Save our seas, save ourselves
by Jess Spear
“Was there anything to even look at?”
A compass jellyfish with its white, semi-translucent bell and distinctive brown markings floats past me. I watch it swimming away, careful to avoid its stinging tentacles and descend further down the shot-line. The water is clear and not too cold. Large, hand-shaped kelp fronds wave back and forth as if to greet me when I reach the seafloor 16 and a half metres down. I’m here learning to scuba dive off the coast of the Maharees in Kerry, so for the moment, my attention is focused on breathing deeply and slowly (and remaining calm). But, all around me, within the kelp forest and all along the rocky walls, are magnificent creatures: sea anemones, sea urchins, big fish, little fish, more jellies, starfish, and crabs.
For a nation completely surrounded by ocean, I’m always surprised that Irish people seem to go about their lives unaware that just offshore lies a rich ecosystem abundant with life. Ireland’s territory includes nearly half a million square kilometres of sea, more than 10 times larger than our land, and according to Birdwatch Ireland, is inhabited by more than 500 species of fish, including 58 species of sharks and rays. We have 24 species of dolphins, two species of seals, and 23 species of marine birds. There’s so much there, and so much we have yet to discover. To give a recent example, in 2018, researchers from the Marine Institute in Oranmore, Co. Galway found a shark nursery 750 metres below the ocean surface.[1] On that same expedition scientists also found what may be a new species of deepwater coral and a rare sponge reef.[2]
While there’s still much to see, our ocean, and the life within and dependent on it (including us), is in big trouble. In addition to the plastic pollution we’re all familiar with, the ocean faces threats from marine heatwaves, ocean acidification, and declining oxygen levels (see Box: All at once). Overfishing, however, is by far the biggest threat to marine life and ocean ecosystems.
Article originally published in Issue 5 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:
Imagine if giant bulldozers with nets on either side were deployed in the Amazon rainforest just to catch the poison-dart frogs. Nets are nondiscriminatory, so they also entangle all the other kinds of frogs you don’t want, in addition to the sloths, squirrel monkeys, birds, and jaguars. You can’t sell those animals, so you toss the dead or dying ‘by-catch’ and continue on. Over and over, you bulldoze, scraping the forest floor to scoop up as many poison-dart frogs as possible, killing huge numbers of other animals and destroying vast tracks of the ecosystem. Think about it. No one would allow that.
But this very thing is happening right off our shores. In fact, “[m]uch of the seabed near Ireland is trawled at least once per year and some regions are trawled more than 10 times per year [my emphasis].”[3]
All at once
Ninety per cent of all heat trapped by burning fossil fuels has been absorbed by the ocean, with all kinds of negative consequences, from bleaching coral reefs to melting ice sheets (and sea-level rise). Marine heatwaves, similar to the deadly events we experience on land, have doubled in frequency since 1982.[4]
Thirty per cent of all emissions have made their way into the marine environment, lowering the pH by a whopping 30%, and creating corrosive conditions for marine life, particularly shell-building critters (corals, oysters, pteropods, etc.).[5]
Oxygen levels are also dropping, primarily for two reasons. Firstly, the ocean is warmer and warmer water takes up less oxygen - gas dissolves more readily in cold liquids and is one of the reasons why your soft drink gets flat as it gets warm - the CO2 evaporates from it. Also, as the water gets warmer, it begins to stratify or become layered with hot, oxygen-rich water on top and colder, oxygen-depleted water below that. Stratification prevents mixing, which means deeper waters get less oxygen. Secondly, the rise in industrial agricultural methods globally has led to gargantuan amounts of “nutrients” (fertilisers and animal waste) pouring into coastal waters.[6] The extra nutrients feed microscopic plankton which bloom in huge numbers and eventually depletes the oxygen levels, leading to massive fish deaths. ‘Dead zones’, where this process of agricultural runoff leading to dangerously low oxygen concentration occurs annually, are growing around coastal regions.
Billions of tons of wild marine animals - fish (including sharks), lobsters and crabs, shellfish (oysters, scallops, mussels), squid, birds, dolphins and whales - are removed from the ocean every year. To catch commercially important species, seafloors worldwide are bulldozed over and over by bottom-trawlers. Supertrawlers, gigantic fishing vessels of 100 metres or more in length with nets big enough to fit jumbo jets, can hoover up hundreds of tons of fish, sea turtles, dolphins, and seabirds in a single day.[7]
Pádraic Fogarty of the Irish Wildlife Trust and author of Whittled Away: Ireland’s vanishing nature notes that “in an Irish context the greatest damage has occurred in the shallow seas, and in the Irish Sea in particular...Once there was extensive beds of oysters and mussels, great shoals of herring and mackerel and large predatory fish such as bass, cod, monkfish, sharks and rays. These are all now gone...”[8]
Why is there no outrage over this as there is about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest? I asked Fintan Kelly of Birdwatch Ireland why people seem oblivious to the damage done over the last decades. He explains that “many marine habitats and species suffer because they are out of sight and out of mind for most of us. While people might notice that they hear certain birds or see certain wildflowers less frequently than when they were young, it’s more difficult for us to directly observe those changes beneath the waves.”[9]
Shifting baselines
I can remember bug-splattered windshields when I was a kid and compare that to relatively cleaner ones today. But to witness the changes in our marine environment would mean observing it regularly over decades, something the vast, vast majority are not in a position to do.
It’s also a case of what researchers call “shifting baseline syndrome”, a term coined by fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly to describe how every generation views the state of the environment they grew up in and around as “normal”.[10] You don’t realise how much has been lost because so much was already gone by the time you arrived. It’s also why as someone who grew up in the US which, despite its intensive farming and fishing practices, still has abundant wildlife, I am always shocked to find almost no animals in the rock pools here. What a healthy environment looks like to me is different to what my Irish friends expect to see. What their parents and grandparents consider “normal” and healthy is likely different still. If you go back far enough and read the historical records, the decline in fish numbers especially becomes more obvious. As Callum Roberts explains in The Unnatural History of the Sea,
“In most parts of the world, human impacts on the sea extend back for hundreds of years, sometimes more than a thousand. Nobody alive today has seen the heyday of cod or herring. No one has watched sporting groups of sperm whales five hundred strong or seen alewife run so thick up rivers there seemed more fish than water. The greater part of the decline of many exploited populations happened before the birth of anyone living today.”[11]
So how are we to know how bad things really are? “When it comes to marine wildlife,” Kelly says, “we are more dependent on government bodies to keep us informed about changes and unfortunately, the kinds of messaging we often get are distorted by commercial interests.”
The diverse and fragile ecosystems, which evolved over aeons in a tight web of competition and energy exchange between primary producers (plants and algae), consumers (animals), and decomposers, are merely “free gifts” for businesses to consume. Raw materials for their commodities. “Stock” for big corporations to grab at will. Whether it’s the ever-growing dairy herd munching on the grass with their waste flowing into our streams and rivers, the draining of the bogs for peat harvesting, or trawling the ocean for seafood, capitalism depends on appropriating vast quantities of nature for raw materials (and its dumping ground). Therefore, it’s in the interest of the fishing industry, particularly the big fishers and major investors, to paint a picture of boundless seas teeming with life.
Cascading rifts
The truth, however, is that centuries of plunder has left the ocean severely degraded. In a four-part series on “Intensive Fishing and the Birth of Capitalism”, Ian Angus describes how ‘transatlantic fishing in the 1500s was one of the world’s first capitalist industries’.[12] While fishing has radically changed over the last century with ‘[e]ver bigger boats, with ever more sophisticated gear that allowed fewer fish to escape[13]’, fishing fleets in the 16th century weren’t tiny operations. Hundreds of ships, employing over 10,000 fishermen-sailors, harvested thousands of tons of fish.[14] One of the first-ever factories, where fishermen worked in assembly-line fashion to quickly process and preserve fish, was in operation as early as 1415.[15] These enterprises were backed by merchants “who had capital to invest in ships and other means of productions”.[16] The “discovery” of Newfoundland in 1497 and the immense quantities of cod inhabiting its seas led to a ‘gold rush’ with first dozens, but eventually hundreds of ships making the journey to net huge numbers of fish by the mid-1500s.[17]
One of the motivating factors driving this ‘gold rush’ was the ‘declining stocks of freshwater fish, caused by expanded agriculture and the growth of towns and cities,’ which polluted and blocked rivers and streams.[18] A century of exploitation had depleted the cod population, such that by 1600 catches were only about 60 per cent of what the fishermen had ‘come to expect’.[19] Four hundred years later, we’re left with devastated fish populations on the brink of collapse and governments subsidising completely unsustainable fish quotas.[20]
The ocean is vast and there is a lot of life in it, but no ecosystem can sustain the constant removal of animals and mechanical destruction of the terrain for centuries and continue producing as before. Set aside the bottom trawling for a moment and just consider what happens when you remove the top predator from an environment, as fishing does with tuna, sharks, and cod. At first, you might think this isn’t so bad. Sure, the cod are gone and that’s sad, but more of the fish they preyed on will survive, and we’ll just eat that. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.
What we now know in an increasing number of land, freshwater, and marine ecosystems is that the impact of top predators goes well beyond the immediate prey and ripples out onto the entire ecosystem. For example, sea otters eat sea urchins and sea urchins eat kelp. The loss of sea otters, removing a check on the sea urchin population, leads to the decline and eventual loss of the kelp forest and all the living organisms dependent on it.[21] You could say in this case that the sea otters help make the kelp forest. The classic example of these ‘trophic cascades’ is the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. The wolves ate the elk, which allowed the aspen tree saplings to survive thereby increasing the beaver and songbird populations.[22]
““What’s actually taking place ‘is a much more insidious kind of extinction: the extinction of ecological interactions’.””
If we allowed the halibut and basking shark (to name just a few of our endangered marine animals[23]) to go extinct in Irish waters, this won’t just be another individual species gone forever, another name on the list alongside the dodo and the thylacine. Their loss (and even their decline in numbers) will profoundly impact other species and, indirectly, the whole ecosystem. What’s actually taking place ‘is a much more insidious kind of extinction: the extinction of ecological interactions’.[24]
These ‘ecological interactions’ are what make an environment. As Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin wrote in The Dialectical Biologist, “The environment and the organism co-determine each other.”
Overfishing disturbs the ‘ecological interactions’ and metabolic exchange between living organisms in the sea and their inorganic (non-living) environment. These ‘metabolic rifts’[25] in the ocean are never fully resolved, only mitigated. Fishing fleets can just move on to areas that have yet to be exploited. They can ‘fish down the food chain’, moving from the top predator fish to harvesting smaller fish, lobster, crabs, or prawns. (In the Irish sea for example, after the decimation of top predators ‘most of what is left of commercial value is prawns...’[26]) Or, they can pen the wild animals and grow them right offshore.
Indeed, aquaculture is growing globally in response to the collapse of fish populations. From 1990 to 2018, worldwide aquaculture production increased by 527%.[27] In Ireland, nearly a fifth of workers employed in fisheries are working in aquaculture. In 2018 farmed fish comprised almost half (41%) of the total Irish fish harvested.[28]
““From 1990 to 2018, worldwide aquaculture production increased by 527%.””
You would think moving to aquaculture would alleviate the problems created by intensive fishing at sea. Hardly. Firstly, aquaculture ‘intensifies fish production by transforming the natural life histories of wild fish stocks into a combined feedlot’.[29] The most profitable farmed fish is Atlantic salmon[30], which has a complex life cycle of one to four years in rivers before moving to the open ocean and then eventually returning to the river in which they were born to reproduce. They are now forced to swim circles in the same small area, surrounded by hundreds of other fish, with sea lice eating them alive. In an attempt to control the sea lice outbreaks, the aquaculture industry has turned to catching cleaner fish, such as wild wrasse, which feeds on the sea lice.[31] With ‘almost two million wild wrasse... transferred to salmon farms between 2015 and 2020’,[32] this “solution” is now threatening the wild wrasse population. Lastly, farmed salmon requires ‘4 pounds of fishmeal for every 1 pound of salmon’.[33] Fishmeal is ground-up, leftover bits of wild fish, so farming salmon depends on catching wild fish. Rather than mitigating the impact of intensive fishing on the marine ecosystem, current fish aquaculture practices worsen it.
Spaceship Earth
We need the ocean and its sharks, tuna, cod, corals, sea otters, sea slugs, whales, jellyfish, octopus, lampreys, lobsters, and all of the rest. Not just for food or recreation. These animals and the ecosystems they co-produce are one part of our ‘life support systems’[34], allowing us and every other living organism to survive in space on this rocky planet we call Earth.
If the Earth is our spaceship, the ocean would be the mainframe computer, helping to regulate heat and nutrients, and ensuring we land-dwellers have oxygen and a stable climate. Marine organisms are a key part of a working ocean system, much as the Amazon rainforest depends on the frogs, birds, insects, jaguars, and capybaras. Scientists are even exploring how life in the ocean helps to mix it.[35]
Without the ocean buffering most of the additional warming from burning fossil fuels so far (though it won’t do this forever[36]), the heatwaves we saw this past summer would have been much worse. It’s also the biggest carbon sink on the planet, helping to regulate atmospheric CO2 concentrations via removal and burial in deep-sea sediments. However, all that awful bottom trawling disturbs the seabed, releasing the carbon back into the water column, which in turn exacerbates ocean acidification and reduces the ocean’s capacity to absorb excess CO2 from the air. A recent study found that bottom trawling across seafloors globally is equivalent to global aviation emissions.[37]
After centuries of exploitation and decades of pollution in the air and water, our marine ecosystems are completely overwhelmed. If we don’t intervene to stop the destruction of our oceans, we face catastrophic consequences. A dead ocean equals a defunct system, a broken spaceship, and game over for humanity.
Healing our ‘world of wounds’
Nearly 80 years ago, the American conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote that ‘one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds’. When you consider the acceleration of that damage, the exponential rise in ecological wounds inflicted by capitalist industry, it’s hard not to despair. The accumulated weight of reality can be paralysing at times. So much has been destroyed. So many species are on the brink of extinction.
I asked Fintan Kelly with all the news coming out about climate change and biodiversity loss and time running short, what gives him hope that we can change how our society interacts with and views nature? He said,
“In Aldo Leopold’s ‘land ethic’ we have the guidance of where we need to go as a society. [Leopold] said ‘When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.’ I think climate breakdown and biodiversity loss are teaching us forcefully that we are a part of nature, not apart from it. I am hopeful that we will learn to have the humility to learn from our mistakes.”
I, too, am hopeful we can learn from the mistakes and recognise the interconnectedness of all life on the planet. The small fishers protesting large trawlers fishing inshore gives me hope.[38] Learning that fishermen originally protested against bottom trawling when first introduced in the mid-1800s reminds me that the industry, for all its faults, is not monolithic in its attitude towards nature.[39] Like with farming, there are small and big fishers; and like with the small farmers, the small fishers and local coastal communities are the ones struggling to make ends meet. They are the ones struggling to stop the supertrawlers and are most invested in maintaining fish populations and sustainable practices.
““The amazing thing about life on earth is how resilient it is and, when left to its own devices, how quickly it returns.””
What gives me the most hope, though, is knowing that the damage can be repaired. The amazing thing about life on earth is how resilient it is and, when left to its own devices, how quickly it returns. In the oceans especially, when you stop harvesting all the fish and bulldozing the seafloor, the fish return in huge numbers, the ecosystem rebounds. This is why scientists and conservationists are calling for the expansion of Marine Protected Areas (MPA) from the current state of less than three per cent globally to 30% by 2030.
MPAs are just what they sound like, an area of the ocean that is protected. They’re ‘safe havens for marine biodiversity’, Kelly explains, ‘They are an essential tool to protect and restore marine biodiversity both within sites but also within the broader marine environment’.
Studies show that, when well-regulated, MPAs allow marine ecosystems to recover. But the catch is, recovery is dependent on the area actually being protected. Harmful activities, meaning fishing, mining, and other destructive practices, have to be prohibited. Without that, the MPA will be little more than a ‘paper park’.
A survey of 87 MPAs around the world found that ecosystem recovery is greatly enhanced when fishing is prohibited (no take), the area is actually protected with enforced restrictions, and the area itself is large (>100 km2) and ‘isolated by deep water or sand’.[40] They also found that the older the MPA, the better, which is pretty obvious, but worth stating.
The recent Programme For Government included a commitment to expand Irish protected areas to 10% (from the paltry 2.13%) ‘as soon as possible’ and to reach 30% by 2030. Yet, Ireland currently has no legal definition of MPAs[41] and completely missed the target to reach 10% by 2020. The areas “protected” today are in reality, just ‘paper parks’, offering almost no protection from harmful activities.[42]
Ireland is not alone in drawing lines on a map and little else. In Scotland, it was found that ‘[a]ll but two of [the country’s] offshore marine ‘protected’ areas are paper parks’ with ‘300 large bottom-trawlers and dredgers plough[ing] Scotland’s protected seabed on a near daily basis’.[43] This is hardly surprising when you consider industrial fishing is a billion-dollar industry. It’s much easier to just declare an area protected and leave it at that than to actually challenge the right of big business to continue plundering and bulldozing.
This is why it’s vital to connect with small fishers and coastal communities that have a stake in protecting marine ecosystems. Without their support, there is no hope of actually enforcing restrictions, and we’ll end up with just more lines on a map and more reports of fisheries collapsing. So the process of designating MPAs offshore must involve them at every stage, and we must ensure they have financial supports in place.
However, “MPAs on their own, adrift in a degraded ocean, will not protect and restore healthy and resilient marine ecosystems,” Kelly reminds us. MPAs won’t stop ocean acidification, marine heatwaves, plastic pollution, or the growth of dead zones. Like overfishing, all are linked overall to the destruction necessitated by our growth-addicted capitalist system. But, winning MPAs that are supported by small fishers and offer real protection for marine ecosystems would represent one big step in the right direction, something we can fight for here and now, while we prepare for the bigger battles ahead.
Notes
1. Lorna Siggins, ‘Baby sharks: Rare shark nursery found off west coast of Ireland’, The Irish Times, 8 November 2018.
2. Pat McGrath, ‘Rare coral uncovered in Irish waters’, RTÉ, 23 July 2018.
3. Gerritsen, H.D. and Kelly, E. 2019. Atlas of Commercial Fisheries around Ireland, third edition. Marine Institute, Ireland. ISBN 978-1-902895-64-2. 72 pp.
4. Jeff Tollefson, ‘Climate Change Has Doubled the Frequency of Ocean Heat Waves’, Scientific Ameican, 18 August 2018.
5. See Jess Spear, ‘Poking the Angry Beat: The other carbon problem’, Rupture Issue 3, Spring 2021.
6. Don’t forget there’s also raw human sewage flowing into our rivers and seas as well! See Kevin O’Sullivan, ‘Raw sewage flowing into rivers and sea in 35 places across Ireland’, The Irish Times, 11 November 2020.
7. Karen McVeigh, ‘Russian supertrawlers off Scottish coast spark fears for UK marine life’, The Guardian, 13 May 2020.
8. Pádraic Fogarty, Whittled Away: Ireland’s Vanishing Nature (Cork, 2017).
9. Written interview with Fintan Kelly conducted on 10 August 2021.
10. George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life (Chicago, 2014).
11. Callum Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea (Washington, DC, 2007).
12. Ian Angus, ‘Intensive Fishing and the Birth of Capitalism, Part 4’, Climate & Capitalism, 31 May 2021.
13. Pádraic Fogarty, Whittled Away: Ireland’s Vanishing Nature (Cork, 2017).
14. Ian Angus, ‘Intensive Fishing and the Birth of Capitalism, Part 4’, Climate & Capitalism, 31 May 2021.
15. Ian Angus, ‘Intensive Fishing and the Birth of Capitalism, Part 1’, Climate & Capitalism, 3 February 2021.
16. Ian Angus, ‘Intensive Fishing and the Birth of Capitalism, Part 4’, Climate & Capitalism, 31 May 2021.
17. Ibid
18. Ibid
19. Ibid
20. Todd Woody, ‘The sea is running out of fish, despite nations’ pledges to stop it’, 8 October 2019, National Geographic.
21. Estes, James A., et al., Trophic Downgrading of Planet Earth. Science, New Series, vol. 333, no. 6040 (15 July 2011), pp. 301-306.
22. Michael L. Pace, ”Trophic Cascades” in Encyclopedia of Biodiversity (Second Edition), 2013.
23. Kevin O’Sullivan, ‘Nearly 50 marine species in Irish waters face extinction’, The Irish Times, 5 February 2018.
24. D.H. Janzen, ‘The deflowering of Central America’, Nat. Hist., 83 (1974), pp. 48-53.
25. See John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York, 2000) and Clausen and Clark, 2005, The Metabolic Rift and Marine Ecology, Organization & Environment, vol. 18, no. 4, pp 422-444.
26. Pádraic Fogarty, Whittled Away: Ireland’s Vanishing Nature (Cork, 2017).
27. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2020, http://www.fao.org/state-of-fisheries-aquaculture, accessed 29 August 2021.
28. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Fisheries and Aquaculture in Ireland, January 2021.
29. Clausen and Clark, 2005. The Metabolic Rift and Marine Ecology, Organization & Environment, vol. 18, no. 4, pp 422-444.
30. Brendan Bordell, ‘Show Me the Money Fish’, Hakai Magazine, 24 August 2020.
31. Niall Sarget, ‘Lice, infectious disease and taking reef fish: The impact of salmon farms on marine biodiversity’, Noteworthy, 26 June 2021.
32. Ibid
33. Clausen and Clark, 2005. The Metabolic Rift and Marine Ecology, Organization & Environment, vol. 18, no. 4, pp 422-444.
34. https://twitter.com/georgemonbiot/status/1103602044768784385
35. For example Amy Adams, ‘Researchers find that swarms of tiny organisms mix nutrients in ocean waters’, Phys.Org, 23 April 2018.
36. IPCC, 2021: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press. In Press.
37. Karen McVeigh, ‘Bottom trawling releases as much carbon as air travel, landmark study finds’, The Guardian, 17 March 2021.
38. Lorna Siggins, ‘Inshore Fishermen Warn Overturning of Ban on Larger Trawlers Inside Six Mile Limit is Worse Than a “No-Deal Brexit”, Afloat, 16 October 2020.
39. Pádraic Fogarty, Whittled Away: Ireland’s Vanishing Nature (Cork, 2017).
40. Edgar, G., Stuart-Smith, R., Willis, T. et al., Global conservation outcomes depend on marine protected areas with five key features. Nature 506, 216–220 (2014).
41. Marine Protected Area Advisory Group (2020). Expanding Ireland’s Marine Protected Area Network: A report by the Marine Protected Area Advisory Group. Report for the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Ireland.
42. Kevin O’Sullivan, ‘IWT report lists ‘serious deterioration’ in Ireland’s protected marine habitats’, The Irish Times, 3 October 2020.
43. The Fishing Daily, ‘All but two of Scotland’s offshore marine ‘protected’ areas are paper parks claim’, 8 August 2021.