Another scheme foresees a future in which floating platforms out at sea blast columns of salty vapor into the atmosphere to trigger the formation of denser and brighter low-level clouds.10 The extra cloud cover would increase the Earth’s albedo, or reflectivity, and help bounce some solar heat back into space. As well as keeping temperatures down, these clouds would help prevent and might even reverse polar ice melt. The idea sparked controversy almost as soon as it was first proposed. Some contended that if clouds were seeded in the Atlantic, it might dry out the Amazon, while others suggested that rainfall would go up, provoking floods and landslides. The problem is that many of these ideas for climate reengineering inhabit the margins of our understanding. Predicting their effects is almost impossible, and there is a serious risk of unexpected consequences.
A lower-cost and perhaps less intrusive solution may be to place microscopic particles into the stratosphere, high in the Earth’s atmosphere, where they would form an aerosol and bounce some solar radiation back into space.11 Huge volcanic eruptions do this sporadically and reduce temperatures fast. Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991 and released a vast cloud of ash high into the atmosphere. It caused the biggest injection of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere of any twentieth-century eruption and depressed global temperatures by about one degree Fahrenheit for the following two years. In engineered cooling schemes, sulfur dioxide or hydrogen sulfide gases would be released that would then react to create sulfate aerosols of the right particle size. Others say we should release sulfuric acid itself at high altitude for a better effect. Some have suggested that the world’s commercial airline fleet could be used to seed sulfuric acid far above the land. While this would wrap the earth in a reflective blanket, it would do nothing to reduce either the buildup of greenhouse gases or ocean acidification. The same is true of cloud brightening. Sun-blocking strategies may be cheap and quick, but they are far from perfect.
High-altitude sulfate particles could also slow the repair of the ozone hole, which has gradually been mending since we reduced emissions of ozone destroying CFC gases in the late 1980s. It would also lead to a whitening of the skies, so say good-bye to those gorgeous cloudless mornings with heavens of brilliant azure. On the other hand, things will liven up in the evenings as the particles scatter light to produce sunsets of rich vermilion and carmine. Climate control schemes would have to radically transform the oceans to make any kind of difference to carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. They would introduce a whole slew of new human impacts on the sea and so are highly controversial. And yet, as Charlie Veron, the Australian coral expert put it, “when your house is on fire, you don’t worry about wetting the wallpaper to put it out.” As evidence of climate change mounts, our appetite for geoengineering fixes might grow.
One problem with all geoengineering schemes is that their effects are somewhat unpredictable. The Earth’s climate system is complex, and we struggle to reproduce the nuances of its behavior in simulations. Doubtless, not everyone would benefit from climate geoengineering. Filling the atmosphere with sulfate aerosols to reflect sunshine back into space would reduce rainfall, since solar energy drives evaporation and cloud formation. Some places experienced a severe drought after Mount Pinatubo erupted, so the ethics of deliberately simulating the effects of an eruption are questionable. The fact that there will be some losers in geoengineering need not disqualify the use of such technology outright. We vaccinate children against disease knowing that a small minority will be harmed by the vaccines, because the great majority will benefit. However, the distribution of benefits has to be overwhelmingly skewed toward the positive to justify a risky intervention. A sensible guiding principle is the basic creed of medical ethics, “First do no harm.”
Most geoengineering schemes have so far foundered on the shoals of skepticism and fear. The costs may be enormous and the perceived benefits too uncertain to warrant full-scale investment. But some technologies have been tried and tested, and even make commercial sense, such as stuffing carbon dioxide back into the oil and gas fields from which it was released. If this process were allied to an efficient system for extracting carbon dioxide from the air, it could begin to push the climate change genie back into the bottle from which we have called it. Middle Eastern countries often fret about what to do once their oil runs out. With all that sunshine, empty desert, and those spent oil fields, they have the energy, space, and carbon dioxide storage capacity to shift from being the purveyors of climate change to planetary saviors.
Before we embark on risky experiments that could backfire and are likely to be difficult to reverse, it is worth remembering that there is another method of carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere that doesn’t involve any risk of making things worse and can be achieved using technologies tested over millions of years. Healthy, natural ecosystems are carbon sinks that draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it in sediments, peat, and carbonate rock.12 It has been estimated that every year healthy salt marshes, mangrove, and sea grass beds collectively remove carbon dioxide equivalent to half the emissions of the world’s transport network (which totaled about 13.5 percent of global emissions in 2000).13 Despite covering only one two-hundredth of the area of the world’s terrestrial vegetation, these habitats remove a comparable amount of carbon from the atmosphere. This makes them some of the most intensive carbon sinks on the planet.14
And yet, just when we need them most, these habitats are being lost at an alarming rate of 2 percent to 7 percent a year. If we were to halt our losses today, we might have the same impact as the 10 percent reduction in emissions that would be required to stabilize warming at four degrees Fahrenheit or less. If we embarked upon large-scale habitat restoration efforts, like those undertaken for Vietnam’s majestic mangrove swamps following the wide-scale use of defoliants during the war, they could contribute more. So if you can do just one thing, protect the salt marshes and mangrove swamps! We limit our options if we think only in terms of global emissions. I hope you will by now agree with me that a compelling case can be made for protecting, nurturing, and rebuilding ocean life to assist our safe passage through the climate crisis ahead and to safeguard the planet for our children’s children.
CHAPTER 19
A New Deal for the Oceans
I had lunch not long ago with a high-ranking official from the European Union’s fisheries directorate. We chatted amiably about politics and fish and why the Common Fisheries Policy was so feckless. Over coffee he became reflective. He said he remembered paddling the tide line of a beach near his home in Spain as a boy: “Every so often I would step on a flatfish and feel it wriggle away in a puff of sand and indignation. Now when I go there with my children, we never see them anymore.” It’s a familiar story, and one I hear more and more often everywhere I go. Unwittingly, he had described a once common method of fishing that dates back to prehistoric times. Our early ancestors would wade the tide line, spear in hand, ready to pounce when they disturbed hidden fish. There are still places with enough flatfish to stumble across one here and there, but as life dwindles around us, it is depressing to consider how easily forgotten such simple pleasures are.
Throughout this book I have touched on the many different ways in which people have changed the oceans since their arrival on the scene. Like it or not, we are stressing and killing marine life, making it harder for all manner of species to sustain and reproduce themselves. The struggle for existence has become a lot tougher.
It baffles me that conservation bodies don’t pursue more energetically the recovery and rebuilding of nature. Instead, they often wage battles to hold the line, with some wins but frequent losses. Each skirmish for this or that species is fought with passion and vigor, but while we are winning individual battles, overall we are losing the war. We need to defend nature if we want to protect our own long-term interests. Nature conservation is too often perceived as a luxury, a view that has become embedded in attitudes and policies. Many people think of the oce
ans as a remote and incidental feature of our world. Their importance is felt in a physical sense, but people don’t realize how much we all owe to life in the sea. Human well-being and economic prosperity cannot be unhitched from nature. Climate change is exposing the folly of our neglect for the ecological underpinnings of life. Humanity is in retreat all over the world. Once productive landscapes have lost their soils, fertile valleys have become too salty to grow crops, lakes and rivers are drying up, groundwater has been drained far beyond the reach of roots, and now the sea is rising again to reclaim some of the world’s most fertile and populous lands. In the oceans, rich fishing grounds have been emptied and life choked from estuaries, bays, and vast areas of the seas. Not since the last ice age has there been less living space for people. Our scant regard for nature means that we have shrunk the ability of the planet to support us just when, with seven billion mouths to feed, we most need to expand it. Contrary to what some might imagine, enlarging the planetary life support system doesn’t mean pressing nature into an ever smaller area.
The solution to our present difficulties can only come from adopting strategies that rebuild nature’s vitality and fecundity. Refurbishing the natural world is not an antidote to all ills facing the sea, but it is as close to a cure-all as we are going to find. This doesn’t mean that we all have to become vegan or give up holidays abroad. Nor does it mean we have to turn off our computers and return to the technologies of yesteryear. We just have to become smarter about how we think about and use nature.
What we need in times of great planetary stress is a vibrant biosphere. The biosphere—that part of the planet that supports life—is sustained by four elements: energy, raw materials, the variety of life, and abundance. Let’s take energy and raw materials for granted for a moment and consider life’s variety and abundance. Both are fundamental to the sustenance of a habitable planet. Together they constitute the engine of the biosphere. Life’s variety makes up its component parts, but the speed at which the engine runs depends on its abundance. In many places, wildlife has been so depleted that ecological processes now only just tick over. Keeping a few water-filtering oysters around will not maintain good water quality in estuaries; for that we need dense beds of filter-feeding invertebrates and aquatic vegetation.
To date wildlife conservation has concentrated on sustaining variety and has neglected abundance. The world’s wonders would be less today without the efforts of thousands of people who since the nineteenth century have expended incredible energy to protect rare species and save wildlife on the brink of oblivion. Many creatures are now so rare that they depend on intensive care for survival. In some places entire nature reserves have been established to protect a single species—even a single individual. We must never give up such work, but now that nature is in retreat all around us, we have to shift our focus and give greater attention to abundance. Conservation of course is all about increasing numbers; the more common a species is, the less its extinction risk. But we have to set our sights higher, because extinction prevention and life as a museum will not keep the oceans healthy and sustain humanity through the difficult times ahead.
There are two bywords for resilience in the natural world: diversity and abundance. More enlightened economists refer to them as key elements of natural capital. Diversity begets flexibility and adaptability. Greater diversity enhances capacity to respond to change in positive ways; to keep the machine of life running, if you like. Abundance dictates how fast the machine runs. If humanity is to survive into the future we must come to appreciate that we cannot prosper without revving the engine of life back into a higher gear, so that life’s processes run swift and sure: the uptake and locking away of carbon; water filtration and detoxification; the construction of biological structures like reefs, marshes, and forests that resist sea-level rise and protect coasts; indeed, the production of oxygen itself. If life were a multinational company, many of its subsidiaries would have gone under by now as a result of lost productivity. The whole business would be at risk of failure. When banks or countries fail we are quick to step in to prop them up, recognizing that we cannot afford a systemic breakdown. We are reaching that point with nature. It is time that we apply a little shock therapy to our environment. So allow me to propose a New Deal for the oceans, a bold and ambitious plan to rebuild and sustain the abundance of life at sea. This New Deal should know no boundaries and should apply to every ecosystem and region on this planet.
Where should we start? People love technological solutions. If nature is going bust, then surely we can build our way out of trouble. We can throw up seawalls to hold back the ocean, farm fish in ponds, mix up nutrients artificially in barren areas to boost productivity, even plant plastic sea grass (God forbid!) to re-create nursery habitats for fish and prawns.1 To many, the answer to improving fisheries is simple: build an artificial reef and they will come. Better still, fill the sea with artificial reefs. Scuba divers have long sought out wrecks where glittering shoals of tiny fish attract animals with bigger mouths. A wreck adds a third dimension to a flat seabed and has the added benefit of discouraging trawlers and dredgers from risking their gear nearby. Anglers love wrecks too. There is always the chance of enticing some grizzled giant from among their rusting pipes and panels. But a nagging question remains: Do they simply concentrate existing fish or do they add living space and so increase the amount of fish a habitat can support?
This debate has bounced around the world of fisheries for decades without any conclusive answer. Perhaps that is because, like so many questions, there is no definitive answer. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. But even if artificial reefs did provide some uplift in fish stocks, is that a good enough reason to fill the sea with junk? Many of the most ardent advocates of artificial reefs seem to have large quantities of bulky waste to dispose of: tires, power station ash, railway cars, ships, and oil rigs. I once saw a newspaper photograph of three garbage trucks being pushed off the side of a boat in Thailand. The caption read, without any hint of irony, that this was a scheme promoted by Queen Sirikit to “rescue the sea from years of overfishing and pollution.” Ever since I have carried an image of these trucks chugging around the bottom of the Gulf of Thailand collecting garbage!
The Gulf of Mexico must be one of the most junk-filled seas in the world. All of the states bordering the gulf have artificial reef programs and appear to be dedicated to getting rid of trash under the guise of environmental protection. Here is what the State of Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has to say:
In 1993, the U. S. military in addressing the need to de-militarize obsolete battle tanks realized that immersion in seawater was an acceptable method. The idea of using these obsolete materials to create artificial reefs was born.… As plans developed the full extent of the impact that this program will have on the reef fisheries and associated economy of Alabama became obvious. The conservative estimate for the life span of the tanks is 50 years as artificial reefs. The potential economic impact of these tanks as artificial reefs during this time is millions of dollars. Even this conservative estimate far outweighs any other method of removing these tanks from military service. It is an outstanding and creative way to convert swords to plowshares.2
I love the language: “immersion in seawater was an acceptable method” of disposal. It sounds so much better than “offshore dumping.” Southern states now use the sea as the repository of choice for all manner of waste, including old highway bridges, oil and gas platforms, mine spoil, school buses, you name it.3 The states of Alabama and Florida have gone further than others in that they permit individuals and companies to dump in designated areas. Only the people involved know the precise locations where they have sunk their junk, so they will benefit most from possible improvements in fishing. Mostly these new “reefs” consist of old vehicles or bits of concrete. I don’t want to suggest that creating artificial reefs has no merit. They keep bottom trawlers out, and there is some evidence that recreational catch
es of red snapper are higher near the reefs than in areas of open seabed. But I have to say the idea makes me deeply uncomfortable. There are better ways to recover productivity than to dump our discarded trucks and bridges in the sea.
In Japan, artificial reef creation has been married with aquaculture in “sea ranching,” whereby areas of coast are used as semienclosed fish ranches within which habitats are “enhanced” with concrete reef structures. Fish are fed at certain places and times, and in some cases music is piped into the sea so they come to associate the music with feedings. I can’t help but think that rather than being a sensible way to enhance fish production this is just another way in which Japan offers subsidies to its politically well-connected concrete industry. The majority of fishery subsidies in Japan go to the cement industry to fund construction of harbors and wharves.
The natural world is far better at generating the services ecosystems provide than we are at engineering them. Unlike real reefs, Florida and Alabama’s underwater scrap yards disintegrate within five or ten years of disposal to litter the bottom with old car parts and crumbling panels. Seawalls cost millions of dollars per mile to build and have to be regularly maintained at great expense, whereas salt marshes, mangroves, and coral reefs protect the coast far better and look after themselves. Fish ponds produce one or a few varieties of fish, usually with large subsidies from wild nature in the form of feed, clean water, land, and waste disposal. The mangroves, salt marshes, and tidal flats they replace are nurseries to dozens of commercially important species that grow and disperse to sustain fisheries more widely. In New Zealand, tests with plastic sea grass showed that it attracted a considerable variety and abundance of fish. Many estuaries in New Zealand have lost nearly all their natural sea grass since the 1960s. But real sea grass is far better at the job, with the added benefits of oxygenating the water, filtering wastes, binding sediment, capturing carbon, and providing food for a host of animals, from turtles to snails. Natural habitats are solar-powered and will continue to deliver their multiple benefits as long as the sun shines and we take care not to harm them. So why are we finding plastic and concrete solutions rather than preserving and protecting our natural resources?
The Ocean of Life Page 31
