The Extreme Seas
Olive Heffernan
Greystone Books, $32.95
The ocean is a rich, fertile and seemingly lawless frontier. It’s a watery wild west, irresistible to individuals hoping to plunder its many riches.
That is the narrative all by way of The Extreme Seas: Greed, Vitality and the Battle for the Unclaimed Oceana fast-paced, fully reported and deeply disquieting e e book by science journalist Olive Heffernan, moreover the founding chief editor of the journal Nature Native climate Change.
The e e book begins by churning rapidly by the waves of historic previous that launched us to instantly, along with how we even define the extreme seas: all ocean waters higher than 200 nautical miles from any nation’s shoreline. In some methods, the fashionable ocean seize was set in motion some 400 years previously. A bitter feud between Dutch and Portuguese retailers culminated in a approved doc known as the Sea of Freedomor the “free seas,” which argues that the ocean is a limiteless worldwide commons owned by no one.
Heffernan devotes a chapter each to alternative routes people are increasingly staking claims to worldwide waters, an progress known as the Blue Acceleration. Some are looking for new fishing grounds or prospecting for seafloor ores (SN: 5/4/20). Others are looking for new medicines inside the DNA of deep-sea microbes, sponges or sea lilies. Nonetheless others are exploring how one can improve the ocean’s carbon uptake to help sluggish native climate change (SN: 4/26/24). Even the home enterprise needs a little bit of the ocean — to create watery graveyards for defunct spacecraft.
The careening from one ocean ambition to a distinct underscores one among many e e book’s largest takeaways: We’ve established a precarious new kind of ocean ecosystem, and it should be extraordinarily troublesome — presumably inconceivable — to juggle the entire priorities whereas moreover defending ocean properly being and biodiversity.
Ponder Trondheim, Norway, the place Heffernan visits the SINTEF SeaLab. Certainly one of many world’s wealthiest oil states, Norway needs to maneuver its financial system away from oil and additional in the direction of aquaculture, partly by dramatically rising the manufacturing of its coastal salmon farms. The ocean’s twilight zone, the murky waters that stretch from about 100 meters to 1,000 meters below the ground, the place daylight no longer penetrates, may current an immense untapped helpful useful resource of feeder fish for these farmed salmon. By a minimal of 1 estimate, Heffernan writes, the twilight zone incorporates as loads as 95 p.c of the ocean’s fish by weight.
Nonetheless these twilight denizens are moreover key to the ocean’s capability to sequester atmospheric carbon (SN: 11/28/17). Crustaceans, fish and completely different creatures rise in the direction of the ground to feed on carbon-bearing plankton at evening time, after which sink into the depths by way of the day — carrying that carbon into the deep.
Such conflicting needs to plunder and defend current up again and again. Nations urging conservation in a single enviornment may push for rising exploration or exploitation in a single different, Heffernan writes. The European Union in 2021, for example, equipped subsidies to its fishing fleet to differ farther offshore, even as a result of it devoted to sustainable fishing. Nations desirous to resolve to defending marine life and combating native climate change can be the same worldwide places that help deep-sea mining, which may be detrimental to life on the ocean floor.
The difficulty, Heffernan says, isn’t that the extreme seas are with none tips. Comparatively, there’s “a mishmash of organizations and our our bodies, each using their very personal rulebook.” Plus, she supplies, “I now discover that a number of these tasked with governing this home willfully ignore science and disrespect expert suggestion.”
There are worldwide efforts afoot to find out uniform, fixed legal guidelines on ocean actions. Particularly, Heffernan notes that in 2023, United Nations member states handed the Extreme Seas Treaty, which could arrange marine protected areas in worldwide waters. If ratified, the treaty might presumably be an unlimited step in the direction of conserving ocean biodiversity.
Nonetheless be warned: This is not an uplifting e e book. By the last word chapter — titled, significantly unconvincingly, “Hope for the extreme seas” — it’s onerous to know what anyone may actually do to help save the ocean. What The Extreme Seas does, and powerfully, is convey the sheer scope and complexity of the Blue Acceleration. We’re at a significant juncture, Heffernan writes: “We’re in a position to proceed going ever deeper and extra offshore in our quest for model new sources of wealth, or we’ll strike a further sustainable steadiness.”
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