The impact can be immense. The famous attacks on tankers and other passing craft off the Somalia coast over the past decade was at least in part a response to foreign fleets fishing illegally in Somalia waters, taking all the fish, and forcing retaliation. Criminal piracy as a response to fishing piracy, also criminal.

The West African coast is very productive but difficult to monitor, and is easy prey to fishing pirates (wikimedia.org)

Now the productive West Coast of Africa – the Guinea Current Large Marine Ecosystem – is the target of most current pirate fishing: almost 40% of its fish are caught illegally. It is a vulnerable region – lots of fish, weak governance and fragile post-war economies, susceptible to corruption and plagued by inadequate regulations and insufficient monitoring. Like Somalia.

Cheating by the illegal ships, mostly trawlers, comes in many forms. International firms use single licenses to cover multiple vessels, employ small mesh nets, launder the fish, and bribe local enforcement officials. Vessels cover their names and markings. Corporations register ships to flags of convenience, eg Panama and Korea, who get paid and don’t care. The fish from West Africa often turn up in European markets, and though the EU now has a blacklist of companies and countries, it has been largely ineffective.

Coastal, community-based artisanal fisheries cannot compete with illegal fishing from pirate trawlers (nature.com)

China is a major player fishing the West African Guinea Current, and no doubt doesn’t want to be accused of piracy. But China has now been charged with under-reporting its global catch by an order of magnitude: instead of an average of of 368,000 tons/yr from 2000-2011, analysts estimate the reality to be 4.6 million tons/yr. Most of that, 2.9 million tons/yr, is from West Africa. This is cheating on a massive, global scale.

China has an ocean going fleet of 900, the world’s largest, operating in the EEZs of 93 coastal nations. Currently 345 ships fish in West Africa, and of these 256 are bottom trawlers. Fairly secret contracts exist between Chinese companies and African nations, and Chinese vessels also sometimes operate under local flags. The coastal fishermen report that the Chines trawlers violate near-shore no-fishing zones, crippling artisanal fisheries. They accuse them of looting their fish and acting like bullies.

China is now one of the more aggressive fishing nations, with a large fleet searching the world’s oceans, and under-reporting their catch (asiancorrespondent.com)

But isn’t this the age of ever greater surveillance? Though most of us may hate it, it may still has its uses. Supported by London’s Environmental Justice Foundation, 23 communities on the coast of Sierra Leone have cooperated to report the pirate trawlers, recording their GPS coordinates, filming them, identifying them, and sending the information to EU and African ports.

The pirate trawlers have mostly left Sierra Leone, but where have they gone? Maybe just along the coast. The problem of cheating is unresolved, but surveillance by communities is at least a start.

Illegal trawler is tracked, identified and reported by surveillance crew on coast of Sierra Leone (guardian.co.uk)

More initiatives like that on the Sierra Leone coast are essential, and possible. Continued pressure on Panama and Korea to cease renting out their flags will eventually work. Every ship registered in the EU is now tracked by the VMS Satellite Monitoring System, providing an hourly report of of location and speed. Though this may keep those ships honest, vessels exporting fish to EU under other flags can avoid the monitoring.

This too can be fixed. Global ports can agree to do business only with monitored ships, and to blacklist pirate vessels. Monitoring every move of every vessel should not be any more difficult than monitoring the individual surfing and purchasing habits of internet users or the movements of every smart phone user, or using existing meta-data mining techniques to analyse our telephone use.

Electronic surveillance by empowered coastal communities along with vessel tracking and enforced blacklisting of cheating vessels and countries is a powerful combination. Cheating may well be an essential feature of human culture, but given the fragility of global fish stocks and coastal fishing communities, eliminating cheating in fisheries seems like a pretty good use for the technologies now abusing us all in so many other ways.

Dan Brown’s Inferno could influence millions (wikipedia.com)

Apart from its loving detail of Dante, art, museums, Florence, Venice and Istanbul to support the chase and adventure, it has a very serious central theme: we are rushing toward a catastrophic end to human society as we know it. The amazingly intelligent characters in the book who are worrying most about all of this conclude that human over-population is the underlying cause.

A hard-to-read graph in the book condenses the evidence. It is a compilation of graphs of the acceleration of pretty well everything in the past 50 to 250 years, originally published in The New Scientist on Oct 12, 2008 as a Special Report, entitled How Our Economy is Killing the Earth. You may need library access or a subscription to read the whole report but the link lets you see some of the underlying data. It is certainly worth looking at, for it bears no good news:

Color version of the graph from Inferno (newscientist.com)

To help you read it where the print is too small:
Time runs along along the bottom or x axis – 1750 on the left with 50 year increments to 2000 on the right. The scales on the vertical or y axis are all relative to a low starting point on the left, but of course vary immensely depending on what is being measured, so no numbers are included.

12 measures are graphed, 5 starting in 1750, 4 in 1900, and 3 in 1950. Some graph global data, some are restricted to the USA.

Starting in 1750, and working down, are Northern hemisphere surface temperature (orange), Global population size (red), CO2 level in atmosphere (blue), GDP (dark red), and Loss of tropical forests and woodland (green).

Starting in 1900, and again working down, are Water use (blue), Paper consumption (yellow), Species extinctions (green), and Number of motor vehicles (black).

And starting in 1950, Tons of fish caught (blue), Foreign investment (light grey), and Ozone depletion (dark grey).

Obviously this is an odd graph, for the scales on all of the measures have been adjusted to make the lines coincide as much as possible. But the essential point is still a valid one – all measures increase rapidly, on their own scales, at about the same rate, at about the same time, and none show signs of slowing down.

Although Brown’s characters are convinced that the causal, driving force is the growth of the global human population, the reality is of course a lot more complicated, for consumption and capitalism also do a lot of the driving.

A famous view of Earth, a reminder that population and consumption are only loosely correlated (earthlights.com)

While we wait for the human population to finally level off, we could do a lot to reduce the rate of growth of almost all of the other measures.

Meanwhile, the graph should worry us all. If it looks like we are generally out of control, we are. With luck, some of the people now in power will read Inferno and become infected by its sense of urgency.

In recent decades, the amount of wild caught fish has leveled off, even declined, while the amount of farmed fish and shrimp has grown ever greater. We could conclude that we are now fishing sustainably from wild populations, and the surge in farming has helped reduce the pressure on them.

We would be so wrong.

Though the global sale of fish continues to climb, farmed fish are responsible for all the recent growth (earth-policy.org)

Instead over the past few decades fishing fleets have grown in size and searched for fish ever further in the world’s oceans. The result is ever greater fishing effort, but increasingly less catch per unit effort. These are features of unsustainable fishing, not sustainable. The FAO estimates that 57% of fish stocks are fully exploited, and 30% are over-exploited. That doesn’t leave much.

As effort in fishing has increased (number and size of vessels), the catch has decreased (worldbank.org)

How can an industry continue to grow despite declining yields? This is a result of huge government subsidies, valued at about 19 billion dollars US per year for developing countries and about nine billion for developed.

Another view – as more and more of the world’s oceans have been fished, the catch per effort has declined (worldbank.com)

And there is much more.

For instance, we know that bottom trawling with its indiscriminate destruction of bottom habitats and of non-target species continues to occur on almost every coast and in increasingly deep water despite condemnation by conservation organizations and fisheries scientists.

We also know that for both fish stocks and coastal fishing communities to persist, large areas of coastline need to be protected as ‘no-take’ areas, but still only about 1% of the world’s coastlines are protected in any way. That number should probably be around 20-30%. Even where no-take areas exist, enforcement is often difficult or impossible.

No-take zones in marine protected areas work – like this area in the Dry Tortugas off of Florida where yellow tailed snapper and red grouper have a chance of survival (saltwatersportsman.com)

If you want to really dig into the state of the world’s fisheries, the best place to go is The Sea Around Us Project where you can explore what is happening and what has happened in each of the world’s 65 coastal Large Marine Ecosystems (LMEs). It is a very sobering journey.

Much of all of this of course has been known for decades, but what’s new is that the amount of data, of evidence, has become immense. What’s now emerging is an ability to assess things accurately on a global scale.

For example, we now know that global fishing effort needs to be cut by about 40% in order to keep fish stocks sustainable. To get there, government subsidies need to eliminated, the number of large fishing vessels and licenses need to be reduced through buy-back programs, and smaller quotas need to be enforced. Reducing the industrial scale and increasing the locally managed fleets of smaller craft would mitigate some of the economic pain and support community-based management.

At the same time, the goal of global fisheries scientists remains to manage fisheries not at the species level but at the ecosystem level, even the level of the LME. Almost all nations except for USA and North Korea have ratified the UN Law of the Sea, agreeing to accept the associated obligations and commitments. Imperfect though it no doubt is, it is a vehicle for regulating fishing pressure and resolving differences. We know that where a few or more nations share an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), fisheries agreements are elusive at best and dangerously volatile at worst (as they currently are in the South China Sea). But treaties continue to emerge, and opportunities for cooperative management at least exist.

Worth watching: China claims most of the South China Sea, and may reject the lines drawn as a result of UN Law of the Sea adjudication (victoryinstitute.net)

With increasing global information about the world’s oceans – including challenging data on coastal development, pollution, ocean warming and acidification – we can encourage decisions that recognize that the Earth is a single, dynamic and adaptable system whose resilience in the face of rapid change is clearly not unlimited.

A demersal or bottom-trawler drags a large net indiscriminately along the bottom seascape (saveourseas.org)

Even in the 1800s trawlers were aware that they were causing huge fish declines. Bottom-trawling spread around Britain from the 1820s, and as fish declined in numbers the inshore trawlers had to travel greater distances and increase their gear size to maintain their catch. By the 1880s they were calling for closing territorial waters to protect nursery and spawning grounds. However, the Royal Commission reports of 1866 and 1887 either disbelieved the fishermen, or simply failed to recommend restrictions. A model for the future.

Trawlers off the coast of Louisiana leave little of the bottom substrate untrawled (Wikipedia.org)

Bottom trawling of course spread around the world, leaving no suitable coast untouched. As inshore fisheries declined and EEZ limits extended to 200 miles, off-shore and deeper-water trawling continued to grow. When sea mounts were discovered and mapped, trawlers extended their reach to depths of 1500 meters. Such deep-water trawling continues, with an impact that is surely devastating though largely unknown.

The damage left by the pass of a single trawler through grass beds (oceana.org)

And yet everyone knows the problems associated with bottom-trawling, whether inshore or deep-water. It ploughs the bottom, removing its sediment, smoothing, radically changing the bottom seascape. It destroys ecosystems through the direct damage of the net, otter-boards and rock-hopper gear. It destroys ecosystems though its destruction and capture of non-target species. It decimates populations of target species through non-selective capture.

Bottom trawlers smooth out the seascape, changing the ecosystem (scientificamerican.com)

What can be done? Well, enter the Marine Stewardship Council. You are probably familiar with it, or at least with its blue logo indicating a fishery it has certified as sustainable. MSC was created in London in 1997, a joint effort of WWF and Unilever. In 1999 it became an independent non-profit organization.

Marine Stewardship Logo, promising the consumer a clear conscience (MSC.org)

Its rules for certification include the following: For a fisheries to be certified, fishing must continue indefinitely without over-exploiting resources. Productivity of the ecosystem must be preserved. All local, national and international laws must be upheld. And every company in the chain from boat to plate must be certified.

Between 2000 and 2004, MSC certified six fisheries, and the commercial benefits of certification began to be recognized. In 2006 WalMart announced that all fish it sold would be MSC certified by 2010. Whole Foods Market has gone the same route. So has Sainsbury’s, and Costco.

What better way to control, restrict, even prohibit bottom-trawling, which in no way meets the essential criteria required for certification? This looked very promising.

Instead, MSC began to certify bottom-trawled fisheries, mostly since 2011. Now certified are the fisheries for North Sea plaice, cod, haddock, and sole; New Zealand Blue whiting; Alaskan pollock in the Eastern Bering Sea (the largest single trawled fishery); and South African Hake, Barents Sea cod and haddock, Baltic cod, Iceland cod, North-west Atlantic shrimp and haddock. Others are in the pipeline.

Crew members opening a zipper in the net full of Alaskan Pollock on the F/V Ocean Hope 3 trawler. This fishery has been certified by MSC, but it shouldn’t be (alaska-in-pictures.com)

In 2011 National WWFs furiously denounced placing any bottom-trawled fish on the MSC list. Remember WWF helped found MSC in the first place. Greenpeace has also denounced it, as has the Pew environmental Group. And so have some of the very fisheries scientists who helped create the MSC.

MSC disagrees, as it proceeds to certify its 200th fisheries. But clearly it has radically loosened its rules for certification. One might be forgiven for thinking that once again the market place sets the rules instead of conservation.

We have not come very far from those disappointing Royal Commissions of 150 and 130 years ago.

There simply is no acceptable justification for bottom trawling. And MSC has failed us.

Belize has banned all bottom trawling within its 200 mile EEZ, a rare exception (uncharteredatolls.com)

Revolution, the new movie by Rob Stewart, (therevolutionmovie.com)

He describes the death of coral reefs, the threat of ocean acidification, the endless use of carbon fuels, the destruction caused by the Alberta Tar Sands, the impact of deforestation, the increase in coastal dead zones, and the occurrence of ‘death by climate change’. He joins and films the growing recognition by people, particularly young people, that action is needed now.

Rob Stewart, film maker and now activist (therevolutionmovie.com)

If you are new to some of this, then Revolution is worth seeing. It certainly has heart. It has won best documentary and audience favorite documentary at film festivals, and it is attempting to have a life in commercial theaters now.

Scattered through the film are some truly unusual and beautiful sequences – a spectacular and poisonous cuttlefish, delicate seahorses clicking their way around a branch of coral, Madagascar lemurs running in their bizarre sideways gallop, reminders of all that we stand to lose.

But a film about saving the planet is the hardest of all to make. The topic is huge, the possibilities for enticing narrative are very limited, the target audience difficult to identify, and the opportunities for depth and insight are limited. Even Al Gore’s famous film Inconvenient Truth struggled with the same problems.

Sharkwater, Stewart’s first movie (sharkwater.com)

Better to focus, I think, on an issue that perhaps represents the whole, but makes story telling possible, and allows time to dig into the issue. Stewart’s first film, Sharkwater, was like that, showing us the beauty of sharks and the ugly practice and devastating impact of shark-finning. It helped, and continues to help, in the efforts to regulate and ban shark-finning, even though the harvest goes on, and sharks remain under threat of extinction. Limited in scope, it is an effective film.

At the end of Revolution Stewart films some of the young people protesting the formal, closed meetings of the climate change conference, COP 16, held at Cancun in 2010. Their concerns were real, justified, and ignored, and emotions ran high.

COP 16 had many thousands of delegates, and no impact (cop16.com)

This was just another protest, however, and not the beginning of any bottom-up revolution. The world continues with business-as-usual, unconvinced that catastrophe lies ahead, irritated with unpragmatic environmentalists.

Except that the predicted human upheaval and global insecurity associated with climate change are now worrying military and intelligence communities, as well as The World Bank. They are considering the probable yet somehow unthinkable consequences of the global temperature rising by 4 degrees, which is where we are headed unless major reductions are made in our CO2 emissions. This is an odd kind of hope – top-down ‘revolution’ is hardly an attractive prospect.

Placard at COP16 – frustration with inertia

The best advice remains, as Will Rogers once said, and Bill McKibbon quotes concerning our current carbon-fueled rush toward a 4 degree increase: If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

Cape Fur Seals breed on the coast of Namibia, where the annual ‘hunt’ removes about 90,000 seals, most of them pups (africareview.com)

The Canadian government has approved a cull of 70,000 grey seals over the next four years to protect cod (guardian.co.uk)

Seals of course eat fish. As opportunistic feeders, they’ll eat any fish they can catch.

When those fish decline in numbers or fail to recover when fishing is curtailed, a natural response has been to blame the seals.

Culling seals to protect fish populations of interest to human fishermen has been going on for more than a hundred years – California Sea Lions, Ringed and Grey Seals in the Baltic Sea, Harbor Seals in both BC and along US East Coast, Grey Seals on the US East Coast, Iceland, Norway, and the UK, and currently Cape Fur Seals in Namibia. In all cases seal populations experienced huge declines.

Culling, as opposed to harvesting, refers to killing the seals without intent to market them in some way. Though the market for seal parts is now close to non-existent, Canada considers its annual Harp Seal hunt to be harvesting, not culling.

Grey seals on Sable Island: are they really responsible for the failure of cod to recover? (truenorthimages.com)

But have the culls resulted in increased fish stocks for human fishermen? Oddly enough, nobody actually knows! There simply are no data, no experiments, nothing to indicate whether culling is effective or not. If anything, almost all of the examples suggest that no particular impact occurred on the target fish species.

Is there then any evidence we can point to indicating an effect of culling? This is of current concern, for Canada has approved a cull of Grey Seals to encourage the recovery of cod, and the Baltic States are considering a cull for the same reasons.

Fishermen want the cull, politicians are sympathetic, and marine scientists are unanimous in opposing culling. This is a familiar stand-off. What’s needed is evidence.

And now there is some, and it illustrates just how complicated ecosystem dynamics are.

Sable Island is an arc of sand on the Scotian Shelf, where Grey Seals breed in large numbers, in a region where cod were once abundant (oceantrack’org)

It involves cod. Following the moratorium on fishing North Atlantic Cod following the collapse of stocks in the early 1990s, everyone assumed the stocks would recover. They didn’t. But Grey Seal numbers exploded to around 400,000, particularly those breeding on Sable Island on the Scotian Shelf, near one of the past major cod stocks. That seems to indicate that seals have suppressed cod recovery, and therefore culling ought to help.

475 ships have wrecked on Sable Island since the 17th Century. Feral horses are the only permanent residents (getimage.php)

Instead the story goes like this. When the Scotian Shelf populations of cod and haddock, both large bottom predators, crashed from overfishing in the early 90s, the result was a major restructuring of the food web, a ‘regime change’ of the sort we have now learned to expect to occur. With the loss of the cod and haddock, planktivorous fish like herring, capelin and sand lance, as well as macro-invertebrates like Northern Shrimp and Snow Crabs became abundant instead – hugely so in some cases, and they have supported alternative fisheries. A new and stable balance of species seemed to have developed, with cod and haddock unrecovered. Grey Seals numbers increased greatly during this time.

Herring exploded in numbers, but have now crashed (fisherycrisis.com)

But this was not in fact a stable system. The biomass of fish in the system increased to an estimated 10 million tons, where carrying capacity is estimated to be less than half of that amount. The fish ran out of food – the zooplankton abundance crashed, the herring and capelin starved, and their populations crashed.

And then, with the herring and capelin gone as predators on cod and haddock larvae, cod and haddock have begun to recover. Particularly haddock. A return to the earlier food web appears to be underway, though how far it gets is unknown, for of course so much else is also involved, such as the impact of climate change, pollution, and continued fishing.

Cod show signs of some recovery (fisherycrisis.com)

Haddock recovery is greater (fisherycrisis.com)

The really good news is that ‘regime changes’ can reverse back to what previously existed. And in this case, in this ecosystem, the evidence indicates that Grey Seals, though obviously eating fish, are not responsible for preventing the recovery of the cod over the past two decades.

Since culling seals probably has no impact on the recovery of overfished populations, decisions to cull them anyway are then political, disregard science, and are so unfortunate.

Grey Seals, Sable Island, waiting to be culled (theglobeandmail.com)

Lawren Harris painted Baffin Island around 1931. This is a summer impression of the north end of the island, the fifth largest in the world (artcountrycanada.com)

The question is not whether there should be any fishing at all – such environmental idealism now has little influence in our real world – but that the fishing needs to be sustainable. Vast potential fisheries will open up as the Arctic ice thins and recedes with the warming climate, but how will the usual overfishing be prevented?

The Inuvialuit of Canada’s Western Arctic have dealt with this question by getting the Federal Government in Ottawa to declare the Beaufort Sea off limits to commercial fisheries, at least for now. Meanwhile more than 2000 scientists, mostly from the Arctic coastal countries, have signed an open letter calling for zero commercial fishing until the changing ecology of the sea is understood.

Is some optimism therefore justified? The pressures of commercial fishing suggest it isn’t.

Russian trawlers at Murmansk, the main Russian port on the Barents Sea (barentsobserver.com).

To start with, Arctic fish populations have not been in any pristine condition for quite a long time, for catch data from 1950 to 2008 were radically under-reported. About 75 times more fish were caught than the various nations reported – a remarkable total of around 950,000 tons. The main offender was the Soviet Union/Russia, reporting a commercial catch of 12,700 tons instead of the 770,000 tons actually caught. The US and Canada acknowledged subsistence fishing by their coastal native communities, but each reported catches of zero instead of a more accurate 90,000 tons.

And of course the pressure to fish continues to build. Canada’s first Arctic commercial fishery has recently developed in the coastal waters around Baffin Island – in the jurisdiction of Nunavut. The fishery is for northern populations of Greenland Halibut, also known as turbot.

Greenland Halibut, or turbot, is a bottom dwelling cold water species that will shift further north as sea temperatures warm (sirena.dk)

Greenland Halibut grow slowly but live long in cold water (marlin.ac.uk)

The Nunavut communities need jobs, and the fish appear to be plentiful. More vessels, both inshore gill-netters and deeper-water trawlers, are entering the fishery. Quotas are rising and the fishery is expanding. There are calls for a deep-water port in northern Baffin Island for the trawlers to off-load so they don’t have to go to southern Greenland to do so. It all looks like a success story.

But it isn’t. In fact it has all the features of the boom phase of a boom-and-bust fishery, the sort we have endured over and over again around the world over the past century. It is all too familiar and will, as always, be difficult to resolve.

For instance, we don’t know at what age or size the fish become sexually mature, and we don’t know how fast – or slowly – they grow, or how long they live. How can we manage the fishery in such ignorance? We can’t.

Gill-netters are more selective than trawlers, and catch larger (and many fewer fish (from Anna Olafsdottir’s Powerpoint at scibd.com)

Trawlers catch 3-4 million fish and 5-6 thousand tons of them annually, much more than do the gill-netters (from Anna Olafsdottir’s Powerpoint (scribd.com)

The conflict between gill-netters and trawlers is heating up, with the gill-netters upset by the growing intrusion of the trawlers. And they should be. Fewer than 15% of caught fish should be less than 45cm long – the major regulation in place to try to protect the fishery – and most trawlers far exceed this. Because trawlers take smaller fish than the more selective gill-netters, they catch many more fish to meet their quota.

Regulation of the fishery is a responsibility of the DFO of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. This is not an incompetent organization, but the ruling Harper government has so reduced the funding of DFO that no-one is available anymore to do the work. As a result, existing regulations are not enforced, and new ones are not developed.

Collateral damage: Greenland Sharks are the most northern of sharks, grow to about 6 meters long, are considered ‘near threatened’ on IUCN’s Red List – and are worrisome bycatch of the Greenland Halibut fishery (biologybiozine.com)

Solutions exist – support the gill-netters, restrict the trawlers, gather fisheries data, limit the expansion of the fishing fleet, support the coastal communities, and at least remember the precautionary principle. None of this is impossible, but will take community leadership and involvement.

So what do we have? A number of nations are about to compete aggressively for opening resources in the Arctic Ocean; the marine ecosystem is changing in ways we don’t yet understand; coastal fisheries are expanding yet lack meaningful regulations; coastal communities face uncertain futures and are in need of access to commercial fishing; international agreements on how to deal with any such problems don’t exist; and the unreported fishing of the recent past has had an unknown impact on current fish populations.

What we have at the moment is familiar chaos. We know that the Arctic is not a productive, resilient marine ecosystem, but we are treating it as if it is.

Certainly we are capable of learning from our many past mistakes. It still is not too late to ensure our Arctic exploitation is sustainable, and not just business-as-usual.

We can do better this time.

Currently we are seeing too many successful efforts at higher government levels in both the US and Canada to limit and censor discussion of climate change.

In the US, apart from the refusal by the Republican Party in Congress to even address issues of climate change, the censorship has been at the state level. For instance last July the Virginia General Assembly agreed to the removal of all references to sea level rise and climate change from a commissioned study on coastal Virginia. About the same time, the North Carolina legislature insisted that a bill related to coastal development regulations be based only on historical records, rejecting any reference to predictions of sea level rise. And then in Texas state legislators made it illegal for state planners and zoning officials even to mention climate change or rising sea levels.

A recent report on the impact of rising sea levels in Galveston Bay estuary on the coast of Texas was censored, removing reference to rising sea levels. (rawstory.com)

In Canada, it is actually worse. When the Conservative Harper Government came to power in 2008 they began to muzzle their own scientists. Scientists could publish their research, but they could not talk to the media about it. This censorship has grown to include discussion of Arctic climate change, polar bear protection, tar sands damage to the environment, and even reasons for the decline in sockeye salmon on the BC coast.

Canadian government scientists protested government actions in Ottawa in summer 2012 (therecord.com)

Last summer, 2000 Canadian government scientists actually held a protest in Ottawa, lamenting ‘the death of evidence’ and surprising everyone since scientists are not renowned as activists. Theirs was a response not only to muzzling, but also to the extraordinary attack by the Harper government on its own federally-funded labs involved in environmental research: the closing of the world famous Experimental Lakes Area as well as the Polar Environmental and Atmospheric Research Lab are breath-taking examples of government cynicism. The Harper Government would like to see its support of the tar sands, its development of pipelines, its plans for Arctic development, and its management of fisheries all remain unexamined and uncriticized, free from the inquiring research of scientists or the glare of media interest.

Closing the Experimental Lakes Area in Canada is an absurd political decision by the Harper government. (wildernesscommittee.org)

So is closing the Polar Environmental and Atmospheric Research Lab at Eureka, Nunavut, at 80 degrees latitude (pearl.candac..ca)

And now, most recently, US and Canadian scientists working on a joint US-Canada Arctic research project were required to sign sweeping confidentiality agreements – an arrangement rejected by at least some of the US scientists.

The muzzling of scientists, the unfunding of inconvenient research, the censoring of commissioned reports, the passage of laws restricting even the use of the appropriate words – altogether, this is lousy news. Not surprisingly, criticism and ridicule in the national and international media have been ineffective.

Of course this a serious abuse of power, and such disdain for evidence erodes our democracies. Given what’s at stake, it is also very dangerous.

Famous writers have written seriously scary books about this sort of thing.

The Great Barrier Reef, managed well since 1994, remains threatened by pollution, warming seas and now coal and natural gas facilities at its southern end (bayrun.com.au)

The GBR has suffered stress from the usual suspects for decades – overfishing, mining, Crown-of-Thorns starfish plagues, run-off from adjacent mainland coastal farms. Now add to those the coral bleaching and intense cyclones of recent years associated with climate change, as well as the looming devastating impact of ocean acidification. Not surprisingly, half the coral cover has been lost or damaged since the 1980s.

Coral bleaching has killed and damaged corals on the GBR just as it has on reefs around the world (scienceonline.org)

The World Heritage Committee based its threat on the recent developments at Gladstone and nearby Curtis Island, at the southern end of the reef. Gladstone has become the largest center for coal export in Australia – there are huge seams of coal running north-south in the eastern part the country adjacent to the reef. The coal is sent where you would expect, to Japan, China, South Korea and India. Now the port of Gladstone is being dredged even deeper to handle ever more and larger ships.

The eastern part of Australia is rich in coal resources (Haliburton.com).

That’s part of UNESCO’s concern.

The other part involves coal seam gas, gas that is or can be extracted during the coal mining process. Curtis Island, lying close to Gladstone, is actually part of the GBR World Heritage Area. However, it is now under extraordinary development to liquefy the coal seam gas to liquid natural gas (LNG), and send it off in refrigerated tankers to consuming nations where it will rendered back into natural gas. The liquid takes up 1/600th the volume of the gas, so the advantage of shipping it as liquid is obvious.

The World Heritage Committee report (p20-22) calls for these developments to cease and for a review of their impact. Since no actual sanctions by UNESCO are possible, beyond downgrading of the status of the Reef, what kind of response can we expect?

The Queensland Government has now submitted a defensive response, promising an independent review of the the Port of Gladstone, and commenting on existing water quality improvement programs, research initiatives, the GBR zoning plan, the Coral Sea reserve, and the recently implemented national carbon tax. The number of gas ports under development will be limited, but they will still be in the World Heritage Area.

However, as the Premier of Queensland said early on, ‘We are in the coal business’. That hasn’t changed.

So there will be no reconsideration, no precautionary plan, no delay in port or LNG development. The long-term threat to the reef is dismissed.

Is this anyway to treat a World Heritage Area? Liquid Natural Gas facilities under development on Curtis Island (Greenpeace.org)

We shouldn’t be surprised. Extract and sell is the mantra of resource exploitation in Canada, the US, Africa, South America, Asia – and Australia. The exported coal and LNG from Gladstone and Curtis Island will no doubt support the Queensland economy, providing jobs and infrastructure. Unfortunately, given the other stresses that already exist, there isn’t any reason to think that a severely damaged GBR will be able to recover.

The tension between extracting resources and conserving natural ecosystems is familiar to us everywhere. You would think one place where conservation trumps extraction would be The Great Barrier Reef. Apparently not.

Will anyone listen to the outcry in defense of the Great Barrier Reef? If you would like to add your voice, visit: ‘Save the Reef’ It could only help.

So worth protecting (ngm.nationalgeographic.com)

Over the past few decades global capture fisheries have added most of the large fish species of any commercial value to the list of missing apex predators. Among those that are still with us, an unexpected response has occurred.

In a comparison of 37 commercially fished stocks, the majority matured earlier and at a smaller size. The effect is clearest in heavily fished populations.

The size of first spawners of Arctic cod has declined, as it has in many other heavily fished species (nature.org).

Is this a genetic change, an evolutionary shift towards smaller size-at-age due to the selective harvesting of the oldest, largest and fast-growing individuals? If it is, it is a dramatic change, and will be difficult to reverse.

It could as well be a response to climate change, with physiological declines in growth rates occurring due to increasing sea temperatures and decreasing oxygen in warmer oceans.

At the same time, we wonder why fish that we have overfished don’t recover when we stop harvesting them. With their huge reproductive potential, fish surely should be resilient, and recover quickly. Famously, though, the cod of the northwest Atlantic have not recovered from their collapse.

The famous graph of exploitation of cod in the northwest Atlantic, leading up the moratorium in Canada in 1992. (Wikipedia.org)

Why not? What stops or delays recovery? And what have we actually learned about the impact of the damage we have done to marine ecosystems?

In fact we have learned quite a lot. We have learned that the responses of an ecosystem to the loss of apex predators are likely to be complex and convoluted, and often unpredictable. Shifts occur within the community of species, involving changes in mortality rates, growth rates, competitive interactions, and prey-predator relationships. (Two fine reviews worth reading were published in Science: Estes et al, July 15, 2011; and Garcia et al, March 2, 2012)

Pandalus borealis, the northern shrimp, became abundant after the collapse of cod, and is in part responsible for the lack of cod recovery. It is also the sweetest shrimp you would ever want to eat. (biology.com)

We have also learned that sufficiently perturbed ecosystems break abruptly into alternative stable states that are usually of lower trophic status and of far less commercial value. Coral reefs have become algal covered rubble. Jellyfish have replaced fish as top consumers.

We have learned that trophic degradation is an inevitable outcome of eliminating or radically reducing apex predators.

And we have learned that there are limits to resilience.

Iconic cod are showing signs of recovery in the northwest Atlantic – not enough to lift the moratorium, but enough to suggest hope lives (ctv.news0

Out of these fisheries disasters has comes some decent advice. For instance, fishing pressure should be spread over more species and sizes, probably netting more fish, but reducing the risk of wiping out a species or restructuring the community. Biomass drops but not biodiversity,
a more ecosystem-based approach.

But also we are aware that the only truly reasonable response is to try to restore the apex predators. If we don’t, biodiversity will decline, trophic degradation will continue, ecosystem phase shifts will occur, and the current global mass extinction will just continue. The world becomes ever more diminished.

Cod captured by trawler in 1949 were often huge. Nevermore. (heritage.nf.ca)

Does it help to understand the reasons for a catastrophe, if there seems to be little chance of preventing or recovering from it?

The answer must be yes. If recovery from the catastrophe is even remotely possible, we can encourage it. And we can use our knowledge to mitigate the impact of other catastrophes-in-waiting.