Eco-catastrophe in the oceans
February 2013
The seas have been at crisis point for some time. The continued exploitation of the seas has now taken us beyond this point. The world is facing an environmental catastrophe of such proportions that it dwarfs the global financial crash. There are increasing international efforts to end the lawlessness of the oceans. The high seas lie beyond national jurisdiction, making it easier for private interests to pillage, plunder and pollute. So international regulation is to be welcomed. How effective the intervention of internal law actually is is open to doubt. The limits of supra-national legislative efforts have been exposed by the EU’s failed attempts to impose quotas on fish catches. The forcing of fishermen to throw their over-sized catches back into the sea was considered a scandal. The real scandal was that those involved in the fishing industry could not constrain their greed within the long term collective rationality prescribed by the rules.
Even with the law in place, private interests cannot see any reason beyond commercial rationality. To understand this, one needs to define the capital system as a process of private accumulation. To argue that national or international law will suffice to constrain capital within reason is to place an inordinate amount of faith in the public realm. It is to act out of the mistaken belief that capital is a public domain, whereas in fact it is a private regime of accumulation. ‘Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and all the Prophets’ wrote Marx. It is no longer Moses who gives the law. The systemic imperative to accumulate is the law. So, the greed and stupidity that is much in evidence on the high seas is not an expression of human psychology but of the accumulative logic that drives the system. National and international law may constrain the accumulative dynamic to a certain extent, but it can never extinguish it without abolishing the capital system as a whole.
How productive is the sea? Are we talking economics or ecology? In the third episode of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, the island Europa is described as a ‘liquid paradise’. Captain Cousteau narrates: ‘In the waters around Europa life flourishes, unmarred by human intervention. No-one comes here to fish, no tankers dump their filth. The water is clear and unpolluted, the coral intact. Here nature has struck a balance and here it remains. Man’s fatal need to strip and spoil and scar has not yet reached this island.’
Cousteau’s life’s work was dedicated towards encouraging us to develop an ecological sense of place in which human beings may thrive in sustainable harmony with Nature. His explorations and observations of the planet’s seas and ecosystems enjoin us to understand and appreciate the delicate beauty of life on Earth. Planetary and human flourishing go hand in hand in this view. We need to see that true value lies in Nature’s web of life.
Diver and Cardinal Fish in Wire Coral Forest 1989 David Doubilet
Ecologically, the oceans are hugely productive, probably the most productive habitat on planet Earth. But there’s money to be made. Allied to an expansion of technical capacity, the obsessive concern to get something for nothing nature has led to over-exploitation. In monetary terms, trillions of dollars' worth of damage has been done. In ecological terms, the damage is incalculable. As conditions for life on Earth, the oceans are a priceless resource. Ecologists who make such a point soon have the new idol of ‘progress’ thrown into their face. Mechanised fleets dragging the ocean, pirate fishing, using slave labour and linked to drugs, arms and people smuggling, and the threat of sea-floor mining. That might be ‘progress’ in economic terms, but it merely proves the point that economics is a rationalisation of industrial madness.
The likes of Stewart Brand and Mark Lynas advocate geo-engineering in order to halt climate change. Does anybody really think that those involved in geo-engineering are concerned with planetary health and well-being? In 2012, a 10,000 sq km geoengineering test took place off Canada but lacked any authorisation.
Here, one reveals the advocacy of geo-engineering to halt climate change in its true light. New laws are being touted to address the growth of deep-sea mining for metals and anticipate the dumping of tonnes of iron or minerals in the oceans. Even those like Brand, who are most vociferous in their claims for geo-engineering, admit that these projects come with no guarantees and uncertain effects. Back in the 1960’s, Lewis Mumford described ‘progress’ in the context of a machine civilisation not as a solution to human problems but, rather, as the predicament that confronts human beings in modern society. To use technology to leap into an unknown future in the name of ‘progress’ is an ‘excellent prescription for sending mankind to the loony bin’ (Mumford, review of Carl G Jung’s Memories 1964:185).
Or a global prison. As Miliband reasons: "But enforcement in the modern world is not going to be a great new navy of ships polluting their way around the high seas. Satellite monitoring could be one solution, while another would be to force fishing vessels to carry location beacons at all times, as many merchant vessels already do.”
Our salvation? It sounds like Bentham’s panopticon to me.
There is another way. Jacques Cousteau’s legacy is alive and well in the shape of The Cousteau Society and Equipe Cousteau, organisations dedicated to ‘the protection and improvement of the quality of life for present and future generations.’ The research, scientific activity and educational programmes of these organisations have environmentally sound and sustainable social progress as their goal. The Cousteau view is that the protection and management of the world’s natural resources ultimately depends on an informed and educated public capable of making the right decisions. ‘Education, science and technology are paramount to ensure human welfare and sustainability today and for future generations in a world that faces increasing environmental problems.’
Point Lobos 1938 Edward Weston Point Lobos 1946 Edward Weston
In other words, education, science and technology are set within the moral frame of environmental and social justice. They are not ends in themselves. Least of all are they servants of monetary and political power. Technical progress allied to systemic greed is destroying life in the oceans and, in consequence, eroding the habitability of the whole planet.
We are seeing pillage and plunder on a mass scale. This is no mere piratical smash and grab, but systematic, organised, evincing a deliberate purpose at work. It’s systemic – accumulate or be accumulated. One capitalist kills many. The result of this competition is an ecological counterpart of financial meltdown. The consequences of this short-term exploitation of the oceans will be catastrophic for long-term collective well-being. Human beings are eating the foundations of their life-support systems, dissipating the capital instead of living off the interest.
Many, many years ago it was calculated that it would require six planets to sustain human economic activity. Even apart from the exploitation of resources, the disposal of waste requires more than the one planet. The endless expansion of the capital economy, with its accumulative imperative, is pursuing infinity within a planet of finite resources and, in the end, that is not sustainable. As David Miliband argues: 'We are living as if there are three or four planets, not one, and you can't get away with that." True, but the problem is not a psychological one, simply appealing to people to change their ways, but a systemic one, the economic imperatives that compel exploitative and acquisitive behaviour.
A new Global Ocean Commission has been formed, comprising former heads of state and senior ministers from leading G20 nations. In 2012, the UN's Earth Summit set 2014 as the deadline for the first ever laws to protect biodiversity in the open oceans. "We are coming to a crunch time: 2014 needs to be the year when we reverse the degradation of the high seas," argues David Miliband. The problem, as Miliband well knows, is that any legal restraints will be challenged by those who put short term economic interests – theirs - over the long-term common good. That’s precisely why we are in this predicament. The problems have been known for some time. The world just can’t escape the accumulative dynamic of capital.
Callum Roberts is professor of marine conservation at the University of York and author of Ocean of Life: How our Seas are Changing. Roberts states: “‘The high seas play a dominant role in the processes that keep our world habitable. They are too big for us to let them fail.” He thus argues that protection for the open oceans is desperately needed: "The high seas are the last and most neglected of all natural spaces. They are home to some extraordinary species, for example, the leather-back turtle. It comes from a lineage 100m years old, but has declined by 95% in the last 20-30 years due to our depredations. Dolphins and sharks are in freefall.
"The oceans make up 95% of the living space on the planet and what happens there is extremely important for the habitability of our planet, from oxygen production to dealing with carbon dioxide and other pollution. Our impact means the oceans will do that less well, with serious consequences for humanity."
All true. But the same arguments could have been marshalled in defence of the land. The telling line is that the high seas are ‘the last’ of the natural spaces. The odds are, without a concerted effort to uproot the capital system and its expansionary dynamic, the high seas will go the same way as the other natural spaces, and for the same reason.
Roberts welcomes the formation of the Global Ocean Commission, dedicated to ending the neglect, in international affairs, of the high seas.
‘Out of sight and out of mind they may be, but the high seas are vital to everyone. By virtue of their sheer size they play a dominant role in the processes that keep our world habitable. They are too big for us to let them fail. The Global Oceans Commission has urgent work to do.’
The high seas are too precious to be left to plunderers and polluters, The Observer 10/2/13
‘The oceans are changing faster today and in more ways than at any time in human history. We are the cause.’
‘We are the cause.’ Those words, from a marine biologist, need to be repeated against all those who lazily refer to ‘natural causes’. Ecologists are frequently accused of wanting to go ‘back to nature’. This pure, pristine nature no longer exists. It has been made-over by human intervention, technique and organisation. But those who dismiss the ‘back to nature’ argument cannot, at the same time, seek to block those ecologists who demand action on the environment by reference to ‘natural causes’. First nature and the second nature that human activity has created out of it are inextricably connected. There is a crisis in the environment, on land and at sea, and ‘we are the cause’. We have to take responsibility, modify our behaviour and change our practices.
David Miliband defines the task before the Global Ocean Commission: "We are going to try to fashion practical solutions that are an environmental win and an economic win, and with a commission which is avowedly across north-south, east-west, rich-poor divides."
It all depends on the economics. Capitalist economics and global ecology won’t go, they are incompatible. To reunite economics and ecology around the oikos requires a recognition that the Earthly home is confined within planetary boundaries. The capital system recognises no such limits. Accumulation proceeds without end.
Miliband states the problem in cash terms – thereby reinforcing the utilitarian approach to the environment. He notes that, according to the World Bank, the destruction of fisheries as a result of over-exploitation costs $50bn (£32bn) a year in lost catches, amounting to $1.5 tn in total over the past three decades. In consequence, the livelihoods of the 200 million people who depend upon fishing, 90% of whom live in poor, developing countries, are directly harmed.
Falling catches threaten the health and well-being of the billion people who rely on fish as their key source of food. With world population projected to reach 9 billion in the next few decades, the collapse in stocks threatens disaster. The solution is known, it has been known for some time – we need a sustainable harvesting that allows stocks time and space to recover and yield greater catches in the future. It requires long-term collective reasoning with respect to the commons to prevail over short term private acquisition. The results of the exploitative approach are clear. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation reports that three-quarters of global fish stocks are overfished or on the brink of being overfished: including tuna, Pacific anchovy, Alaskan pollock and Atlantic herring.
Garret Hardin referred to the ‘tragedy of the commons’, a situation in which unconstrained private self-interest generated the collective irrationality of the destruction of the resources upon which we depend. David Miliband describes the governance of international waters - via the UN's 30-year-old laws of the seas - as a "tragedy". "The current enforcement on the high seas is inadequate at best and worthless at worst."
Prof. Callum Roberts also refers to the tragedy of the commons argument. ‘These seas lie far beyond the horizon - 200 nautical miles offshore to be precise - and begin where sovereign national waters give way to the global commons, owned by none, shared by all.’ Except that the seas are a global commons being pillaged, plundered and polluted by some at the expense of all.
As Roberts argues: “Like all common spaces, the high seas are vulnerable to misuse and abuse. Our indifference is costing the world dear for the high seas are being plundered.”
Roberts details the history of this plunder. Whalers were first to spot the high seas' potential as a source of monetary wealth, slaughtering their way through the 19th and 20th centuries until the great whales were brought to the brink of extinction.’
Philippe Cousteau wrote of his experiences on expedition with his father Jacques: "I cannot help but express the poignant sense of regret experienced by both my father and myself when we are forced to stand by helplessly and watch the destruction of cetaceans such as the great blue whale, the largest living creature of all time and one that will soon be no more than a memory.”
Human pillaging and plundering is leaving an awful lot of bad memories on the planet. Roberts continues: ‘Ocean-going seabirds such as albatross and petrels were also early victims of exploitation. But commercial fishing began in earnest in the 1950s, with long-line and drift-net fleets profiting in open ocean species such as tuna, swordfish, marlin and shark. By the 1980s, these fisheries had caused huge collateral damage. As Callum Roberts relates the sorry tale: ‘Drift nets spread lethal curtains tens of miles long killing indiscriminately, taking turtles, whales and dolphins alongside the target fish. They were banned by the UN in 1992 but long lines studded with tens of thousands of hooks continue the massacre. Enough long lines are set every night to wrap around the globe 500 times.’
At the same time, Soviet and European vessels facing the decline of their shallow water fish stocks in the 1960s, sought riches in the deep, on the Atlantic frontier, and around the summits of submerged offshore mountains. These fisheries have proved highly vulnerable to overexploitation.
‘Within the space of a few decades, species such as the roundnose grenadier and orange roughy have become so depleted they are considered threatened with extinction.’
Deep sea fisheries also exact a high cost in loss of coral forests and sponge groves. As Roberts points out: ‘Life is glacial in the frigid inkiness of the deep, so these habitats have developed over thousands of years, sustained by table scraps sinking from a narrow surface layer where sunlight fuels plant growth. The bottom trawls that are used to catch fish cut down animals that are hundreds or even thousands of years old.’
Roberts dismisses the laws of the seas as "useless", pointing out that they were written at a time when "people thought the resources of the oceans were limitless". The extent to which territorial disputes continue to be fought over the Arctic and Southern oceans indicates the extent to which the dominant economic interests still think natural resources to be limitless. In truth, this collision between economics and ecology is easily explainable. Economic activity under the capital system is driven by an accumulative dynamic. The whole system is organised around capital’s self-expansion of values. Without that expansion, the system collapses. So, of course, the principal economic actors proceed as though natural resources are limitless – they have to be, to serve the expansionary logic of capital. Capital recognises no limits, and no amount of legislative constraint can, ultimately, check that systemic imperative to accumulate and expand.
Miliband calls for international law and governance. "The high seas were protected for thousands of years because people simply could not get there," said Miliband. "Exploitation has increased over 30 years, but the governance framework has not kept up." To give an example, there is no international mechanism for protecting biodiversity in the deep oceans.
Fine, but here’s the political problem. For the past few decades, the globalisation of economic relations has been accompanied by a ruthless liberalisation, privatisation and commodification, a stripping away of social and environmental legislation to facilitate the pursuit of private interests. Miliband is arguing for the protection of the high and the deep seas when, as a member of government, he couldn’t protect the working class people upon whose support, effort and money his party rests.
Callum Roberts laments: ‘Without ever making a conscious decision to do it we are losing unseen habitats whose equals on land would include the giant redwood glades of North America, the baobabs of Madagascar and Amazon rainforest.’ This is true. But it implies that we need to make a conscious decision to preserve the planet’s life support systems. And that means asking what processes lie behind the unconscious, systemic destruction of habitats.
Over-fishing is only part of the bigger problem of commodification and commercialisation. Like everywhere else on the planet, the high seas are subject to the depredations of climate change and pollution. ‘Mercury and industrial emissions from power plants and industry shed their toxic loads far out to sea. Chemicals concentrate in the surface layer that separates air from water and can quickly leapfrog across thousands of miles of ocean in wind-whipped aerosols.’
Roberts refers to the "great ocean garbage patches" formed by circulating currents gathering the floating refuse of modern society into enormous regions. Human beings are eating their own refuse. ‘Over the years, drifting plastics fragment into ever-smaller particles that pick up and concentrate chemical pollutants such as mercury and DDT. Small fish mistake plastics for food and pass chemicals up the food chain until they reach the flesh of animals we eat, like tuna and sharks. What goes around comes around.’ Indeed. Human beings are a part of nature’s great web of life. Damage any part of that web and we damage ourselves. It’s an old message, but true, and it bears repetition. You never know. One day, we might learn.
But refuse is not the main problem. As big a problem as this may seem, there is a much bigger problem to face. Human beings might be eating their own refuse in the food chain. They are also suffocating in their own waste through the burning of fossil fuels. Climate change as the result of human industrial activity is enlarging deserts in the seas as well as on land. As Roberts argues: ‘Surface waters of the open ocean have all the light but few nutrients, which severely limits productivity. Most of the time, upward mixing of nutrients is inhibited by a density barrier between the warm and light surface layer and cold, dense water below. Global warming is heating the surface ocean, making it even harder to cross between these layers. This in turn is starving deeper waters of oxygen that has to mix downwards from the atmosphere and surface plants.’ The result is that living space in the oceans is shrinking, just as it is shrinking on land.
And there’s more. The acidification of the oceans may be the biggest problem of all. ‘Carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is building up in the sea as well as the atmosphere. There, it forms carbonic acid (as in fizzy drinks). Acid is the nemesis of carbonate, the basic ingredient of chalk and a fundamental building block of ocean life, including shellfish, corals and plankton.’ Prof. Roberts, a marine biologist, is clear that if carbon emissions are not curtailed sufficiently, then ocean acidity will reach levels by the end of the twenty-first century that the planet has not experienced for 55 million years. In a period of runaway global warming, ‘it is difficult to predict the exact outcome, but let's just say that last time around, corals and chalky plankton suffered badly.’
We carry on today much as we have done for thousands of years, using natural resources as if they were endless. But population growth changes everything. We must get to grips with the consequences of our planetary dominance, otherwise the consequences will master us.
We need to get to the roots of this clash between infinite demands upon finite resources. If we think that this is merely a matter of psychology, human greed, then we will not solve the problem. Getting to grips with our planetary dominance is a matter of getting to the roots of our expansionary social system. This requires a conscious social determination on the part of human beings as against the current unconscious determinism exercised over human agents by the imperatives of the capital economy.
The problem returns to the clash between the long-term interest organised around the common good and the short-term interest driven by private gain. There is no mechanism within the capital system to secure the long-term common good. The commons have been and continue to be enclosed and commodified with a view to yielding exchange value and accumulating capital. Any consequence, beneficial or otherwise, is secondary to the dynamic of capital accumulation. Whether we refer to Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ of the market, Bernard de Mandeville’s private vices yielding public goods, or simply to unintended consequences, the reasoning is of a piece – the primary determinant is the process of private accumulation, everything else is a secondary consequence. Until that point is grasped, and the rule of capital uprooted at base, the accumulative dynamic will continue to subordinate the world and its resources to a systemic imperative, over and against any ends we seek to prescribe for our own and for the planet’s good.
We need modes of thought, organisation and action which are oriented towards the long-term good of the commons upon which all life depends. This was the point that Captain Jacques Cousteau made all his life. Impossible?
‘The impossible missions are the only ones which succeed.’
- Jacques Cousteau
That long term vision is a matter of making ourselves at home on Earth. It requires an appropriate technics, technologies set within an ecological matrix. In 1993, the President of France named Cousteau Chairman of the Council on the Rights of Future Generations. Cousteau took those rights seriously, resigning this post in 1995 to protest France’s resumption of nuclear testing in the Pacific. In 1994 Cousteau was influential in the launch of the UNESCO-Cousteau Ecotechnie Programme. He emphasised that the biggest flaw of modern society is the lack of a long-term vision regarding the environment. We need new modes of thought, action and organisation to ensure the health of the global commons. Cousteau called for a new kind of decision-making and new decision-makers, educated to understand and appreciate the interconnection between humankind and nature, people who are concerned about the future and who are able to acknowledge values beyond those of economics.
The UNESCO-Cousteau Ecotechnie Programme (UCEP) promotes interdisciplinary education, research and policy-making to this end. Cousteau fashioned the term ‘Ecotechnie’ from the Greek words oikos, which means “home,” and techné, meaning “the art of doing.” Ecotechnie is a way of making and sustaining our home on Earth. Ecotechnie takes a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to the environment, incorporating ecology, economics, social sciences and technology to form an Ecological Economics, Human Ecology and Eco-technology. Ecotechnie is concerned to ensure that thought and action are harnessed towards the long-term good of the environment upon which all life depends.
Separated by their specialisms, scientists and experts contribute only a partial knowledge, informing the short term perspectives of business and politics. The expert knowledge never really synergizes to form a greater whole. We need a holistic approach that integrates our knowledge, that links up our expertise and generates a synergy that is capable of embracing the long term good of the whole. We move from a fractured, dissected jigsaw puzzle in which expertise cancels itself out to a holistic organism in which the parts complement each other to form the whole.
(The three-sided design of Ecotechnie is suggestive. Pythagoras, the great triangle man of ancient Greece, and the Pythagoreans who followed his teaching, considered the triangle sacred. The universe is a manifestation of mathematical relationships. As Catherine Blackledge argues in The Story of V, this reverence was not only because of the triangle's perfect shape, but also because the Pythagoreans read the three-sided form as a symbol of the generative power of the whole world, of energy per se and the source of all being. (Blackledge 2003: 46). For Tantrics, the inverted triangle is the emblem of creative-genetrix power, the primary symbol of life. In Tantric Buddhism, the downward facing triangle is known as the trikona, the 'source of the dharma [the Hindu essential principle of the cosmos]'. After centuries of science dissecting the physical world to destruction and economics enclosing the global commons, Ecotechnie is putting Mother Nature back together again. We may yet find ourselves a home on Earth yet.)
Wachensee Germany
Ecotechnie implies a reordering of our priorities, putting our inverted world the right way up.
The current political and economic system organises decision-making around short-term benefits at the expense of imposing long-term environmental, social and cultural costs. There is also the problem of specialism in the universities, something which works to prevent the emergence of an holistic appreciation of the environment. Along with vested interests in politics, economics and the corporate sphere, sectionalism and specialization pervade society to raise barriers and block the necessary transition toward a more long-term, integrated decision-making capable of fostering ecological sensibility and sustainability. UCEP is concerned to develop a mode of understanding that acknowledges that dealing with environmental problems and achieving sustainable development requires an integrated approach which incorporates economic, ecological, social, cultural and technological considerations.
The differentiation of scientific disciplines within the universities prevents joint work between social and environmental scientists and confines these scientists within their disciplinary boundaries. UCEP therefore seeks to build bridges between disciplines and to reinvigorate ingrained working methods so as to develop the integrated, long-term perspective that would enable future decision-makers to address the complexity of environmental problems. This perspective involves an awareness of local, regional and international issues. With education as the key instrument, UCEP seeks to develop integrated, multidisciplinary education, training and research.
Ecotechnie's approach consist therefore of:
• Recognizing the multidisciplinary nature of a problem;
• Having a long-term perspective;
•Improving the effective balance between conserving and using resources;
• Increasing informed public participation in decision-making process;
• Promoting the equitable sharing of resources and reduce the risk for conflicts;
• Fostering respect for cultural, social and biological diversity;
The only problem is this, we should have committed ourselves to this programme decades ago. Now, with the crisis in the climate system upon us, we seem to have denied ourselves a long term to prepare for.