P-I Focus: Crisis in the Deep Blue

After a daring, 900-mile chase across the Bering Sea, the captain of the Sherman received permission to open fire if necessary. The crew of the Coast Guard cutter swiftly uncovered its machine guns and began manning battle stations.

The target was not a boat full of terrorists or drug smugglers. It was the Arctic Wind, a Korean-owned, Russian-crewed, Honduras- registered fishing boat that had been using illegal, 8-mile-long drift nets in American waters off the coast of Alaska. When the Sherman finally got serious, the Arctic Wind quickly backed down and let the Coast Guard seize its illegal catch.

This incident illustrates several problems afflicting the ocean. The Arctic Wind was flying under a flag of convenience that provided little if no oversight. Its owners viewed the ocean as a vast commons from which they could take whatever they wanted. And the Arctic Wind's nets contained much bycatch -- dead sharks, puffins, albatross, porpoises -- in addition to the illegal salmon.

Like the owners of the Arctic Wind, most humans have long viewed the oceans' bounty as limitless and thought of the oceans' capacity to absorb waste as infinite. Lord Byron expressed the sentiment two hundred years ago:

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean -- roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin -- his control
Stops with the shore.

But the poet never encountered rockhopper gear, global positioning systems or persistent organic pollutants. Today, the shore no longer provides a meaningful boundary. In January 1998, 1,600 marine scientists, fishery biologists and oceanographers authored a joint statement that the oceans are in serious trouble and that trouble is mostly traceable to human abuse.

Congress subsequently created yet another commission to advise it what to do about the ocean's failing health. The Commission on Ocean Policy, which has held hearings all over the country, was in Seattle this month, listening to fishing interests, shipping executives, environmentalists, coastal officials, tribes, scholars and others. Although witnesses sometimes disagreed sharply about the best solutions, they displayed a remarkable consensus on the nature of the problems.

Wild fisheries are shrinking

Several salmon and steelhead populations were recently listed as threatened or endangered in the Pacific Northwest. Similar collapses have affected many other major fisheries, from New England cod to Peruvian anchovies. In recent years, the global wild fish catch has fallen in all but two of the world's 15 major marine fishing regions.

This bleak situation has been masked by two factors that have keep total worldwide fish "tonnage" relatively stable. From the mid-1980s to 2000, aquaculture production grew from 7 million metric tons to 36 million metric tons. Second, fishers are turning to smaller, less valuable fish (pilchard, mackerel, pollock, dogfish, monkfish and other species) that once were considered trash. They are fishing their way down the food chain; the South Pacific catch of orange roughy fell 70 percent in six years.

Fish are at the top of the marine policy agenda because they are an important part of human diets and regional economies. Worldwide, humans obtain more of their animal protein from fish than either beef or pork.

Nearly 1 billion people in Asia, island states and coastal Africa get most of their animal protein from fish. They are having increasing difficulty competing for fish in a global economic marketplace where most of the world's commercial catch -- 83 percent by value -- is exported to industrial countries.

Trawlers are "clear-cutting"

Bottom trawling is analogous to clear-cutting ancient forests: Both activities completely destroy complex, stable ecosystems. While you are reading this, European trawlers are mindlessly obliterating 4,500-year-old cold water corals off the coasts of Scotland, Ireland and Norway. Norway has already lost more than half its coral.

There are, however, two important differences between trawling and clear-cutting. First, bottom trawling is invisible to anyone who is not hundreds of yards under the surface of the ocean. As the rock group America sang in "A Horse with No Name," "The ocean is a desert with its life underground, and the perfect disguise above." There are no protesters camping out on the ocean floor or chaining themselves to trawlers.

Second, the scope of bottom trawling is vastly greater than that of clear-cutting. Each year, trawling disrupts 150 times as much area as is clear-cut around the world. Advances in fishing technology have essentially eliminated what were once de facto refuges from trawling.

A flood of pollution

A vast flood of fertilizer, feed-lot run-off, pesticides and industrial pollutants courses down virtually every river in the world. Most of the world's population and most of the biggest cities are on coastlines, where sewage, oil, heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, artificial hormones and other biologically disruptive substances flow directly into the sea.

In a particularly dramatic example, the drainage basin of the Mississippi River touches nearly every state from the Rockies to the Appalachians. The flood of pollution has created a "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico that, at its summer peak, is about the size of New Jersey. With the dead zone utterly devoid of oxygen, anything living in this huge region must flee or die.

If an 8,000-square-mile "dead zone" popped up on land, it would get fixed in a year. But there is no similar level of urgency for problems at sea.

Climate change

Climate change is the issue the oil industry most wants to forget. In the Bush administration, the Ocean Commission will be under pressure not to mention global warming. But trying to tackle ocean issues while ignoring climate change is like discussing urban design without mentioning the automobile.

At some point, global warming will shut down the North Atlantic Current. Historically, this shutdown has taken about 10 years to accomplish, and millennia to reverse. It renders much of Europe uninhabitable.

At some point, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will collapse, raising all the world's oceans 16 feet to 20 feet. The last time this ice sheet disappeared, the world was 4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today. Scientists believe the Earth's temperature could increase by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit this century.

Climate change has already been tied to widespread death of coral reefs and more intense tropical hurricanes. In the Northwest, a decline in winter snowpack will likely to have traumatic consequences for Pacific salmon.

The future of the world's oceans is intimately bound up with the future of the world's climate.

The list of problems goes on and on. A few solutions enjoy broad support.

Submerged lands under U.S. jurisdiction make up more than 4.4 million square miles, more than the nation's land area. From Maine to Guam, from Alaska to Puerto Rico, these regions encompass far more marine diversity than those of any other nation. The time is ripe to create a system of marine reserves that fully protect rich samples of all the major marine ecosystems. The reserves should be of sufficient size to allow the recovery and permanent protection of broad swaths of biological diversity, providing refuge for species throughout their life cycles. These marine reserves should enjoy a degree of enforcement and protection similar to that accorded our national parks.

Almost inevitably, fishing will shift from a "hunting and gathering" industry to one dominated by aquaculture. Already, fish farms produce about 40 percent as much tonnage as all commercial fishing vessels. But these "farms" bring potential perils as well as benefits.

Most international attention has been focused on the destruction of fragile, coastal ecosystems in tropical countries. However, salmon farming in Cascadia is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the global industry. The proposed lifting of a Canadian moratorium on new installations could lead to hundreds of new fish farms between Vancouver Island and southeast Alaska over the next few years.

Escaping exotic Atlantic salmon and the introduction of diseases into pristine waters will have a proven detrimental effect on wild Pacific salmon stocks.

It is reasonable to demand that pens be designed so that non-native fish cannot possibly escape, even during storms. Moreover, fish farms must be required to treat all their sewage, which can be as much as is produced by a small city.

Agencies with marine responsibility are scattered all over the place. They should be consolidated into one department with a clear mandate. Ocean advocates tend to prefer a new Department of Oceans. Others prefer that the Interior Department have a marine division that parallels its authority over public lands. There is widespread agreement that the current placement of ocean science and fisheries management in the Department of Commerce has worked poorly.

For 3 billion years, all life on Earth was marine. Like other terrestrial critters, we humans still carry the sea with us. Our tears, our sweat and our blood recapitulate our salty origins.

As might be expected after so long, the sea is incredibly diverse. For example, 32 of the 33 animal phyla are found in marine habitats -- only insects are missing. Fifteen of these are exclusively marine phyla, and five more are predominantly marine.

Contemplating this astonishing variety -- much of it under serious stress -- beneath the surface of the ocean offers a new dimension and new urgency to Aldo Leopold's famous observation in A Sand Country Almanac: "We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations, that men are only fellow voyagers with other creatures.... This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship ... a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise."

Denis Hayes is president of the Bullitt Foundation and international chairman of the Earth Day Network. The opinions in this article represent only those of the author.

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