The Changing Face of Our Oceans Part 10: Take Action

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

This was originally intended to be the final post in this series, but in the process of writing it I've figured out at least one and likely more posts to continue with. Looks like this already long series is going to get even longer.

I've spent the past nine posts talking about the various ways in which we're wrecking our oceans. Now it's time to start talking about exactly what we can do to help deal with the problem.

Tube sponges attracting a variety of fish. [Image source]

The fundamental problem in dealing with oceanic ecosystem damage is that we just don't understand it that well. Even with the huge amount we do understand about it- as should be indicated by the fact that this has been my longest post series ever- there's just so much more we don't understand. The oceans make up 90% of the world's biosphere, and it's expensive and difficult to explore them. We've only even mapped a fraction of the seafloor with scanners- most of our seafloor maps are generated from satellite gravitational scans, a far less precise measuring technique than sonar or marine radar.

So if you're a politician, find more funding for ocean research. Most of us aren't politicians, though. That being said, as marine technology advances, we're growing more and more capable of doing significantly more research for cheaper. If you're contemplating a career in science, now wouldn't be an awful time to jump into marine research. (Shoutouts to my friends studying coastal geology right now. One will be getting started on Steemit soon!)

A tropical beach of Mauritus, the island in the Indian Ocean where dodos once lived. [Image source]

Another major problem lies with the way our legal system and societal understanding of the oceans operates. We've proven that we're at least somewhat capable of regulating what goes on in coastal waters- with a bit of enforcement we can regulate overfishing and other harmful practices in said waters. Our legal system is much less capable, however, of controlling effects that damage the oceans from outside of those waters. In international waters? There's very little we can do to prevent ships from deepwater trawling, overfishing, or dumping waste.

In the exact same vein, much of the damage we're doing to the oceans originates inland, yet the farther inland the damage occurs the less ability to regulate and control it we find we have. The great dead zones in the oceans are, for the most part, caused by agricultural runoff in regions hundreds or even thousands of miles inland. Controlling said agricultural runoff- necessary for a great many other reasons as well- is an incredibly knotty problem.

A krill. These tiny crustaceans are one of the foundations of marine ecosystems, being the main food source for, among others, baleen whales. [Image source]

This all comes from a fundamental fragmentation of our understanding of the world. Our society, culture, and intellectual heritage tend to instill an understanding of the world in us that treats each part as separate, as an island, if you will. Ecological thinking is a profoundly newfangled invention to modern industrial civilization. (I can- and will- do a whole sequence of posts on agricultural, pastoral, and hunter-gatherer relationships with nature. It's a profoundly more complex one than we tend to imagine.) This fragmented understanding has percolated outwards into our language, our legal and regulatory systems, our building codes, and countless other parts of our civilization in a way that makes it profoundly difficult to address ecological problems stretching across multiple biomes and polities.

So, somehow, we need to integrate our understanding of the world once more. This is ultimately the main goal of my blog- if I can help even a few people better understand the world as a more cohesive place, and help remove the mental borders between civilization and the natural world just a little bit, it'll have been worth it. So there's something you can do- better educate yourself and try to educate others. (And, again, if you're a lawmaker or regulator, try to approach things with a more ecological perspective.)

Melting Arctic sea ice. [Image source]

These are all high minded, difficult tasks, though. Most of us don't have any influence on laws being made. So what can we do on a more personal level?

• Eat only sustainably sourced seafood. By doing so you can help prevent your money from going towards overfishing and damaging the oceans. Check to see if your seafood is sustainably sourced at places like Seafood Watch.
• As a corollary to eating sustainably sourced seafood, you can actually effect positive change in the oceans by carefully choosing new types of seafood to eat. Eating invasive species, for example, can actively help in preventing their spread. Lionfish is one of the ecologically friendliest dishes you can eat right now. Likewise, eating more squid and jellyfish, which are both doing fine right now, helps relieve massive amounts of pressure on other fisheries.
• Get your food from farms that practice techniques like no till farming, drip irrigation, contouring, multicropping, and other techniques that reduce agricultural runoff. This is a tricky one- while foods are often advertised as organic or gmo free, these other techniques aren't really advertised. Your best bets are asking farmers at farmer markets about their farming techniques, or finding farm to table services. Or even growing your own food using techniques like this- there are quite a few homesteaders on Steemit, so if you haven't looked into this, it's a great strategy.
• Go on vacation. Specifically, take ocean related ecotourism trips. This actually applies economic incentives to protect aquatic regions. Before making the trip, however, do your research and make sure that the trip is actually environmentally friendly- some unethical companies are selling trips as ecofriendly when they're very much not.
• Write your legislators, sign petitions, the works. You know the drill- you hear about a ocean related environmental problem, make some noise, demand your government do something about it.
• Donate to a marine related charity. The Monteray Bay Aquarium and the Ocean Foundation are both great options, but you can find quite a few other good options as well with a few minutes of research. Always make sure to check to see how reputable the charity is beforehand, though.

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Bibliography:

• The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea, by Callum Roberts
• The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert
• Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization, by David R. Montgomery
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean
• http://www.montereybayaquarium.org
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfishing
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_runoff