Page 82 - AlertDiver_Spring2013

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science until recent technologies made pinpoint navigation
possible. Comprehensive knowledge of currents, tides and
temperature along with weather forecasting and advanced
communication capabilities now make all parts of the ocean
safer than ever before for shipping, fishing, mining, finding
and retrieving lost ships and much more. Technologies as
sophisticated as those used to access outer space are being
applied to exploit the ocean’s deep inner space for oil,
gas, minerals and marine life. Changing, too, are policies
about ocean governance. Historically, property rights and
boundaries — and thus protection — were easier to establish
and manage on land than at sea.
Well into the 20th century, nations claimed jurisdiction
over the ocean from the shoreline to just three nautical miles
offshore — the range of a cannon shot in the 1600s. Dutch
jurist Hugo Grotius articulated in 1609 the widely adopted
concept of “freedom of the seas” in international waters as “the
common heritage of mankind,” in which peaceful navigation
and access to fish, minerals and other assets would be freely
available to all. Even today, nearly half the Earth — the “high
seas” — is regarded as a largely unregulated global commons,
used by all and protected by none.
In the mid-1970s, Australia established the Great Barrier
Reef Marine Park Authority, and the United States gave
sanctuary status to the historic shipwreck Monitor, the
first of more than 5,000 ocean areas that have since been
designated around the world. Most are small with only a tiny
fraction of 1 percent of all the planet’s waters set aside for
the protection of marine life. This is far short of the goal of
30 percent we were supposed to reach by 2012, a goal set by
the World Parks Congress in Durban, South Africa, in 2003.
Clearly it is not enough to maintain the vital functions the
ocean provides: the basic life support mechanisms that we
have heretofore taken for granted.
In 2009, in response to being awarded a TED Prize —
$100,000 and the chance to make a wish big enough to
“change the world” — I suggested the following: “I wish you
would use all means at your disposal — Films! Expeditions!
The web! New submarines! — to create a campaign to ignite
public support for a global network of marine protected
areas, ‘hope spots,’ large enough to save and restore the
ocean, the blue heart of the planet. How much is large
enough? Some say 10 percent, some say 30 percent. You
decide: How much of your heart do you want to protect?
Whatever it is, a fraction of 1 percent is not enough.”
At the rate we’ve been going, it will be near the end of the
century before we can attain the 30 percent goal targeted by
the World Parks Congress. All the same, there is a growing
awareness that our fate and the ocean’s are closely linked. If
the ocean is in trouble, so are we. It is, and we are.
Awareness on the Rise
But there are reasons to be optimistic. A global conference in
Dubai in December 2011 focused attention on “blue carbon,”
acknowledging the ocean’s important role in taking carbon
dioxide from the air and the urgent need for greater ocean
protection globally. The World Economic Forum in Davos in
2012 for the first time devoted several major sessions to critical
ocean issues, and soon thereafter the British publication The
Economist sponsored a World Oceans Summit in Singapore,
which brought together leaders in industry, science, technology
and conservation to discuss the connections between human
prosperity and healthy ocean systems.
Ocean issues were prominently on the agenda of the
170 leaders who gathered at the United Nations’ “Rio+20”
conference in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012, but one of the
most pressing topics — a plan for governance of the “high
seas” (the vast blue global commons) — was tabled for
two years. As Ghislaine Maxwell, founder of the Terra​Mar
Project, put it, “No one and everyone owns the high seas.”
Dozens of scientists worked together to produce a
sobering report, the Ocean Health Index, which was released
in the summer of 2012; it offers a comprehensive system
for measuring and monitoring the condition of the world’s
coastal waters, country by country. Topics such as fisheries,
tourism, biodiversity, carbon storage and economic well-
being were considered. The global score, 60 on a scale of 0
to 100, suggests cause for hope but demonstrates an urgent
need for improvement.
Since my TED wish in 2009, several nations have shown
leadership in increasing ocean care. The tone was set in 2006
by two presidents: George W. Bush, who designated major
areas in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands and the western
Pacific, and Anote Tong, leader of the Pacific island Republic
of Kiribati, who declared protection that year and in 2008 for
158,000 square miles of ocean surrounding the nation’s 33
atolls and islands. Another island nation, the United Kingdom,
followed in 2010 with what is presently the world’s largest
fully protected marine reserve: 225,810 square miles around
the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. In November
2012 Australia created a network of marine reserves covering
888,035 square miles of sea and bringing the total area of
Australia’s protected ocean to 1.2 million square miles.
Small island nations including Fiji, Palau, the Marshall
Islands, the Gilberts, the Maldives, the Seychelles, the
Bahamas, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, and dozens
of others have quite suddenly become “large ocean nations,”
with major voices in the politics of ocean management. Some
have aligned with Japanese interests in continued hunting of
whales, and many have sold licenses to take fish and minerals
for cash and economic assistance. But there is a growing
Opposite page, from top: Google Earth now allows a means to explore the ocean as well. As many as 100 million
sharks may be killed annually, primarily for the devastatingly wasteful shark-fin trade. Healthy shark populations
are worth more to mankind (in terms of tourism dollars and ecosystem stabilization) than dead sharks.