By John Waldman
source: Mark Power/Magnum Photos
Not that long ago the world’s oceans were viewed as too gargantuan for humans to influence. This view was voiced most notably in 1883 by the English biologist Thomas Huxley, who in his inaugural address to the International Fisheries Exhibition in London asserted that “all the great sea fisheries are inexhaustible.”
Nowadays, such naïveté seems inconceivable. We’re witnessing rampant overfishing and the decline in size of commercially important fish; rising water temperatures and even “marine heat waves” that are throwing ecosystems into disarray and driving fish and crustacean stocks to the relief of deeper water and toward the poles; acidity that is challenging the ability of sea creatures to form shells; lessening oxygen levels and “dead zones”; contamination from oil spills — a gloomy totality that has come to be known as the “Aquacalypse.”
The seemingly inexhaustible is becoming dangerously exhausted.
I’m an aquatic conservation biologist at Queens College. Among the courses I teach is a graduate seminar on “historical ecology” in the context of marine conservation. My students become most absorbed not in the grim realities of the alarming present, which they take as a given, but by historical accounts of incredible abundance. For instance, in the 1500s, Europeans exploring Nova Scotia simply dropped baskets in near-shore waters and hauled up large cod. Spanish sailors near Cuba saw turtles “in such vast numbers that they covered the sea.” Travelers noted large whales “infinite in number,” “impossible to be counted.” River herring once ran up rivers from the sea to spawn in quantities that seemed “unbelievable, indeed, indescribable, as also incomprehensible.”
Nowadays, such naïveté seems inconceivable. We’re witnessing rampant overfishing and the decline in size of commercially important fish; rising water temperatures and even “marine heat waves” that are throwing ecosystems into disarray and driving fish and crustacean stocks to the relief of deeper water and toward the poles; acidity that is challenging the ability of sea creatures to form shells; lessening oxygen levels and “dead zones”; contamination from oil spills — a gloomy totality that has come to be known as the “Aquacalypse.”
