“Ocean Sprawl”: the Mauling of Our Seas

July 14, 2010

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Is it really possible that the planet’s blue space is at risk of being completely consumed and abused?

Given the gusher in the Gulf (86 days and counting) it is easy to imagine man having nothing but negative impact on the world’s ocean. But with 72 percent of the planet covered by salt water is it really possible that our one big ocean could truly be at risk of what some have dubbed “ocean sprawl?”

I’d like to say no, that the ocean is simply too big, that while the its fringes may suffer from man’s flagrant contempt, won’t the bulk of it be protected simply by its its depths, its enormity, its far-awayness?

Then I remind myself just how rapacious we have proven as a species.

Man’s heavy footprint on the ocean came to me the other day flying low in a helicopter south of Port Fouchon, Louisiana, headquarters of the state’s $70 billion a year oil industry. Below, everywhere I looked were scattered oilrigs, shrimpers, tankers, small fishing boats, floating docks and barges, stretching for many miles away from the coastline.

Let’s not be fooled by current events though; it is hardly just the oil industry that is threatening Planet Ocean.

Oil and natural gas are obvious villains, in part due to the BP spill, but also the infrastructure that accompanies it, giant physical rigs and infrastructure carrying resources from seabed to shore.

But we use – and abuse — the ocean in hundreds of ways, from fishing to generating electricity, from tourism to military protection. Shipping lanes collide with the migration routes of endangered whales. Fish farming booms while climate change alters ocean chemistry. Power lines, reefs, lobster traps and sunken ships compete for seafloor space. New energy sources including wave generated power and offshore wind turbines each eat up space. Every year coastal development destroys 20,000 acres of estuaries and near-coast fish habitat (Louisiana’s coastline alone loses 25 square miles a year, a football field every half hour). Urban waste runs-off into the ocean, so do millions of gallons of pesticides from farm fields. Plastics and cigarette butts are the most common types of ocean litter. And then there are those damn oil spills.

It is the cumulative impact that is most worrying. Is the ocean’s future to become some kind of watery version of Houston – paved over, horribly polluted, with no zoning, no controls.

Around the globe three billion people live within an hour of the ocean. In the U.S. the ocean that surrounds creates more than two million jobs and more than $128 billion in gross domestic product each year. One impediment to taking care of and monitoring man’s impact is because there is no one agency or policy controlling it. In the U.S. more than 140 laws are administered by six different federal departments and twenty different agencies, each operating under conflicting mandates and often failing to coordinate with one another in their efforts to “look after” our ocean and coastlines.

Within months of taking office President Obama set up a first-of-its-kind task force to put together a federal plan for the ocean and coastlines. He stocked it with some of the best and the brightest drawn from the marine biology world. Since issuing an interim report ninety days after it was first set up the task force has been largely on hold as the same team has devoted itself to the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher.

For all those good intentions, which I hope arrive at some kind of national Ocean Policy, ever since man started using the ocean – to explore, to open trade routes, for resources – he has approached the ocean with a single mindset: Out of sight, out of mind.

It is in part the ocean’s very vastness and seeming toughness that has allowed us to continue to abuse it.

That has to change, for the ocean’s sake, for our sake.

“Frustrating and Infuriating,” The Fishermen’s Lament

June 10, 2010

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Tracy Kuhns never imagined a future as an environmental activist. A native of Louisiana, she was living and going to college in Texas – already a young mother – when she discovered the reason the neighborhood kids, and herself, were getting rashes and constantly sick was because they were living next door to a chemical plant’s waste pit. Six years after she began fighting the area was declared a Superfund site, the houses in her neighborhood were razed, and she moved back to Louisiana.

Once back home in bayou country, married to a fisherman, she found it impossible to look the other way when she saws signs of trouble in her new backyard. When her fishermen neighbors started bringing back stories from the nearby fishing grounds of pollution left behind by oil and gas companies who’d come in, exploited and left – leaving spills, pipelines and infrastructure behind, fouling the estuaries – she had to get involved. Joined by her husband Mike Roberts today they are the official Louisiana Bayoukeepers and she also works with the local Fisherman’s Association in Barataria, counseling on everything from health insurance to, now, recovering from the loss of income due to the oil spill.

The day I find her at home, Mike’s fishing boat docked on the canal behind the house, sun glistening off the waterway that leads towards the Gulf (30 miles away) would have been the opening day of brown shrimp season.

“We’re used to spills around here, but usually they’re small and you won’t be able to fish in that area for a couple years. This is something totally different. This is something they (the oil company) can’t control and it’s just heartbreaking and infuriating.

For the rest of my conversation with Tracy, plus video, go to takepart.com.

Busier Than Usual Hurricane Season On Its Way

June 6, 2010

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Just like the neighborhood swimming pool and major league baseball the Gulf of Mexico’s annual hurricane season has opening (June 1) and closing (November 30) dates. Predictions for the season just begun are that it will be “busy” to “active.”

Experts from NOAA and Colorado State University are anticipating 14 to 23 tropical storms in the Gulf of Mexico, including five to ten hurricanes, two or three of them “major” (qualified by sustained winds of 111 mph). Typically there’s a one in three chance that one of the major’s will hit land; this year’s stats put it somewhere between 50 to 75 percent.

In a normal year those numbers would be worrying; this season is complicated by the 40 million gallons of loosed oil – 40 million gallons and still gushing!! – afloat on the Gulf’s surface, lying just below it or spreading in massive plumes down to 500 feet below sea level. The leak sits dead center in the superhighway that in past years has delivered hurricanes like Camille and Katrina deep inland.

The higher numbers are due to warmer-than-usual tropical Atlantic Ocean surface temperatures, which may be complicated by the fact that all that oil in the water is making surface temps even warmer.

“In this ‘untreaded water’ it’s tough to theorize about what would happen,” Joe Bastardi, chief long-range hurricane forecaster with AccuWeather.com told the AP.

Locals are understandably panicked by the thought of all those potential storm waters arriving laden with heavy crude. Hurricane winds would push the oil deeper into estuaries, wetlands and freshwater marshes, its waterspouts sucking up oily water and spreading it inland. Imagine a Katrina-like flood repeating in New Orleans, with its heavy surge waters filled with oil. The worst case? A long-lasting (4-5 day) storm out of the southeast, which could drive the storm surge as much as twenty miles inland.

For the rest of my report on the upcoming hurricane season, go to takepart.com.