2977. The Last of the Ocean Wilderness

By Kendall Jones and James Watson, Scientific American, Jully 26, 2018

The ocean covers more than 70 percent of our planet, an area of nearly 140 million square miles. It is so immense that explorers once thought there was no way to cross it. Once our ships were advanced enough to do so, naturalists then thought it impossible for humans to ever exhaust fisheries or drive marine species to extinction.

How we have proved them wrong.

Commercial fishing now covers an area four times that of agriculture and much of this has been completely unsustainable. We have depleted 90 percent of important species. Large fish have been harvested so heavily that they have been virtually wiped out in many places. Indeed, studying coral reefs today has been compared to trying to understand the Serengeti by studying termites and locusts while ignoring the wildebeest and lions.

But surely, given that humans don’t live on the ocean and we need specialized ships to go far beyond the coast, there must still be immense areas that are untouched.

That is incorrect. In a study just published in Current Biology, we used fine-scale global data on 19 human stressors to the ocean—including commercial shipping, sediment runoff, and several types of fishing—to show that Earth’s “marine wilderness” is dwindling. Just 13 percent of the ocean remains as wilderness and in coastal regions, where human activities are most intense, there is almost no wilderness left at all. Of the roughly 21 million square miles of marine wilderness remaining, almost all is found in the Arctic and Antarctic, or around remote Pacific island nations with low populations.

These marine wilderness areas are home to unparalleled levels of marine life, sustaining large predators and high levels of genetic diversity. Their lack of human impacts can also make them highly resilient to rising sea temperatures and coral bleaching—stressors that cannot be halted without globally coordinated efforts to reduce emissions.

In an era of widespread marine biodiversity loss, wilderness areas also act like a window into the past, revealing what the ocean looked like before overfishing and pollution took their toll. This is crucial information for marine conservation. If we are to restore degraded areas to their former state, we need to know what to aim for.

Despite being irreplaceable and increasingly threatened, most wilderness remains unprotected. This means it could be lost at any time, as improvements in technology allow us to fish deeper and ship further than ever before. Thanks to a warming climate, even places that were once safe due to year-round ice cover are now open to fishing and shipping.

This lack of protection is largely due to international environmental policies failing to recognize the unique values of wilderness, instead focusing on saving at-risk ecosystems and avoiding extinctions. This is like a government using its entire health budget on emergency heart surgery, without pre-emptive policies encouraging exercise to decrease the risk of heart attacks occurring in the first place.

If Earth’s marine biodiversity is to be preserved in perpetuity, it is time for conservation to focus not only on the emergency room but also on preventative health measures.

This paper comes with a plea. As we develop international conservation agreements, it is crucial that we recognize the unique values of wilderness and sets targets for its retention.

Without such targets, wilderness areas will likely be lost forever—something President Lyndon B. Johnson urged us to avoid when he signed the American Wilderness Act in 1964. “If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt,” observed Johnson, “we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning.”

1722. Where Have All the Cod Gone?

By W. Jeffrey Bolster, The New York Times, January 1, 2015

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — IN November, regulators from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shut down recreational and commercial cod fishing in the Gulf of Maine, that enchanting arm of the coastal sea stretching east-northeast from Cape Cod. 
They did not have much choice: Federal law requires action to rebuild fish stocks when they are depleted, and recent surveys revealed cod populations to be at record lows, despite decades of regulations intended to restore them.

It’s easy to imagine this recent drop in the cod population as a new phenomenon — a result, perhaps, of global warming, or some combination of climate change and overfishing by giant steel ships armed with electronic fish-finders and precise GPS navigation systems. And it’s just as easy to imagine that, after a season or two of belt-tightening, fish populations will rebound — it is, after all, a strategy that state and federal regulators have pursued for decades.

In fact, humans have been affecting the Atlantic’s fish stocks for centuries, beginning with technology so simple that people today would not even consider it “technology.” Forgetting that history, we opt for short-term fixes, which only compound the problem.

The fishery resources of the western Atlantic once seemed virtually limitless, with fish supposedly as numerous as grains of sand in the Sahara. And yet the current emergency effort to restore cod populations is simply the latest chapter in a 150-year saga in which fishermen, scientists, industrialists and politicians have consistently confronted emptier nets and fewer fish.

As early as the 1850s, fishermen from Maine and Massachusetts began to pester their governments to do something about declining cod catches. Those men fished with hooks and lines from small wooden sailboats and rowboats. Fearing “the material injury of the codfishing interests of this state” by increased fishing for menhaden, a critical forage fish for cod, fishermen from Gouldsboro, Me., implored the Legislature in 1857 to limit menhaden hauls.

Yet annual cod landings in the Gulf of Maine continued to slide, from about 70,000 metric tons in 1861 to about 54,000 metric tons in 1880, to about 20,000 tons in the 1920s, to just a few thousand metric tons in recent years. There have been a few upticks along the way, such as one bumper year in the mid-1980s when the cod catch reached 25,000 tons (due, in part, to an unnecessarily large expansion of the fishing fleet), but for the most part the trend has been noticeably downward since the era of the Civil War. There have been plenty of warnings along the way. Maine’s fishery commissioner, Edwin W. Gould, spoke out plainly in 1892. “It is the same old story,” he said. “The buffalo is gone; the whale is disappearing; the seal fishery is threatened with destruction.” For Mr. Gould, the path forward was clear: “Fish need protection.”

In July 1914, after more than 40 years of reports on declining fishery resources by the United States Fish Commission and state fish commissions, The New York Times ran an article forecasting disaster. “Extermination Threatens American Sea Fishes — Cost to Consumer Has Risen between 10 and 600 Per Cent Because of Decrease in Supply.”

But that was right before a technological revolution in the fisheries. Sails and oars and hooks and lines were about to be replaced by steam and diesel engines, and massive nets dragged along the bottom that snared every fish in their path. Decades of well-founded concerns about depletion were overwhelmed by an avalanche of cheap fish. The new generation of draggers could fish faster, harder and deeper for the few fish that remained. Fishermen breathed a sigh of relief.

Twentieth-century cod populations, ravaged by draggers’ efficiency, declined further. In 1954 a fisheries economist from Boston charged fishing interests with continuing “to exploit recklessly the limited self-renewing stocks of these species.” That was just before the first factory-equipped freezer-trawler arrived at the prime fishing waters around the Grand Banks off Newfoundland from Europe. The size of an ocean liner, it could scoop up everything in its wake. Those ships made the steam-powered draggers from 1914 look positively quaint. And they caught lots of fish.

Overfishing has been the norm for a very long time, but the market has masked the mess in two fundamental ways. At every step fishermen confronting declining catches developed gear that fished more intensively, taking a larger percentage of the fewer fish that remained. Such a strategy was clearly not sustainable. Meanwhile, fishermen continued to earn enough to make fishing worthwhile, even if many encouraged their sons to pursue other careers because there would be little future in fishing. The Gulf of Maine cod stocks today are probably only a fraction of 1 percent of what they were during George Washington’s presidency.

If there is any lesson in this story of large-scale, long-term environmental degradation, it is not that fishermen were (or are) to blame, or that scientists were (or are) to blame, or that politicians were (or are) to blame. The system was (and is) to blame. Our system of exploiting nature’s resources, with its checks and balances, its desire for prosperity and security, its willingness to honor a multiplicity of voices, and its changing sense of “normal” is insufficiently nimble to stop the desecration of commonly held resources on which the long-term good of everyone depends.

The recent ban on cod fishing in the Gulf of Maine was an important step toward restoration, though clearly marine systems are very complex and subject to many variables. Considering that ban in light of history, however, is crucial. Historical perspectives provide a vital sense of scale for the sobering restoration challenges we face.

The fisheries story, however, also provides a heading into the future, revealing as it does the tragic consequences of decision makers’ unwillingness to steer a precautionary course in the face of environmental uncertainties. At every step of the way, decisions could have been made to exploit fish stocks more sustainably. That’s a tale worth pondering.