Memo to environmental activists: It’s the oceans, stupids.
This summer, people will flock to beaches to swim, surf, wade, boat, fish, sunbathe, or even fall in love. To these revelers, the oceans are eternal — a permanent bounty in an impermanent world.
But there is a rub: The oceans are living entities and they are in trouble.
Mark Spalding, president of The Ocean Foundation, says, “We are putting too much into the oceans and taking too much out.”
Whether deliberately or not, we are dumping stuff into the oceans at a horrifying rate and, in places, we are overfishing them.
But the No. 1 enemy of oceans is invisible: carbon.
Carbon is a huge threat, according to ocean champion U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I. The oceans are a great carbon sink, he explains, but they are reaching a carbon saturation point, and as so-called “deep carbon” resurfaces, it limits the oxygen in the water and destroys fish and marine life.
There is a 6,474-square-mile “dead zone” — an area about the size of Connecticut with low to no oxygen — in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Dead zones are appearing in oceans around the world due to excessive nutrient pollution (especially nitrogen and phosphorous) from agribusiness and sewage. Two great U.S. estuaries are in trouble: the Chesapeake Bay and the Long Island Sound.
Warming in the North Atlantic is disturbing fish populations: Maine lobsters are migrating to Canada’s cooler waters.
The shallow seas, like the Baltic and the Adriatic, are subject to “red tides” — harmful algal booms, due to nutrient overenrichment, that kill fish and make shellfish dangerous to consume.
My appeal to the environmental community is this: If you are worried about the air, concentrate on the oceans. It is hard to explain greenhouse gases to a public that is distrustful, or fears the economic effect of reducing fossil fuel consumption. If I lived in a West Virginia hollow, and the only work was coal mining, you bet I would be a climate denier.
The oceans are easier to understand. You can explain that the sea levels are rising; that it is possible for life-sustaining currents, like the Gulf Stream, to stop or reverse course; and you can point to the ways seemingly innocent actions, or those thought of as virtuous (like hefting around spring water in plastic bottles) have harmful effects.
Plastic is a big problem. Great gyres of plastic, hundreds of miles long, are floating in the Pacific. Flip-flops washed into the ocean in Asia are piling up on beaches in Africa. Fish are ingesting microplastic particles — and you will ingest this plastic when you tuck into your fish and chips. Sea birds and dolphins get tangled in the plastic harnesses we put on six-packs of beer and soft drinks. They die horrible deaths. Sunscreen is lethal to coral.
It is hard to explain the way carbon, methane and ozone in the atmosphere cause the Earth to heat up. It is easier, I am telling my environmentalist friends, to understand that we will not be able to swim in the oceans.
I have met climate deniers, but I have never run into an ocean denier.
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