World Ocean Forum ™
World Ocean Radio: Our 150th Anniversary Episode
This week marks the 150th episode of World Ocean Radio. In honor of this anniversary, we're revisiting our very first World Ocean Radio episode-The Sea Connects All Things-which first aired December 7, 2007.
As a blog entry this week, we are posting the transcript of the episode here. You may also listen to the episode if you wish. This week and every week, World Ocean Radio celebrates the vast, interconnected global system that is the world ocean. The sea connects all things...
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I’m Peter Neill, Director of the World Ocean Observatory. For many, the ocean is a place apart, a vast wilderness extending beyond our physical and psychological horizons, at once alien and indifferent, fascinating and compelling, and about which we know very little. But consider these facts: the ocean covers 71% of the earth’s surface; the ocean is a central element in the recycling and purification of fresh water; the ocean provides 40% of the world’s protein, especially in developing nations; more than 200 million people worldwide are dependent on the ocean for their livelihood; 65% of the world’s population lives within 100 miles of an ocean coast.
The reality is that the ocean is essential to human survival, a primary source of food, water, climate, and community – immediate, universal, and undeniable. In short, the ocean is the determinant ecology in which we live – the sea connects all things. If, indeed, all life is dependent on the ocean, then this understanding calls for its new definition as:
- an inter-connected, global eco-system that integrates natural process, habitat, and species with human intervention and impact;
- a comprehensive social system that integrates human needs and actions;
- and a complex political system that connects all peoples worldwide through economic interests, cultural traditions, and cooperative governance.
Thus, when we envision the ocean as a wilderness, we are ignoring the reality of the ocean as a domesticated place where humans have left their mark throughout history by exploration and exploitation, immigration and trade, and the exchange of custom and culture. To look today from a satellite, one can see that the ocean is marked constantly by the tracks of ships, the tools of globalization through marine transport as old as the ancient Chinese in the Pacific, the Phoenicians in the Mediterranean, and the Vikings in the Atlantic.
What has changed over time, however, is the impact of human population growth whereby the use of the ocean has increased exponentially so that today the ocean evinces a shift from abundance to scarcity and from accommodation to conflict.
This is well exemplified by the crisis in fisheries. Research has documented the collapse of certain species such as cod that once formed the staple diet of much of North America and Europe, a result of a complex of causes to include unrestricted catch, the advent of new, efficient gear and technology, and the unwillingness of fishers, both artinisal and industrial, to work cooperatively toward a sustainable harvest. This problem was further compounded by the difficulty of regulation, a result of lack of jurisdiction outside of national economic zones, the inability to monitor or enforce quotas, and the failure of governance to address the challenge.
There are many other examples. What underlies them all, however, is the understanding that just as there are social causes to these problems, there must also be social solutions. We can complain and accuse and litigate, much as we do for similar behavior on land, but the true solution lies with our determination to deal with both the cause and effect of our need to domesticate Nature—whether terrestrial or marine—for human use, and to engage in the dialogue and change required to conserve and sustain all natural resources for the benefit of all mankind. To inform this understanding is the purpose of World Ocean Radio.
National Endowment for the Ocean, Coasts, & Great Lakes Act
Note: As of mid-September, 2011, the EPW (Environment & Public Works) Committee passed the RESTORE Act – which includes funding to create a National Endowment for the Oceans. This is an important step towards getting the full Senate to vote on this bill. Please take a moment to show your support by visiting Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's website to learn more.
An encouraging sign of a new awareness and public awakening about the critical needs of the marine environment has been the recent introduction by Senators Olympia Snowe (R-Me) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) of The National Endowment for the Oceans, Coasts, and Great Lakes Act, designed to enhance America’s invaluable coastal and ocean resources through protection, research, and management. According to Senator Snowe, “…our coastal communities and economy are inextricably linked to the ocean’s health and sustainability…the Act would help to fulfill our responsibility to preserve the vitality of the critical ecosystem it supports.”
The proposed legislation would create a funding process based on interest from the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, 12.5 percent of revenues from offshore energy development (to include oil, gas, and renewable energy), and 10 percent of civil penalties for regulatory violations on the Continental Shelf. Overhead is capped at 3%. The Endowment would be overseen by the Secretary of Commerce, more specifically by a seven person Council comprising additional representatives of other Federal agencies with over-lapping authority. Panels of experts and community representatives would advise.
Here is some specific language from the Act. Its purposes “are to protect, conserve, re-store, and understand the oceans, coasts, and Great Lakes of the United States, ensuring present and future generations will benefit from the full range of ecological, economic, educational, social, cultural, nutritional, and recreational opportunities and services these resources are capable of providing.”
“Activities harming ocean, coastal, and Great Lakes ecosystems jeopardize the economies and social structure of communities dependent on resources from such ecosystems.”
“The coastal regions of the United States have high biological productivity and contribute approximately 50 percent of the gross domestic product of the United States. The oceans, coasts, and Great Lakes are susceptible to change as a direct and indirect result of human activities, which can inhibit ecosystem integrity and productivity, biodiversity, environmental quality, national security, economic competitiveness, availability of energy, resistance to natural hazards, and transportation safety and efficiency.”
“A variety of human activities have caused dramatic declines in the health and productivity of ocean, coastal, and Great Lakes ecosystems of the United States, including chemical, nutrient, thermal, and biological pollution, including the introduction of invasive species, and the introduction of marine debris; unwise land use and coastal development; loss and degradation of habitat, including upstream freshwater habitat for anadromous, diadromous, and migratory fish species; overfishing and by-catch of non-target marine species; and global climate change and ocean acidification.”
These are strong, perhaps unexpected statements, grounded in reality, indicative of insightful legislative purpose, based on research and best practice.
The legislation would establish a grants program to fund projects to restore habitat, manage fisheries, plan for sustainable coastal development, acquire coastal properties for preservation, and relocate critical coastal infrastructure. Applicants could include States, regional associations, non-governmental organizations, and research organizations.To be eligible, States would be required to provide an approved five-year coastal management plan and, in some cases, match Federal grant funds dollar for dollar.
This is a welcome step forward, and is the logical and practical follow-up to the nation’s new National Ocean Policy that was established by President Obama earlier this year. Now, of course, comes the hard part, as the Act enters the troubled waters of the legislative process. – review by sub-committees, full committees, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and then the so-called reconciling, trading, compromising and diluting by opposing interests in what passes for governance these days. Think of this initiative as one of those alewives or salmon that return home to inland places to spawn, avoiding all the dangers of the open ocean, surviving the hunters, the pollutants, and the dams. Let’s hope this one makes it; we need this initiative badly if we are ever to deal successfully with the once and future ocean.
July 6, 2011
What Will It Take?
Japan lies devastated by a giant wave and its geological, nuclear, financial, sociological, and psychological aftershocks.
A natural event, deep underwater, sets in motion circumstances that evince how defenseless we are to the power of the ocean unleashed. What more will it take to demonstrate the stupidity of those who continue to subvert the scientific study of ocean and climate systems to meet their short-term interests? How many people have to die? How often do we have to witness the physical and emotional collapse that follows these disasters? Are we safe because the destruction is elsewhere? Do we think these circumstances cannot inundate us as well at some future time? We are far less prepared and we are doing everything we can to dismiss the threat, to discredit and de-fund the science, and to eliminate the early warning systems that in this case may have saved thousands of lives, but not nearly enough. And when marine disasters do occur within our own waters, -- Katrina or Deep Water Horizon for example -- within months we revert to our narrow, foolish, ignorant ways – forgetting the victims, enabling the perpetrators, sabotaging the alternatives, denying the facts, and compromising our environmental protections, indeed our very survival.
What will it take? A waterquake; an invisible wave traveling many hundreds of miles an hour in all directions. Could this devastation have been prevented? Maybe not, but the danger was known, studied, foreseen and surely in part limited by research, planning, precautions, standards, and governance at every level. Japan’s scientific research, tsunami early warning system, earthquake building codes, shoreline defenses, and disaster preparedness are as sophisticated as exist and yet the video shows how impossible it is to contain such force when released. Japan took that force seriously; however awful it is today and tomorrow, it could still have been worse.
What do we do? We reject the science. We deny the problem. We degrade those who advocate for change and the future. The ocean just laughs at our ideological differences, preening nationalism, religious and racial biases, pompous sound-bites, and petty political aspirations. It will show no respect for us, because we show no respect for it. What will it take?
Ocean Zoning: More Effective Marine Management
Management of marine resources remains our primary tool to counter the myriad challenges presented by the ocean today: the depletion of fisheries, pollution of coastal zones, conflicting uses within the coastal zones, demands for exploitation of deep sea resources for energy, mining, and pharmacological purposes. Add to that the impact of climate change – sea level rise, extreme weather, acidification, and much more – and the ocean environment demands a critical management response to mitigate, adapt, and invent revolutionary strategies to sustain its resources in space and in time.
Management strategies have been primarily local and hard earned. Coastal conservation efforts, marine protected areas, networks of marine protected areas, regional management schemes, and, most recently, experiments in “marine spatial planning” have served as an evolutionary, opportunistic response. But, clearly, these have not been enough.
In her new publication, Ocean Zoning – Making Marine Management More Effective (Earthscan, 2010), Dr. Tundi Agardy, Executive Director of Sound Seas, Director of the MARES Program at Forest Trends, and Science and Policy Director of the World Ocean Observatory, argues clearly and cogently for a paradigm shift: ocean zoning as an up-scaled, enhanced, and integrated system that “overcomes the shortcomings of small-scale protected areas; recognizes the relative ecological importance and environmental vulnerability of differing areas; allows harmonization with terrestrial land-use and coastal planning; better articulates private sector roles, responsibilities, and market opportunities; minimizes conflict between incompatible uses; and moves us away from fragmented sectoral efforts towards integrated and effective ecosystem-based management that fully includes all uses of, and impacts on, the oceans”
Dr. Agardy goes on to assert that zoning is simple, straightforward, systematic, and strategic and that it clarifies rights and creates shared management responsibilities. The parceling of the ocean into areas according to their human-use values is radical and certainly difficult in the face of vested interests, conventional thinking, and local, regional, national, and international politics, but it provides “a framework that can evolve out of existing use patterns and cooperative agreements toward meeting the larger goals of biodiversity conservation, conservation of rare and threatened species, maintenance of natural ecosystem functioning at a regional scale, and management of fisheries, recreation, education, and research in a more coordinated and complimentary fashion. The integrated approach inherent in zoning is a natural response to a complex set of ecological processes and environmental problems and is an efficient way to allocate scarce time and resources to combating the issues that parties deem to be most critical.”
Ocean zoning will be, no doubt, as controversial as it is frequently on land. But there are serious benefits to be earned through economies of scale, pro-rated costs, reconciliation of competing interests, and more effective conservation. Many encouraging experiments are already underway: at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in Australia, in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Italy and the Mediterranean Sea, along the coasts of the European northeast Atlantic, and Africa. The need is there. We must adopt such radical tools if we are to meet the insistent challenges the ocean now presents, to reverse degradation and improve ocean health. We must put all such tools to use, realizing of course that they are only as good as the man or woman who wields them.
The True Cost of Deepwater Horizon
The DeepWater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico provides a telling example of how to calculate the true cost of “progress.” As economists join with scientists, we are moving from observation and study to predictable measurement and advance calculation of the true value of natural resources -- the cost of their development, of their loss, of the mitigation and adaptation required by their consequence, and of their implementation without first taking into consideration the broader and deeper financial implications for the community, immediately and downstream.
Historically, the conventional corporate argument, typically made to local communities, regulators, and state and federal legislators, has been that the presence of an offshore drilling industry be valued in terms of jobs created, taxes and royalties paid, and value added to the overall financial health of the local, national, and indeed global economy. Given the quarterly financial reports of the oil companies, this evaluation adds up to substantial profit. But much is left out of the calculation.
For example, we tend to forget that the natural resources within any national 200-mile limit are owned by the public and that, as such, government is obliged to exploit that capacity for the national good. In many cases, the legislation enabling the licensing of these resources requires royalty payment frequently designated to restricted funds for specific purposes: scientific research, education, environmental protection or historic preservation. While that may be true on paper, those royalties most often end up not in support of those designated purposes, but in the general fund.
Moreover, it is evident that the royalties collected are only a fraction of the market value of those resources, and the profits generated, even after all the substantial costs of administration, exploration, drilling, transportation, refining, distribution, and conversion into innumerable oil-based products, when distributed to the shareholders represent a not so visible but very real transfer of value from owners to investors, from public sector to private sector, from the many to the few, in not necessarily equitable percentage.
In addition, government provides enormous public subsidy to the oil industry in the form of incentives and tax credits for exploration and research, technology development, depreciation, and many, many other legislative amendments, regulatory adjustments, and management decisions along the way made for the benefit of the industry. And, of course, there is the continuing presence of politicians and government officials, chosen for their influence, sitting on the boards of these companies and expected to avoid direct and indirect conflicts of interest.
What, then, is the true value of an oil well drilled a mile down offshore in a unique ecological zone subject to multiple uses? Is it simply the cost of the well or the price of the product? The real calculation must include all the ancillary expense and revenue, and the cost of their loss. When you begin to add up what the public has paid for DeepWater Horizon versus what has been gained – and when you add the hidden subsidy – and when you add the cost of dealing with the consequence of the disaster – and when you add the value of loss to the environmental refugees and communities affected – and when you add the value of damage to the productive ecology and the future revenues lost – you have a dramatically different equation. From a balance sheet perspective, what in the near term seems profit is in the long term a financial disaster, visualized today in the photos of oil slicks, wide and deep, fouled beaches, dead wildlife, destroyed wetlands, unemployed fishermen, bankrupt tourism businesses, depressed local economies, ruined communities.
And, if you add collapsed shareholder value and a wounded international company to this calculation, why would anyone invest in this strategy for the future?
Comments
It doesn't seem as if this should be a big issue but then again there are always going to be those who will not like what is done, especially when it comes to zoning. Maybe it is just the term that freaks people out.