The Return of Pristine Seas and Life-Filled Oceans
How can we turn our outdated perspective of the sea around to fit the 21st century?
by Deborah Rowan Wright for the World Ocean Forum
Part One of a Three-Part Series
“…Conservation NGOs, fishing communities, scientists, concerned citizens, school kids, writers, film-makers, and journalists are dedicating huge amounts of time and effort in all kinds of ways to safeguard oceans and marine life. Meanwhile corporate exploitation continues to empty and pollute waters, and frequently ruins undersea and coastal habitats the world over — as though it is the natural order of things. It’s a back-to-front reality that is neither logical nor just.”
As many of us know, the world’s oceans face serious threats on many fronts: excessive and destructive commercial fishing; widespread chemical and plastic pollution; ocean acidification; coral bleaching; disappearing ice and rising sea levels; many undersea and coastal habitats destroyed; bottom trawling releasing vast quantities of sediment-captured CO2; wildlife killed by discarded fishing gear; 90 percent of large predatory fish gone; corruption and labor exploitation in the fishing and shipping industries; distress and death to animals from underwater noise caused by shipping, sonar, construction, oil and gas exploration and mining. These are the shameful truths of the sea — brutal, immoral and some say suicidal, given that all life on Earth is ultimately dependent on healthy and life-rich oceans. Together they are an unmistakable red flag telling us the old paradigm, the incumbent world-view — however you call our entire approach to the sea — doesn’t work.
Commerce and industry have long assumed the right to exploit and profit from the living and mineral riches of the sea, with little concern for the damage they cause in the process. The precedent was set centuries ago and is so firmly established that we’re almost unaware of it. The grass is green; there are seven days in a week; we can exploit the sea as we please — unencumbered.
But regarding the sea as an inexhaustible larder for humankind or as an everlasting cash cow for corporate coffers doesn’t serve us or the natural world. Perhaps it wasn’t apparent when the human population was a fraction of today’s, before the industrial revolution rocketed the demand for energy and raw materials, and when fishing was relatively small-scale. But with industrialization came larger diesel-powered ships, mechanized winches, nets so large as to be measured in miles, refrigerated storage, and sonar and satellite technology to find whatever it is you seek. Ships could go farther and farther into distant waters to catch more and more fish, delve into deeper and deeper waters for gas, oil and minerals, and transport millions of tons of cargo across the globe (today, an estimated 90 percent of traded goods are shipped). Ocean damage accelerated and spread, and many wildlife populations plummeted, some to the brink of extinction.
Despite decades of clamoring for preventative and protective action from scientists and conservationists, most governments have done far too little to tackle the crisis at sea. No matter how persuasive the evidence is, for the most part, the state prefers to prioritize the economic interests of marine industries. This is the norm; this is how it works in most of the sea, the world over — commercial interests come first; nature comes second, or third, or not at all. It’s no wonder, when the political and economic culture of the day is founded on a world-view that consistently values money more than it values life.
All of that leaves conservation NGOs, fishing communities, scientists, concerned citizens, school kids, writers, film-makers, and journalists dedicating huge amounts of time and effort in all kinds of ways to safeguard oceans and marine life. Meanwhile corporate exploitation continues to empty and pollute waters, and frequently ruins undersea and coastal habitats the world over — as though it is the natural order of things. It’s a back-to-front reality that is neither logical nor just.
Grassroots counter-offensive
There are hundreds of counteractive strategies and initiatives already protecting marine environments, and many are very successful.
Community-based marine conservation, also called locally led marine management, is a citizen-driven method of safeguarding marine habitats which emerged in Fiji in the 1990s. As in most small island states, many Fijians are heavily dependent on marine resources for food and making a living, but by the early 1990s, despite the postcard scenery, it was clear that all was not well in this ocean paradise.
Years of unrestrained commercial fishing, of pollution, and of removing live corals and tropical fish for the aquarium market had left much of Fiji’s seas and their wildlife in decline.
People in the village of Ucunivanua on Fiji’s largest island, Viti Levu, decided to take action. They closed off sixty acres of nearby mudflats and sea-grass beds for three years, hoping that the clam population would rebound and larvae would spread to seed and repopulate areas beyond.
It was Fiji’s first locally managed marine area (LMMA) and the difference it made was dramatic. Within seven years, clam populations increased twenty four times over. Not only were there more clams to eat, the village prospered with higher incomes from selling the surplus. Populations of other species rebounded as well. The notion that ‘experts’ — scientists, managers, and politicians — know best how to solve problems was debunked. News of the clam experiment reached other villages and prompted them to follow suit, triggering a rippling revolution, with hundreds more recovery areas being created by communities all around the Fijian coasts.
Locally-led marine management inspires and motivates people. They see how quickly dwindling sea life populations can recover, they have the satisfaction of taking control and deciding how to use natural resources in a way that suits them best, and they see the benefits of cooperative decision making.
There are now thousands of similar projects running in island nations and coastal communities all over the South Pacific and far beyond. The movement has reached Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, the Philippines, and right across the Southern Hemisphere from India to Kenya, Mozambique, and Madagascar, as far as South America, Central America through to Mexico and Canada, and from North Africa to Europe.
Marine Protected Areas
In contrast to community-driven action, the most favored top-down ocean conservation strategy is to establish Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and Marine Reserves (with a higher level of protection). When left undisturbed, damaged habitats regenerate and depleted populations of wildlife bounce back. As well as the ecological benefits, they bring economic and social advantages for nearby communities. An upsurge of sea life spilling over the boundaries boosts the catches of fisheries in adjacent waters. In time, everything and everybody wins. Thousands of protected areas of ocean have been designated around the world, offering some degree of sanctuary for marine life, including a number of very large MPAs such as those in remote regions of the Pacific and south Atlantic.
There are a few downsides to this method of fixing broken oceans though. Many MPAs are too small or too detached to be effective, or they may have only seasonal closures. Some are ‘protected areas’ in name only and provide no more respite than the unprotected sea. It could be that regulations aren’t monitored and enforced, or there’s no management plan in place. It could also be that restrictions are so minimal that they make no real difference. A bewildering example is that bottom-trawling is permitted in 98 percent of the UK’s off-shore marine protected areas.
The best protected areas reconcile the need to safeguard nature with people’s need to use marine resources. Striking the balance between protection and exploitation means that well-managed protected areas provide the working model for how to keep seas loaded with life.
Is this the best way to help oceans thrive: designate more marine protected areas and reserves? The international, cross-sector campaign 30 x 30: A Blueprint for Ocean Protection has raised the target (which was initially 10, then 20 percent) and aims for 30 percent of the global ocean to be protected by 2030. This will be a momentous step forward when it is reached. And yet, I have misgivings. There is something about the strategy which doesn’t hold up.
Undeniably, creating more protected areas is hugely beneficial, but this approach isn’t confronting the existential threat to the oceans. Patch protection doesn’t put a stop to irresponsible over-exploitation — it just moves somewhere else. The cruelty and destruction can continue in the rest of the global ocean — in most of it — in the remaining 70 percent. The paradigm of plunder is dented, but it still rules.
Can we turn around our outdated perspective of the sea to fit the 21st century? To value nature’s riches more than financial or material riches? Everything we have to do with the sea will then be based on a simple universal principle: to safeguard all of the sea and use all of it responsibly. In time, thousands of species of fish, invertebrates, seaweeds, corals and sponges, crabs and lobsters, sharks, rays and octopuses, seals, turtles, dolphins, whales, seabirds — in short, a riot of life — will return.
The oceans will still be fished, cargo shipped across them, jobs will continue, and profits will still be made — but only in rational, responsible, non-destructive ways. Instead of havens of safe water within raided oceans, there will be areas of responsible use within healthy oceans. We’ll be creating Marine Commercial Areas instead of Marine Protected Areas. In simple terms, it’s time to ditch the paradigm of plunder and protect the whole lot.
Sounds idealistic, or improbable? Maybe, and yet the essential foundations to make it happen already exist. Watch this space to find out how.
Part two available here.
Deborah Rowan Wright is an independent researcher who writes about marine conservation. She has worked with the UK NGOs Whale & Dolphin Conservation, Friends of the Earth, and Marinet. Her work on marine renewable energy, ocean governance reform, and public-trust law has been published by the International Whaling Commission and the Ecologist, among others. In 2020, her book Future Sea: How to Rescue and Protect the World’s Oceans was published by the University of Chicago Press and it is receiving many excellent editorial reviews.
Reprinted with permission from Future Sea: How to Rescue and Protect the World’s Oceans by Deborah Rowan Wright, published by The University of Chicago Press. © 2020 by Deborah Rowan Wright. All rights reserved.
To learn more, find Future Sea: How to rescue and protect the world’s oceans wherever you purchase books.
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