Sustainable Seas: The Vision, the Reality - Sylvia Earle, 2013 Environmental Summit
Sylvia Earle is an oceanographer, aquanaut, and author.
She was the chief scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from 1990 to 1992.
Time magazine named her the first "Hero for the Planet."
From BBC
Mankind is consuming the ocean’s resources at an alarming rate.
How do
we sustain this vital resource for generations to come?
National
Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Sylvia Earle outlines some of the ways
to save this vital ecosystem.
Predicting the future state of the ocean is tricky, partly because we
still know so little about this vast ecosystem that makes up so much of
our planet.
Presently, less than 10% of the ocean floor has been mapped
with accuracy comparable to what exists for the terrestrial parts of
our planet, or Mars, Venus and the dark side of the Moon.
Little is
known about most of the ocean itself, the water that exists between the
upper sunlit region and the deep terrain below.
While a dozen people
have walked on the moon 240,000 miles (390,000km) above the Earth’s
surface, only three have descended – and returned – from the
deepest part in the sea, seven miles (11km) below our realm.
A recent 10-year assessment of life in the sea accounted for about a
quarter-of-a-million marine species,
with an estimated million, perhaps 10 million more yet to be discovered
and at least given a name (and that doesn’t include microbial forms).
The largest animal in the sea, Architeuthys dux – the giant squid of all
giant squids – eluded being seen alive by humans in its own, dark realm
until 2013.
What else is out there, down there, awaiting discovery?
While
the magnitude of our ignorance is vast, enough is known to realise that
the ocean governs the way the world functions, drives climate and
weather, generates more than half of the oxygen in the atmosphere,
shapes planetary chemistry, stabilises temperature, and otherwise makes
Earth hospitable for humankind and life as we know it.
Water is the key,
the single non-negotiable thing life requires.
Earth’s oceans are 97%
water, but in reality it is much more – a living minestrone, dominated
by a microbial matrix of bacteria, single-celled organisms, viruses and
microscopic planktonic organisms as well as legions of small, medium and
large creatures that together shape planetary chemistry.
The ocean,
including the watery realm deep within the cracks in the rocks under the
seafloor, comprises more than 90% of the biosphere.
We now know
the ocean is the cornerstone of Earth’s life support system.
It is the
living blue engine that sets Earth apart from any other place in the
Universe that we know of. If it is in trouble, so are we. It is, and we
are.
Once thought to be too big to fail, it is increasingly obvious that
there are limits to what can be put into the sea, such as CO2, toxic
and nuclear waste, plastic debris.
And there also limits to what can be
taken out – oil, gas, minerals, wildlife – without serious consequences
to things we care about: the economy, our health, security and, most
importantly of all, our existence.
We should hold as our highest
priority taking care of the ocean systems that make our lives possible.
So, 40 years hence, what will the oceans be like?
In Her Words: Sylvia Earle on Women in Science
Watch, not catch
Some of us rely on ocean wildlife as a source of locally caught and locally consumed food, but
industrial-scale extraction of shrimp, fish and other animals
for luxury markets, fertiliser, oil and food for domestic animals is
swiftly depleting wild populations both in coastal areas and
increasingly in the high seas, beyond local jurisdiction.
Fish and other
ocean wildlife are taking on new importance in the eyes of many as
vital elements in ocean ecosystems, just as wild birds, once primarily
targeted for the table, are now regarded with significant ecological and
aesthetic esteem.
Already, tourism that relies on living fish and
intact ocean ecosystems is economically more valuable than fisheries in
many island countries.
A live whale or whale shark or coral reef fish
can be a source of tourism revenues for decades or taken to market –
once. Perhaps by 2050, fish watching will rival the sport of spotting
birds.
By then, however, some species may be rare or non-existent.
Ninety percent of many kinds of commercially exploited species – tuna,
swordfish, sharks, marlin, salmon, cod, grouper, seahorses and other
ocean wildlife – have been extracted already, plucked from the sea much
faster than they can recover.
Sharks, once feared as voracious
man-eaters must now fear man (and woman) as voracious shark-eaters.
In
the next 40 years, either fishing policies will have shifted toward
reduction of large scale exploitation of ocean wildlife by choice, or
they will have shifted because the number of fish can no longer justify
the investment needed to catch them.
It is likely that some creatures, such as
Northern Right Whale,
now numbering about 300, will not survive, nor will several other
marine mammals with fewer than 1,000 individuals – the Mexican
Vaquita, New Zealand’s
Hector’s and
Maui dolphin, the
Mediterranean Monk seal.
The outlook for bluefin tuna is bleak given the swift decline to fewer
than 10% of its 1970s population, which coincided with a sharp increase
in their value for luxury tastes.
In 2012 a young bluefin
sold in Tokyo for $736,000; in 2013 one weighing 222kg (488lb) brought $1.8m – kilo for kilo eight times the value of silver.
Presently,
aquaculture accounts for about half of all of the aquatic animals
consumed, and the amount is increasing.
Some methods, especially
water-efficient inland closed systems (“more crop per drop”) which focus
on fast-growing plant-eating fish, are an especially promising,
cost-effective way of translating energy from the sun through plants to
animal protein for human consumption.
The same rationale that has led
farmers to raise plant-eating animals on the land (chickens and cows
rather than leopards and owls) is driving a trend toward cultivation of
catfish, tilapia, carp and other herbivorous fish.
Rather than squeeze
valuable omega-3 rich oils from small fish and krill, some companies
like Martek Biosciences are cultivating oil-rich plankton in land-based
facilities, thereby setting a high standard for smart aquaculture.
It
is likely that by 2050 the present tendency to raise carnivorous fish
such as salmon, tuna, sturgeon and Arctic char will be limited to
high-end luxury markets owing to the mathematics of food cost and
efficiency.
It takes about two pounds of plants to grow a pound of
year-old tilapia or chicken.
The older the animal and the farther up the
food chain, the higher the cost.
Several thousands of pounds of plants
are invested in a three-year-old cultivated salmon and even more in wild
10-year-old tunas or sharks that occupy the end of a long, convoluted
food chain.
In the last 40 years, half the coral reefs, mangrove
forests, coastal marshes and seagrass meadows have disappeared.
Hundreds
of
coastal dead zones
have developed and the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, now
passing 400 parts per million for the first time in human history, is
driving planetary warming, melting ice, sea level rise, and most
worrisome of all, perhaps, acidification of the ocean.
In recent
decades coastal nations have claimed jurisdiction over waters 200 miles
from the shore, greatly extending their responsibilities – and
opportunities – into the ocean.
With half of the Arctic’s summer
sea ice now gone, how long before open water will prevail there the year
around?
From zero coastal “dead zones” in 1980 to hundreds today, how
many will there be when today’s children are having children?
Will human
ingenuity and the will to resolve the problems facing the ocean – and
therefore our future prosperity – be enough to avert the dire
predictions about what will happen if we do not?
Making peace with the ocean
Halfway
across the Pacific Ocean on Midway Island, I recently contemplated
these weighty questions in the presence of a Laysan albatross known as
Wisdom, a bird banded with an ID tag in the 1950s and at the moment
serenely warming her most recent egg.
She was learning to fly over broad
areas of the open ocean at about the same time I first began to dive
under the sea.
During her decades of flight and annual returns to her
special nest site, she has witnessed a catastrophic decline of her
species and other sea birds coincident with more than a doubling of the
number of humans.
She has survived the
avalanche of trash, lost and discarded fishing gear and plastic debris
new to the sea in recent times, and has endured despite increasing
competition with humans for decreasing numbers of the squid and small
fish vital for her sustenance and that of her ever-hungry yearly chick.
Wisdom
cannot know why the world has changed so greatly during her more than
half-century of experience, nor would she know what to do even if she
understood.
Humans are the only ones who know the reasons underlying the
worrisome changes, and we are the only ones with the means to do
something about them.
We have a choice.
Technologies exist now to
greatly expand the current modest global network of monitoring and
observation stations to better predict and track weather, major storms,
earthquakes, tsunamis and ocean chemistry.
Coupled with satellites and
other systems that acquire, transmit, analyze and store data, a growing
fleet of manned, remotely operated and autonomous unmanned systems are
providing vital knowledge about the ocean.
Smart underwater floats and
gliders are rapidly improving the quality and quantity of surveying and
mapping.
New batteries, new designs and the possibility of using clear
glass to build deep submersibles to take people to full ocean depth for
science, recreation and effective observations are on the horizon.
For the same reasons that scientists camp out for weeks in the desert, systems such as the
Aquarius Undersea laboratory
based near Key Largo, Florida, may become a more common means for
scientists to explore coral reefs and other habitats by submerging in
their midst for days and weeks at a time.
If we have the will we
can, by 2050, cut CO2 emissions by half compared to 1990 and stabilise
global warming below two degrees Celsius.
We can choose to expand the
current portion of the ocean dedicated to protection from just over 2%
to 20% by 2020, or more if, as some propose, we treat the high seas as a
Global Public Trust, free from humans extracting anything other than
oxygen and water vapour.
There is time, but not a lot, to make peace
with the ocean by 2050, to treat Earth’s great blue realm as though our
lives depend on it.
Because they do.
