The Ocean of Life

by Callum Roberts

  The laws governing the high seas are weak. Countries must first sign up to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea to be bound by its regulations (the United States still hasn’t signed). They also have to sign up to become members of Regional Fisheries Management Organizations to be tied by their rules. Nations that remain outside these agreements are not breaking any laws if they catch fish or pollute or infringe any other legal measures set out by these bodies, because they are not party to them. It seems mad and it is. It is as if a robber were free to break into houses and take whatever he wanted because he refused to acknowledge the law against theft. This legal loophole has spawned a trade in so-called “flags of convenience,” wherein countries like Belize, Panama, and Liberia sell their flags to ships that wish to remain outside the law. Often this is to avoid restrictions on fishing, but it is also to avoid international labor laws, so that crews can be made to work under horrendous, exploitative conditions. You can buy a flag online in minutes for a few thousand dollars.

  It is hard to combat activities that are not overtly illegal. One approach which is enjoying some success is for Regional Fisheries Management Organizations to “harass” the boats of nonsignatory countries out of their areas by denying them access to ports. The high seas are enormous, so this can make it uneconomic for boats to operate beyond the law. However, even if conservation measures on the high seas were made legally binding to all, governance would still be left in the hands of organizations that place exploitation far above conservation.

  Are there any good models of international collaboration to inspire us? The beginnings of a nature-first approach to management can be seen in the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Living Marine Resources. This agreement has been signed by thirty-one countries to date. The overarching aim of the convention is to ensure that marine life remains healthy in the Southern Ocean. Only as much fishing as is compatible with this aim is allowed, and populations of penguins, albatross, and seals, among others, are monitored closely to ensure there are no adverse effects. This body has been pretty successful in kicking out longline boats that were slaughtering albatross by the thousands while fishing for Chilean sea bass. Victory in one place can mean disaster for another, however, as fleets of illegal or unregulated boats will simply move elsewhere. What we need is governance like Antarctica’s to be rolled out across all of the high seas and for it to apply to everyone, whether or not they have signed up to international conventions and treaties. The world is too small and crowded to let fleets flagged by irresponsible countries sow destruction wherever they wish.

  The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea was conceived and written in the 1960s and 1970s, came into effect in the 1980s, and is badly outdated now. Article 62 gives a flavor of the motivations of those who drafted it:

  The coastal State shall determine its capacity to harvest the living resources of the exclusive economic zone. Where the coastal State does not have the capacity to harvest the entire allowable catch, it shall, through agreements or other arrangements… give other States access to the surplus of the allowable catch.6

  In other words, the default position is that all of the seas must be exploited. In fact, the Law of the Sea still has no provision to create protected areas despite wide recognition that they are needed, even within the United Nations. A couple of years ago I asked a legal expert close to the United Nations when we might expect a change. He rolled his eyes and groaned as if to say, “Not in my lifetime.”

  We don’t have much time to reform our management of the oceans. Big creatures go down hard and fast and come back slowly, if at all. Most have few young and can take decades to over a century to come back. Whales often give birth to a single calf every other year and sometimes fewer. Manta rays in the Maldives appear to pup only once every five years.7 With the megafauna, there are no quick fixes and populations can get stranded at very low abundance where they simply can’t give birth fast enough to compensate for losses. But recoveries do happen. In 2010, for the first time in over a hundred years, possibly much longer, a southern right whale gave birth in the Derwent Estuary near Hobart in Tasmania. In the early nineteenth century, boats had to stay close to shore to get from one part of the bay to another because there were so many whales it was too risky to sail through their midst. By the 1830s there were nine whaling stations near Hobart, but by the 1840s their work was done. They had killed almost every right whale that used the bay. It has taken a very long time for them to come back.

  Some regional bodies are moving forward to create high seas protected areas. I was lucky enough recently to work with OSPAR, a regional body that oversees environmental protection of the North East Atlantic. In 2003, minsters of the fifteen OSPAR countries agreed that by 2010 they would fill their seas with marine protected areas that would create a network of wildlife havens. By 2008 it was clear that there was a massive high seas void in the emerging network, so they asked my team at the University of York to find places that warranted protection and to build a case for each one.8 The outcome could not have been better. In 2010 OSPAR declared six places in the middle of the North Atlantic as marine protected areas; together they cover 111,000 square miles of high seas. For comparison, this is about the size of Nevada, and bigger than New Zealand or the UK. When I heard the news I was at a conference. There can be few moments of such excitement in a scientific career. I felt like pulling my shirt off and running around the room in a soccer player’s goal celebration, but there were rather a lot of people there so I decided against it! Our science was the easy bit, though. It took extraordinary political skill and tenacity by many people to see this through. The politics was complex and often frustrating, as we saw firsthand at a succession of international meetings. We had to revisit some sites several times to alter boundaries, or bolster the case. We also had to drop two sites due to objections from some member states including, to my chagrin, the UK. There were last-minute complications when Iceland and Portugal made claims to the United Nations for huge areas of seabed to become part of their national waters. But in the end we won through.9 Ours may be the first high-seas protected area network, but another is being built in the Southern Ocean, and island nations of the Pacific have declared no-fishing zones for tuna in pockets of international waters between their exclusive economic zones. The world turns slowly, but at last a future is being built for life at sea.10

  The nineteenth-century biologist Ernst Haeckel spent much of his time looking at plankton through a microscope. His exquisite illustrations were celebrated and inspired the organic forms of Art Nouveau.11 There is immense beauty to be found in a thimble of seawater, but tiny animals and plants produce different emotions from the ocean’s giants. I once went diving in a kelp forest off California’s Channel Islands. On the boat ride from the mainland we came upon two blue whales which captivated us for half an hour as they fed. As one sounded, it threw its tail skyward and rivulets cascaded from a fluke as wide as a two-lane highway. I felt awed and humbled to be so near the largest animal ever to have lived on this planet. Nothing about my dive in the kelp forest could match that experience. On the boat ride back, four hundred Pacific white-sided dolphins erupted from the water around us. The sea filled with leaping and twisting bodies ablaze with the warm glow of the setting sun. The megafauna worked their magic again.

  The great beasts of the sea have long inspired wonder and fear. They exert a hold that few other creatures can match. More than this, though, they have come to be symbolic of the state of our seas. If whales, dolphins, sharks, and turtles disappear they will leave the sea incomplete; we lose something more important than mere flesh and blood with their passing. Slowly we have come to appreciate that megafauna are not merely embellishments, they are vital to the natural rhythms of life. Preventing these species from going extinct is not enough. Our aim should be to rebuild their numbers.

  What my grumpy Scottish questioner had failed to grasp is that gray seals had only become a problem because of our failure to reverse declin
es in the fish that both seals and people enjoy. In his view, we should shoot the seals, a logic shared by the Scottish government and disingenuous Japanese whaling officials who argue that their hunt, banned by most other countries, is necessary to spare more fish for people to eat. In the past there was fish aplenty for wildlife and for us. That is the point we need to strive for once again. Culling the oceans’ largest inhabitants because they eat fish treats the symptoms, not the disease.

  CHAPTER 22

  Preparing for the Worst

  We are on the cusp of one of the great reorganizations of planetary life. Five times our world has been plunged into turmoil that ended with the extinction of huge swathes of life. Asteroid impact and geologic upheavals that belched forth colossal quantities of lava have been implicated in several of these mass extinctions. Many scientists, myself included, now believe we are at the beginning of a sixth mass extinction, for the extinction rates of plants and animals now run at one hundred to one thousand times the background rate seen in the calm intervals between previous geologic extinction spasms.1 Since we are the cause this time, it is still possible to avert catastrophe.

  This is a remarkable century to be alive. According to the best estimates, the human population will reach a peak in the next ninety years at somewhere between nine and eleven billion people.2 As fertility rates fall, a run of population growth that has been virtually continuous for thousands of years will come to an end. Grave concern tempers this good news. There are important assumptions built into this prediction which we cannot take for granted. The final population figure is incredibly important to our ability to survive the apex of human population. It depends critically on quickly lowering fertility in developing countries. Demographers are concerned that people simply expect to watch human numbers rise to the peak and then gently fall afterward. But lowering fertility fast enough to stabilize the world population at nine billion will require us to ensure people in developing countries have rapid and secure access to family planning. The world’s religions must rise to this challenge too. Just as the old ways of using resources are no longer tenable, so too religious doctrines forged thousands of years ago must be reinterpreted for this century of global crisis.

  Regardless of the specific level at which the human population peaks, demand for resources will be intense, and there is no assurance that the world can feed a population this large. Enormous pressure will be heaped upon the natural world as we scramble for ways to live sustainably at this population level. While the curves of predicted population growth all level off reassuringly between 2050 and 2100, the curve of population multiplied by consumption does not; it just carries on skywards in an exponentially steepening rise.

  All those new people added to the planet will not want to scratch a living for a dollar a day. They will aspire to better material standards of living, just like the billion plus people who live in abject poverty today. One of the development goals established by the United Nations at the beginning of this millennium was to end poverty and hunger. If, as I said earlier, the world is already using resources equivalent to the sustainable production of one and a half planets, how much more will a world need with 30 percent to 60 percent more people, the poorest of whom will want a bigger share than is claimed by today’s poor? This is what scares the pants off me.

  If we just carry on with business as usual, humanity has a bleak and uncertain future. The direst predictions see us on a planet suffering from runaway global warming. Drought and inundation by rising seas will rob the world of its most fertile lands, while wildfire, flood, and tempest will cause upheaval elsewhere. The oceans and lands will hemorrhage species as the sixth great extinction accelerates, leaving us with less and less from which to meet our needs. Civil disorder will rise and conflicts among nations will escalate as people struggle to survive. Refugees will flood the luckier nations as they flee war and famine and rising seas, and might overwhelm them. Standards of living will plummet in both developing and developed nations.

  There is a less dismal future ahead if we quickly wean society off fossil fuels and apply every scrap of human ingenuity to find ways to live within the limits imposed by nature and to bring population growth down fast. There are many people who hope for the latter, but they will have to fight their case hard to win against the entrenched opposition and apathetic insouciance of others who fear the inconvenience such a move might impose on their lives or businesses. It is a natural reaction not to want to change long-established habits. As I have shown in this book, our relationship with the seas has developed over more than a hundred thousand years. It is incredibly difficult to shrug off mind-sets that have such deep roots we scarcely question them; like the mantra that there are plenty more fish in the sea, or the belief that a little collateral damage in catching them won’t hurt, or that the oceans are a bottomless receptacle for wastes, or can disperse and neutralize all of the toxins we release.

  Every generation likes to think of itself as different from its predecessors. For much of the last thousand years this has been true as each generation has brought its creative fire to find new solutions to old problems. Over much of the course of this history we have harnessed nature to our own ends to secure comfort and prosperity. But now that relationship has begun to falter: We have surpassed nature’s capacity to sustain our wants.

  This change has overtaken us rapidly, so it isn’t surprising we are finding it hard to adjust. My grandparents never worried about their world running out of fuel, or space to grow crops, or fertile soil, or fish. It is we who must grapple with a planetary account that is in the red. We must rebuild our inventory or humanity faces bankruptcy. At the heart of the problems is a difficult dilemma: How do developing countries meet their aspirations from a dwindling pool of resources? It is not right for developed nations to dictate that they remain poor, or that they pay a higher price to gain access to energy and infrastructure, which is one of the main reasons climate change negotiations have been fraught and to date unsuccessful. On balance we are most likely to tread a path somewhere between the best and worst extremes, but there is one certainty: Things will get worse before they get better. We must prepare for the difficult times ahead.

  In the deep past there were comparable changes in ocean acidity to those we are likely to face in the next hundred years that led to widespread loss of life. Some scientists, such as the Australian coral biologist Charlie Veron, see alarming parallels between those crises and the present. With increased ocean temperatures and acidity, he says, we will not just lose one ecosystem; we will set in motion a domino effect in which we will see one ocean ecosystem fail after another. It could be a replay of what happened 55 million years ago during the runaway global warming of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum when carbon dioxide levels, temperature, and ocean acidity spiked ferociously. The planet has recovered from previous extinction crises, but not without devastating upheavals and loss of life. As species fell others rose from the ashes of their empires and ecosystems were remade from a few of the old parts and many new. But it took millions of years.

  The geologic record gives us more than enough reasons to terrify us into action. But we cannot stop the chemical transformation of our atmosphere in its tracks any more than we can halt human population growth. Both have enough latent capacity to maintain the momentum of planetary change far into the twenty-second century. The seas are likely to become more hostile to life.

  Even if we get serious about cutting greenhouse gas emissions, with more and more mouths to feed the assault on the oceans could simply carry on. More fertilizer and sewage input would increase the frequency of harmful algal blooms, intensify oxygen depletion, create more dead zones, and set the stage for the jellyfish ascendancy. The spread of aquaculture will eat away at natural habitats and aggravate problems of nutrient enrichment. More intense agriculture on degrading soils will flush extra mud into coastal waters, which might help build coastal wetlands like salt marsh and mangrove but would destroy sensitive habita
ts constructed by invertebrates like corals. Sea level rises to which we are already committed by past emissions will lead to more seawalls and other defenses in a process of coastal hardening that will squeeze out productive habitats like mudflat and marsh. With the disappearance of these vital nurseries, wild fisheries will suffer, and there will be fewer feeding grounds for migratory birds. And if we remain wedded to all the comforts that modern technology can give us and remain as wasteful as we are today, the oceans will continue to accumulate toxic contaminants and the soup of plastic particles will thicken.

  It doesn’t have to be like this, but we are sleepwalking in that direction. We can change the course of the future by what we do today. There is an old adage, much loved of self-help books, that says “today is the first day of the rest of your life.” If we change course by a few degrees now, it will take us to a very different place in fifty years time from where we are headed. Our children will reap the benefits. The great thing about the future is that it has yet to come so there is everything to play for. We don’t have to accept our fate. In the few pages left of this book I will explore what we can do to maximize the chances that our transition to sustainable lifestyles can be accomplished without impoverishing nature and destroying ourselves. I have to assume that we will work to control human population growth, switch to clean energy, reduce emissions, and lower pollution of all varieties, because without these shifts there is no question the outcome will be bad; the only uncertainty is when will the end finally come?