Endangered Oceans | Introduction
People do not often think about how much humans depend on the world’s oceans. Oceans regulate the climate, maintain a livable atmosphere, and break down natural wastes. According to marine biologist and conservationist Carl Safina, “Without an ocean, this planet would merely spin unnamed three orbits from a star, its browned-out face its own sterile moonscape.” Nevertheless, people treat the oceans as if they were inexhaustible both in terms of what they produce and in what they can absorb. Although people are now more aware of threats to the world’s oceans, marine conservation efforts still comprise only a small part of total conservation efforts. For example, about 18 percent of U.S. land is protected while only 0.4 percent of U.S. waters are protected. Unlike land, which is visible and stationary, the ocean is opaque and fluid. These characteristics make marine conservation efforts more difficult than efforts to protect the land.
While people can readily observe destructive land use practices, abuse of the oceans often goes unseen. For this reason, laws and regulations to protect the oceans often come long after the damage has been done. Land degradation caused by the clear cutting of forests, for example, is obvious to those who live in the surrounding community. In contrast, the deep ocean floor is unseen by most people, so the devastation caused by bottom trawling equipment goes unnoticed. According to ocean policy analyst Hannah Gillelan, “Were trawls clearing swaths on land, as they do on the seafloor, the practice would have been severely curtailed or halted before now.” The destruction of marine wildlife also goes unrecognized for the same reason. Tom Butler, editor of Wild Earth, writes, “How many of us have seen a living shark, bleeding from a gaping wound, dumped overboard to sink and die alone, a sacrifice to the whims of people who enjoy shark fin soup?”
Another challenge to marine conservation efforts is that unlike land, the ocean is fluid. In consequence, pollution affects oceans differently than its does land masses. Environmental policy analyst Anne Platt McGinn writes, “Once contaminants enter the sea, currents and tides may carry them far from the original source. Or they may be consumed by a species and move up the food chain, becoming more concentrated as they go. Both pollutants and species continually migrate across boundaries and interact, complicating protection efforts.” Pollutants created and dispersed by one nation may have an impact on oceans and wildlife far from its borders. Persistent organic pollutants (POPs), synthetic chemicals that do not degrade easily, tend to circulate toward colder environments such as the Arctic. They accumulate in the fatty tissues of fish that are then consumed by predators at a more concentrated level and, as a result, have been implicated in a wide range of animal and human health problems. Although the problem of POPs is global, not until May 2001 did concerned nations sign the Stockholm Convention, an international treaty that aims to eliminate POPs.
Perhaps the greatest difficulty in protecting the world’s oceans is that although ocean waters are used by many nations, no nation owns them. A nation has sovereignty over its lands and territorial sea, the small coastal strip adjacent to its shores, but no nation has sovereignty over the “high seas.” Conserving open-ocean resources thus requires concerted international cooperation, a vastly more complicated effort than is involved in national land conservation efforts, which can generally be coordinated within one nation. Prior to the mid–twentieth century, this international cooperation was lacking; in fact, the use of ocean resources was guided by the freedom-of-the-seas principle. In 1609 Hugo Grotius argued in Mare Liberum (Free Sea) that no one owned the high seas because they could not be occupied in the sense that land can be occupied. The high seas, he claimed, were therefore free to all nations and subject to none.
In 1958, however, a number of factors prompted the United Nations to develop an international law to govern the oceans. Some coastal nations had unilaterally claimed different parts of the oceans as their own and conflicts between nations began to arise. In addition, ocean pollution had begun to threaten coastal regions and wildlife worldwide. In response, the United Nations held a series of conventions between 1958 and 1982 that resulted in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which went into effect in 1994 and, as of February 2002, has been ratified by 138 nations. Although the United States has not yet ratified the Convention, it has accepted it in principle. UNCLOS covers a wide range of ocean issues, including protection of the marine environment and the conservation and management of its resources. UNCLOS also approved a twelve-nautical-mile territorial limit for coastal nations and a two-hundred-nautical-mile Exclusive Economic Zone, in which the adjacent nation may control fishing rights, marine environmental protection, and scientific research. According to Jose Luis Jesus, a member of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the convention “has contributed much to bring stability and order to the oceans. The era of unilateral claims and sovereignty disputes . . . seem to be a thing of the past.”
For other commentators, however, stability and order are not enough. The provisions of UNCLOS, they claim, are insufficient to protect the marine environment. According to researchers Robert J. Wilder, Mia J. Tegner, and Paul K. Dayton, “The scarce language in UNCLOS regarding the conservation of marine biodiversity is far more aspirational than operational.” Treaties such as UNCLOS, they argue, operate using unsuccessful marine policies, often based on the outdated maxim, “Take as much as can be taken and pollute as much as can be polluted until a problem arises.” These conservationists argue that a precautionary principle—preventing damage before it occurs—must be incorporated into conservation treaties.
For many, marine conservation efforts continue to lag be- hind those on land, and identifying how best to meet the challenges of conserving ocean and coastal resources remains the subject of debate. In Opposing Viewpoints: Endangered Oceans, other controversies surrounding the conservation of the world’s oceans and coastal areas are debated in the following chapters: How Endangered Are the World’s Oceans and Coastlines? What Ocean Management and Conservation Practices Should Be Pursued? What Strategies Would Best Promote Sustainable Fishing? What Impact Do Human Activities Have on Marine Mammals? The authors express diverse views about the extent of the threat to the world’s oceans and debate the most effective ways to protect the marine environment.
