“It’s really easy to say no fishing. And it’s really easy to say, let’s fish as much as we can until all the fish are gone. What’s hard is finding that space in between, and that’s what I’m calling the gray area of science,” Lewis said. 

That “gray area” extends beyond resource extraction. Lewis views environmental systems as networks, which also extends into the human condition. 

“When you get down to it, fisheries [science] is a social science, right? Because it's human behavior. And economics is well known to be more of a behavioral social science than it is about counting numbers,” Lewis reflected.

Traditionally, interdisciplinarity in oceanography might mean a physical oceanographer working with a biological oceanographer. Transdisciplinary oceanography goes further to consider fields such as Sociology, Economics, Communications, and Psychology in conjunction with the Natural Sciences. Teams might include ecologists, hazard geographers, and political scientists, for example. The integration of social sciences and oceanography acknowledges that humans are inseparable from global ecosystems and modify them significantly. 

“It took the wind out of my sails,” Lewis stated.

Funding can be difficult to secure for transdisciplinary work because evaluators struggle to assess its full purpose and value. When Lewis and her colleagues receive feedback, “it’s usually ‘not enough [natural] science’ or ‘too much social science.’” To address this, Lewis and colleagues are currently working on a paper to better define Transdisciplinary Oceanography and provide a foundation for future project proposals. 

Transdisciplinary approaches work to solve urgent, yet nuanced environmental problems because, as Lewis said, “The solutions are not going to come in a silo. They’re going to have to come across the university and across cultures and across difference.”

These cuts to funding don’t just impact investigators, they affect students. One of Lewis’ students at GSO lost four years of PhD funding, she said. The dynamic funding landscape also affects her ability to support students after graduation. Decreased federal funding for environmental science translates to fewer job opportunities. 

Without stable sources of funding, early-career researchers and students face lasting setbacks. The effects of the recent cuts by NSF extend far beyond each individual lab. “This is not three-year damage,” Lewis said. “This is decadal level damage to academia and to the federal institutions that are managing our natural resources.”