Oceans in peril.

Since the beginning of life on Earth, the oceans have been the ecological keel of the biosphere. The marine environment, from the brackish waters where rivers flow into the sea to the deepest depths, constitutes roughly 90 percent of the world's inhabited space. The oceans cover nearly 71 percent of the Earth's surface, and their deepest trenches plunge lower below sea level than Mount Everest climbs above it. They hold 97 percent of the water on Earth, more than 10,000 times as much water as all the world's freshwater lakes and rivers combined.

The oceans' seminal contribution to the planet was life itself The first living organisms on Earth are thought to be bacteria that developed in the depths of the seas some four billion years ago. Not only are they the evolutionary ancestors of us all, but they created the oxygen-rich atmosphere - a key to our existence - as a by product of their photosynthesis. Even today the oceans are a foundation of global climate, and they are home to a unique array of species, many of which cannot be found on land. Remarkably, deep sea dredges indicate that the ocean floor may contain as many species as the world's tropical rainforests. Many of the species brought to the surface cannot be identified because they have never been seen before, and are unlikely to be caught again. Scientists are increasingly turning to the sea because of its unique biological diversity. They have derived anti-leukemia drugs from sea sponges, bone graft material from corals, diagnostic chemicals from red algae, anti-infection compounds from shark skin and many more useful agents.

Time and evolution have distanced us from our oceanic origins, but we still bear the traces of our saltwater heritage in our blood. We have an almost universal fascination with the timeless procession of waves, the smell of salt water, the call of seabirds, the sheer scale of the sea. From the vantage point of a beach or a coastal cliff, the oceans look limitless and unchanged from the way they appeared thousands of years ago. Throughout most of human history, we have seen only this view, and our governments have made few, if any, attempts to protect the marine environment. Today, however, with technologies that allow us to penetrate the salt water depths, we have discovered that the oceans, too, are vulnerable to the unsustainable trends that degrade the environment on land. Rapid population growth, industrial expansion, rising consumption and persistent poverty are causing levels of marine pollution, habitat destruction and depletion of marine life that constitute a global threat to the marine environment.

If we were to declare war against the oceans, the most destructive strategy would be to target the coasts, the regions of most highly concentrated biological activity. Tragically, that is what we are already doing - not by deliberate attack, of course, but through overcrowding of coastal areas and unsustainable economic development. Here is where agricultural and urban waste pours in from the land, smoggy clouds pour out their contaminants, ships flush their tanks, and cities bulldoze wetlands to extend their land seaward. Over half the people in the world now live within 100 kilometers of the coast, while coastal cities make up nine of the 10 largest cities and over two-thirds of the top 50 in the world. As these cities continue to grow, developers drain wetlands that once served to trap nutrients, sediments and toxins, so that runoff from construction, city streets, sewage plants and industrial facilities now flows unimpeded into coastal waters.

The world is dotted with cities that have degraded their coastal habitats. San Francisco Bay, the largest estuary in the western United States, which has shrunk by 60 percent with land reclamation in the last 140 years, is overrun by alien species, and can no longer support commercial fishing. Off the Palos Verdes peninsula just south of Los Angeles, a city sewage plant contributed to the progressive elimination of 7.8 square kilometers of kelp forest as it increased its discharge 20-fold between 1928 and 1966. Sludge laced with toxins and heavy metals covered 95 percent of the former kelp bed. But the most extensive source of habitat destruction along the coasts actually occurs in rural areas, partly because poor people quit scarce farm land to try fishing. Shrimp farmers in the Asian and South American tropics, for instance, have cleared extensive tracts of mangroves for holding ponds; they now produce 20 percent of the world's shrimp supply. But about half of the world's salt marshes and mangrove swamps have been cleared, drained, diked or filled. Five to 10 percent of the world's coral reefs have been ruined by pollution and destruction - another 60 percent could be lost in the next 20 to 40 years. Even beaches are endangered, with 70 percent eroding worldwide.

The flow of nutrients into the oceans has at least doubled since prehistoric times, and sediments have nearly tripled due to human activity. Together, nutrients and sediments have become pollutants that degrade estuaries and coastal waters by blocking sunlight, suffocating fish and coastal habitats, and carrying pathogens and toxins. They have contributed to "red tides," blooms of algae that release deadly levels of toxins into the surrounding waters. In Japan's Seto Inland Sea, the number of red tides increased from 40 in 1965 to more than 300 in 1973. Three years later, after the Japanese authorities had introduced controls to limit the influx of nutrients, they began to decline in frequency. In other areas, however, the tides continue. The poisons released by them kill mass quantities of fish and can weaken or kill people through direct exposure or contaminated seafood.

Roughly one half of the nutrients entering coastal waters comes from the ubiquitous problem of sewage and runoff from coastal cities and farms, but the other half, surprisingly, comes from inland. In the eastern United States, for instance, the Chesapeake Bay has been overwhelmed by nutrients from distant sources. Farmers contribute one-third and air pollution one-quarter of the nitrogen pollution that has crippled this estuary, the largest in the United States, and once one of the most productive in the world. The oyster catch in the Chesapeake has fallen from 20,000 tons in the 1950s to under 3,000 tons in the late 1980s, partly because of pollution. When Europeans first came to the United States, oysters in the Chesapeake could filter all the water in the Bay in two weeks. Now, because there are so few, they take more than a year.

But the Chesapeake also offers an example of what can be done to try to curb coastal pollution. This estuary is fed by over 150 tributary rivers and streams spread over six states and the District of Columbia. Under the Chesapeake Bay Agreement of 1987, the District of Columbia, Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania have until the year 2000 to reduce nutrients by 40 percent by controlling the discharge of toxins and increasing wetland area. So far, they have had mixed success. Seagrass area has increased by 57 percent, the Potomac is much cleaner, and phosphorus levels are down by 20 percent. But runoff from agriculture has increased, the population in the region continues to grow rapidly, development on the Bay coastline continues and, as a result, the load of nitrogen nutrients entering the Bay continues to increase. This experience demonstrates the difficulty of implementing such programs in a single country, much less worldwide.

Fishing Beyond the Limits

Fishers are the first to encounter the limits of the sea. Marine fishing, which supplies the world's people with more animal protein than any other source, including either pork or beef, faces a global crisis. The ocean catch grew rapidly through the middle decades of this century, starting from under five million tons per year in 1900 and rising to over 80 million tons in recent years. Then, in the early 1970s, the Peruvian anchovy catch, the largest in the world, collapsed from 12 million to two million tons per year over the course of three years. This event, apparently due to the combined effects of overfishing and natural fluctuations, marked the beginning of a new era. For the next two decades, the marine catch grew by only 2.3 percent per year, down from the heyday of six percent annual growth, and after peaking at 86 million tons in 1989, it fell by seven percent over the next three years back to 80 million tons in 1992.

The proliferation of fishers, combined with the greatly increased capacity of their equipment, has now begun to put formerly populous species at risk. Sonar and aircraft enable fishers to locate schools of fish in the open ocean, and giant nets allow them to literally strain the sea of fish. The mouth of a recently designed Icelandic trawling net, for example, is large enough to simultaneously trap 12 Boeing 747 airplanes in piles of six. According to the environmental group Greenpeace, even larger trawlers are under construction. Other forms of net fishing can also be devastating. Coastal trawlers, which drag nets along the seabed, catch large quantities of unwanted species. Shrimp trawlers probably have the highest rate of such "by-catch," bringing in up to 90 percent or more "trash fish" with each haul in tropical waters. Worldwide, shrimp fishers are estimated to discard up to 15 million tons of unwanted fish per year, and other fishers are thought to discard another five million tons.

Overfishing has precipitated declines in individual stocks throughout the world. The catch of four commonly eaten, average-value fish (Atlantic cod, Cape hake, haddock and silver hake) fell from five million tons in 1970 to 2.6 million tons in 1989. Canada has placed a two-year moratorium on cod fishing off Newfoundland to try to stem the decline in fish stocks, and the European Community is restricting cod fishing as well. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) concludes that depletion of various stocks has occurred in virtually all coastal states throughout the world. FAO also estimates that all 17 of the world's major fishing areas have either reached or exceeded their natural limits, and that nine of the areas are in serious decline.

In past decades, fishers have managed to keep increasing their catch by abandoning fished-out stocks and pursuing new species, but these substitutions are typically lower-value fish that had been undesirable because they were too small, bony, poor-tasting or otherwise not good for eating. Five species - Alaska pollack, Chilean jack mackerel, Japanese pilchard, South American pilchard and the rebounding Peruvian anchovy - have made up most of the production increases in the 1980s. But Alaska pollack has only one-third the value of the Atlantic cod, a traditionally average-priced eating fish, and the other four have only a tenth the value of cod. Although these five species accounted for 29 percent of the world fish catch by weight in 1989, they made up only six percent of the total value. The FAO, which once estimated that the marine environment could sustainably yield about 100 million tons of fish per year, 20 million tons more than the 1992 yield, now says that "there is little reason to believe that the global catch can continue to expand, except for increases that might occur through more effective management of stocks."

Worldwide, the fishing industry employs some 200 million people, many of whom now find their jobs threatened. In Canada, between 30,000 and 50,000 people were put out of work when the country had to shut down its cod fishery last year to allow stocks to recover. In France, fishers fearing for their livelihoods have protested violently against the import of low-priced fish from Russia and other non-European Community countries. Peaceful demonstrations have turned violent when protestors set off small explosives and broke windows, and fishers have fought street battles with police all along the French coast.

In Indonesia, small-scale fishers have attacked and burned shrimp trawling vessels that encroach on their fishing grounds. But with limited political power and equipment, local fishers who use small boats and traditional techniques inevitably suffer from depleted stocks. In the Indian state of Kerala, the government promoted and subsidized commercial fishing for export, which put poor fishers who could not afford commercial-scale boats and equipment at a disadvantage. Off the coast of Sierra Leone in West Africa, uncontrolled fishing by foreign fleets led to a decline in the catch of traditional fishers, who supply 75 percent of their country's consumption of animal protein. The foreign fleets primarily export their catch, so the negative impact of the commercial incursion then spreads beyond the fishers' families to the population at large.

Poverty drives the fishing problem into an even more vicious circle. In a Southeast Asian practice known as muro-ami, children are forced to swim through the water pounding coral reefs with rocks tied to brightly colored streamers to scare the fish toward waiting nets. They damage the corals and deplete the reef, and they may also be killed by needle-fish, sharks, barracuda, poisonous sea snakes and disease. In the Philippines, one corporation has been running 40 muro-ami ships that carry up to 300 boys and destroy up to a square kilometer of reef per day. The children are reportedly taken from the poor barrios of the big cities, an ironic end, since as work becomes scarcer inland, more people migrate to the coasts to take up fishing, the "employer of last resort."

Global leaders need to tackle the problem of "too many fishers chasing too few fish." The fact is that national fishing fleets have grown too big for existing stocks. FAO estimates that global annual expenditures on fishing amount to $124 billion - to catch just $70 billion worth of fish. Governments make up most of the $54 billion difference with low interest loans, access fees for foreign fishing grounds and direct subsidies for boats and operations.

Rather than carrying the industry as a budgetary burden, countries could collect rents for fishing grounds. As in the management of grazing, logging or mining on public lands, fees are an integral part of limiting exploitation and compensating the public for the use of commonly held resources. In Australia, for example, rents for the use of fishing grounds have ranged from 11 to 60 percent of the gross value of the catch, with an average of 30 percent. Rents could be adjusted according to the status of the fish stocks, with fees rising as the stocks become more depleted. Governments could potentially save some $54 billion per year by eliminating subsidies, and earn another $25 billion per year in rents. And if stocks are allowed to recover, FAO estimates that fishers could increase their annual catch by as much as 20 million tons, worth about $16 billion at todays prices.

Do Oceans Have a Future?

Agreements to halt the decimation of marine mammals have been more successful than their fishing counterparts. The first international treaty on the taking of marine life was the Convention for the Preservation and Protection of Fur Seals, signed in 1911 by Russia, Japan, the United States and Great Britain on behalf of Canada to restrict the hunting of the North Pacific fur seal to specific breeding islands. The number of seals soared from 125,000 in 1911 to 2.3 million in 1941.

The International Whaling Commission (IWC), a voluntary association of nations founded in 1947, adopted a moratorium on whaling in 1985. Iceland withdrew from the IWC in protest, and Japan has continued to kill approximately 300 minke whales per year for "scientific" purposes - such as supplying high-price restaurants and shops. But many whale populations have rebounded. At the 1993 IWC meeting, which upheld the ban, Norwegian and Japanese delegates protested bitterly, arguing that IWC research shows that minke whales, with a global population over 800,000, can now be sustainably harvested. (Doubters replied that the IWC does not have detailed information on minke reproduction, nor does it have a working plan for enforcing whaling quotas.) After the meeting, Norway announced that it would resume whaling, and in the 1993 season its fleet killed 157 minke whales.

Even so, these marine mammal treaties have brought some stability to previously threatened populations, and they stand in stark contrast to international efforts to protect fish and coastal areas. Since nations govern their own coastal zones, they are in the best position to re-establish the basic tenets of local fishery management and conservation, such as limiting the fishing season, the size of the catch and the boundaries of the fishing areas. New Zealand, for example, has created no-fishing zones, where fish are allowed to mature and reproduce unmolested, leading to increased overall stocks. Sierra Leone established a five-mile fishing zone along the coast where only traditional fishers can fish. In the Philippines, the government grants local communities 25-year contracts to manage their coastlines. Several communities have now restored hundreds of hectares of mangroves, established no-fishing zones, and limited fishing - with an overall improvement in the fish catch.

But the oceans ultimately belong to the world, and people and nations must work together to protect them. The international moratorium on the use of driftnets, for instance, grew out of activism by such groups as Greenpeace, the Bering Sea Fishermen's Association, the American Oceans Campaign and Defenders of Wildlife, among others. The South Pacific Forum started by banning the use, possession and transit of driftnets longer than 2.5 kilometers in the territorial waters of its member island nations - a sizable portion of the Pacific Ocean - and by requesting a United Nations moratorium on driftnetting. The general assembly adopted such an international moratorium that went into effect on December 31, 1992. Several countries were late to comply. Taiwan has issued public statements that it would halt the practice, but its ships have since been spotted driftnetting off the coast of South Africa. And Italy continues to use 10- to 30-kilometer driftnets in the Mediterranean. But, on the whole, driftnetting has decreased sharply. The 1,000 to 2,000 vessels that each used to lay 30- to 40-kilometer nets in the North Pacific are mostly gone. And driftnetting has ceased in the South Pacific.

We can no longer afford to act as if the oceans are limitless or unalterable. The complex links between land and sea may make the task of protecting the oceans for future generations seem daunting, if not impossible. But it is precisely because of these links - because the oceans touch the lives of us all - that we cannot ignore their health if we are to protect our own place on the planet.