By Jean-Michel Cousteau
| Like the dolphin, we are an intelligent part of a global web of life. But whereas the dolphin can perhaps understand the web, we can change it. |
My father was not the only aquanautic utopian. Others were talking about replacing human blood with fluids less prone to the bends, making undersea activity truly limitless. So as any boy might, I had a great sense of pioneering. Not only because of the revolutionary technology that assisted my explorations, but because of the new attitude my immersion in the sea required. After all, the streets of France had been discovered already, while the ocean just offshore was a blank slate. Dolphins were my companions. Like them, I was a sleek, graceful adventurer able to understand the connections.
Last month the United Nations announced that 1998 would be designated the Year of the Oceans. In a way, the entire world community is getting a chance to pioneer, to look for connections.
It is, unreservedly, a good thing. At last, the 75 percent of the Earth's surface area that has been somehow misplaced in the world's consciousness will be the focus of our attention. The announcement fills me with satisfaction, but also with the awareness of an immense challenge.
First, the good news. There is still a lot to pioneer. Around the world, new technologies allow scientists to descend to ever greater depths. They have discovered remarkable creatures in the deepest trenches of the biosphere, crustaceans and worms that function without light and in an atmosphere of 8 tons pressure per square inch.
Seemingly every day, laboratories reveal new interrelationships between sea chemistry and climate. And research into biodiversity consistently contradicts the assertion that the sea is a deep, wet desert devoid of life. Estimates of undiscovered species range from half a million to 10 million. And there's quality to the quantity as well -- when we look at the diversity of the basic body plans of living organisms, we find that 80 percent of all phyla are found only in the sea, according to a 1992 report in Nature magazine.
So there is an incredible amount of life to be explored, and the Year of the Oceans campaign is a good way to stimulate interest in the potential for exploration beneath the waves. But it will be a waste of time and energy if our soundings content themselves with mere celebration, without arousing a sense of urgency regarding the oceans' future.
As often happens, it is not the general public that needs education. It's the leaders. From fisheries to coastal development to deep seabed mining and nuclear waste disposal, the mentality of government and industry continues to be dominated by short-term calculations of the oceans' potential for satisfying our immediate desires. On any given day, the oceans are reputed to be our shopping center, our climatic buffer and our toilet, all wrapped into one.
While we understand something about how the seas influence climate, about how deep elephant seals dive, about El Nino's effect on Galapagos' turtles, I don't believe we have fully grasped the link between life on land and life in the sea. We still perceive the oceans as somehow "apart" from us, their destiny as separate from ours. They are big and changeable and able to look after themselves.
This is a tragic misconception.
We are all affected by oceanic change. For some, this is not worrisome. Nature can handle change, they say fatalistically. Yet while we accept change as a normal part of nature, we must realize that life only persists because diversity allows it to weather changing conditions. Reduce diversity as we are doing, and we reduce the ability of natural systems to adapt. A resilient system becomes a fragile one.
So it is with climate change, our main link to the oceans. According to estimates published in the United Nations Environment Programme's Global Biodiversity Assessment (1995), a two-degree rise in global temperature by 2030 -- an entirely feasible if not inevitable projection -- could result in a sea-level rise of over four feet (1.5 meters).
Life on Earth has dealt adequately with such change in the past, but not in such a compressed time-frame. Such a rate of change induced by humans is fifty times that driven by nonhuman natural forces. The effect locally would be the invasion of saltwater into freshwater bays and wetlands, decimating the estuarine "nurseries" of the sea.
Other effects are more subtle. Marine biologists working in Antarctica have studied the population dynamics of two competing types of marine creatures, krill and salps, for over twenty years. Both species depend on algae growing on the underside of polar ice floes, though salps are also able to feed in the open ocean.
As reported last month in the journal Nature, climatic warming may be responsible for an overabundance of salps, reducing the survivability of krill, and of all the species dependent on krill for food, including marine mammals.
In addition, the carbon in algae taken by salps is not vaulted up the food web, as is the case with krill, but merely excreted, sinking to the bottom of the water column. Such changes compound like a deadly form of interest that we cannot repay as easily as we accrue debt. We may manage local effects by building seawalls, but the larger effect -- a loss of global ecological vitality -- will at some point lie beyond our reach.
The Year of the Oceans will be a time to absorb these kinds of connections -- not to observe the marine environment as consumers, exploiters and polluters, but to reclaim our identity as pioneers in the search for creative solutions.
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