demonstrate that you have these skills with animals and that you're willing to prioritize them. But more generally, for somebody who wants to work in the environmental field, I would say the biggest thing is just remembering to have hope, which sounds dark, but the world can be dark, as we know. At some point, I feel that I had to make a decision to be like, you know what? I'm going to choose to have hope because I can sit here and be pessimistic and say that climate change is going to end the world, or I can try to do something and have hope that me trying to do something will inspire somebody else to try to do something. If all of us people who grew up with that message look at each other and say, hey, maybe there's something we can do about this, then maybe there is hope in the future.

Early in my job here, I definitely would have a lot of times that I would go into my boss's office and be like, ‘Why does it all matter? How can the Alaska Sea Life Center save the whole world? What is the point of all of it?’ That was a big question, but quitting didn't actually solve anything. And just giving up and taking a high paying job at a for-profit also didn't solve anything. Having hope that there's people like you out there who are looking around and saying, hey, maybe I don't need piles and piles of presents, and maybe there are these environmental organizations, and maybe I can do something and make an impact. That gives me hope.

Q: What is the best way for people to get to know Alaska Sealife Center better?

A: I would say, if you can make it to Seward in Alaska here at the end of the road, come say hi. If not, follow us on social media. Our social media is delightful, in my opinion. I learned a lot about the center just by following our social media, and you get cute Walrus pictures. On Disney Plus, there's a TV series called Alaska Animal Rescue that heavily features the Sealife Center, as well as the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center and the Alaska Raptor Center. I definitely binged all of the two seasons of it before I got my job up here. But yes, Alaska Animal Rescue is a great thing to watch. Otherwise, definitely our social media. We have a website, but social media, @alaskasealifecenter is going to be my go-to.

Visit alaskasealife.org to learn more and visit this Planet Presents page to add Alaska Sealife Center to your wishlist.