EARTH IS REALLY A WATER PLANET. AS LAND DWELLERS, WE ARE AIR chauvinists who are immensely ignorant of what lies beneath the ocean waves. Yet while atmosphere, climate, and topsoil are being altered, marine systems seem to be buffered from rapid change. So, increasingly, we are turning to the oceans for resources, especially food.
The oceans cover 70 percent of the planet’s surface. They are where life itself began, and they are home for a vast array of living things. Today, those waters are being plundered on a scale that is catastrophic. If we protest the burning, clear-cut logging, and damming of the Amazon rain forest, British Columbia’s coastal rain forests, California’s redwoods, and the James Bay watersheds, we cannot ignore the ecological devastation being inflicted on the oceans.
We are taking too much and destroying the oceans’ habitats in the process. You can get a hint of the cause of the problem by visiting Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market, the largest in the world. Kilometers of tightly packed aisles are crowded with merchants selling sea life in mind-boggling volume and variety. Row upon row of huge frozen tuna, swordfish, and sharks are sold on the docks. Fish eggs of many species, tiny fish fry, small octopuses and crabs, slabs of deep red whale meat and fish of every size, shape, and variety are for sale. By afternoon, the stalls are empty, and the next morning, the process is repeated. Since Japan’s insatiable appetite cannot be satisfied from its own waters, it buys or catches food from the oceans of the world.
Everything about the causes of the environmental crisis—ignorance, shortsightedness, greed—is exemplified by the way we are “harvesting” the oceans. Our knowledge of ecosystems in the aqueous world is extremely limited. So we act as if things that are out of sight needn’t be thought about. How else can we explain the way we use the oceans as dumps for garbage, sewage, industrial effluent, nuclear waste, and old chemical weapons?
Moreover, our fishing policies are determined by political and economic priorities instead of the requirements of complex marine ecosystems. Japan’s fishing fleet plies the Seven Seas like twentieth-century buccaneers, looting and pillaging “international” waters with impunity. It is the drift nets of Japan, as well as Taiwan and Korea, that represent the ultimate in greed and shortsightedness. If we were willing to go to war over Kuwait, we should respond just as massively to the vandalism in the seas.
Common sense ought to inform us that when 50,000 kilometers (30,000 miles) of near-invisible nylon nets are set nightly six months a year, the destruction will be unacceptable. These “curtains of death” form walls that trap far more than the squid they are said to be fishing—they indiscriminately catch fish, marine birds, and mammals, including porpoises, seals, and small whales. Like deadly scythes, drift nets cut broad swaths through the ocean. Fishers use drift nets as if the animals caught will be somehow endlessly replaced. Japan’s assurances that the effects of drift nets will be “monitored” are a cynical ploy. This ocean strip-mining should be stopped immediately.
The oceans are vast and often treacherous, and each season, hundreds if not thousands of kilometers of drift nets are lost. No longer under human control, they become “ghost nets” and continue to catch fish around the clock all year. When they acquire a heavy load of victims, the nets may sink to the ocean floor until the carcasses decay and fall off. Then, like an invisible undersea monster, the nets rise again to continue their deadly chore.
The long-term ecological effects of our marine activity have to be rated above the short-term economic benefits. And it’s not just drift nets—we treat the ocean floor as if it is uniform and endlessly resilient. Immense factory ships drag massive weights and nets across the ocean bottom in an ecologically destructive operation that is like clear-cutting a forest. Large clams called geoducks, many more than a hundred years old, are blasted out of the ocean floor with jets of water that destroy habitat for many bottom dwellers.
Governments assume that by regulating catch limits, fishing gear, and fishing seasons, ocean resources are “managed.” Instead of beginning from a sense of our vast ignorance of ocean ecosystems and productivity and designing regulations that always err on the side of caution, we allow organisms to be taken until they disappear. If we mean it when we talk about a “sustainable future,” we have to change the way we exploit the oceans. Drift nets are a place to start.
Update
After Japan had created drift nets made of deadly, efficient, and tough nylon monofilament in the late 1970s, the number of boats using them increased enormously. Used primarily to catch squid, the nets were so effective that Japan banned them within 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) of its shores, thereby sending Japanese boats to fish far out at sea. More than five hundred boats in the Bering Sea in the 1980s, mainly from Japan and Taiwan, led Alaska to expel the Japanese fleet from the Bering Sea and led New Zealand to ban Taiwanese drift nets from their waters in 1983. In 1989, Hawaii banned them, South Pacific nations signed the Tarawa Declaration calling for a ban, and the Canadian minister of Fisheries and Oceans, Tom Siddon, declared his opposition. The FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) estimated that in 1989, between 315,000 and a million dolphins were killed in drift nets. In December 1989, the United States introduced a resolution in the United Nations calling for a ban on drift nets in the South Pacific and a worldwide moratorium by June 30, 1992. In order to pass the resolution, it was watered down.
Observers aboard fishing boats led to estimates that Japanese drift nets took 106 million squid and 40 million others of a hundred species. On November 25, 1991, Japan and the U.S. announced an agreement to phase out Japanese drift nets throughout the world. On December 20, 1991, the UN passed a resolution for a 50 percent reduction by June 30, 1992, and a full phaseout by the end of 1992. European boats continued to use drift nets in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean until the late 1990s.
Drift nets had scythed a terrible swath through fish, mammals, turtles, and birds by the time the nets were phased out. But other deadly methods were already in use. Longlines that could stretch up to 50 kilometers (30 miles) and carry 10,000 hooks were and still are being deployed throughout the oceans. As they are played out, the lines extend close to the surface far behind the ships, where the baited hooks attract seabirds, especially albatross. Between 1997 and 2000 in the South Pacific alone, it is estimated that 330,000 seabirds, including 46,500 albatross, 7,200 giant petrels, and 138,000 white-chinned petrels, were drowned by longlines. In addition, the long-lines take sharks, turtles, dolphins, and even whales, which become entangled. In 1994, the bycatch (nontarget species) with longlines off Alaska alone was 572 million pounds.
If that weren’t enough, technological improvements allowed immense nets dragged along the ocean bottom by two trawlers to haul up anything in their way. Nets made of strong, synthetic fibers are big enough to hold twelve jumbo jets! In six weeks, French and Scottish pair trawlers caught more than two thousand dolphins. Not only are huge amounts of bycatch taken on board and then discarded, the weights to hold the nets down are immense rollers that crush the habitat of the sea bottom. Marine conservationist Elliott Norse estimates the total area of sea bottom dragged annually is 115 times as great as the area of forest clear-cut throughout the world each year.
The crisis is in the development of powerful technologies that can increase yields dramatically but destroy habitat, kill a wide spectrum of noncommercial species, and increase the take of the economically valuable targets. Without ecological principles of sustainability to limit their take, new techniques fuel a gold-rush mentality without regard to the future