We should mine the sea's last big gift

By Liza Field

06/24/2008

--Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Each June, sea-loving Americans begin to flow shoreward like rivers, seeking from the coast those treasures no other environment can give.

The raucous cry of gulls. The warm fish-rot air, switching with cool salt winds. Flumes of pink sunrise over the waves. Night swims among the starry phosphorus. These images remain perennially in the brine of our blood, even if we return home with nothing more than a sunburn.

More tangibly, the sea has given humankind food, inland rains, a vast coolant to balance Earth's climate, and unpaved, open roadways to foreign lands. The very life and history of humankind has been a "gift from the sea."

Today, we're waking up to the stunning fact that our ocean's life is itself imperiled. Rising temperatures, pollution, acidification, the effects of cruise and cargo ships, even inland spills of plastic pellets have taken a toll on everything from phytoplankton to shellfish, sea turtles to birds, whales to wetlands.

Ninety years of industrial-scale overfishing have meanwhile led to what biologists are calling an ecological meltdown, dismantling the ocean's food chains. Cod, blue fin, haddock, mackerel, red snapper, whale and shark-once abundant in our seas-are among those whose numbers have plummeted.

Their loss leads to others. As many shark species have dwindled to 1 percent of their former populations along the Atlantic coast, the rays and skates they once fed on are flourishing, consuming clams and scallops toward extinction.

Wasteful harvesting methods globally contribute to these declines. The practice of "finning"-slicing off sharks' pectoral and dorsal fins for soup ingredients-wastes 40 million of these creatures per year. "Bycatch," the unwanted species caught by the fishing industry worldwide, comprises over 16 billion pounds of fish per year, along with numerous seabirds, turtles and marine mammals.

Reading up on these losses, as beach season opens, has eliminated "seafood" from the gift list I used to take to the sea. Canadian food journalist Taras Grescoe, author of Bottomfeeder, articulates it well. In his overview of our role in the demise of ocean life, Grescoe explains his own reduced appetite for seafood, reasoning, "I would get no pleasure from eating a nearly extinct songbird. For me, a pleasure that diminishes the experience of everybody else on Earth is no pleasure at all."

For the same reason, I can't stomach the notion of further imperiling our coastal waters with offshore drilling, simply to save human beings a scant few pennies (if even that much) at the gas pump.

It's hard to find joy in taking anything the sea can no longer sustainably give. Yet facing the overwhelming mess we've made of our oceans, it's clear we still need something from the sea to help us navigate this confusing dilemma-among many others. In fact, that something is the one remaining resource our commercial age has under-harvested: wisdom.

Earlier peoples received this resource in abundance from the sea. As a society that has become good at taking, perhaps we have much to learn from the oceans who have known, through the ages, how to give. Here are a few sea pearls emerging into view from the grit of our problems.

• Pace. To save marine life, biologists say, the human world must slow down-our inland development, wasteful fishing methods, consumption, even cargo shipping-to the speed of life. The ocean teaches slowness, and it is her slow creatures-like the right whales, vulnerable to ship strikes-who suffer from human haste. While the Bush Administration has dallied for years to enact recommended ship speed limits, our scant Right Whale population remains in decline.

• Life. Complicit in human speed today is our misconception that "time is money." Immediate (not longterm) economic gain is the reason we hesitate to slow down ships or create marine protections that could save ocean species. But time isn't money; time is life. And since life is not a commodity, but a gift we can't create, it isn't ours to destroy for short-term gain. Nor would that gain be viable, as our oceans' predicament makes clear, since the human economy comes from life, not vice versa.

• Oceanic Vision. When we stand shin-deep in the ocean, we touch foreign shores, myriad other creatures, the earth and sky, past and future. This position can help us remember that the world is one place. What we do inland to the air, water and ground affects the distant ocean, the whole climate and every nation of the globe. This is the bigger view we need to gain from the vast eye of the ocean, whose life-we now see-is our own.