In the last half century (the blink of an eye in which I’ve lived my life), the ocean—the crucible of life on our blue marble planet—has been devastated by a series of cascading disasters. These include industrial overfishing for the global seafood market that has seen 90 percent of the large open ocean fish killed off, as well as the possible extinction of edible species of fish by 2048. Oil, chemical, and plastic pollution of the seas has also become ubiquitous. Add to this the effects of fossil-fuel-fired climate change, and it’s understandable why some leading marine scientists have begun to despair. Personally, I’m more frustrated than despairing because we know what the solutions are. Fish tend to grow back once you stop killing them faster than they can reproduce. We don’t need to produce 100 million metric tons of single-use plastic a year if much of that ends up in the ocean killing seabirds and turtles. Protecting coastal wetlands, reefs, and mangroves also protects human populations from storm impacts while providing livelihoods in fishing, tourism, and other industries (plus, they sequester carbon). Coal and oil are the leading energy systems of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. We’re now in the twenty-first. And it’s worth noting that no Louisiana bayou was ever destroyed by a wind spill or turbine-turning tide. It’s unclear if we can establish the rule of law at sea in ways that can rein in the saltwater special interests such as BP and Mitsubishi (a major buyer of endangered bluefin tuna). All we can know for certain is that if we don’t try, we lose. And this salty blue marble planet of ours is too wild, fun, and sacred to lose.
David Helvarg is an author and president of the Blue Frontier Campaign, a marine conservation and policy group. His latest book is “Saved by the Sea: A Love Story with Fish.” This is an excerpt of his article in the Dec/Jan special issue of The Progressive, "Saving the Earth." To read the full article, and the entire special issue (containing interviews with Margaret Atwood, Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, and Vandana Shiva), simply subscribe to The Progressive for $14.97 by clicking here.