Restoring the Living Ocean: the Time Is Now
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www.ecologicalcitizen.net LONG ARTICLE Restoring the living ocean: The time is now The first part of this two-part essay looks at the destruction that industrial fishing has Eileen Crist unleashed on the global ocean. Human beings have forgotten the living abundance that the seas once harboured. A conglomerate of anthropocentric concepts, mega machines, About the author international fishing fleets and consumerist oblivion has laid waste to that abundance, and Eileen has been teaching brought extinction, death and suffering to marine beings. The subject matter of part two at Virginia Tech in the Department of Science and is deep-sea mining, which is under preparation for commercial launching. Like industrial Technology in Society since fishing, it must be stopped. What is at stake at this historic moment is not only the fate of 1997. She has written and the living ocean, but who we are and who we choose to be as humanity on this planet. co-edited numerous papers and books, with her work Part 1: Sweet delight as if massively destroying ecosystems focusing on biodiversity were the most normal thing ever devised. loss and destruction of wild places, along with pathways and endless night The global fishing industry operates more to halt these trends. Eileen vessels than there are numbers of fish left to lives in Blacksburg, VA, USA. he global ocean is imperilled. be caught, while the incalculable numbers What remains of marine life of slaughtered bystanders are labelled ‘by- Citation abundance, a tiny fraction of catch’ as if they are killed by mistake. Crist E (2019) Restoring the T living ocean: The time is now. what once was, continues to be afflicted This onslaught on virtually the entire The Ecological Citizen 3(Suppl by industrial fishing, anthropogenic ocean rests on its presumed rightful A): 27–41. starvations and diseases, rapid climate conversion into an all-you-can-eat buffet change and acidification, and all manner of for global consumers, cushioned with Keywords pollution such as sewage, garbage, oil spills, nomenclature like fisheries, fish stock, Biodiversity; human and fertilizer and pesticide runoff(Danson, seafood and by-catch to moor the normality supremacy; protected 2011). Persistent organic pollutants have of that buffet in the human mind. Industrial areas; sixth mass extinction; water infiltrated the ocean so that the bodies of fishing additionally depends on rezoning some top predators meet the definition of the ocean’s places as either nation-owned toxic waste (Whitty, 2011: 118). And what to (economic exclusive zones) or humanity’s say of the spectre of gigantic amounts of commonwealth (the high seas [also known plastic, decomposing but not biodegrading, as ‘the Area’]), thus institutionalizing killing millions of marine animals every human ownership of the ocean – and year, and entering the worldwide food web? further befuddling the human mind. (Law and Thompson, 2014; Mooney, 2014). Industrial fishing also relies on a plunder- Of the multiple threats to the ocean, enabling international regime of ‘maximum industrial fishing has caused and continues sustainable yields’, flags of convenience, to cause the greatest devastation. In the odd government subsidies, developing nations 150 years of its history, and especially since (corrupt and non-corrupt) selling fishing 1950, industrial fishing by an international rights to developed nations (unscrupulous cadre has perpetrated an egregious assault and not), and lax-to-non-existent law on fish – indeed, on all marine life and enforcement against illegal fishing practices habitats. Along with industrial agriculture, by both authorized and poaching vessels. industrial fishing constitutes Exhibit A of What suffers is not only the living ocean the human-supremacist mode of operation: whose very existence in the cosmos is as both exercise biome-scale appropriation and close to the miraculous as human beings extraction, with blithe matter-of-factness, can experience. What suffers is the human – The Ecological Citizen Vol 3 Suppl A 2019 27 Restoring the living ocean: The time is now www.ecologicalcitizen.net human identity – degraded to user, usurper submarines and cables. A ‘serviceable’ big and petty criminal in the community of life. body of water, in other words. Ignorance about both the ecological history and current state of the ocean is Abundance rampant. The seas have become destitute Which is exactly what the ocean is not. of “their once great abundance of whales, Everything about the ocean – including walruses, sea cows, seals, dolphins, sea its delicious scent, which is also fading turtles, sharks, rays, and large fish” (Upton, 2013) – flows from its polyphony (Jackson, 2005: 29). The immense shoals of of life. The ocean is a life-creating and small fish – known as prey or forage fish life-proliferating crucible, the place where because they feed a diverse and large cast of life itself likely emerged, and whose deep “Ignorance about predators – are also in precipitous decline. past lingers in our intimate fluids of sweat, both the ecological It strains the imagination to countenance blood, and tears (Helmreich, 2010). Until history and current the destruction of marine life that has recently, the seas teemed with beings state of the ocean occurred: to learn from archaeological data, from the microscopic phytoplankton eyewitness and first-hand accounts e.g.( and zooplankton (the bottom of the food is rampant. ” fishing or whaling logbooks), and historical web, now threatened) to billions of prey marine ecology about the cornucopia fish, billions of carnivorous big fish, and of marine life, most especially prior to millions of whales whose carcasses and when industrial fishing commenced on a dung returned to marine life – including to global scale (Schrope, 2006; Roberts, 2007). the abyssal biota – food to feed them. As true Marine biologist Callum Roberts writes of the ocean as it is of the land, “the world is that “before 20th century industrial fishing the sphere of superabundance. Heaven and took off, European seas seethed with life” Earth contrive to drip sweet dew. Contrary (2007: 128); these were seas that had already to the command of man, it drips evenly been long assailed by fishing – we might over all species” (Cafard, 2017: 70). try to imagine what that life-seething Abundance fed abundance and bred was like in places more untouched. On a abundance, and fish often graced with long global scale today, in the words of marine lives grew to be really big. (Fish typically researchers Ransom Myers and Boris continue to grow as they become older. Worm, “everywhere you go, in every ocean Bigger fish lay more eggs, so bigness is basin, hotspots of life are only relics of what a vital source of marine abundance.) In was once there” (Myers and Worm, 2005). The Unnatural History of the Seas,1 Callum Without willingness to open to the Roberts reports that 30-foot great white understanding of what has been lost, sharks were compared to whales and 20- humanity will remain incapable of aspiring foot sharks (rare these days) were common to the restoration of life-filled seas. when, for example, the Europeans arrived Instead, people will settle for the large- at the islands, shores and seas of the New scale replacement of wild fish with factory- World (Roberts, 2007). Erstwhile numbers farmed fish, while seas suffer bulldozed and sizes of all fish are legendary – not continental shelves and seamounts, massive only the cod who fed people for centuries, defaunation and extinctions, offshore but also the tuna, marlin, sturgeon, salmon and deep-sea mining, jellyfish population and swordfish to name some others. explosions, and the disappearance of coral Cod could reach three feet, and their reefs and coastal wetlands. Humanity is extravagant numbers were compared with in danger of capitulating to the human grains of sand; imagine the numbers of takeover of the ocean that is leading to the fish they fed on. The average swordfish its ontological reduction into a ‘protein’ today has dropped to less than half the size factory, a desalinizing solution to the it was 100 years ago (Danson, 2011: 104), freshwater crisis, a fossil-fuel and mineral meaning that swordfish live under the extraction domain, and a global transit perpetual shadow of being hunted so their zone for container ships, nuclear-armed odds of living long are slim. 28 The Ecological Citizen Vol 3 Suppl A 2019 www.ecologicalcitizen.net Restoring the living ocean: The time is now Indeed marine animals do not get to live towards former and not that distant Edens as long, eat as heartily and grow as big as of the seas is not some nostalgic pastime: It they did when the seas overflowed with is about nurturing a yearning towards who life, and feeding was not a competition or a we need to become to restore and inhabit struggle with scarcity, but an extravaganza that rich lifeworld again. of more-than-plenty to go around. Coastal The food web of the ocean belied the seas were bursting with enormous diversity classic pyramid structure of profusion and numbers of beings, and wildlife of microorganisms, followed by prolific spectacles could be witnessed from shore plant life and small critters, topped by (Roberts, 2007). What beauty there was to lesser numbers of mid-sized predators, bruise the eyes when the Caribbean was and finally capped by few large predators graced with coral reefs, forested with sea at the web’s apex. Rather than being meadows, and dwelled in by innumerable triangular, the ocean’s food web displayed groupers, reef sharks, moray eels, rays, abundance at every trophic tier (Jackson, parrotfish, seals, sea turtles, and rainbows 2005). The plankton and krill; prey fish like of all sorts and sizes of tropical fish herring, sand eels, sardines, menhaden (Figure 1). Only ten per cent of the original and anchovetas; the larger fish such as coral-reef Caribbean habitat remains today.