If you like oysters, it is time to pay attention to what is happening
in Oregon. And even if you don't like them, but care about the global
food web that allows oysters to grow, reproduce and thrive, what's
happening Oregon should give you pause.
Ocean acidification, a
consequence of the oceans being overloaded with carbon dioxide from
human fossil fuel use, has been shown by a group of researchers to
hamper the development of larval oysters at a hatchery on the Oregon
coast. After years of suspicion, this was the smoking gun demonstrating
that acidification has real damaging effects on commercial fisheries and
that they are happening not 100 years from now but as we speak.
Scientists
have long been able to demonstrate in the lab and on paper why this
would be so. In the absence of hard evidence from the field, how-ever,
they have been exceptionally careful to distinguish what they know from
what they suspect. But now it is folly to assume that this problem is
limited to one small stretch of Pacific Northwest coastline.
As an
indictment of our failure to wean ourselves off oil and coal, this is
more fuel for the fire. More importantly, this news will help people
understand that there is a hard dollar cost to misusing the oceans.
Indeed there is tremendous financial incentive to leaving at least parts
of it alone.
My job is lucky enough to come with an office that
looks over a lovely marine reserve in the Pacific Ocean whose boundaries
recently expanded as part of a revision of California Marine Protected
Areas. Of course, this expansion didn't happen without controversy.
There was a predictable hue and cry from sport fishers and commercial
fishers who claimed they were being physically separated from their
livelihood by a line drawn in the water.
But the facts don't
necessarily sup-port that. Fishermen in Baja California, Mexico decided
more than a decade ago to create a marine reserve and make themselves
the enforcers of its boundaries. The region they protect is now one of
the biologically richest places in Mexico and the subsistence fishermen
in Cabo Pulmo no longer have to worry about feeding them-selves.
California now has a chance to replicate that experience.
Separately
a group of researchers writing for the Stockholm Environment Institute
put an especially fine point on the argument against exploiting the
oceans unsustainably. They calculated a cost savings of more than $1
trillion per year by 2100 if a course of aggressive greenhouse gas
emissions reduction is pursued versus our current negligence, often
labelled "business-as-usual." It is a brave attempt to derive a hard
dollar figure using extremely nebulous variables. Nonetheless they make a
good argument that their estimate is a conservative one.
It is
frustratingly naive to believe that the benefits of offshore oil
exploration (or terrestrial, for that matter) automatically justify the
costs. The same can be said for corporate farming that routes tons of
fertilizer and pesticides to the oceans. And the same is true for
largely uncontrolled disposal of pharmaceutical products and plastics.
It is naive because even the most educated experts do not yet even know
the full costs.
The oyster industry in Oregon affected by ocean
acidification is worth about $278 million, a pittance in a world where a
single oil rig can cost $5 billion. On the other hand, that industry is
everything to the people who rely on that fishery and a source of great
pleasure to the consumers it serves. As if that is not enough to make
us think, here is a final thought: The acidification brought on by the
past 150 years or so of fossil fuel use will require more than 1,000
years to reverse.
The ocean is large and opaque. It is an act of
irresponsible faith to think that impenetrable blue mass is big enough
to absorb all our sins with-out consequence. We need to finish the work
of realistically assessing the ocean's value, and cherish it
accordingly.
Written by Tony Haymet director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography@The Vancouver Sun
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