Philippe Cousteau, Environmental Advocate

The ocean can and should be a source of hope and solutions for a brighter future
  — Philippe Cousteau, environmental advocate

 

 

Philippe Cousteau, special correspondent for CNN International, and grandson of Jacques Cousteau, began his essay Oceans: Environmental victim or savior? like this:

My grandfather Jacques Cousteau and my father Philippe dedicated their lives to revealing the ocean's wonders and helping us understand our connection to this vast expanse of water. Their work inspired generations and filled people with awe.

Times have changed and so have circumstances and perceptions about the ocean. In recent years, the focus has been on the very serious challenges the ocean faces and the impact these challenges are already having on our daily lives.

The effects of climate change, pollution and overfishing should be making headlines because the ocean and all of us — and I literally mean all humankind — who depend on its resources are facing the very real prospect of the catastrophic collapse of ocean ecosystems if we continue on our current course.

Despite the challenges our ocean faces, I believe it's time to recapture the sense of wonder and inspiration my grandfather and father felt when they gazed on its surface. In fact, the ocean can and should be a source of hope and solutions for a brighter future.

Now, I want you to pause for a moment to savor the irony of noting the "very real prospect of the catastrophic collapse of ocean ecosystems" in one paragraph, and then saying "the ocean can and should be a source of hope and solutions for a brighter future" in the next paragraph.

For if the oceans are facing catastrophic collapse, and it's not hard to figure out why, and the causes of that eventual collapse have not changed, how can those same oceans be a source of hope and solutions for a brighter future?

Have you seen the irony? Good. I followed the collapse link, which led me to CNN's Overfished and under-protected: Oceans on the brink of catastrophic collapse. I will quote liberally from that article.

Remoteness, however, has not left the oceans and their inhabitants unaffected by humans, with overfishing, climate change and pollution destabilizing marine environments across the world.

Many marine scientists consider overfishing to be the greatest of these threats. The Census of Marine Life, a decade-long international survey of ocean life completed in 2010, estimated that 90% of the big fish had disappeared from the world's oceans, victims primarily of overfishing...

In some cases, the collapse has spread to entire fisheries. The remaining fishing trawlers in the Irish Sea, for example, bring back nothing more than prawns and scallops, says marine biologist Callum Roberts, from the UK's York University.

A smear of protein.

"Is a smear of protein the sort of marine environment we want or need? No, we need one with a variety of species, that is going to be more resistant to the conditions we can expect from climate change," Roberts said.

The situation is even worse in Southeast Asia. In Indonesia, people are now fishing for juvenile fish and protein that they can grind into fishmeal and use as feed for coastal prawn farms. "It's heading towards an end game," laments Roberts.

Trawling toward disaster, bulldozing the ocean bottom.

One particular type of fishing, bottom-trawling, is blamed for some of the worst and unnecessary damage. It involves dropping a large net, around 60 meters-wide in some cases, into the sea and dragging it along with heavy weights from a trawler.

[Image left — click to enlarge, source]

Marine conservationists compare it to a bulldozer, with the nets pulled for as far as 20km, picking up turtles, coral and anything else in their path. The bycatch, unwanted fish and other ocean life thrown back into the sea, can amount to as much as 90% of a trawl's total catch.

Upwards of one million sea turtles were estimated to have been killed as by catch during the period 1990-2008, according to a report published in Conservation Letters in 2010, and many of the species are on the IUCN's list of threatened species.

Campaigners, with the support of marine scientists, have repeatedly tried to persuade countries to agree to an international ban, arguing that the indiscriminate nature of bottom-trawling is causing irreversible damage to coral reefs and slow-growing fish species, which can take decades to reach maturity and are therefore slow to replenish their numbers.

Because they can.

"It's akin to someone plowing up a wildflower meadow, just because they can," says Roberts. Others have compared it to the deforestation of tropical rainforests.

Bottom-trawling's knock-on impacts are best illustrated by the plight of the deep-sea fish, the orange roughy (also known as slimeheads) whose populations have been reduced by more than 90%, according to marine scientists.

Orange roughys are found on, or around, mineral-rich seamounts that often form coral and act as feeding and spawning hubs for a variety of marine life.

"Anywhere you go and try to harvest fish with a trawl you are going to destroy any coral that lives there, and there is example after example of the damage that is done by trawlers," says Ron O'Dor, a senior scientist on the Census of Marine Life...

Essential ecosystem services, the pointlessness of economics.

At the same time fisheries and vital marine ecosystems like coral are being decimated, the oceans continue to provide vital services, absorbing up to one third of human carbon dioxide emissions while producing 50% of all the oxygen we breathe.

But absorbing increasing quantities of carbon dioxide (CO2) has come at a cost, increasing the acidity of the water.

"The two worst things in my mind happening to oceans are global warming and ocean acidification," says O'Dor, "They're going to have terrible effects on coral reefs. Because of acidification essentially, the coral can't grow and it's going to dissolve away."

The ocean has become 30% more acidic since the start of The Industrial Revolution in the 18th century and is predicted to be 150% more acidic by the end of this century, according to a UNESCO report published last year...

"There's a real lack of public and political awareness of these issues," says Alex Rogers, professor of conservation biology at the UK's Oxford University.

"They're too big to understand in economic terms. We can put a value on the loss of fishing, but how can we put a value on oxygen production or the absorption of carbon dioxide?" he says.

There's no need to further explain any of this stuff. If you require further explanation, you're far too dense to be reading DOTE. The oceans "should" be a source of hope and solutions for a brighter future, but they are not, and the reason they are not is as plain as the nose on your face.

Personal Note

I started by asking you to savor the irony of Cousteau's Obligatory Hope as the oceans face eventual catastrophic collapse in the 21st century. Now I want to consider another irony, one which affects me personally in a profound way.

It is not lost on me that my target audience is made up of the very same humans who are fucking up the oceans, the climate, other animal species, and just about everything else, including their self-created economy. Thus, in all but a few cases, my warnings, my insights about human behavior, my descriptions of the science and evidence, and all the rest will fall on deaf ears. The essential craziness and hopelessness my "mission" on DOTE is not lost on me. But then again, how are we to spend our precious time on Earth? Writing this blog was my choice.

Now, for the relatively few people who read this blog, there are two ways to go—you can make my job easier, or you can make it harder. If the former, I am grateful. If the latter, congratulations! — you are part of the human mess I go to great lengths to describe.

The comments you make, the donations you do or do not send, the links to DOTE you put up on other web sites, the recommendations of DOTE you make to others—all these things make a difference to me. All I can do is write this blog, which is unique on the internet in many ways. And once this blog is gone, it is very likely that nothing will replace it.

The rest is up to you.

Comments

[JohnWDB]

Sea Lion pups having a rough go--

http://www.npr.org/2013/04/09/176586940/starving-baby-sea-lions-flood-southern-california-shores

"She says the main theory scientists are investigating is that the prey — the smaller fish these animals feed on — are just not available. The mystery is why."

Yes, it is a mystery. Why do we have to treat each of these things as some distinct mystery? It's like looking at a lung cancer patient and being puzzled over why he's losing weight, why he can't catch his breath, and why he seems to be in such pain. They're all symptoms of the same disease, and if a doctor called one of them a "mystery", he'd rightly be presumed incompetent.