Honorary Degree Conferral to Dr. Barbara Page

Thu Apr 7 17:02:58 MST 2022

Dear Colleagues,

Last week, I was honored to host a ceremony in the courtyard of the Forbes Building where Provost Folks conferred an honorary degree to Dr. Barbara Page, co-founder of the Anthropocene Institute, a California-based incubator for new technologies in clean energy and ocean conservation that aims to create economically sustainable processes to motivate environmental and social sustainability.

Barbara was nominated in Fall 2020 by our Department of Environmental Science faculty, and her nomination was supported by the CALS faculty. I am very thankful to all our faculty for nominating and then supporting her degree conferral, because of my own past involvement with marine biology, conservation and aquaculture.

I hope you will share my pride in our association with Dr. Page's work and with the Future of Fish Feed Initiative<https://carnivore.f3challenge.org/> (F3). F3, co-founded in 2015 with our own Dr. Kevin Fitzsimmons (ENVS), became three separate technology prizes focused on accelerating the commercialization of alternative aquaculture feed ingredients. Aquaculture is the fastest growing of all animal-based human food sources and, while replacing wild fishing for human food, it is still an enormous strain on wild fisheries and the marine ecosystem as a whole. The impact of the first two F3 competitions are savings of at least 2.4 billion forage fish annually--and with this, saving the oceans' food webs. The third contest, the Carnivore Challenge, is underway; it is about finding alternative ingredients for the carnivorous species salmon, shrimp, and trout, and is the most challenging.

One of our distinguished CALS alumni, Dr. Loc Tran, who is the founder and director, ShrimpVet Laboratory, Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, is also a key contributor to the research underpinning the F3's success.

Dr. Page requested a small and intimate celebration, but I want to share some excerpts from her remarks with you.

One way to save the oceans is to save life within them, and we focused on the tiny, little fish that sustained so many species, including salmon, cod, and tuna. It turns out that these fish are in trouble, and when we discovered that, we had to look at who was over-fishing them and why. It turns out that those fish are over-fished to become ingredients. Those ingredients are going to feed pellets. Those feed pellets go to fish farms, and those fish become the fish on our dinner plate…

[W]e created the Marine Conservation Fund at the University of Arizona and the F3 challenge to address the problem and to create solutions to encourage substitute ingredients and encourage fish-free feeds… [E]ven though this is a large problem that also means that there is a large opportunity…

I receive this honor on behalf of many, many incredible people and organizations. It is our combined effort that created the spark.

As a Japanese American proud of my heritage, I want to thank my mentors from the community… and I want to thank my parents again for teaching me about the importance of collaboration and leaving the world habitable for the next generation…

I also owe a great debt to my country, the United States of America. In very few places in the world do we have the democracy and the freedom to identify problems, follow the facts, and to make things better. We still have a lot to do to feed a world of nine billion sustainably.

I couldn't agree more with Dr. Page, especially as she represents everything we do together: from researching how to grow crops with less water to sharing the latest technologies with Arizona's ranchers, to teaching Phoenix families how to stretch their food dollar and eat for their health and wellness, to providing the support that make all these and hundreds of other activities possible. I am so honored to be a part of our enterprise with you and focused on solving the socio-economic and geopolitical grand challenge of feeding our world and keeping our planet livable--locally and globally.

Regards,
Shane

Shane C. Burgess
Vice President for the Division of Agriculture, Life & Veterinary Sciences, and
Cooperative Extension

Charles-Sander Dean of the College of Agriculture & Life Sciences
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