Overfishing, Climate Change, and the Rise of Slime
Can We Save Our Oceans from the Cusp of Extinction?
SOURCE: flickr.com/utnapistim
We risk losing what makes the world’s oceans a valuable natural resource: their rich biodiversity. It’s time to get the concept on the cultural radar.
Give the president credit where credit is due. While his administration has made every effort to unravel many of the most significant pieces of environmental legislation signed over the past four decades, President George W. Bush has often demonstrated an almost preternatural commitment to ocean conservation. He made considerable waves in 2006 when he created one of the world’s largest marine reserves around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, earning plaudits from even his most critical detractors. Now, by proposing to designate two new marine national monuments—one protecting the Central Pacific Islands and the other areas around the Northern Mariana Islands—he could be on the cusp of cementing a “blue legacy” that would place him in the enviable company of Teddy Roosevelt as one of the nation’s most conservation-minded presidents. Which makes it all the more bittersweet, of course, when one realizes that even his most valiant attempts can, or will, do little to counter the oceans’ long-standing decline.
Around 90 percent of the ocean’s largest fisheries species have now been extinguished, and live coral cover has been reduced by up to 93 percent on some reefs.
It’s time to face up to the facts: If we continue to ignore the terrible plight befalling our oceans for much longer, we risk losing what makes them such a unique and valuable natural resource: their rich biodiversity. With most large fisheries stocks now in decline, and with what is left over besieged on all fronts by global warming, ocean acidification, pollution and habitat destruction, it is only a matter of time before our fragile ocean ecosystems complete the long and painful transition from lush, species-rich habitats to barren deserts. But don’t take it just from me. Jeremy Jackson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of the world’s preeminent experts on the impacts of human activities on the ocean, has written what can only be described as a disturbing diagnosis of our ocean’s health. In his article, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jackson warns that the ocean stands on the brink of a mass extinction—one that could just as easily be precipitated by our actions as by the impacts of climate change. Taken together, these problems risk “transforming once complex ecosystems like coral reefs and kelp forests into monotonous level bottoms, transforming clear and productive coastal seas into anoxic dead zones, and transforming complex food webs topped by big animals into simplified, microbially dominated ecosystems with boom and bust cycles of toxic dinoflagellate blooms, jellyfish, and disease,” Jackson writes.
As fatalistic as this may sound, Jackson’s prognosis is given all the more weight because many of the earlier predictions he made a decade ago—though greeted with snorts of derision and loud skepticism at the time—have largely been vindicated. Around 90 percent of the ocean’s largest fisheries species have now been extinguished, and live coral cover has been reduced by up to 93 percent on some reefs. Record amounts of agricultural runoff, fuelled by poor farming practices and our overreliance on industrial fertilizers, are choking our oceans—sparking mass toxic algal blooms and turning once vibrant ecosystems into lifeless dead zones. Sea-surface warming, by increasing the stratification of the oceans (preventing the mixing of deep, nutrient-rich waters with shallow, depleted waters), has caused the ocean’s least biologically productive areas—the so-called ocean “deserts”—to expand much faster than originally predicted, putting the populations of many fish species at risk of extinction. And, if we are to believe his most gloomy prognostications, the worse has yet to come: a future in which the “mass extinction of multicellular life will result in profound loss of animal and plant biodiversity” and lead to the rise of “slime” (what he calls microbes).
The best way to ensure the successful restoration of threatened habitats, the authors explain, is to devolve more authority to local communities, which are naturally more invested in them.
Yet, despite the severity of the situation, not all is lost. In addition to dispensing the usual set of solutions—reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving ocean and coastal management policies and establishing more marine protected areas, or MPAs—Jackson also suggests switching from wild fisheries, which he claims will not be able to sustain growing global demand (regardless of how well they are managed), to a sustainable form of industrial aquaculture. With the right environmental standards in place, and the requisite political will, he argues that aquaculture will be compatible with a policy approach focused on habitat preservation and pollution mitigation. Another interesting idea would be to eliminate the subsidies that have sustained the excessive consumption of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and to tax their use. This would help greatly reduce the number of hypoxia and eutrophication events that have contributed to the formation of over 400 dead zones—affecting an area of more than 245,000 square kilometers (roughly the size of Oregon)—worldwide.
In another article recently published in PNAS, Stanford University ecologists Paul Ehrlich and Robert Pringle prescribe a series of simple, commonsense solutions, which they whimsically call “a hopeful portfolio of partial solutions,” that, while not specifically targeted at the oceans, could easily be applied to just about any ecosystem. Encouraging ecotourism and placing an accurate value on the services ecosystems provide—such as natural water filtration, flood mitigation by plants and carbon sequestration and storage by trees—would help individuals, governments and businesses appreciate them more and make them more likely to integrate these ecosystem-service values into future policy and land use decisions. This is an idea that has long been advocated by economists: reduce the overconsumption of natural resources by making people pay the full price for their use (hence their overwhelming support for water pricing and a carbon tax scheme). The best way to ensure the successful restoration of threatened habitats, the authors explain, is to devolve more authority to local communities, which are naturally more invested in them. Poor communities in developing countries, which depend on their habitats for food, shelter and other resources, will be much more likely to protect their surroundings if they are made aware of the consequences of habitat degradation. Furthermore, imbuing local leaders with the knowledge and skills to manage and preserve their habitats will build local capacity and generate more grassroots support for conservation planning—an enthusiasm that is likely to be passed on to future generations.
Perhaps the simplest, and most obvious, solution the authors suggest is to get biodiversity back onto the “cultural radar screen”—to convince people that it is not their large homes, SUVs, clothing, and big screen TVs that they should value most, but the beauty and plentiful ecosystem services offered by nature. A herculean task, to be sure, but one that should be vigorously pursued by all educators and policymakers. Only by instilling in our children and grandchildren an appreciation for nature that can “rival virtual reality as a source of entertainment, intrigue, and inspiration,” can we make sure that the biodiversity crisis is eventually resolved.
Jeremy Jacquot is a graduate student in marine environmental biology at the University of Southern California and is the Los Angeles correspondent for TreeHugger.com.
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