Why not escape to Mars? Or leap back or forward in time?
Before the middle of this century, a few astronauts likely will be setting up housekeeping on the red planet, but they will have to take along a life-support system. Water is scarce, and it is the single nonnegotiable thing all life requires. The atmosphere on Mars is about 95 percent carbon dioxide and therefore lethal to humans (much like Earth’s atmosphere in her early years), the temperature averages around −55 degrees centigrade (−67 degrees Fahrenheit). Food, shelter, clothing? Better pack them along and, somehow, find water. Perversely, at the same time some are doing their utmost to make the red planet more like the blue one, a process called “terraforming,” we seem to be doing all we can to “Marsiform” Earth. Human actions here on the blue planet have caused the abundance and diversity of life, along with the potable fresh water supply, to decrease, while carbon dioxide is increasing.
Earthlings take for granted that the world is blue, embraced by an ocean that harbors most of the life on the planet, contains 97 percent of the water, drives climate and weather, stabilizes temperature, generates most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, absorbs much of the carbon dioxide, and otherwise tends to hold the planet steady—a friendly place in a universe of inhospitable options.
Owing to more than 2 billion years of microbial photosynthetic activity in the sea and several hundred million years of land-based photosynthesis, Earth’s atmosphere now is just right for humans—roughly 21 percent oxygen, 79 percent nitrogen, with trace gases, including just enough carbon dioxide to drive photosynthesis and the continuous production of oxygen and food. Even today, one kind of inconspicuous but enormously abundant sea-dwelling blue-green bacteria, Prochlorococcus, churns out 20 percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere, thereby supplying one in every five breaths we take. With other planktonic species, as well as seagrasses, mangroves, kelps, and thousands of other kinds of algae, ocean organisms do the heavy lifting in terms of taking up carbon dioxide and water via photosynthesis, producing sugar that drives great ocean food chains, and yielding atmospheric oxygen along the way. As much as 70 percent of the air we breathe is produced by underwater life.
Should you choose to go back a billion years on Earth, you would find a planet a lot like Mars except for the abundance of water. Life would be mostly microbial. No trees; no flowers or moss or ferns; no bees or bats or birds—a bleak place compared to the great diversity of life that gradually developed, each and every organism doing its part to shape the barren land and seascapes into an increasingly rich and complex living tapestry.
I have dreamed of being able to see the world as it was a hundred million years ago, to dive into a sea filled with sea stars, urchins, sponges, jellies, corals, seaweeds, sharks, horseshoe crabs, shrimp, and corals. There would be no dolphins or whales, but I might see large aquatic counterparts of terrestrial dinosaurs and giant crustaceans competing with sharks as top ocean predators. Think Jurassic Park in the sea!
Humans living on Earth 10,000 years ago were on the brink of an unusually favorable warming period, with massive Northern Hemisphere glaciers diminishing, sea levels rising, the land and sea filled with a rich assemblage of life, including many that served as a source of sustenance for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. During the previous 100,000 years, the ingredients were present for human prosperity, but there were challenging swings in climate, and societies were widely dispersed. While people were endowed with intelligence comparable to that of twenty-first-century humans, they lacked the benefits of thousands of generations of collective knowledge that have allowed subsequent societies to thrive.
People then, as now, shared space with plenty of intelligent animals. Dogs, cats, horses, bonobos, chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, whales, parrots, albatrosses, octopuses, and certain unusually crafty mantis shrimp come to mind. But none of that intelligent life formed the social bonds that led to the great civilizations humans have built by acquiring and sharing knowledge in ways that enabled succeeding generations to advance.
Two of my friends, Dr. Nancy Knowlton and Dr. Jeremy Jackson, both highly respected marine scientists, are affectionately known as the Doctors Doom and Gloom, and for good reasons. Keen observers, they have witnessed and documented a swift, sharp decline in the world’s ocean ecosystems. Some once-common species will likely be extinct soon, no matter what we do. Hundreds of “dead zones,” largely resulting from recent land-based pollution, plague coastal regions globally. Enormous “garbage patches” of plastic blight the sea, some sinking to the depths, some cast ashore in great windrows, all destined to be permanent evidence of our carelessness.
There are plenty of reasons for despair. The good news is that half of the coral reefs are still in good shape. Ten percent of the sharks, swordfish, bluefin tuna, grouper, snappers, halibut, and wild salmon are still swimming. Best of all, there is widespread awareness that protection of nature is not a luxury. Rather, it is the key to all past, present, and future prosperity. We may be the planet’s worst nightmare, but we are also its best hope.
In January 2012, I sat next to a sixty-one-year-old Laysan albatross, admiring the soft white feathers warming her most recent egg, a small oval of hope nestled in a grassy patch on Midway Island, about halfway across the Pacific Ocean. The artist Wyland, the scientist-photographer Susan Middleton, and I were working with National Park and Fish and Wildlife officials to document the status of the land and surrounding ocean—part of the 140,000-square-mile Papaha-naumokua-kea National Marine Monument designated by President George W. Bush in 2006. The albatross, named Wisdom, appeared serenely indifferent to our presence when we quietly approached to pay our respects. I marveled at the perils she had survived during six decades, including the first ten or so years before she found a lifetime mate. She learned to fly and navigate over thousands of miles to secure enough small fish and squid to sustain herself and, every other year or so, find her way back to this tiny island and small patch of grass where a voraciously hungry chick waited for special delivery meals.
Like those of us who have roots in the twentieth century and now live in the twenty-first, Wisdom has witnessed a time of unprecedented change. She may wonder about the confusing avalanche of plastic debris, the thousands of miles of drift nets and long lines that bring death to many seabirds, the noise and smells of traffic across the ocean and in the air, all of which she encounters during her months at sea. She may be aware that the world has changed in frightening ways in the course of her lifetime, but she cannot know why, and even if she did know, she would not know what to do to about it. We do know why, and we do know what can be done to secure an enduring place for ourselves within the natural systems that keep us alive.
Making peace with nature is the key.
Early in the twentieth century, President Theodore Roosevelt was among those who led a movement to protect natural areas, watersheds, landscapes, and places of cultural and historic interest as national parks—a concept that Ken Burns called “America’s best idea ever.” Other nations followed, nearly all adopting the concept, so that such parks now embrace a total area of about 14 percent of the land globally. Presently, less than 2 percent of the ocean is protected, but that soon may change.
In the past, the ocean has not required specific policies to be safe from human actions. Polar regions and the deep ocean have been protected by their inaccessibility, and returning to the same place in the sea has been more art than science until recent technologies made pinpoint navigation possible. Weather forecasting, knowledge of currents, tides, and temperature, and advanced communications now make all parts of the ocean safer than ever before for shipping, fishing, mining, finding and retrieving lost ships, and much more. Technologies as sophisticated as those used to access outer space are being applied to exploit the ocean’s deep inner space for oil, gas, minerals, and marine life.
Changing, too, are policies about ocean governance. Historically, property rights and boundaries—and thus protection—have been somewhat easier to
establish and manage on land than at sea. Far into the twentieth century, nations claimed jurisdiction over the ocean from the shoreline to just 3 nautical miles—the range of a cannon shot in the 1600s. The Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius in 1609 articulated the widely adopted concept of “freedom of the seas” in international waters as “the common heritage of mankind,” with peaceful navigation and open access for one and all to fish and extract minerals and other assets. Even today, nearly half the Earth—the “high seas”—is regarded as a largely unregulated global commons, used by all, protected by none.
Over the years, military conflicts, disputes over fishing rights, and other questions of national interest have led to various international treaties and policies, including those that extend national claims over an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), 200 nautical miles out from a country’s coastline. The concept began to take hold in the 1940s and became official as a part of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982. Although, as of 2012, the United States remains the only industrialized Western nation that has not ratified the Law of the Sea Treaty, this country does claim and respect the EEZ provision. The landmass of the United States covers more than 3.5 million square miles, but the EEZ embraces more than 7 million, the largest square mileage of any nation, essentially doubling the size of the country. Because France has jurisdiction over so many islands around the world, that country is second only to the United States in the size of her submerged claims. Australia, surrounded by ocean, has more submerged area under its jurisdiction than land above.
In the mid-1970s, Australia established the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, and the United States gave sanctuary status to the historic shipwreck Monitor: the first of more than 5,000 ocean areas that have since been designated around the world. Most are small, with only a tiny fraction of 1 percent of all the planet’s waters set aside for the protection of marine life. This is far short of the goal of 30 percent we were supposed to reach by 2012, a goal set by the World Parks Congress in Durban, South Africa, in 2003. And clearly it is not enough to maintain the vital functions the ocean delivers to us for “free”—the basic life support that heretofore we have taken for granted.
In 2009, in response to being awarded a TED Prize—$100,000 and the chance to make a wish big enough to “change the world”—I suggested the following: “I wish you would use all means at your disposal—Films! Expeditions! The web! New submarines!—to create a campaign 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. How much is large enough? Some say 10 percent, some say 30 percent. You decide: How much of your heart do you want to protect? Whatever it is, a fraction of one percent is not enough.”
At the rate we’ve been going, it will be near the end of the century before we can attain the 30 percent goal targeted by the World Parks Congress. All the same, there is a growing awareness that our fate and the ocean’s are closely linked. If the ocean is in trouble, so are we. It is, and we are. But there are reasons to be optimistic.
A global conference in Dubai in December 2011 focused attention on “blue carbon,” acknowledging the important role the ocean has in taking carbon dioxide from the air—and the urgent need for greater ocean protection globally. The World Economic Forum in Davos in 2012 for the first time devoted several major sessions to critical ocean issues, and soon thereafter the British publication The Economist sponsored a World Oceans Summit in Singapore that brought together leaders of industry, science, technology, and conservation, with an emphasis on the connections between human prosperity and healthy ocean systems.
Ocean issues were prominently on the agenda of the 170 leaders who gathered at the Rio+20 conference in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012, but one of the most pressing topics—developing a process to address the governance of the “high seas”—was tabled for two years. “No one—and everyone—owns the high seas,” says Ghislaine Maxwell, founder of the TerraMar Project, a name given to the vast blue global commons. She is encouraging people to sign up for virtual citizenship on the TerraMar website in order to provide a collective voice on behalf of half of the planet.
Dozens of scientists have worked together to produce a sobering report, the Ocean Health Index, which was released in the summer of 2012 and offers a comprehensive system for measuring and monitoring the condition of the world’s coastal waters, country by country. Topics such as fisheries, tourism, biodiversity, carbon storage, and economic well-being were considered, and scores were assigned from low to high on a scale of 0 to 100. The lowest ranked is Sierra Leone (36); the highest (86) is Jarvis Island, in the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. The global score, 60, suggests cause for hope, yet it also demonstrates an urgent need for improvement.
Since my TED wish in 2009, several nations have shown leadership in increasing ocean care. The tone was set in 2006 by two presidents: George W. Bush, who designated major areas in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands and the western Pacific, and Anote Tong, leader of the Pacific island republic of Kiribati, who declared protection that year and in 2008 for 158,000 square miles of ocean surrounding the nation’s thirty-three equatorial atolls and islands. Another island nation, the United Kingdom, followed in 2010 with what presently is the world’s largest fully protected marine reserve: 225,810 square miles around the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Australia will soon surpass this when it implements a recently announced plan to develop a network of marine reserves covering about one-third of the country’s territorial waters. The area will include 386,000 square miles of the Coral Sea bordering the Great Barrier Reef. New Caledonia has announced its intention to create a marine park nearly half the size of India—more than half a million square miles of ocean.
Small island nations—Fiji, Palau, the Marshall Islands, the Gilberts, the Maldives, the Seychelles, the Bahamas, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, and dozens of others—have quite suddenly become “large ocean nations,” with a major voice in the politics of ocean management. Some have aligned with Japanese interests in continued exploitation of whales, and many have sold licenses to take fish and minerals for cash and economic assistance. But there is a growing consciousness that protecting the ocean can yield greater and more enduring financial and social benefits than traditional exploitation.
Late in August 2012, I witnessed leaders from sixteen Pacific Island nations gather in the Cook Islands for their forty-third annual meeting to discuss topics of mutual concern, including sea-level rise, the decline of fishing, and the growing dependence on imported fossil fuels and on revenues from tourism. The Cook Islands has a population of 20,000 people who live on fifteen islands that together have a landmass that is slightly larger than that of Washington, D.C. Their ocean mass, however, occupies more than a million square miles. In late August, Henry Puna, the charismatic prime minister of that country, announced the creation of what will soon be the world’s largest marine park: 424,000 square miles encompassing most of the southern Cook Islands, an area bigger than France and Germany. He observed, “The marine park will provide the necessary framework to promote sustainable development by balancing economic growth interests such as tourism, fishing, and deep sea mining with conserving core biodiversity in the ocean [. . .] a contribution from the Cook Islands to the well-being of not only our peoples, but also of humanity.”
Prior to the meeting of island leaders, I accompanied a small group from Conservation International (CI) for several days of diving around Aitutaki, one of the jewel-like atolls of the Cook Islands. We were thrilled with our repeated encounters with a Napoleon wrasse, a spectacularly ornamented fish as large as the goliath grouper that I had recently observed observing me in the Florida Keys. Valued in Asian markets as a delicacy (especially their large lips), the once-common species is now extremely rare. We were also pleased but sad to see a shark, just one, in a part of the ocean that should have had hundreds. My dive buddy, Greg Stone, the leader of CI’s
marine program and an ocean policy strategist, has worked closely with President Tong, Prime Minister Puna, and other island leaders to foster a grand vision for an integrated “oceanscape,” involving the cooperation of all the island-nations in the region to agree on measures needed to protect their shared ocean assets. The presence or absence of sharks and other large fish is a good indicator of reef productivity. “Healthy reefs need sharks, and sharks need healthy reefs,” Greg noted. “Both are worth more alive than dead.”
Linking “natural capital”—land and sea—to human prosperity and life itself is an idea whose time has come too late to save Steller’s sea cows, Caribbean monk seals, the great auks, and gray whales in the Atlantic Ocean; and it may be too late for many species and systems now on the edge of oblivion. But it is not too late to restore some of the world’s damaged reefs, mangroves, and marshes, and to make the blue planet safer, healthier, and more resilient. Lucky us: we are residents of Earth, the sweetest place in the universe at this, the sweetest time.
JOHN PAVLUS
Machines of the Infinite
FROM Scientific American
ON A SNOWY day in Princeton, New Jersey, in March 1956, a short, owlish-looking man named Kurt Gödel wrote his last letter to a dying friend. Gödel addressed John von Neumann formally even though the two had known each other for decades as colleagues at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Both men were mathematical geniuses, instrumental in establishing the United States’ scientific and military supremacy in the years after World War II. Now, however, von Neumann had cancer, and there was little that even a genius like Gödel could do except express a few overoptimistic pleasantries and then change the subject:
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013 Page 10
