Dying seas.

THERE ARE ONLY A FEW OF THEM ON THE PLANET. YET, THE CIVILIZATIONS THAT HAVE ALWAYS DEPENDED ON THEM FOR SUSTENANCE AND SECURITY ARE NOW SLOWLY KILLING THEM.

During the last four thousand years, the part of our past that we think of as the history of civilization, human settlements have tended to cluster around land-enclosed seas, rivers, and lakes. People in these settlements have been able to supply themselves with food, security, and community to a degree that would have been far more difficult in the vast inland territories--drylands, mountains, scrub forests, deserts, and steppes--that make up the bulk of the terrestrial world.

Whether it was the ancient Aegeans on the Mediterranean, the Persians on the Caspian, or the Chinese on the Yellow Sea, civilizations rose in places where small boats could exchange knowledge and goods, trade was easily conducted, fish were abundant, and the land was rich with the topsoil carried downstream by rivers.

For these reasons, the basins of the great seas were also more highly valued than other landforms, and controlling them became central to human notions of security. Security meant military control of homelands and trade routes. It has also meant, increasingly in the past few centuries, control of the water itself--by damming tributaries, digging irrigation ditches, dredging shipping channels and harbors, and constructing breakwaters.

In just the last few decades, however, a new kind of stress has crept into the historic relationship between humans and the seas. While civilizations have continued to develop most rapidly around the coasts and rivers that feed the seas, that growth has accelerated to a point that is now dangerously unstable. Various side effects of human activity that passed unnoticed until this century have begun to ravage the very qualities that make the seas valuable--depleting both sea-based and land-based food production, fouling the human nest, and evidently even beginning to alter weather patterns for the worse.

Today, most of the world's seas are suffering from a wide range of human-caused assaults, in various lethal combinations: their ecological links to the land blocked by dams; their bottoms punctured and contaminated by oil drilling; their wildlife habitats wiped out by coastal development; and their water contaminated--or turned anoxic--by farm and factory waste. And what fish remain after these assaults are being decimated by overfishing. In the world's most biologically productive and diverse bodies of water, ecosystems are on the verge of collapse--and in some cases have already collapsed. The levels of damage and progress toward protection vary from sea to sea. But in general, compared to the open oceans, semi-enclosed seas tend to be damaged more severely and quickly because water circulation is limited and there is less dilution of pollutants.

Today, the seas are as strategically important as they ever were in the days of Kublai Khan's armada or the Greek trading ships, but for new reasons. The old preoccupation with controlling key military positions, ports, and trade routes is now rivaled by a more urgent priority: to rescue and protect the more fundamental assets that made the seas worth living near in the first place, but which are now being dangerously damaged.

To set up this protection means establishing a new paradigm for security, in which shared responsibility for sustaining the vitality of these seas becomes the basis for a mutual, rather than competitive, effort. This is something that national governments may find difficult, since it necessarily overrides traditional concepts of sovereignty and control. But most of the great seas are shared in too many ways for anything but a mutual vigilance--and coordinated defense against our own human excesses--to work. Cooperative solutions have begun to emerge in a few regions, such as the Mediterranean and the Baltic. But on other seas, conflicts arc escalating--suggesting that cooperation is not likely to prevail without a fuller understanding of just what is at stake.

There are about 35 major seas in the world, some coastal and some enclosed by land. Of these, seven--the Baltic, Mediterranean, Black, Caspian, Bering, Yellow, and South China Seas--illustrate the panoply of ills that now afflict, in varying degrees, all 35. Each of these seven carries different wounds. One, the Black, is a microcosm of them all.

1. BLACK SEA: A SEA OF TROUBLES

In ancient times, it was valued for its abundance of fish, its relatively temperate climate, and its strategic location: the city of Constantinople was the gateway between East and West, capital of the Byzantine Empire, and one of the great hubs of human civilization. During the past century, the Black sea became famous for its beach resorts where wealthy Russians and Ukranians built their dachas. But in recent decades, this beautiful place has been ravaged. First, and most tragically, there has been the onset of a disease that is now endemic to enclosed or semi-enclosed bodies of water worldwide: an immense excess of marine nutrients. Like a compulsive eater who becomes increasingly obese, immobile, and finally moribund, the Black Sea has been overloaded with nutrients--fertilizer washing downstream from farms, human waste from the cities. The result has been massive eutrophication--a burgeoning growth of algae and bacteria, creating thick floating mats so dense that they block sunlight and destroy the natural ecological balance.

To this cancer-like process, other complications have been added. While the Black Sea was serving as a playground for elite Soviets during the Cold War, it was also being used as a convenient sink for all sorts of industrial activity--in an era when Soviet industries were driven by production quotas with little concern for their environmental impact. Toxic pollutants from plants ran uncontrolled down the three main tributary rivers, and growing quantities of municipal waste mingled with industrial and agricultural waste. The contaminated waters weakened the fish populations, which were further destroyed by heavy overfishing.

In this morass of biological decline, the most visible blight is the vast greenish mass that now lies over much of the water. What was once a rich, diverse ecosystem has been replaced by a monoculture of opportunistic weeds and algae. Gradually, as the dissolved oxygen supply is depleted by the algae and bacteria, the water becomes anoxic--incapable of supporting oxygen-dependent plants or animals. When the algae dies, it settles to the sea bottom, releasing hydrogen sulfide, which is poisonous to animals.

A key source of the trouble can be found along a 350 kilometer stretch of northwestern shoreline where three major rivers, the Danube, the Dniester and the Dnieper, drain into the sea. The Danube delivers much of the fertilizer runoff, detergent waste, and human sewage produced by the 81 million people in the Central and Eastern European drainage basin. Each year, it dumps an estimated 60,000 tons of phosphorus and 340,000 tons of inorganic nitrogen on the shallow waters of the Black Sea shelf, which is approximately one-fourth of the sea's entire area.

In the past 25 years, the Danube's concentrations of nitrate and phosphate (stable compounds that form when nitrogen and phosphorus react with oxygen) have increased six-fold and four-fold respectively. Concentrations from the Dniester, which flows across the Ukrainian breadbasket region, have increased three-fold for nitrate and seven-fold for phosphate since the 1950s. The Dniester has also brought heavy loads of pesticides, after flowing through the fields of Ukrainian and Moldovan farmers. And the Dnieper still suffers from the radioactive fallout of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.

Today, 90 percent of the volume of the Black Sea is anoxic. All of the deep layers of water in the central and southern parts of the basin are anoxic, and the dead water is expanding steadily upward from the bottom. The upper tenth, while still biologically productive, is deteriorating. "I know of no other inland sea under such pressure," said Stanislav Konovalov, director of the Soviet Institute for Biology of the Southern Seas at Sevastopol, Ukraine, two years ago. Since then, conditions have worsened.

Extreme eutrophication has repercussions through the food web, causing a decline in the number of species and economic losses in both fisheries and seaside tourism. Populations of the jelly-fish-like ctenophore Mnemiopis leidyi, first noticed in 1982, have erupted--consuming zooplankton, shellfish, and eggs and larvae of fish. At times, almost 95 percent of the Black Sea biomass consists of these gelatinous pests.

The problem is exacerbated by the long time needed for biological recovery in inland seas even under the best of conditions. It takes 167 years for water to flow from the Danube river delta southward through the sea's basin and out through the Bosporus Strait to the Mediterranean--and far longer, of course, to reach the Atlantic Ocean. With limited freshwater supplies and virtually no flushing, the Black Sea is essentially choking to death. Some scientists say it has 10 to 15 years to live; others give it 40 years. Most fishermen and tourists say it is already dead.

To effectively reduce nutrient loads will require major changes in industrial and agricultural practices, updating of sewage treatment facilities, and reduced detergent use. Unfortunately, the needed changes seem to be neither economically nor politically realistic, given the desperate economic situations in the former Soviet and Eastern European countries. Yet, the dilemma for these countries is that if they do not invest in such changes, their resources and economies will only decline further.

Moreover, the pall of eutrophication is not the only problem confronting the Black Sea community of nations. Toxic pollution from industries in the Black Sea drainage basin, oil spills from intensive shipping, direct dumping of waste, and the disruptions of marine or coastal habitats by mineral exploration and river alteration have all added to the blight.

Between 1986 and 1992, the Black Sea's total fish catch dropped from 900,000 to 100,000 metric tons per year. Dolphin, caviar, sturgeon, anchovy, and mackerel populations have all plummeted. Altogether, the cumulative effects of dead water, poisoned water, and overfishing have already cost more than 150,000 fishing jobs. Another 2 million people who make their living from fishing and fishery-related industries are at risk. Direct economic losses have mounted to more than $200 million per year in the fishing industry, and the costs to related industries could push the figure over $1 billion. At the same time, the tourism industry has lost $300 million each year because of beach closings, unsanitary conditions, algae-clogged swimming areas, and outbreaks of cholera on both the Romanian and Ukrainian sides of the Danube Delta. "The Black Sea is on the brink of extinction," reports the Russian newspaper Tass.

2. YELLOW SEA: HEAVY METALS 

Six thousand kilometers east-southeast, between northern China and Korea, the Yellow Sea suffers its own version of the Black Sea's dysfunctional relationship with its tributary rivers. And here, too, the result has been a disaster for fisheries. But whereas the Black Sea region is moderately populated, the Yellow Sea coastal region is densely populated and growing rapidly. Here, as a result, the decline of fisheries has gone beyond the economic sphere, into overt military confrontation. And here, perhaps more than anywhere else, the fundamental dilemma--and irony--of the human relationship with the seas is illustrated in its simplest form: the more people there are to depend on the seas for food and jobs, the more pollution there is to make those assets scarcer. In China, pollution takes on a broader meaning as well--it includes huge quantities of silt from the intensive farming that takes place on every available hectare of the drainage basin.

In fact, the Yellow Sea gets its name from the ochre-colored soil that washes down the Yellow River (Huang He) out to the Bohai Sea (the large bay linking Beijing and the Yellow Sea) at a rate of 2.4 billion tons per year. Today, a more accurate name for the Yellow Sea might be the Brownish-Red Sea. And the problem with this silt is that it is no longer just topsoil, but is now laced with heavy metals. Just as the sea has absorbed silt for thousands of years, it now absorbs the pollution and wastes from China's rapidly industrializing coastal areas.

Currently, there are more than 400 million Chinese living on or near the coast. With an estimated 40 percent of the industrial plants located along the coast, more workers and their families are tempted to move to coastal areas every year in search of jobs. In fact, of all the migratory movements in the world today, this internal movement of rural Chinese to the coast may be the largest. In 1989, the coastal population density was 312 people per square kilometer. By the year 2000, it is projected to have risen by an additional 62 people per square kilometer.

To keep up with demand for housing and buildings, coastal land that used to be cultivated is now developed at a rate of 3,400 square kilometers per year. This leaves aquatic and terrestrial habitat areas at an even greater disadvantage: not only are they losing ground, but they arc being forced to absorb increasing volumes of runoff from more industries and more people. Not surprisingly, the coasts of China and Korea are showing signs of extraordinary stress.

Pollution from heavy metals "may be among the highest in the world" in China's coastal areas (including the Yellow Sea, East China Sea, and South China Sea), according to Fan Zhijie of the State Oceanic Administration in Dalian, China and R.P. Cote of the Dalhousie University School for Resource and Environmental Studies in Halifax, Nova Scotia. One reason is that rapid industrialization in the region has occurred with few or no pollution control measures.

According to the Chinese Annual of Environment Quality in Offshore of China, 1989, the Yellow River dumped 751 tons of cadmium, mercury, lead, zinc, arsenic, and chromium, along with 21,000 tons of oil, into the Bohai Sea in 1989. The Yellow Sea itself received more than twice that quantity of heavy metals. This study also found that the greatest concentrations of toxic metals occurred in the top layer of sediment--in some cases more than 1,000 times greater than those in the water.

The contamination is thus heavily concentrated in the seabed where many species live and feed. And indeed, monitoring between 1981 and 1984 showed that the concentrations of cadmium in crustaceans (such as crabs) increased three-fold, while lead and copper in fish and mollusks (such as mussels) increased two- to four-fold. Data from 1989 found that mercury in bivalves (clams and oysters) was over 10 times acceptable levels.

In addition to the contamination flowing in from rivers, the Yellow Sea is being contaminated by atmospheric pollution, particularly from coal-burning plants and smogbound cities, and by direct dumping from coastal industries. The Qingdao Soda Plant on Kiaochow Bay, for example, has dramatically altered the condition of sediments. Chromium levels in sediments near the plant have been recorded at levels as high as 430 mg per kilogram--enough to dramatically discolor a beach near the discharge point. In 1963, 141 types of marine animals--mollusks, crustaceans, echinoderms, and the like--were living in these sediments; by 1988, only 24 remained.

By this year, most of the estuaries, bays, and wetlands bordering the Yellow Sea had been polluted enough to have serious effects on fisheries--the decline of which has been drastic enough to make them targets for military intervention. North Korea recently declared a 50-nautical-mile military warning zone to protect its remaining fisheries from pirates and foreign fleets. Chinese fishers in the Yellow Sea have been attacked and fired at by North Korean vessels, while South Korea has arrested fishers who stray too close to its depleted grounds. In the East China Sea and South Yellow Sea, Chinese patrol boats' attacks on Russian fishing vessels have slowed only because Russia deployed a navy flotilla there and threatened to "blow pirates out of the water."

3. BALTIC SEA: ORGANOCHLORINES 

In Scandinavia, the numerous rivers and fjords coming out of Sweden and Norway into the Baltic Sea have a very different look; instead of wending across wide, intensively cultivated and heavily populated valleys like so many of the world's sea-feeding tributaries, they wind through quiet, seemingly pristine forests. But these forests are also the sites--and resources for--another kind of sea-endangering industry: pulp and paper mills. In the 1940s, most of these mills began using elemental chlorine or chlorine compounds to bleach the paper--to make it white enough to satisfy consumers, publishers, and especially advertisers.

The bleaching processes release substantial amounts of organochlorine compounds into the environment. These compounds do not dissolve in water, but are lipid-soluble and accumulate readily in the fatty tissues of animals and fish. With the pulp and paper industries of Sweden and Finland now accounting for 10 percent of the world's total output, some 300,000 to 400,000 tons of chlorinated compounds are released each year--much ending up in the Baltic Sea.

What happens when these compounds find their way up the food chain into humans and other higher animals has become a subject of intense scientific scrutiny in the past seven years--with the weight of evidence linking them not only to cancer but to reproductive and endocrine diseases.

Among the early inklings of these effects were reports of die-offs in sea eagles, seals, and minks, first observed on the shores of the Swedish coast in the late 1950s. Since then, these species have suffered severe declines and are now almost extinct. Studies of other species in decline--including both marine mammals and such fish as herring, cod, sprat, and salmon--show that they too contain high levels of organochlorines. Compared to fish in the neighboring North Sea, fish in the Baltic have been found to contain concentrations of these chemicals three to ten times greater.

In addition to the population declines or collapses, marine biologists report a disturbing increase in birth defects in populations with high organochlorine levels. Among Baltic gray seals, half the females observed in one study were incapable of breeding because of deformed uteri horns. Among baby seals, eggshell-fragile skulls and skull bone lesions were believed to be caused by the immune suppression effects of exposure to PCBs. Unfortunately, these trends were not well documented until the late 1980s. Now the effects are so far along and pollution is so great that it is "almost too late to do anything about it," according to Susan Shaw, Executive Director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute in New York City, who works with marine biologists in Sweden.

For epidemiologists, the witches' brew of organochlorines (there are hundreds of these compounds) is trouble enough. But in the Baltic, other ingredients are being added to the brew as well. For years, this sea served as a receptacle for the untreated sewage and industrial wastewater generated by areas under Communist rule, such as Upper Silesia in Poland and Ostrava in the Czech Republic. A 1991 Ambio article, for example, indicates that atmospheric metal input is the most important source of metal contamination in the Baltic area. Metal concentrations in the region have increased five-fold over the last 50 years, largely as a result of burning fossil fuels. Fish from many coastal areas are now blacklisted, because they contain too much mercury. But with the sources of Baltic pollution so diffused, it is difficult--with one major exception--to detect and monitor the polluters.

The exception is the pulp and paper mills. In the last few years, the European community has moved to impose new restrictions on chlorine bleaching. How well they succeed may go a long way toward determining the health of the Baltic for future generations--both of marine life and of the people who depend on it.

4. CASPIAN SEA: THE CONTROL OF RIVERS AND RESOURCES

A majority of the major seas are only partially enclosed, which gives them at least some--albeit very limited--opportunity to recover. With the Black Sea, there is at least a narrow channel to the Mediterranean. But about 500 kilometers east of the Black, the smaller Caspian Sea is entirely enclosed and its riverine lifelines have been more manipulated--and strangled. As a consequence, it has even less absorptive capacity. Yet, it too has had to serve as a receptacle for massive amounts of waste. And that collision of interests has produced an outcome of ironic and TABULAR DATA OMITTED tragic simplicity: the Caspian's most valued product--its caviar--has been virtually wiped out.

Perhaps nowhere else is the human bent for controlling and manipulating--and its effects on nature--so pronounced as in the Caspian. Over the centuries, powerful rivals have fought to control this sea's strategic rivers and ports. In the late nineteenth century, an oil boom in Azerbaijan gave birth to a major industrial center on the Caspian's western shore, in the area around Baku; during World War II, the Soviet war effort was powered almost entirely by Baku's oil. And since the breakup of the Soviet Union, there have been ongoing discussions among Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Iran, as well as Western oil companies, about access to oil supplies.

If the southern part of the Caspian drainage area is strategically important for oil, the north is strategic for its agricultural resources and hydroelectric power. It produces one-fifth of the former Soviet countries' total crop yield, and one-third of their industrial output. In the last forty years, a string of dams and hydropower plants has been built along the Volga River, to supply electric power to the industries and to irrigate the crops. These uses have lowered water levels enough to severely impair the Volga's capacity to dilute waste and runoff, upsetting the natural balances of salinity, temperature, and oxygen in water downstream.

The Volga is the Caspian's major source of contamination. In 1989, the Caspian received 40 million tons of polluted wastewater. Draining the area from north of Leningrad to south of Tehran, it was forced to accept more than one-fourth of all the wastewater disgorged by Russia. From petrochemical factories alone, some 67,000 tons of wastes flush into the sea each year.

As a result, here too, fisheries have collapsed. The catches of pike and perch, for example, have dropped by 96-percent in the past three decades. But the biggest shock to this region has been the fate of its caviar--or sturgeon's eggs. The Caspian Sea used to produce 90 percent of world's supply of this prized delicacy, still known as the "black pearls of the Caspian." But the number of sturgeon returning to the Caspian from the Volga River has declined drastically, primarily because of obstructed migratory paths, overfishing, and pollution.

In the 1970s, it was not uncommon to find a specimen that was 60 years old and weighed 900 pounds. Today, an estimated 90 percent of the sea's sturgeon are killed before they are mature enough to reproduce--and the typical adult is just 18 years old and weighs 77 pounds. In the Iranian Sefid Rud River delta in the southern Caspian, the commercial catch of sturgeon dropped from 6,700 tons in 1961 to less than one-half ton in 1993.

This pattern of accelerating decline is being played out in virtually every fishery of every sea in the world. As supplies dwindle, fish are captured at earlier stages of their life cycle. With fewer fish available, fishers turn to more desperate measures to capture them. A vicious circle, already hastened by contamination from human and industrial waste, river diversion projects, and sheer growth in human population, accelerates still further. One result is to drive the search for food farther afield, to parts of the planet where supplies have not yet been exhausted.

5. BERING SEA: TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH 

In the far northern reaches of the Pacific Ocean, enclosed by the Aleutian island chain and the Russian Kamchatka peninsula, the Bering Sea receives nutrient-rich ocean currents and replenishing water from the south to support its abundant marine mammals, plants, and fish. In gulfs, bays, and ocean waters that are relatively free of pollution and habitat destruction, marine life thrives. One might suppose that this sea, at least, is safe. But it is not.

Unlike the other seas discussed here, the Bering Sea has not supported a large human population. But as demand for food has risen, and with it the technology of extraction, the Bering is proving an asset of central importance to the food security of the human world at large.

The Bering Sea is "perhaps the richest marine region in the world ocean, as evidenced by the number of species and their biomass," according to marine scientists Natalia Mirovitskaya at Russia's Institute of World Economy and International Relations and J. Christopher Haney of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. The Northwestern Pacific as a whole (including the Sea of Okhotsk, Sea of Japan, Yellow Sea and East China Sea) has an exceptionally high marine productivity--yielding up to 917 kilograms per square kilometer each year, compared to an average world ocean productivity of less than 189 kilograms.

Yet, despite its geographic remoteness, the Bering Sea is already being ravaged by overfishing. The Alaskan pollack industry took off in the 1960s, with dramatic increases in catch attracting new investment in the industry. Between the early 1970s and the late 1980s, the United States and Canada increased their catches in this region four-fold--and were joined by an influx of fishers from Russia, Korea, China, and Japan.

Alaska or walleye Pollack is now one of the world's biggest catches. In 1993, 3 million metric tons of it was taken, worldwide. But in the central Bering Sea, catches of pollack crashed from a peak of nearly 1.5 million metric tons in 1989 to 11,000 in 1992--a 99-percent decline in just three years--primarily because of overfishing in the "Donut Hole," an area of international water outside the bounds of the Russian and American Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) jurisdictions, where Russian, American, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and even Polish fishing vessels all compete in the search for pollack.

6. SOUTH CHINA SEA: "A DISASTER WAITING TO HAPPEN"

Some 6,000 kilometers down the Pacific Rim from the Bering Sea, the South China Sea serves a region as heavily populated as the Bering is sparse--yet some of its troubles are uncannily similar. It's a region where virtually all of the problems afflicting seas worldwide are being further exacerbated by political conflict--over fisheries, oil fields, military control, and the competing interests of commercial and local economies. But what in the Bering Sea is described as a "donut hole" might be better compared in the South China Sea to a Charybdis--the treacherous whirlpool of Greek mythology.

China, the largest of the South China's many antagonists, has claimed exclusive domain over a large part of this sea, including the Spratley Islands, ever since Chinese merchants first took to its waves in the 15th century. The claim is rejected by other countries because it limits access to fisheries, seabed oil and minerals, shipping lanes, and navigational rights. The disagreement is particularly contentious between China and Vietnam, and in areas around Taiwan, Brunei, Malaysia, and the Philippines where EEZ boundaries overlap.

China is now expanding its claims to include coveted oil fields--further escalating the disputes. Oil was first discovered in the area in 1976, and there are now an estimated 80 to 100 oil wells in the South China Sea. The Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, and the United States all have interests there, and tensions have been rising over who owns what. The United States began funding Indonesia's war in East Timor around the time of that discovery, partly to protect its oil interests in the region. And in the 1980s, China tripled the size of its South China naval fleet--suggesting that it, too, may be willing to wage war over these resources.

A 1991 newspaper article from Bandung, Indonesia describes the South China Sea as "a disaster waiting to happen." It warns of the potential for ecological disaster caused by uncontrolled commercial activity, but its message is no less applicable to the burden of environmental degradation the sea is already carrying. And the fact that the South China Sea serves as a strategic military zone complicates the picture--and raises tensions--even further. Military bases are located throughout the region, navy ships patrol the waters, and spent nuclear fuel is shipped through the area.

7. MEDITERRANEAN: TANKERS AND TOURISTS

Few seas have played more vital roles in the rise of human civilizations--and the support of their rapidly growing populations over the past four millennia--than the Mediterranean. Providing access to three continents, it played key roles in the rise of Aegean, Egyptian, Phoenician, Greek, and Roman empires, and to the development of historic exchanges of information and culture between places as far-flung as China, Britain, and Ethiopia. Today, it is bordered by 18 countries, all of which are as dependent on the sea as their predecessors were. Yet, the Mediterranean, like the other seas, is being subjected to heavy degradation--with the prospect of irreversible losses to its dependent human communities.

Concern about this degradation began to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s, with a series of tanker spills and severe chemical leaks. The heart of the Mediterranean, the Lake of Santa Gida near Cagliari, Sardinia, was a fertile breeding area for 10,000 water birds. But it was also a repository for mercury effluent from petrochemical factories. Mercury contamination was so severe in the fall of 1976 that the regional government had to block off the entrance to the lake, remove all the shellfish, and dredge the bottom to remove any traces of the metal.

While marine scientists had warned for many years of marine degradation, it was not until fishers were banned from contaminated waters, beach-goers were forced to go home early, and oil-covered seals and dophins made the nightly news, that--with tourist revenue at stake--the first actions were taken. Tourism is critical to the Mediterranean economy; each summer, the seasonal population on the sea's coasts almost doubles, adding 100 million visitors each year to the region's more than 160 million residents.

The Mediterranean is especially vulnerable to pollution because it is a major shipping and transport route between the Middle East and Europe--meaning that there is heavy traffic of oil tankers. It also has naturally low levels of rainfall, nutrients, and species diversity, which, combined with increasing levels of urban and coastal pollution, leave the sea with little leeway. Luckily, in the 1970s, developing and industrialized countries around the region realized that the sea was sick, and for environmental reasons and self-interest they joined together to try to prevent it from getting worse.

In 1975, Mediterranean countries were the first to approve a UNEP sponsored regional sea program--and today, arguably, the condition of the Mediterranean is not as bad as it would have been without the Mediterranean Action Plan (MEDAP). The first issue MEDAP tackled was marine dumping, in the Barcelona Convention. A Regional Oil Center was established on Malta in 1976 to provide training, information, emergency management programs, and waste retention facilities in ports. But the problems did not stop: in the 1980s, one fifth of the world's oil spills occurred in the Mediterranean Sea.

With growing concern for regional environmental issues, the debate and discussions moved beyond the issues of oil pollution and dumping, to a more comprehensive definition and understanding of marine pollution. Likewise, the action plan itself evolved from a general framework to specific substance-based and media-based limits and controls. The Land-Based Protocol, signed and finalized in 1980, was a significant achievement because it set limits on industrial, agricultural, and municipal emissions into the Mediterranean in addition to controlling wastes in rivers and air--thus establishing clear links between land pollution and marine pollution.

RE-SETTING THE COMPASS

The world's seas, crucial to both human economies and the planet's life systems, have been gravely injured. Human actions have done most of the damage, some of it now irreversible. Even so, few agreements have been reached on how joint efforts can be made to save these shared resources.

Existing agreements are staked on archaic claims of rights to extraction and control. When no claims exist, as in the Bering Sea "Donut Hole," or when claims overlap, as in the South China Sea, a gold rush mentality has brought growing chaos and violence.

Among the Earth's sea-dependent populations, there appears to be little or no money for marine protection, or in many cases even for basic sanitation services and sewage treatment. Subsistence fishers, seasonal dockworkers, small-scale farmers, and migrant workers are encountering growing hardship. As resources become scarce and tensions rise, the fishing industry, tourist resorts, oil and gas developers, and shipping facilities are all taking losses.

To reverse these losses will require at least three politically difficult but ecologically essential steps. The first is to reduce and restrict the use of damaging chemicals: chlorine in paper bleaching, and phosphates, nitrates, and chlorine in detergents and pesticides. These are chemicals that persist in the environment, bioaccumulate in animal tissues, cause direct damage to individual species and entire aquatic ecosystems, exacerbate anoxia, and disrupt the earth's carbon cycle. Banning or limiting their use will allow ecosystems to slowly re-establish their natural equilibrium.

The second step is to secure financial commitments from industrial countries and private companies, to invest in basic infrastructure to handle the sewage and waste from cities. This is already being done in the Baltic where Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany are helping eastern Baltic countries to pay for sewage treatment plants. Recently, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development committed $67 million to construct a sewage treatment plant in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.

The third, and most critical, step is to secure cooperation--commitment to joint management in lieu of preoccupation with extraction and control--at all levels of community and government. On the international level, an instructive model is the Ronneby Declaration, signed in 1990 by all of the Baltic Sea countries, members of the European Union, and four multilateral banks. This agreement identifies 132 pollution hot spots in the Baltic region, most of them in the former Eastern bloc countries. To clean up the hot spots, a 20-year, $25.6 billion Joint Comprehensive Environmental Action Program underwrites investments in sewage treatment, the refitting of pulp and paper plants, and other pollution control efforts. At the community level, a successful example can be found in the Gulf of Thailand, where several Buddhist and Muslim fishing villages are working with local activists and the U.S.-based Earth Island Institute to close the inner reaches of Kuntulee bay to push-nets and trawlers. Both of these cases shows how action and change can happen even in the absence of political agreement.

Finally, we need a philosophical change of heart to reconnect ourselves with the seas that have supported our civilizations since the dawn of history. We may not need to restore the seas to their original pristine conditions--that may no longer be possible. But we urgently need to rehabilitate and protect whatever ecological and economic value can still be salvaged.

Anne E. Platt is a staff researcher at the Worldwatch Institute.