It is fitting, given the recent oil rig explosion off the coast of Louisiana that we excerpt Wilma Subra’s piece from OCEANS, The Threats to the Sea and What You Can Do To Turn the Tide, about Dead Zones. When Erin Brockovich was still a teenager, Wilma was already chasing down polluting companies, doing the chemistry on their various harms and presenting her results to lawyers, politicians and most importantly the communities they were impacting. A trained chemist, she is also a MacArthur grant “Genius.” More than thirty-five years ago she was part of a group of Gulf State scientists who identified the causes of what we now know as the Dead Zone, which grows larger each year in the Gulf of Mexico, as do another 400 similarly tarnished gulfs around the world, for similar reasons.
The Dead Zone is located in waters of the Gulf of Mexico that are or were prime fishing grounds, waters that previously supported successful commercial fish and shellfish species. The Dead Zone is hurting the fisheries resources in the Gulf of Mexico, which are declining badly, resulting in a huge economic impact on the fishing industry across Louisiana. The result of the growing Dead Zone is that commercial and recreational fishermen must go farther out into the Gulf of Mexico to find live fish and shrimp. Those longer trips result in sizable increases in time and fuel costs thus less profit.
More than 235,000 tons of food in the Gulf of Mexico is lost to the Dead Zone, food sources that are critical to maintaining the seafood species living and growing there. Entire species are being killed off or devastated. At risk is the three billion dollar per year fishing industry in Louisiana.
The impact of the Dead Zone on the Gulf of Mexico fisheries in Louisiana is having a direct impact on the availability of seafood for the rest of the United States. Forty percent of the seafood consumed in the United States that comes from the Lower 48 is caught in Louisiana’s coastal and offshore waters. As the availability of the fish species decline due to the Dead Zone, the cost of fishing increases and the seafood markets across the U.S. bear the rising prices. Thus the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico may seem like a local, Louisiana/Texas problem, but in fact it should be of concern to everyone in the U.S. who eats fish.
The solution to reducing the size of the Dead Zone is reducing the quantity of nutrients running off the land and into the Mississippi River. A 2001 agreement by states and federal agencies to reduce fertilizer runoff failed. More recently the Interagency Gulf of Mexico/Mississippi River Watershed Nutrient Task Force established a goal of reducing the dead zone to 2,000 square miles or less by 2015. However states do not have to provide information on how they plan to meet the target until 2013, a mere two years before the target is scheduled to be met.
In addition to establishing that goal of 2,000 square miles or less, I have been working with federal and state regulatory agencies and environmental organizations along the main stem of the Mississippi River to assist states draining into the Mississippi River Basin to develop numeric water quality standards for nitrogen and phosphorus. In addition I am working with the Environmental Protection Agency and environmental organizations to assist in developing water quality criteria for nutrients at the federal level. Along with the environmental organizations, I am encouraging the Environmental Protection Agency to develop federal Total Maximum Daily Load quota. The need for enforcement of the water quality standards and monitoring of the nutrient runoff by state and federal agencies are critical to attaining nutrient load reduction to the Mississippi River.
It’s been a monstrous week of news and travel, natural disaster and man-made catastrophe, with Earth Day thrown into the midst, and all the increasing hoopla, hypocrisy and hype that comes with it. One result is that the stories out there, the content, that I am most interested in and fervent about, got lots of attention. I couldn’t pick up a paper yesterday or flick through the two hundred channels on the television in my hotel room without seeing good reporting on the environment (though the “smart shopper” on ABC wins a prize for promoting double bagging with plastic to prevent your groceries from leaking in the backseat … probably not the best Earth Day synergy, encouraging people to use more plastic bags …). CNN replayed a bunch of its “Planet in Peril” series; every website in the universe went Green-For-A-Day; the U.S. Congress convened to discuss the threat of ocean acidification (led-off by a great piece of reporting on the subject on “Good Morning America”) and on and on. I’m curious to throw open the blinds on the media world today to see if the same heightened fervor will continue!
Given that it was Earth Day and that I’d been making small pleas that one year it should be dubbed Ocean Day, our writings got a fair amount of attention too, amongst the pile-on. My new favorite website TakePart.com, part of Participant Media’s social-action-driven multi-media kit, has been running daily blogs by me for the past few weeks; yesterday’s was a quick look at the human impact of exploding oil rigs. The Huffington Post helped promote my new OCEANS book, by excerpting an interview with NOAA director Jane Lubchenco, as did Gadling, which continues its “Bowermaster’s Adventures” series, though they focused on “Her Deepness,” Syliva Earle’s contribution. Plus very fun interviews with two of my favorite local radio pals, Joe Donahue at WAMC and Jimmy Buff at WDST.
I wrote for Etsy, a great site — kind of the handmade jewelry, much-hipper equivalent to the Home Shopping Channel — about my affection for all things blue and even the doyenne of good manners, Martha Stewart – on her Earth Day show, which was the best, most original television I saw all day – gave OCEANS a great plug (my only disappointment was that her crew didn’t dig into the vault for some of the video they ran for years of Martha and I sea kayaking off the coast of Newfoundland!).
A fiery reminder of our continued addiction to fossil fuels lit up the sky fifty miles off the coast of Louisiana yesterday when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. After 36 hours the 396-foot-long, 256-foot-wide rig sank; its leasors – British Petroleum – insisted that pollution from the fire would be minimal, since most of the oil would simply burn off. I wrote about the accident at length at Take Part’s The Current.
The timing – on the eve of the 40th Earth Day – is an impeccable reminder of the real-life impacts of the oil drilling which many Republicans, and some Democrats in Congress regard as our best way towards “energy independence.” The hallow chant of “Drill Baby, Drill” must now be followed by “Burn Baby, Burn.” Nighttime images of the fire, which killed at least eleven oil workers, resemble a Satanic ritual afloat in the heart of the ocean.
A one-time commercial fisherman and one of the first official Riverkeeper’s to patrol a major U.S. river (New York’s Hudson), John Cronin long ago committed to attempting to protect waterways from up-close. In recent years he has chosen to focus his sights on the important link between ocean and river – our estuaries – as they are increasingly at risk. An excerpt from our new book, OCEANS, The Threats to Our Seas and What You Can Do to Turn the Tide.
Estuary is not a term that trips lightly off the tongue. It has a biologically suggestive sound, but human, like a vestigial organ located somewhere between the Isles of Langerhans and the Alimentary Canal. I don’t know if Ron knew of the word. I was raised in a city on the estuary, and never knew of it.
One way to understand an estuary is by its generic definition: a partially enclosed aquatic ecosystem where fresh water from rivers mixes with salt water from the sea. But I suggest you look up examples of estuaries and extract the essence for yourself. The lower 154 miles of the Hudson River is an estuary. So are Tampa Bay in Florida, Cook Inlet in Alaska, and the Tigris-Euphrates delta system in Iraq. To the unwary observer it would be difficult to find three water bodies that less resemble each other.
Most of the world’s population lives near estuaries . Most of the world’s major cities, such as Los Angeles, London, Tokyo and Calcutta, are located on estuaries. The geopolitical names of estuarine waters are better known than the fact they are estuaries, or are home to estuaries: Columbia River, Galveston Bay, San Francisco Bay, and Puget Sound; the Thames, Seine, Yangtze, Ganges, and South Africa’s St. Lucia. There are too many estuaries on the planet to name, or count.
Though the design and functioning of each estuary is singular, and can be arcane, they have essential things in common. The bottom lies below sea level allowing the tide to roll in. The freshwater that feeds the estuary flows overland, through tributaries and down rivers, from underground springs and aquifers, and from the sky above diluting the ocean salt. An estuary’s lowest reach is salty as the sea. Move away from the ocean and the waters become brackish, and then fresh in the furthest inland reaches. Were it not for all the fresh water draining from its watershed, what we call an estuary would simply be an arm of the sea.
This dynamism is the heart and soul of an estuary. One American Indian name for the lower Hudson was Muhheakantuck, loosely translated as “waters always in motion.” This is an apt description. An estuary’s ever-changing tides and currents constantly re-suspend sediments and food, energizing its incredible biological productivity. Fresh water perch and ocean sturgeon, young and adult, thrive at once in its rich nutrient soup.
American shad tell their own estuarine story. This largest member of the herring family is my role model, spending all its life following its ideal climate. Shad favor temperatures of 55 to 61 degrees Fahrenheit. They thrive in the coastal waters off Florida in winter, and around Canada’s Bay of Fundy come summer. The remainder of the year they orbit between those poles on the warming and cooling isotherms of the Atlantic Ocean. Their physical appearance suggests a life at sea: a deep, narrow body, 24 to 30 inches in length, built for long-distance swimming, with a distinctive blue-green iridescence along the back, and a silvery white underside.
In April, adult shad that hatched in the Hudson split off from the ocean-going population. Driven by a chemical trigger that roughly translates into an acute sense of smell, they find their way home after thousands of miles at sea. They take no time to feed during their upriver journey — and who can blame them? They are on their way to spawn, 100 miles north in the river’s freshwater reaches around Kingston, NY and beyond.
When their eggs hatch, the larvae slosh their way to the lower estuary along the flooding and ebbing currents of the tidal Hudson. By the time they are juveniles, sometime from late August to September, young shad are physically ready for the nourishing, brackish waters of the lower estuary, where the river is shallow and broad, the food, sunlight and plant life bountiful. When hearty enough, they head south for the saltier regions nearer the river’s mouth and, finally, to the ocean itself. Five to six years later, they return as mature adults to their original spawning grounds to perform the same ritual of reproduction as their forebears. In all, a remarkable piece of ecological choreography, repeated for millennia, on the Hudson and virtually every available inland tidewater on the coast.
I spent the bulk of Earth/Ocean Day on airplanes, hardly the most environmentally healthy thing to do. I would have much preferred a long walk on a beach somewhere … anywhere … but ultimately escaping my week-long lockdown in London and avoiding that long bus-ride to Madrid to get off the continent was worth it. I arrived at Heathrow armed with several different airline reservations and flew back to New York on a plane oddly only half-full and laden with more smiles than I’ve ever seen in any airport scenario in a well-traveled life.
Being at 36,000 feet and looking out the window for several hours did give me an opportunity to ponder just how the orb below is faring. I would have liked to divert and fly over the Icelandic volcano that had so handcuffed much of the world’s air travel for the past week, though the pilots probably would not have been inclined to test their engines by flying into the ashen sky; I wish I could have talked them into detouring south and flying over the Gulf of Mexico, for a bird’s eye view of that horrific/spectacular fire burning on the Deep water Horizon oil rig, a reminder of one of the real impacts of our dependence on fossil fuels; if they’d been willing to drop even lower, I imagine we could have skimmed over the surface and seen those growing gyres filled with plastic in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
But from high altitude it is hard to see the pollutants threatening the ocean. Truth is, it’s even hard in most cases to see them at sea level. Which is a big part of the problem when it comes to environmental protection. Out of sight, out of mind. (As spectacular as the images are of that oil rig ablaze, for example, it’s 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana. Very few people will see it up close, thus its damage will always seem very far remote.) The fact that the ocean has been altered by man over the past century – polluted, its acidity levels altered by carbon dioxide, over fished, its reef damaged – is indisputable. That in so many cases the ocean still manages to look pristine and unharmed almost works against it. I’ve fallen victim to that myself, both at sea level staring out at that place on the horizon where blue meets blue, and from up high looking down on a watery landscape that often – mistakenly — seems the very definition of pacific.
If you want to see some of the ocean’s greatest beauty, slip out in the next few days and see the new Jacques Perrin/Jacques Cluzaud film OCEANS (their last together was WINGED MIGRATION). I’m biased, since I’ve done the companion book to the film (Oceans, The Threats to the Seas and What You Can Do to Turn the Tide), but the $75 million movie – distributed in the U.S. by DisneyNature – strings together some of the most incredible ocean footage ever. And for the first week it’s out, Disney is donating a dollar per ticket to a Nature Conservancy program to set aside a marine protected area in the Bahamas.
A feature film of course can only go so far in regard to making a difference. Sitting in theater “observing” the ocean is only half the battle. If you really want to affect change in regard to the ocean, the first thing we have to encourage is changing rules and regulations to protect it. On a more personal level I think you have to go out and get in the ocean every once in awhile to remind you of its beauty, its power and its fragility. To save the ocean, I’m afraid, you’ll have to get wet.
Abigail Alling studies coral reefs around the globe and as a member of Biosphere 2 – living for two years sealed inside a complete and enclosed mini-world, built in the Arizona desert — she built, managed and monitored a one-million-gallon faux reef system. She currently lives aboard a research ship off the coast of Malta. An excerpt from her essay on the health of the planet’s coral reefs, from OCEANS, The Threats to Our Seas and What You Can Do to Turn the Tide.
It’s quite powerful to actually witness a reef being killed; it is a helpless experience, one I experienced last year during a dive along an undeveloped coastline on the west coast of Lombok, Indonesia. The dive began well, but when we came around the corner and got into the lee of the coast, the water became still and the reef quiet. Soft corals were bent towards the sand, dripping with sediment that covered the entire organism. A thick clay/silt layer of soil lay over the reef and its large boulder corals like a grey-brown blanket. Three lionfish floated motionless in the still water, their eyes staring out at the eerie sediment wasteland. A few other fish appeared here and there, but that was it. My fellow divers and I looked at each other as bewildered as the lionfish. One of us finally signaled “lets go up.” There, just inland, was the answer: Tractors were plowing the land, trees had been felled and a swath of soil laid bare in preparation for a large construction project.
The runoff from construction and deforestation makes it to rivers or to the water’s edge where it runs into the sea and settles out of the water column. When this happens in tropical seas, the sediment falls like a gentle snow onto the coral colonies suffocating the coral (which is a small animal) and starving it, as well as preventing sunlight from reaching the small algae, known as zooxanthellae that live in its tissue.
Some island cultures prefer to mine coral rock (either living or dead coral) to use in constructing houses, roads and jetties. On remote islands where cement for is very expensive, locals see reef rock as free building materials. In the Maldives and other low-lying tropical coastal communities this has had drastic ramifications though, because the removal of the reef rock removes underwater walls key to helping prevent surging seas from swallowing coastlines. I dove on the reef of Ghizo, in the Solomon Islands, soon after the April 2, 2007 tsunami and the familiar underwater coral landscape we had been surveying since 2000 looked like a computer simulation, as if an underwater hurricane had swept through mowing down coral formations and turning them over all in the same direction. After seeing a reef turned “upside down” like that it is easy to appreciate how a healthy reef will help “slow down” tsunami waves before they impact the coast.
In December 2004 my phone rang and it was friends aboard our ship in the Kiribati Islands, detailing an alarming discovery, that the corals surrounding the atoll of Kanton Island were dead.” “Dead?” I answered thinking it was not like her to speak so emotionally. It wasn’t until I saw her video of the corals that I realized the impact of what had happened. We downloaded NOAA’s sea surface temperature data and deduced that the reefs had suffered from unusually high and persistent water temperatures for seven months, from August 2002 to March 2003. The mysteriously warm waters had left the remote and beautiful coral reef ecosystem and its lagoon dead.
We had been studying these atolls for nearly a decade and had experienced some degree of bleaching corals at nearly every reef, but had never witnessed a field of table corals killed all at once due to any similar temperature “event.” When corals “bleach” there is a rapid change in the color of the coral tissue to white because the minute algae living in the tissue migrates from the coral due to a change in temperature or the environment that it cannot tolerate. Because a coral animal needs these zooxanthellae algae in its tissue for food and oxygen, it will die unless the circumstances change and the algae return. For exactly those reasons, climate change has become the greatest threat to coral reefs today. The increasing amounts of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere – particularly carbon dioxide — has led to global warming which in turn has led to increased sea temperatures and a lowering of water pH known as ocean acidification. These twin processes have already had harmful effects on coral reefs and threaten to become even more pronounced in the near future.
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