Hot Off The Press

Each month we feature excerpts from new books.  This month's selection is from Extreme Life of the Sea, by the father-son team Stephen and Anthony Palumbi (Princeton University Press). A delightful and readable account of why the oceans are worth saving. 

 

 

 

 

 

An Epilogue and Grand Bargain

A wooden skiff with a splintering hull and faded blue paint churns along under stormy skies.  The coughing outboard engine takes it through warm, gentle Philippine waters.  First green, then grey with reflected clouds, and finally dark with submerged reefs.  Laden with heavy SCUBA gear, you swivel your head to the mossy crag overlooking the lagoon.  Apo Island’s steep volcanic slopes shelter a small village from strong South Pacific winds.  A flotilla of fishing boats surrounds your skiff as the reedy pilot approaches your destination.  All these fishing boats are a poor omen to start a dive; a sign of skittish and depleted marine life below.

Securing the mask over your face, you sink your teeth into the regulator’s rubber and drop over the side.  Sinking slowly through the clear, blue-tinged water, you get your first look at the reef.  Your worries up above were blessedly premature.  Countless fish swarm and twist through the reef, stunning in their colors and diversity.  Bumphead wrasses sit in repose under coral heads, emerging on your approach to angrily posture.  Three or four feet in length, they stake out territory and brook no intruders.  Friendlier fish flash past: green-and-purple parrotfish, platter-sized rays and an armada of silver jacks that’s grown legendary in local waters.  This is a thriving reef, nowhere near decline.

Apo Island’s reef is a rare and precious gem set in the heart of the Philippine archipelago—a region that has suffered heavy marine depletion.  The large, healthy fish, and the thriving corals sprawled beneath your feet, sprouted from a single prescient decision.  Decades ago, the island’s small sheltered village decided to stop fishing on one part of the reef.  It wasn’t to be touched for any reason, nor anything taken: what foreign ecologists would term a marine protected area.  The safe zone wasn’t very big, and fishermen were allowed to fish just right up to its invisible boundaries.  Nevertheless, the impact of this small change on the reef was stupendous.  Inside the protected zone, fish across the food chain could live a long time, growing to enormous size like the furious bumpheads.  Instead of being taken immediately, they lived for many years into maturity, cranking out millions of offspring.  Many reef fish confine themselves to a home range the size of a swimming pool, so the lucky ones in protected areas can grow old and die without ever seeing a hook.[1]  Outside the zone, existence is nasty, brutish and short.  Fish are snapped out of the water by the dense fishing fleet, and the fish stocks are all but gone. But the folks from Apo Island go home most nights with solid catches, taken from reefs just outside the protected zone. The protected area’s immense productivity, left untouched, can replace anything the fishermen take elsewhere[2].

At this point in natural history, the oceans are cracking under our species’ collective strain - but they have not truly broken. As we look forward to the year 2100, when the children of today will be grandparents, two broadly different futures swim into focus. One is the course we are on now,[3] with CO2 endlessly piling up in the atmosphere and oceans. If by 2100 we’re still pumping out carbon at our present rate or above (the top line in the figure below), the oceans will not be salvageable, not returnable to their present state. By that point they will be too acidified, too warm, too high and too stormy. And the amount of time that it will take for climate changes to abate will be so long that by 2100 the damage is likely to be very long term.

Emissions scenarios from the IPCC. Ref[4]

 

But we can put ourselves onto a different CO2 curve, and if we do, then the oceans in the year 2100 will still be suffering, but they will be beginning the long planet-cleansing process of reducing CO2. They will not be ruined, and they will be on the verge of getting better. If emissions are tamed by 2050, then CO2 in the atmosphere might begin to drop by 2100, and the heat, storms, and acidification will slowly begin to abate after that. It won’t be pretty, but the point is that it will be getting better, not horribly worse, and the damage will be much shorter-lived.

Scientists and the conservation community cannot put our society on a different CO2 path. We are left with a grand challenge and a difficult bargain. The bargain is this. The economic forces, industries and citizens of the world must work to do whatever it takes to stop the rise of CO2 emissions by 2050, and return them to lower, tolerable levels by 2100. A different global energy source besides fossil fuels seems central to this success, but the shift does not have to be immediate. We have a generation to make this happen.

In return, the scientists and environmental engineers must work flat out to save as much of the world’s wild habitats, in the oceans and on land, and as many of the world’s extreme and varied species for the next century. When the climate begins to turn around improve because of the heroic efforts of our children, conservationists promise to have a wild world ready to regrow.

Marine scientists know how to do their part. Protection and even recovery is already happening in places like Apo Island where the big fish have returned, and California’s Monterey Bay, where a single marine protected area became a foothold for sea otters to re-conquer their old coastal haunts. Ocean life – extreme or not - is ready and able to thrive for us. The very same biological energy that makes the Productivity Bomb so terrifying can also repair the damage we’ve caused. The ocean itself is our single greatest tool when properly harnessed and leveraged.  That tool sits ready, and we have a good idea how to use it, through protecting habitats, sustainable fishing, guarding against discarded fertilizer and other coastal pollution, and rekindling respect for the value of healthy oceans. No matter what we do, the seas of 2100 will teem with life.  In lockstep with efforts to skid climate change to a halt, we still can choose to have the life of the sea be the whales, the tuna, the coral reefs, the sea turtles and smiling Vaquitas.


[1] Palumbi, S. R. 2001. The ecology of marine protected areas. In M. D. Bertness, S. D. Gaines, and M. E. Hay, editors. Marine community ecology. Sinauer, Sunderland, Mass. Pp. 509–530.

[2] Alcala, A. C., G. R. Russ, A. P. Maypa, and H. P. Calumpong. 2005. A long-term, spatially replicated experimental test of the effect of marine reserves on local fish yields. Can. J. Fish. Aquat. Sci. 62: 98–108.

[3] called RCP 8.5 by the IPCC.

[4] Van Vuuren, D. P., Edmonds, J., Kainuma, M., Riahi, K., Thomson, A., Hibbard, K., ... & Rose, S. K. (2011). The representative concentration pathways: an overview. Climatic Change, 109(1-2), 5-31.

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