David Helvarg
As we prepare to March for the Ocean on Saturday, June 9, in Washington, D.C., with dozens of sister marches around the world, people have begun to thank me and other organizers for keeping the focus on solutions rather than just threats.
Sure, we’re against the Trump Administration’s plans to open up more than 90 percent of our public seas to offshore oil drilling and spilling; against the plastic pollution of our seas and sea life; and against the outmoded energy policies and coastal development that increasingly put our communities at risk.
But we’re also for a revolution in job-generating renewable energy and for holding corporations accountable for their waste. We want to shift the burden from the consumer of plastic straws and bags to the perpetrators of a throwaway culture. The plastic pollution movement’s demand for accountability from corporations could be one of the news stories that will emerge out of the March for the Ocean.
David Helvarg
We’re also advocating that $100 billion dollars be dedicated to “living infrastructure” upgrades, instead of tax-cuts for oligarchs. We could actually save money restoring the dunes, estuaries, salt marshes, bayous, sea grasses, mangrove forests, and oyster and coral reefs that protect us from both natural and unnatural disasters—such as projected three to six feet of sea level rise in coming decades. Reminder: The next hurricane season starts June 1.
It’s surprisingly easy to inspire hope about ways that we can still turn the tide. “Eco-Optimism” has become a whole new enterprise. However, as a former journalist turned advocate for our living seas, I feel an obligation to speak truth not just to power but to my friends and colleagues in the struggle to protect our blue marble planet.
Ask one of March for the Ocean’s keynote speakers, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Dr. Sylvia Earle, what her favorite places to scuba dive are and she’ll tell you, “Anywhere fifty years ago.”
We’re marching on June 9 not to bring back all that we’ve lost but to save enough remaining biological reserves for a viable future. The everlasting sea will endure. It’s our species that remains an evolutionary question mark.
Put another way: In the 1970s we marched to save the whales, now we’re marching to save it all, including the whales. Just ask another of our speakers, Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Society. He’s gone from sinking illegal whaling vessels to working with the government of Mexico to protect the last dozen vaquitas, a small species of porpoise endemic to the northern Sea of Cortez. There is a real risk that corruption and organized crime could lead to the vaquitas’ demise, within a very short time.
And the North Atlantic right whale, found off the U.S. eastern seaboard could, with just over 400 members of its tribe left, could soon follow them into extinction.
For the fourth out of five years, the North Pole is now experiencing a “heat wave” with temperatures going above the melting point, adding to historic flows and lows of sea ice. Since 2013, sea ice has been disappearing (including for the first time in winter months) in the Bering and Chukchi Seas. That’s good news for the Trump Administration, which wants to reopen these areas to offshore drilling. While no oil company is interested in drilling offshore right now, Trump’s tearing up of the Iran nuclear deal means oil prices can be expected to spike again.
The push of fresh water from the Arctic and Greenland’s glaciers is also suspected of being responsible for a 15 percent slowdown in the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation which could have huge impacts on Europe’s weather and U.S. coastal storminess.
At the same time, bleaching linked to warming seas has killed off half of the Great Barrier Reef’s corals in the last few years.
David Burdick
Which is to say our solutions—a rapid transition to carbon-free energy, reduced pollution; an end to overfishing and pirate fishing; building coastal resilience based on ecological restoration—are not really about returning our coast and ocean to a more pristine state so much as they are triage.
So when I talk to someone who says, “I don’t want to see another oil spill but you need a triggering event, you need a crisis to mobilize people,” all I can think is we’re in a global crisis right now. Our linked ocean and climate system could soon break our civilization’s life support system.
In the meantime, we are actually hopeful that the thousands who will March for the Ocean June 9—the scientists, surfers, divers, explorers, youth and students, social justice warriors, fishermen and women, beach walkers, mariners, and others—will succeed in helping to protect what they love. I’m never more optimistic than when I’m in the ocean.
And many of us will also Vote for the Ocean in November and get extra credit for that. Those politicians who favor offshore drilling and deny climate science, it turns out, also tend to be the same people nobody else likes. To quote two of our M4O hash tags – #The Ocean is Rising #And So Are We.
David Helvarg is an author, ocean activist and regular contributor to The Progressive.