Friday, July 12, 2013

Elephant in the Room?


Environmentally Destructive Human Activities That Take Place on Land May Ultimately Determine the Health of Our Marine Living Resources

Now is the time for the proponents of the Ecosystem Approach to Marine life Management to more fully confront the environmental damages that arise from land based human activities.  Broadly speaking, ocean ecosystems are not protected enough from the negative environmental by-products arising from our ever expanding world population as it struggles to feed, clothe, house, create products, transport, and heat/cool itself.

1.  Worldwide, runoffs of agricultural fertilizers/pesticides, industrial wastes, and sewers have caused a growing number of coastal “dead zones” where very little marine life can live due to oxygen depletion or other toxicities.  There are over 400 of these dead zones that persist or exist periodically each year around the globe.  These types of runoffs will most likely continue to increase along with our ever-growing population and create additional problems that may negatively affect the entire structure of the ocean food web.

2.  The global burning of fossil fuels, wood, and other organic matter to provide energy for a growing world population produces excessive greenhouse gases and airborne particulates that increase global warming and the acidity of our oceans.  Ocean acidification has been linked to inhibiting the ability of shellfish larvae and certain plankton to incorporate calcium into their bodies to assure their proper development and survival.  It is possible that the emerging negative consequences of ocean acidification will make all historical overfishing damages look tame by comparison. 

3.  Worldwide, people are increasingly building on marine coastlines and in riparian zones resulting in the destruction of estuaries, swamplands, marshes, mangrove forests, and watersheds.  This results in the degradation of productive coastal marine and riparian habitats that have for millions of years served as nurseries and homes to a vast diversity of aquatic life.  This continual loss of productive marine coastlines and riparian zones may prove to be much more negative in the long run than any overfishing activities currently happening around the world today.

Many environmental activists call for the establishment of marine reserves to allow for the recovery of ocean habitats that have been damaged by irresponsible fishing.  They advocate that 10% to 50% of our oceans be placed in such reserves.  They want approximately 80% of these reserves to be located near the coastlines of the world.  These marine areas, unfortunately, are where most of the negative environmental influences coming from the land-based activities of humans mentioned above tend to manifest themselves.

Without NGOs and nations taking a more aggressive role in confronting our growing world population with its concomitant environmental impacts, all our efforts to manage fisheries or to create marine reserves may ultimately prove to be too narrow-minded.  The Ecosystem Approach to Marine life Management needs to broaden its perspective to incorporate the negative environmental by-products of the land based activities of an ever-expanding world population that may reach 10 billion by the year 2050.  Now is the time to more fully confront this elephant in the room that we too often seem to ignore.