Saving Our Seas

   It is easy to distance ourselves from the ocean, a remote, implacable and still mysterious place.

  A baby boy contracts cholera in Bangladesh. The mother feels her child’s suffering. Scientists note an increase in cholera in Bangladesh in late spring and summer. These spikes coincide with spikes in sea surface temperatures in the Bay of Bengal. Warm water and feverish infant are inextricably linked. The warm seas encourage the growth of zooplankton which carries the cholera bacteria. Monsoons drive the water into estuaries where the bacteria contaminate local water supplies. The boy dies. 

   Ocean currents absorb heat in the tropics and distribute it around the world. If the Gulf Stream and its extension, the North Atlantic Current, should veer, northern Europe would be a gray, icy land. 

   Living coral reefs cover 360,000 square miles, an area slightly smaller than British Columbia. An innocuous splotch on the globe? Corals secrete calcium carbonate - limestone - on a scale so massive it affects carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and the very health of the planet. 

  ET-743 is not a particularly catchy name, but it could possibly become a joyous household word. Derived from sea squirt tunicates, ET-743 has been found to slow or halt the progression of cancer tumors. It is being tested on patients with advanced breast, colon, ovarian, lung cancer and sarcomas. As you read this, researchers are working to find drugs that may do things that nobody thought drugs could do. Coral, sponges, tunicates and mosses have already yielded compounds active against inflammations, asthma, heart disease, leukemia, tumors, bacterial and fungal infections and viruses, including HIV. The oceans are home to more than two-thirds of the world’s species, and perhaps more possibilities.

   Cast a look back. The plants in the ancient oceans breathed forth the oxygen-rich atmosphere that brought the land to life.

   The ancient Greeks believed that the ocean flowed around the Earth and into eternity.  Before it does, the ocean flows into all our lives.

  Just as intimately, our lives flow into the ocean.

  Consider this near Twilight Zone scenario. In the Midwest, farmers apply tons of chemical fertilizers to corn and other crops. Feedlots for cattle, hogs, and chickens generate improbable amounts of methane, ammonia, and nitrogen. Iowa suburbanites spray their rose bushes. Rains and snows wash this nutrient-rich brew into the Mississippi River, whose watershed drains 41 percent of the continental United States into the Gulf of Mexico. This massive flow of freshwater fans out across the surface of the saltier and denser Gulf waters. Warmed by spring and summer sun, fed by a fantasy buffet of nitrogen and phosphorus, algae bloom like kudzu. Tiny crustaceans and other pin-head sized creatures feed on the algae. The pin heads die, the algae die; massive quantities of both waft down to the bottom of the Gulf. There, in a voracious feeding frenzy, bacteria suck up this detritus of death, and oxygen too. Their greed overrides their own survival. In a final feeding frenzy they suck up the last remaining oxygen, suffocating themselves.

   Beneath the Gulf of Mexico, in spring and summer, there is a dead zone roughly the size of New Jersey. No oxygen. No life. The surface of the Gulf sparkles prettily. Just beneath the happy skein, shoals of fish flick and dart. Sink deeper, and you pass through a hazy shimmering layer. Stretching to the horizon and beyond, empty murk and muck.

   The Gulf is not alone. In other seas these desolate worlds bloom like sad flowers. Poisoned runoff is not unique to the Gulf of Mexico. In Los Angeles environmentalists call the first big storm of winter “the first flush“. Trash absently tossed into streets and storm drains, oil and grease on the freeways, chemicals sprayed on the postage stamp lawns, all of it rushes to the sea. In 1999 the waters off Huntington Beach - Surf City USA - were closed for most of the summer due to dangerous bacterial counts. Again the water sparkled prettily. Water is a pretty mask. 

   The oceans look fine, but they are not. 

   “There is no part of the ocean not feeling the heavy hand of society,” says oceanographer Richard Barber.       

    It is hard to know where to start.

   Seventy to 80 percent of worldwide marine fish stocks need urgent intervention to halt population declines and rebuild species depleted by overfishing. Fishery disasters have stunned New England (cod), the Pacific (Chilean sea bass, orange roughy, pollock, salmon) and Canada.  Fisheries are shutting down. In poorer countries people are starving.

   Sensitive to the smallest changes in their environment, coral reefs are buffeted by pollution and increased water temperatures brought on by global warming. In a fuse-lit flash, fish bombs turn ancient coral to rubble; cyanide fishermen stun the live fish they are after, and poison the reef. Sediment from coastal development obliterates the coral’s life-sustaining sunlight; choking agricultural runoff spawns plankton blooms and explosions of coral-hungry crown-of-thorns sea stars. In a final insult, eco-tourists stand on the delicate organisms, crushing them underfoot or wiping away critical protective coating. Some scientists warn that nearly three-quarters of the world’s coral reefs could lie in ruin within 50 years. The Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos - some 21,000 islands - contain nearly one-fifth of the Earth’s coral reefs. Fewer than ten percent of Indonesia’s reefs remain in prime condition: in the Philippines, that number is less than five percent. 

   Trawlers, used to catch more than half the world’s fish, drag nets anchored with heavy chains, tires and steel plates, scouring life off the bottom like a razor mowing stubble and scooping up wasted bycatch by the truckload. Some estimate that a dozen pounds of sea life, much of it juvenile fish, may be sacrificed for a pound of shrimp; others put the ratio at four dozen pounds to one. The National Marine Fisheries Service estimates that the U.S. shrimp bycatch is close to one billion pounds a year. That is a “b”. Whatever the figures, to watch a Texas shrimper toss silver snowfalls of dying fish overboard is to ponder our view of the sanctity of life. Longliners troll the oceans with 25-mile lines bristling with thousands of hooks, catching what they want, and what they don’t; swordfish, sharks, dolphins, sea birds and sea turtles spinning slow, lifeless pirouettes. The world’s aquatic species are going extinct at rate five times faster than that of land animals.

   At the root of all these problems, an unnerving spiral. Each day the Earth’s population grows by 219,000 people. By the year 2000, more than 3 billion people occupied the world’s coastal regions. That figure is expected to double by 2050. 

  Man, more and more of him, is placing his hand on the oceans, devouring more and more, dumping more and more, leaving less and less. It is not a leap to see man as voracious bacteria, and remember the bacteria’s fate.

   “We are ruining the natural economy on which the market economy depends,” states E.O. Wilson, sociobiologist and scholar on evolution at Harvard University. “And, as an unintended consequence, we may extinguish half the species of plants and animals by the end of the 21^st century… If these considerations don’t make us change our ways, I‘m afraid nothing will.” 

   It is, of course, easy to ignore this. The problems seem monumental and overwhelming. The statistics numb. The warning cries of endless experts blend to a bleating. Our minds fog, wander, then give up. Ignorance is easy, comfortable, and a mistake.

   Because there is hope, and that hope heralds more hope, as surely as ignoring the ocean’s problems will bring defeat. In the face of headline-splashing ills, success stories abound.  People and nations are making a difference.ibbs, Islands Magazine