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Skriven 2004-09-27 05:58:00 av Michael Ragland (1:278/230)
Ärende: Challenge to our Darwinia
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Challenge to our Darwinian Durability
Sea Change: A Message from the Oceans
By Sylvia A. Earle, Putnam Publishing Group, 1995, 336 pages, $25.95. 

Anthropogenic changes to terrestrial and maritime ecological systems in
the last century have caused environmental transformations normally
associated with geological time scales. Plants and animals once thought
to be inexhaustibly plentiful are currently being lost at an
unprecedented rate, and nowhere is the impact of human activity more
alarming than in the oceans. Creatures like horseshoe crabs and sharks,
which have endured meteoric cataclysms on their watch, now face the most
serious threat ever to their survival—human beings who are blithely
turning them into plant fertilizer and steak. 

Until recently, the scientific community has been reluctant to
proactively engage in policy discussions about the issues that will
ultimately determine the long-term viability of people on this planet.
Underlying this not altogether surprising situation are two forces:
First, technical academe has a somewhat parochial view of what it means
to be a scientist, and it generally frowns upon members of the
establishment who stray very far from conventional notions of pure or
applied research. Second, there is some element of truth to the popular
perception of the bespectacled, bookish, and socially awkward natural
philosopher, whose heavily laden arguments sound clumsy to the public at
large. 

This partially explains why the most widely read book about the urgency
of ecological stewardship was written not by a botanist or an
oceanographer, but by the vice president of the United States. 

Consequently, when a distinguished member of the scientific community
speaks out, not just in the dispassionate tones appropriate to
laboratory research and archival publication, but in moving and
meaningful terms designed to convey the relevance of her work to
society, the rest of us should listen carefully. In Sea Change, Sylvia
Earle, the Senate-confirmed former chief scientist at the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has taken a bold step forward by
mingling her personal views with objective observations about the
precarious health of the earth's oceans. Earle explicitly challenges the
Darwinian durability of a species that places a pollyanna-ish trust in a
sacrosanct market-based economics while simultaneously negotiating the
(commercial) fate of the few thousand remaining cetacean specimens. In
doing so she enhances her technical credibility by the simple grace,
humanity, and charm of her writing. 

The difficulty of her theme demands nothing less. One is bluntly faced
with the hard reality that the planet survived hundreds of millions of
years without DDT, 40-mile-long drift nets, and plastic six-pack
containers, and could unceremoniously return to this less sophisticated
state if need be. Mother nature can pack her solipsistic kids off to
bed, so to speak, so she can clean up their mess and relax for a few
eons of relative peace and quiet. Although Earle's prose is seductive,
laced with humor and familial anecdotes, this is not light reading. 

Earle presents a compelling case that the notion of maximum sustainable
yield, as authoritatively scientific as it sounds, is a theoretical
abstraction that has little place in a serious discussion of how to
harvest the seas. The reasons are plain enough: The ecological systems
of the planet, especially those near the bottom of the food chain, where
solar energy is first fixed into convertible sugars and proteins, are
understood only macroscopically at best. Although particular
representatives from other levels of the hierarchy are well studied,
there is an unsettling dearth of knowledge concerning the dependencies
and interdependencies of pelagic fauna and flora. That humans are
irrevocably influencing these links is undisputed; the only remain-ing
question is the long-term implication of our reliance upon these
organisms. 

For instance, the permanent damage wreaked upon the neustron by
thousands of oil spills, small and large, deliberate and unintended, has
not been quantitatively understood or documented. Nevertheless, in
articulate firsthand accounts of visits to Prince William Sound and the
Persian Gulf, Earle characterizes the scope and magnitude of the problem
in bite-sized technical chunks while artfully animating scientific
collaborators and government colleagues with faces, personalities, and
passion. Her written portraits of the heroes who capped the Kuwaiti
gushers are more memorable than any of the sepia-toned images we saw
five years ago. 

Hers may be the most effective arguments against those who believe in
industrial progress first and global life-support systems second. In
order to maintain the current aggregate level of economic expansion for
the next ten years, for example, Earle claims that we will have to find
as much oil in the next decade as has been found in all of history.
Then, of course, we have to drill, process, transport, spill, and burn
it. Combustion in particular receives a lot of attention these days
because it produces carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. 

The ability of the seas to hold as much as 50 times more carbon dioxide
than the atmosphere is a function of temperature, which is slowly but
steadily increasing. The release of 2% of the carbon dioxide currently
dissolved in the ocean would almost double its concentration in the
atmosphere, thereby reinforcing the greenhouse cycle by warming the
planet even more. 

Meanwhile the polar ice caps are slowly melting, and ocean levels are
rising along with the temperature. Although small changes are troubling,
rational worst-case scenarios of the economic impact of this kind of sea
change are mind-boggling. And that is just the carbon dioxide part of
the story. Confounding subtexts address the nasty by-products created in
the manufacturing of plastic from petroleum, the noxious fumes generated
when we burn the plastic, and the fish, turtles, birds, and dolphins
that are strangled by the bits we throw away. 

The principal obstacle, according to Earle, is ignorance. Apparently,
most people are simply not aware of the wrenching harm we inflict upon
the ocean by overfishing, dumping toxic chemicals, sinking radioactive
submarines and oil platforms, and disposing of raw sewage. Point sources
can be diluted, the wind and currents can help mix down dangerous
substances, and some unusual kinds of bacteria even thrive on the scum
of our earth. 

But every physical system—even one as seemingly large as the
ocean—has its limits, and we are rapidly approaching the threshold of
its ability to heal itself in any time frame of interest to ten
generations of human beings. This is about how long it takes for a
plastic trash bag to decompose in the salty sea. Some stuff never will.
Despite years of relentless formality within the hallowed halls of the
ivory tower, Earle has apparently not lost one bit of her enthusiasm and
childlike curiosity. One would have pardoned her a more rigid style and
lexicon, but she generously conveys the exhilaration of discovering
worms and plants in places previously thought to be barren of life,
instead of just reporting their class, genus, and species. These
rhetorical risks pale in comparison with the many professional hazards
she has faced, including the thousands of hours under deep water in
submersibles and suits of her own design. And ultimately the urgency of
her message is as clear as the Florida Keys water of her youth: 

Each species lost diminishes the chance that we can "get it right," that
is, find an enduring place for ourselves within the living matrix that
sustains us. 

Peter L. Levin was a White House Fellow in the Natural Resources,
Energy, and Science Division of the Office of Management and Budget in
Washington, DC. He is on leave from Worcester Polytechnic Institute,
where he is director of the Computational Fields Laboratory. 
The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the opinions or
policies of either institution. 
© 1996 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
SIAM News, Volume 29, Number 9, November 1996

"It's uncertain whether intelligence has any long term survival value.
Bacteria do quite well without it."
 Stephen Hawking
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