The Ocean of Life

by Callum Roberts

  Fauna and Flora international (FFI) was founded in the UK in 1903. Early on they focused on protection of big game in Africa where hunting was decimating iconic animals like lions, cheetahs, and leopards. FFI has since expanded worldwide and today has satellite organizations in the United States, Australia, and Singapore that guide extensive regional programs. With over a century of practical conservation behind it, FFI is one of the most experienced organizations around. However, it was only in 2010 that they founded a full-fledged marine program, in recognition of the growing peril faced by life at sea, supported by generous donations from Lisbet Rausing, Peter Baldwin, and Arcadia. The shape of this program is still evolving, but its core emphasis is to support the creation and effective management of marine protected areas. As a council member of FFI since 2007, I have been lucky enough to help FFI launch its efforts seaward.

  Greenpeace (www.greenpeace.org)

  Greenpeace has its origins in the environmental movement of the late 1960s and from the beginning campaigned on ocean issues from its vessel Rainbow Warrior. In recent years it has been a passionate advocate for high seas and deep sea protection in the global commons beyond the limits of national waters. My research group did a report for Greenpeace a few years ago in which we asked what a network of high seas marine protected areas might look like if we were to create it today. It was a flag-waving exercise to highlight the almost complete lack of protection these areas had. I am glad to say that through Greenpeace’s efforts, some areas we proposed have now been placed off limits to tuna fishing in the Pacific, and OSPAR has further developed suggestions for North Atlantic MPAs and implemented them in 2010. I always enjoy working with Greenpeace—it has a refreshing idealism coupled with steely determination.

  Marine Conservation Institute (www.marine-conservation.org)

  The Marine Conservation Institute is a highly respected outfit that is headquartered in the United States but whose reach extends far beyond U.S. borders. In no small part that is due to the enormous energy and boundless vision of its founding president Elliott Norse. Elliott is a master strategist and a tireless campaigner. And although too modest to admit it widely, he and his team have notched up a string of successes, notably in campaigns to establish huge marine protected areas during the Clinton and Bush (George W.) presidencies. The Marine Conservation Institute has dedicated enormous effort to seabed protection from bottom trawling, especially in the deep sea. They were a core partner of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition that gained UN support for deep sea protection in 2008. Like SeaWeb, MCI is committed to generating and using excellent science in the cause of greater protection for marine life.

  The Nature Conservancy (www.nature.org)

  The Nature Conservancy was founded in the United States in the 1950s but has since spread its wings internationally. For many years, it devoted most of its funds to buy land to create refuges for threatened habitats and species. The oceans are publicly owned and so this approach cannot be translated directly except in coastal areas where they have used it to great effect to protect wetlands and shores. Farther seaward, the conservancy has been working to develop ways to promote resilience in natural habitats so they can better deal with the slew of stresses I have described in this book. Like Conservation International, it has an especially active program of reef conservation in the Coral Triangle.

  The Ocean Conservancy (www.oceanconservancy.org)

  The Ocean Conservancy is based in the United States and has historically concentrated on protecting national waters. It has dedicated itself to causes such as reducing plastics and trash that despoil oceans and coasts, and to establishing more and better Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). The Ocean Conservancy was among a small number of players that were instrumental in getting California’s Marine Life Protection Act onto the statute books and using it to build a network of MPAs that will, in my view, become a source of national pride over the course of time. They are also campaigning for a fresh approach to environmental protection in the Gulf of Mexico following BP’s blowout of 2010. They see opportunity in the aftermath of disaster and propose that some of the damages fund be put toward ending years of environmental neglect and degradation in the Gulf of Mexico. (Remember those seas of trash, I mean artificial reefs, I mentioned!)

  Oceana (na.oceana.org)

  Oceana claims to be the world’s biggest organization dedicated wholly to ocean conservation. It has over half a million members and is active all over the world, especially the United States and Europe. Oceana runs campaigns across a wide spectrum of ocean problems, from overfishing to ocean acidification to mercury pollution. Its successes include efforts to protect the oceans from bottom trawling in Alaska, ban shark finning in Chile, and ban the trade in shark fins in California (and as the saying goes, where California leads, the nation follows). Oceana is one of the few organizations to tackle the pernicious issue of harmful government subsidies that prop up overfishing. It has waged a long campaign to remove subsidies that is not yet won, but the rewards are potentially huge. Withdrawal of subsidies from high seas and deep sea fisheries could eliminate overnight much of the harm these industries perpetrate, since they are only economic with generous taxpayer handouts.

  Pew Environment Group (www.pewenvironment.org)

  The Pew Environment Group was set up with support from The Pew Charitable Trusts, which has long had an intense interest in the sea. It runs the well-known Pew Fellows Program in Marine Conservation, which supports people in mid-career who are dedicated to promoting greater protection for the oceans (I am lucky enough to be one). Under the tireless leadership of Josh Reichert, Pew has been a powerful advocate for the oceans, establishing the Pew Oceans Commission that reported on the state of the sea in the United States in 2003. Although the focus has traditionally been concentrated in America, increasingly the reach extends outward as it turns to solving problems that respect no borders. Efforts include campaigns to establish very large and highly protected areas, like the northwest Hawaiian Islands, British Indian Ocean Territory (Chagos Islands), and Australia’s Coral Sea. Among many other things, they are working hard to put in place strategies to protect sharks. The Pew Environment Group has given strong support to basic scientific research that can inform and underpin conservation.

  Rare (www.rareconservation.org)

  Rare is an organization that works internationally from the bottom up by promoting a stronger cultural and emotional connection between people and nature. I first came across them years ago when I was studying the effectiveness of marine reserves in St. Lucia. This Caribbean island was where it all began for Rare, with a passionate campaign to save the native parrot, then on the brink of extinction. The parrot was uniquely St. Lucian and the successful campaign to save it tapped into a growing sense of national identity and pride. Since then, Rare has rolled out this approach in more than fifty countries, training local conservation fellows to apply lessons learned from these efforts to achieve rapid and lasting benefits for the environment and thereby enhance quality of life for their communities. In recent years Rare has begun vigorous efforts to increase numbers and effectiveness of marine reserves in places that desperately need them, such as the Philippines.

  Sea Shepherd (www.seashepherd.org)

  This is the only organization in this list that I have not worked with or experienced personally in some capacity. But for those of you who prefer your conservation to be more confrontational, Sea Shepherd can probably not be bettered. Their mission is to protect wildlife at sea, and there is not much they won’t do to get between those intent on killing animals and their quarry. Their most high profile campaign has been against Japanese whaling in Antarctica, but they have also been active in many other places. Among dozens of campaigns, they have helped patrol the Galapágos Marine Reserve against shark poachers. They have tried to protect Taiji’s migrating dolphins (whose plight was brought to international attention by the movie The Cove) from slaughter in Japan. And for many years they have fought against Canada�
��s harp seal hunt.

  SeaWeb (www.seaweb.org)

  SeaWeb’s motto is “Leading voices for a healthy ocean.” High-quality, accurate scientific knowledge of the state of the sea forms the bedrock for all SeaWeb’s programs and campaigns. They take a unique approach to conservation, putting the latest understanding from communications science to work in their efforts to raise awareness of problems at sea, change mind-sets, and put in place measures to protect marine life. Its commitment to basic science has made SeaWeb a trusted source of information by those looking for the facts without the spin that is often imparted by those with agendas to pursue. I mentioned one of those information portals in Appendix 1—Kidsafe Seafood (www.kidsafeseafood.org)—which helps parents gain the health benefits of fish for their children while avoiding the toxic downside posed by compounds like mercury. Over the years I have benefited greatly from one of SeaWeb’s services to ocean professionals: a regular e-mail update on the latest scientific research (Marine Science Review: www.seaweb.org/science/MSRnewsletters/msr_archives.php). For those who want to see some of the issues I have covered in a more graphic way, SeaWeb runs a Marine Photobank (www.marinephotobank.org) that contains thousands of incredible photos from all over the world, donated by the photographers and available for use by the media.

  Rather than considering the corporate world an enemy, as some conservation bodies do, SeaWeb has sought to engage them, with considerable success. Its flagship program, Seafood Choices, has for years been building better relationships between the seafood industry and conservationists. To achieve this they have enlisted the help of celebrity chefs, restaurateurs, and captains of industry to speak out and encourage others to follow the path toward more sustainable fisheries. Their hugely popular annual “Seafood Summit” provides neutral ground at which conservation and consumption can meet and exchange ideas. SeaWeb’s work has broadened over the years from a focus on campaigns to protect species threatened by overfishing, such as swordfish and sturgeon (caviar) to tackling the threats posed by pollution and climate change. As a board member of SeaWeb since 2007, I know firsthand that the SeaWeb team works incredibly hard to foster greater understanding of the importance of the sea to us.

  Sylvia Earle Alliance—SEA (www.sylviaearlealliance.org)

  Sylvia Earle is the most eminent advocate for ocean conservation in the world. She has had a long and starred career as scientist, oceanographer, explorer, government appointee, and author. Although now in her seventies, she never scoffs at hard work and dedicates greater energy to conservation than most people half her age. She was awarded the TED Prize in 2009, which gives recipients to the chance to make a wish. Hers was that we “use all means at your disposal—Films! Expeditions! The Web! More!—to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas, ‘hope spots’ large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet.” The upshot has been dramatic. Sylvia has done a huge amount to raise awareness of the perils facing life in the sea among people who have significant resources or means to do something about them. She founded SEA as part of her TED Prize and has since raised millions of dollars for marine conservation.

  Wildaid (www.wildaid.org)

  Wildaid focuses its efforts on reducing demand for wildlife products (“when the buying stops, the killing can too”). It is one of the few conservation groups to have made serious inroads into the Chinese center of Asian seafood consumption. They are best known for their quirky and beautifully made infomercials that urge people to change their eating habits (such as shunning sharkfin soup in China or turtle eggs in Mexico). They enlist celebrities to carry these messages to a wide audience, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Richard Branson, and Chinese basketball ace Yao Ming.

  WWF (www.worldwildlife.org [United States], www.wwf.org.uk [UK], www.panda.org [international], and many other national offices)

  WWF (World Wildlife Fund in the United States and World Wide Fund for Nature everywhere else) celebrated its fiftieth year of conservation effort in 2011. It is a vast organization that now claims millions of members in more than a hundred countries of the world and has projects in many more. WWF works with partners all the way from village level in places like Africa through national governments to international bodies. It has long taken the view that it must work directly with governments and businesses to promote environmental protection, drawing criticism from those who consider some of these relationships too toxic to be pursued. However, through these initiatives they have often gained privileged access to high-level meetings and forums that have enabled them to score many landmark conservation successes. I served two terms on the national council of WWF-US and have been an ambassador for WWF-UK since 2009.

  Forgive me if I haven’t mentioned your favorite organization here. There are literally hundreds worldwide. I have concentrated on those working internationally in the above list so my apologies to all those excellent groups working to make things better nationally, like Canada’s Living Oceans Society, the Australian Conservation Foundation, the UK’s Marine Conservation Society, Mexico’s Communidad y Biodiversidad, all of whom I can vouch for personally, as well as countless more.

  Notes

  Prologue

  1. McClenachan, L., “Documenting Loss of Large Trophy Fish from the Florida Keys with Historical Photographs,” Conservation Biology 23 (2009): 636–43.

  Chapter 1: Four and a Half Billion Years

  1. Valley, J. W., “A Cool Early Earth?” Scientific American (2005): 58–65.

  2. We can date the timing of the Earth’s formation very precisely, to 4.567 billion years ago, based on the age of the earliest meteorites. Valley, J. W., “Early Earth,” Elements 2 (2006): 201–4.

  3. Sleep, N. H., et al., “Initiation of Clement Surface Conditions on the Earliest Earth,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98 (2001): 3666–72.

  4. Fedonkin, M. A., et al., The Rise of Animals: Evolution and Diversification of the Kingdom Animalia (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

  5. Strangely, it has been very hard to find evidence for higher and more energetic tides in the geological record. As Harvard professor Andrew Knoll put it to me, “Perhaps we don’t know what to look for.”

  6. Wilde, S. A., et al., “Evidence from Detrital Zircons for the Existence of Continental Crust and Oceans on the Earth 4.4 Gyr Ago,” Nature 409 (2001): 175–78.

  7. Drake, M. J., “Origin of Water in the Terrestrial Planets,” Meteoritics and Planetary Science 40 (2005): 519–27.

  8. Isotopes are variants of elements that have different atomic weights from the original because they contain different numbers of neutrons. They help us distinguish the origins of ocean water, since the isotopic composition of the historical source must be similar to that of present-day oceans.

  9. Hartogh, P., et al., “Ocean-like Water in the Jupiter-Family Comet 103P/Hartley 2,” Nature 478 (2011): 218–20.

  10. Schopf, T. J. M., Paleoceanography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).

  11. Koeberl, C., “Impact Processes on the Early Earth,” Elements 2 (2006): 211–16.

  12. Charette, M. A., and W. H. F. Smith, “The Volume of Earth’s Ocean,” Oceanography 23 (2010): 112–14.

  13. Hawkesworth, C. J., et al., “The Generation and Evolution of Continental Crust,” Journal of the Geological Society (London) 167 (2010): 229–48.

  14. Snelgrove, P. V. R., Discoveries of the Census of Marine Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  15. Nutman, A. P., “Antiquity of the Oceans and Continents,” Elements 2 (2006): 223–27.

  16. Hessen, D. O., “Solar Radiation and the Evolution of Life,” in E. Bjertness, ed., Solar Radiation and Human Health (Oslo: The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, 2008), pp. 123–36.

  17. Battistuzzi, F. U., et al., “A Genomic Timescale of Prokaryote Evolution: Insights into the Origin of Methanogenesis, Phototrophy, and the Colonization of Land,” BMC Evolutionary Biology 4 (2004): 44. d
oi:10.1186/1471-2148-4-44.

  18. Some of this warming probably came about through the splitting of methane in the upper atmosphere and the conversion of ethane, another powerful greenhouse gas. Haqq-Misra, J. D., et al., “A Revised, Hazy Methane Greenhouse for the Archean Earth,” Astrobiology 8 (2008): 1127–37.

  19. This lack of physical evidence means that the study of the earliest life is highly controversial and is constantly under review as new evidence emerges.

  20. Our best estimates suggest that the oceans of the deep past were tens to hundreds of times less productive than today.

  21. Canfield, D. E., et al., “Early Anaerobic Metabolisms,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 361 (2006): 1819–36.

  22. Canfield, D. E., “The Early History of Atmospheric Oxygen: Homage to Robert M. Garrels,” Annual Reviews of Earth and Planetary Science 33 (2005): 1–36.

  23. Buick, R., “When Did Oxygenic Photosynthesis Evolve?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 363 (2008): 2731–43.

  24. Anbar, A. D., et al., “A Whiff of Oxygen Before the Great Oxidation Event?” Science 317 (2007): 1903–6.

  25. Kopp, R. E., et al., “The Paleoproterozoic Snowball Earth: A Climate Disaster Triggered by the Evolution of Oxygenic Photosynthesis,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102 (2005): 11131–36.

  26. Williams, D. M., et al., “Low-Latitude Glaciation and Rapid Changes in the Earth’s Obliquity Explained by Obliquity-oblateness Feedback,” Nature 396 (1998): 453–55.

  27. Kappler, A. et al., “Deposition of Banded Iron Formations by Anoxygenic Phototrophic Fe(II)-Oxidising Bacteria,” Geology 33 (2005): 865–68.

  28. Anbar, A. D., and A. H. Knoll, “Proterozoic Ocean Chemistry and Evolution: A Bioinorganic Bridge?” Science 297 (2002): 1137–42. Sulfide is toxic to oxygen-producing cells, so they were excluded from deeper layers.

  29. The earliest oxygen users might have gained it from the breakdown of hydrogen peroxide. Dismukes, G. C., et al., “The Origin of Atmospheric Oxygen on Earth: The Innovation of Oxygenic Photosynthesis,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98 (2001): 2170–75.