Ahoy,

On July 11, 2008, about 100 participants arrived in Svalbard in the high Norwegian arctic and boarded the Lindblad Expeditions ship National Geographic Endeavor for a Climate Action Summit.  We came to take ourselves out of the daily rhythm of our lives and work, to experience the spare and elemental place near the top of the world, to listen to the music of vast silences, and to feel the heave and subsidence of the sea.  We watched seabirds, wild reindeer, walrus, and polar bears living and moving to a different rhythm.  A rhythm not of our making–until recently.

Walruses in the Arctic (Photo by Carl Safina)

We came to see and discuss the arctic’s climate, and what we might do.

Climate Action Summit in the Arctic (Photo by Carl Safina)

Here in these sparseley peopled arctic spaces we learned two things:  that the reach of humanity extends far beyond the humanity’s normal haunts, and that as goes the arctic, so goes the world.

Ice World Mirage (Photo by Carl Safina)

The climate that kept the arctic stable over ten millennia produced the same stability that has made civilization possible.  Among thinning glaciers and melting seas, we came to appreciate first-hand that Earth has a fever.  We came to a closer and more urgent understanding that global warming and disruption of the world’s carbon balance are serious threats.  They are serious threats to civilization; to wildlife, forests, and the ocean; to freshwater; to agriculture; to justice; to the poor; to those who will yet be born–and to peace.  Without great moral and political leadership, we face perhaps the greatest challenge civilization has ever faced.  But we also face the greatest opportunities:  to improve security, improve and diversify energy sources, and improve the path of the human endeavor, and the prospects for prosperity and peace.

C.S., Spitzbergen 7-19-08

For the full “Spirit of Endeavor” statement released on behalf of the group, please see: http://www.expeditions.com/climateaction

Black-legged Kittiwake (Photo by Carl Safina)

Polar Bears in the Arctic (Photo by Carl Safina)

Ivory Gulls (Photo by Carl Safina)

 

Blue Ice (Photo by Carl Safina)

 

Guest blogger Annie Christian is a writer, farmer, and friend of Blue Ocean Institute.  She is currently teaching English in Korea and writing about her adventures throughout Southeast Asia.

One moment it’s a modern city street, and the next it has morphed into a timeless tableau of gabbing people crouching over brightly colored plastic bowls full of flora, fauna, and fungi.  Over their heads stand battered, multi-colored umbrellas, casting a reddish light on all.  As you walk along, the combined smell of medicinal herbs, overripe fruit, fish, and fermenting soy pummel the nose.  There’s a cacophony of splashing water, chopping knives, rumbling produce trucks, and friendly shouts to the next stall.  To be here is an exhilarating chaos for the mind and body, a reminder of life’s messy vibrancy.

When you visit a shijang, meaning “market” here in the Republic of Korea, few will try and hawk their goods to you.  This is because the vendors are mostly elderly men and women, sprawled out and napping under cardboard on daybeds in small rooms behind their stands.  Their market tables hold an eclectic hodgepodge of goods crowded together; fermented soybean paste in used water bottles, pastel-colored rice cakes, fish heads, ginseng, apples, grains, beans and anything else that might strike the vendor as worthy.  By far, the most noticeable and bizarre element of these markets is the concentration of seafood and its presence in many states.

Stalls upon stalls of elderly women sell all manner of fresh, whole, cut, dried, salted, and fermented sea creatures and plants.  Many of the stands have seawater tanks, filled with a smattering of different species.  There is such diversity, and it seems as though anything caught is used, ranging from a huge cross-sectioned chunk of a tuna neatly displaying its vertebrae and circulatory system, to hundreds of tiny, dessicated silvery bodies shoved into plastic bags for a snack.  There are animals gelatinous or shelled, bright as metal or dull as mud, lively, apathetic, in pickling brine, just born or clearly post-mortem.  You can find sea life in every stage of its life cycle.  Initially, I found this disconcerting, making a value judgment that the young sea creatures should have a chance to grow.  Yet, after some time here, I am munching on these tiny fish along with everyone else. 

At his time three months ago, I thought my ideas on responsible seafood consumption were universal, that everyone would agree on the kinds of changes that needed to happen in order for the oceans to have a chance against humankind.  This is why I winced upon seeing the tiny fish at the market.  I did not understand the Korean culinary traditions, many of which have existed for more than a millennium.  Koreans use every part of what they catch and raise.  With a fish, they eat its flesh and skin and use its cartilage for soup and side dishes.  They fry, pickle and preserve every last inch of nutritious tissue.  This practice has been sustainability long before the word existed.

Yet it is true that our oceans are struggling under the weight of human demands, both directly and indirectly.  We are all taking so much.  After seeing the fish markets in Busan, I came to understand the scale more completely.

Busan is South Korea’s second largest city, a sprawling port on the Southeastern tip of the Korean peninsula.  A majority of Korean imports and exports pass through this harbor, as do countless ferries.  A friend and I were scheduled to take an early morning ferry from Busan to Fukuoka, Japan.  Feeling adventurous, we roamed the streets of Busan in the wee morning hours.  Near the ferry terminal we spotted a map and discussed the general area where we might wander.  We had to visit the fish markets.  It was the perfect time.

We came upon tiny stalls at first, many of them restaurants set right against the harbor.  Feeling a late night hunger pang and an urge to take the adventure a step further, we sidled up to one of the stalls and dined on a sea creature that looked something like a lamprey, complete with a sucker mouth.  Our hostess-chef threw its flesh, which still wriggled a bit, into a tinfoil pan full of onions, garlic, and red pepper paste.  It smelled and tasted heavenly, albeit the texture was somewhere between jicama and squid.  We wrapped up the mystery fish in anise-flavored sesame leaves, crammed it into our mouths and hoped to escape food poisoning as the hostess fished some glasses out of a bucket of dirty water for our barley tea.

As we moved deeper into the markets, the noises and scents intensified as fisher folk and merchants in bright galoshes began the day.  We watched as they filled their tanks with fresh seawater and their catch, hosed down their stands and sat back to eat their breakfast of kimchi and rice.  At their feet sat huge, square net packs of clams, mussels, and abalone that must have weighed several hundred pounds each, likely being readied for shipment to cities throughout Korea.  A few women sat shucking mussels into shallow dishes, perhaps to be dried or pickled and then sent off to other markets.

There were many moments when I found myself in awe of how the live animals were still struggling to survive.  We saw a large crab try and pull itself out of a tank by hooking its spindly leg on a bar across the tank, hanging there, unclear where to go next.  There was an octopus that had managed to crawl out onto the floor, but lay still at my feet.  Some tanks of fish swam in a state of hysteria, shaking the tank in their futile search for an exit.

These creatures were all so desperate to live, and I felt moved by the sight of them, on both a micro level of their present struggle and the global level of their dwindling populations.  This all reached a point of utmost intensity when I crouched down next to a tank jammed full of octopi and filmed a bit of their languid movements.  I focused my camera on an octopus in the center of the tank, and this animal watched me as intently and clearly as I watched it.

Koreans have relied on marine wildlife for thousands of years, and it will be necessary to understand this tradition before beginning a dialogue on change.  My hope is that as our global village grows and we begin to understand the scale of our impact as a species, these conversations will not come too late.

The New York Times’ Andy Revkin writes, “Does the world need leatherback turtles?  Most likely not.”  http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/02/a-race-to-save-ancient-sea-turtle-species/

To morph into an actual question, this tiresomely vague query, “Does the world need…[fill in the blank],” has to ask:

For what? 

For whom?

Implied is that people are the same as “the world.”  Accepting this bold assumption, we can restate:  do people need leatherback turtles?

Do we need ball point pens?  Antibiotics?  Indoor plumbing?  The framers of the Constitution, who knew a thing or two about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, had none of these things.  Nor do most people living today.  People, it turns out, need very little.  But some people would prefer not to live in poverty.  We were born to a rich living world.  No religious or ethical tradition would suggest we should leave it poorer.

The world does not need opera, baseball, cheap bottled beer, or computers.  Only a tiny fraction of people–even of just the people alive right now–have known these things.

Asking if the world needs leatherback turtles assumes four things:

1)  That we understand perfectly all of their possible value and so are in a position to answer.                    

2)  That those who love, are fascinated and inspired by, or whose living depends partly on studying or guiding interested people to see leaterhback turtles have no right to enjoy them or depend on their existence, if most other people don’t care.

3)  No one has reason to expect that a thousand-pound animal that has been here for hundreds of millions of years without us should, by rights alone, continue, unless some threshold-number of people make some “use” of it.

4)   That we have asked all the people yet to be born if they will want it, and they–all of them–said, “Nah, go ahead and destroy it.”   

Expectant parents paint animals on the walls of nurseries because they wish to usher newborn children into the world with an acknowledgement that they have come to a place with a rich living endowment.   

Only a few people need–or have heard of–leatherback turtles.  But if people vanished, it’s fairly clear that leatherback turtles would survive.  If leatherbacks vanish, it’s a symptom that it’s less clear people will survive.  That we even ask the question makes it clear to me that our chance of surviving is less than it could be.

The following is a guest blog by Megan Smith of Blue Ocean Institute:

Recently, Land Rover launched an ad campaign (see below) that creates parallels between facts they deem either “useful” or useless.”  I realize that many individuals have historically turned to Land Rover regarding matters of utility when facing such conundrums as:  “Does this Range Rover come in sage?  I’d like to blend into the suburban jungle,” or the age-old question:  “Does the LR3 make me look fat?”  All are important queries that demand accurate answers and beg thoughtful reflection.

However, Land Rover went way off-road  this time–and in the wrong direction too.  Their ad reads:  “USELESS FACT:  Loggerhead Sea Turtles have the amazing ability to navigate across thousands of miles of ocean and return to the exact beach of their birth.”  Now for the, ahem, useful fact:  “USEFUL FACT:  The LR3 Navigation system uses ‘electronic bread crumbs’ to keep you on course, even if your adventure takes you off the map.”

The ad poorly articulates the sheer extent to which Loggerheads exhaust themselves for the greater good of their species.  Loggerheads are highly migratory, traveling as much as 7,500 miles in one trip, mostly forgoing food and rest to find the perfect nesting area to proliferate their prehistoric lineage.  You won’t see this pioneer interrupt its journey for a bathroom break or make frequent, pricy stops to fill up a greedy gas tank that gets a paltry 12 and 18 miles per gallon. (That’s according to sources other than Land Rover because it’s impossible to find that info on their website.)

Unfortunately, the turtles’ marvelous mobility makes them especially vulnerable to accidental capture in the nets and longlines of the world’s fisheries.  In 1978, Loggerheads were placed on the United States Fish & Wildlife Service Endangered Species List as “threatened,” and they remain there today.

In the face of adversity, Loggerheads accomplish their remarkable migrations without “electronic bread crumbs,” MapQuest, or street signs.  It is widely thought that they can detect both wave direction and the Earth’s magnetic fields, enabling navigation across the ocean.  Meanwhile, some of us can’t find the bathroom light switch at night.

The moral of the story is that the Loggerhead is an amazing living, breathing antiquity.  Our existence, and most certainly Land Rover’s, is merely a drop in the bucket of time compared to that of our 100-million-year-old friend, the Loggerhead.  So instead of underestimating their customers’ ideas of value, Land Rover should take pause, digest the mysterious beauty and inherent sense of utility of such majestic creatures, and thus, be humbled.

This is what I really think:

Preying on people who are wrought with insecurity about their sense of direction or bravery, Land Rover posits that “limits are for the weak of heart.”  They can make you a better person — or at least they can make you appear better, riding high on that four-wheeled throne, transporting dullards who don’t know how to read a map, and essentially rendering any inkling of natural human instinct we have left ultimately impotent.  But fear not:  while being carted around in this climate-controlled behemoth, this notion will be the last thought on your mind.  Instead, you’ll be entirely too preoccupied with the presets on your satellite radio while adjusting the temperature of your heated leather seats.

– Megan Smith, Blue Ocean Institute

Though the Bluefin is a special fish, its problems are just one instructive example of how management can go off the tracks if the scientific part of the process is corruptible by short-term economics and political lobbying.  We call for a five-year moratorium on possession of Bluefin tuna throughout the western Altantic and the closure of Gulf of Mexico spawning areas to all gear capable of catching Bluefin tuna during Bluefin spawning season. 

To Pemba

Our commercial flight got us as far as the island of Unguja.  A charter flight took us the last leg of our trip, to Pemba Island.  We’re off the coast of Tanzania, East Africa.  Collectively called Zanzibar, these islands are part of the “Swahili Coast.”  The mainly Muslim sub-culture here has been deeply influenced by centuries of ocean-going sailing trade with Arabs.  We’re filming the second and final shoot of the pilot for our planned TV series, OCEAN, and here’s the angle:  We’ll profile a new local effort by Islamic leaders to instill a conservation ethic in the residents and religious leaders of Pemba Island’s fishing villages.

Our film crew consists of British-born director John Angier; Dutch-born cameraman Peter Hoving; Italian underwater camerawoman Valentina Cucchiara, who comes via her home on the Egyptian Red Sea; Kenyan sound man Hassan Ali Gharalla; and the kid from Brooklyn:  me. 

 

This a culture straddling several centuries at once.  Electricity, for instance, is a sometime thing.  Power outages are daily, but many villages would never know—they don’t have electric lines.  Or plumbing.  Many houses are mud and thatch.

 

Our base is the town of Chake-Chake (pronounced cha’-kay cha’-kay).  Our visit has been arranged with the help of CARE and the Misali Island Conservation Association, an improbable little local group that formed to wage a successful fight against a planned tourist development on Misali Island.  Fishers feared they’d lose access to the surrounding waters and that the intended resort would also cut the locals out of any tourism revenue.  And as one local leader said, “We are concerned tourism will bring people who will leave garbage, and break corals.”

 

Going Coastal

Around Pemba Island, tides range widely.  At low tide many boats simply careen on the flats, stranded till the tide returns.  The boats, all wooden, are called dhows.  They have one mast, one boom, and one triangular sail.  The boom is  hoisted to the top of the mast, then angled at about 45 degrees.  The sails assume a perfect shape and fill without luffing, even in the merest breeze.  They look like they were built centuries ago; indeed, their design has probably changed little in thousands of years. 

 

Many smaller dhows—mostly just dugout canoes fitted with mast and sail—work local waters.  Much larger ones carry cargo along the coast.  Fish are kept without ice, displayed without ice, sold without ice, and presumably, eaten quickly.

The people, heavily dependent on the sea for their livelihoods, catch various fishes, cephalopods (squids and their relatives), sea cucumbers, and snails, and collect seaweed.  They use traps, nets and spears.

Some very healthy coral reefs remain.  (Several dive operators provide good access for tourists seeking views of fine coral and dense fish populations.)

The island of Misali lies on the horizon.  Misali’s mystique derives from its legend.  Story has it that in the past a prophet visited.  When it came time to pray, his companion worried that they had no proper prayer mat.  “The island will be our mat,” the prophet replied.  And so the place, named after the Swahili word for “mat,” became imbued with a sense of holy presence.  In addition, from the local villages it lies on the horizon in the direction of Mecca, deepening the religious overtone.

 

Extensive flats wreath the island in a turquoise halo.  Men hunt octopus hiding in patchy corals in the sparkling water.  Their gear is simply a mask and a hook on the end of a stick. 

 

An area closed to fishing by the government, a little over a square kilometer, protects some of the island’s best coral.  Outside that zone, fishing is allowed.  But fishing with explosives or poisons, spear guns (the crudely homemade guns shoot their spear using simple rubber slings), and haul-seine nets are banned.  The emphasis is on preserving the coral, which is home to rainbowed fishes on which the people’s survival depends.   

But this is an impoverished, imperiled paradise.  At the village of Kichenjani, I join two barefoot fishers, Musser Khalfan (age 22) and Nassor Sleman (a hard-weathered 45 years old).  Using hand-carved paddles we pull seaward, then hoist the old, tattered sail.

 

Nassor complains that as a young man he caught more fish.  There are now too many fishermen, too many traps and nets all through this area—he gestures with his hand.  Nearly 40 nearby villages send boats to fish the area.  And more come from distant locales where they have already depleted their own waters. 

He complains—and this surprises me—that the area closed to fishing is too small.  He says fishermen need many more such areas closed to fishing—because the closed areas produce the fish. 

“Everyone is fishing here,” he complains.  “Everyone is coming to pressurize this area because the closed zone gives us fish.”  He wants closed areas established in more places, so competing fishermen will have enough fish near their own villages—and won’t need to come here.

Two brothers, Haji Faki Shehe and Juma Faki Shehe, in their 20s, use traps made from a frame of bent sticks covered with small-mesh wire.  The funnel-shaped trap entrance is woven from palm fronds.  They retrieve their traps with a short stick with several projecting branches and rock tied to one end—a Paleolithic grappling hook. 

 

Their first trap holds damselfish and butterflyfish the size of large potato chips, several small rabbitfish, a small porcupinefish, a puffer, and a lovely palm-sized cowry snail.  They’d all look nice in an aquarium.  If we caught these kinds of things back home we’d put them in a bucket of water and admire them, then set them free and go home for lunch.  Here the bucket has no water, and they are lunch.  Nothing gets thrown back. 

 Island Islam

In a round, thatch-roofed high school classroom, Mbarouk Mussa Omar, a pleasant fellow working with the Misali Island Conservation Association, draws on the blackboard for the students.  His diagram shows how sunlight helps grow corals and seaweeds, how smaller fish, then bigger fish result, and how we are part of this circle of life.  His Swahili is peppered with words like “chlorophyll” and “photosynthesis.”

 

He says that the Qur’an instructs that if you destroy the natural environment you will be punished; from that punishment you must learn, and do things better.  As examples he explains how the tsunami brought the worst damage where the people had cut down all the protective coastal mangrove trees and mined out the coral reefs.  Mbarouk tells them that when fishing, they must let little ones grow; they will be much bigger next time they are caught.  The students get it.

From here Mbarouk takes us to Kukuu, another fishing village.  The issue here is mangrove trees.  They can form dense ribbons of forest between the sea and shore.  In many areas mangroves are the first line of defense against flooding and storms.  But here many have been cut.  “If we cut all the mangroves,” he says, “the sea will come to our houses.”  The Qur’an teaches, he says, that if you cut a tree you must plant a tree.

And so we will.

I and about a dozen villagers who’ve been working on this project line up in an open muddy area adjacent to a nice stand of trees, and, on signal, begin planting.  Our bare feet squish pleasingly through the mud as we plant a seed, take two steps, and repeat.  When planting you simply push the lower third of the foot-long seed into the mud, leaving the remaining two-thirds standing.  So the whole area looks immediately like a new little garden.  Indeed, the group is eager to show how well seedlings of recent plantings are growing, filling in areas that had been cut-over.

 

By the Book

The Imam of the central mosque in Chake-Chake, Sheik Suleiman, is a tall man with quick bright eyes and a kindly bearing.  Today, he has convened about 50 Imams from around the island to meet for a couple of hours and discuss Islamic ethics and the Qur’an’s teachings as they relate to nature.

 

Suleiman sees a deep connection between human well-being and the environment.  For him, depletion of natural resources is linked to poverty in real, immediate, and life-threatening ways. 

He explains, “God created the world in greenness.  To protect creation is humanity’s role.  Everyone has that responsibility.” 

In time for Friday afternoon prayers, we go to the central mosque to hear Suleiman’s sermon about Islam’s environmental ethic.  Global warming is one of the main topics in his sermon.  There is no conflict between science and Islam, he explains.  He speaks energetically without notes for 40 minutes, delivering his teaching.  Afterwards, Suleiman explains to me, “In a Muslim country, the message can be given through the Islamic perspective.  But it is a message for all religions, for all people.”

 

The final planned activity of the day is a ceremony wherein Fazlun Khalid of the Birmingham (England)-based Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences will bestow upon the community a brand-new booklet, “Teachers Guide Book for Islamic Environmental Education.”  The booklet uses six Islamic themes and numerous verses, and explains their implications for environmental ethics.  The themes are Tawhid, the principle of unity, the nature of the Creator, and the importance of his Creation; Khalq, every single thing we see around us—the environment and ourselves; Mizan, the principle of balance on which all creation works; Insan, the purpose of humankind; Fasad, the human capacity for corruption, mischief, and destructiveness; Khalifa, our obligation as God’s steward on Earth and guardian of His creation.  It’s printed both in English and Swahili versions, and Fazlun’s brought plenty of copies. 

Several hundred people gather outside a school under the shade of an immense mango tree.  Musicians play drums and tambourines.  Girls—despite being seated in formal assembly and Muslim dress—cannot keep their bodies from dancing in place to the rhythms.  Several men in fine robes are performing a traditional dance.

 

Tables and chairs are set for about two-dozen local dignitaries.  The color, sound, and setting make it a picturesque pageant, indeed.  The actual presentation is formal and rather solemn.  The closing speech comes from the Mufti, a high-ranking religious leader, who reinforces the importance of conserving the natural environment.  As the crowd begins slowly to disperse, the teachers try herding students back toward the school, but the girls keep asking the drummers to play so they can dance—and the drummers keep obliging.  The Mufti expresses to me his personal approval and appreciation of this project, the booklet, and our visit.

“You have seen with your own eyes,” he says.  “Through the Qur’an, through the Bible, we welcome in this effort all religions, all people.”

Outgoing Fisheries Service director William T. Hogarth writes in The Washington Post on December 29 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/28/AR2007122802570.html?sub=AR) that his agency “has followed recommendations from top scientists for managing the bluefin tuna.”

Not so.  Since 1982, when scientists recommended a “near-zero” quota, fisheries managers in his agency and internationally have often set much higher quotas than scientists have recommended.  His agency ignores many top scientists consistently calling for reduced quotas and closed spawning areas.  Bottom line:  by ignoring real science he and other managers have failed so acutely that the U.S. catch has dropped 90% inside of five years.  A very real threat of extinction now looms for one of the largest fish in the sea, while fishermen go out of business.

Yes, European countries’ fishing is out of control.  But that’s not why our fish are disappearing.  Some of the science Hogarth and his advisors are ignoring is tagging data showing that the fish originating in U.S. waters tend to stay here.  Only about 10 percent of our fish go east.  Meanwhile, many European fish come here.  That European “subsidy” means our own fish are in even sharper decline than the 90-percent drop in U.S. catch suggests.  What Hogarth calls the “few bluefin” caught in the Gulf of Mexico spawning area are the last few breeders in our population.

Hogarth’s agency insists on allowing boats to fish there because pointing fingers at Europe’s mismanagement is easier than taking action.  Letting our boats go out of business and our giant tuna go extinct is negligent management that ignores science, sense, and the law.  Dr. Hogarth is missing his opportunity to do the right thing before he leaves the agency.

For more on the beleaguered Bluefin, see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/23/AR2007122301515.html

 Our plan is to look at coral reef protection with a focus on sharks.  We’re going to spend a little time in Belize.  First we’ll go to a fish market, then to a protected atoll called Glover’s Reef.  We’ll be filming part of a pilot for a TV series called OCEAN.

Dr. Carl Safina, right, in Belize during the filming of the pilot for OCEAN

 Three huge cruise ships stand outside Belize City.  Of the thousands of people on board, most would enjoy some locally caught fish or lobster.  Can we love the reefs without loving them to death?

 The fish market has fishermen offering jacks (mainly Horse-eye), groupers (a few), small Yellowtail snappers (lots), sharks (most very small, just pups), and a few other smallish reef fish.  The largest fish in the market is a juvenile Goliath Grouper weighing about 50 pounds (unmolested, they exceed 500 pounds).  A decade ago the market had no sharks.  Now fishermen call all sharks to market, even the oft-unloved nurse shark whose fins are worthless for soup-making.

Dr. Carl Safina, far right, observes the offerings at a Belize fishmarket.  Shark fins

fetch $40 to $50 a pound.

 Shark fins are used by the Chinese community here, and some are exported all the way to China, for making “shark. fin soup.”  The soup itself is just chicken or beef stock.  The fins add no flavor.  The cartilaginous fin-rays that stiffen the sharks’ fins are all that is of value.  They thicken the soup.  But flour makes a better thickener.  Fins fetch $40 to $50 a pound, an astronomical sum around here.  This drives the fishing, as it drives shark fishing worldwide now.

 A rather rough, rather wet, rather long ride gets us to Glover’s Reef, an ocean atoll rising from the deep seafloor 20 miles outside the barrier reef.  It’s 20 miles long and 7 miles wide with four small islands.  Middle Key, the one we’re on, hosts a scientific station managed by the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.  Like all atolls, it’s a ring of coral reef whose central lagoon is full of small, picturesque “patch reefs.” 

Middle Key

 The waving palms, turquoise shallows, emerald mangrove shoreline, and fringing reef appear intensely beautiful.  Outside that wave-breaking necklace of reef, the ocean plunges to indigo deep.  The seafloor, about sixty feet, is covered with big barrel sponges and soft corals waving gently in the easy-flowing current.  The place is bang-on gorgeous.  Schools of small and medium fishes are evident everywhere.

 We’re here to see what happens when a place is protected from certain kinds of fishing.  Nets are verboten on the whole atoll, and a big pie-slice section is closed to all removal of marine life.

 Dr. Janet Gibson has for nearly two decades been involved in achieving protection for Belize’s barrier reef.  Her goal is to bring 15 to 20 percent of the reef tract under total protection.  That’s about what many scientists think would be needed to give the reef resilience to fishing in the other 80 to 85 percent.  So far about one percent is fully protected.  But inside those few reserves the results are so dramatic–there are so many more conch, lobster, and big fish–that Gibson hopes to get more reserves established, at an accelerating pace.  Of course, “It’s a race against time,” Janet acknowledges.

 Here at Glover’s, Ellen Pikitch and Demian Chapman’s decade-long study of sharks on the reef is showing that the reserve is working for Nurse Sharks and Caribbean Reef Sharks. But it’s working because these sharks seldom leave the protected area.

 Around the reef, the scientists have planted receivers.  Inside the sharks, they’ve implanted transmitters.  There are quite a few sharks here, and we have no difficulty capturing several for the purpose of implanting transmitters.  Each transmitter is the diameter of a pencil and about an inch long.  It’ll go “beep” for 18 months.  Each time the shark is in range of a receiver, the beep says, “I’m here.”

Dr. Carl Safina, center, studying sharks at Glover’s Reef

 Turns out, when we look at Demian’s data, these sharks are homebodies.  Most of the time they stick to only one part of the atoll, going off to deep water during daylight, coming into the shallows at night.  The pings recorded by the receiver tell a story of individual sharks spending much of their time in quite small parts of the reef, with occasional exursions around the atoll.

 What would happen if they wandered in and out a lot?  “They’d be goners,” says Demian.  “They’d be those pups we saw in the fish market because, basically, where gillnets are allowed, they pretty quickly catch nearly all the sharks.”

 Is the difference really so stark?  We arrange to meet some fishermen about 20 miles away.  Three raggedly dressed men hail us from their small open single-engine boat.  Expecting us, they’re waiting patiently with their net.  They set it last night and it’s been in the water 10 hours.  Marked by floats, the net stretches half a kilometer.  Any swimming thing bigger than about eight inches long will have been arrested by all that mesh.

The head fisherman has been pulling on nets like this for three decades.  They have seen the catch go, he says, “very down.”  He blames increasing competition.  But he insists the number of fish in the water, and number being caught, remain the same as always.

 And then comes the shock:  the whole net contains not one fish.  Zero.  Ten hours, 500 yards of netting–not a single fish.  I don’t see too much competition for the same catch–I see no catch and the writing on the wall for these fishermen.  And for their children, the ink is set, and it says, “No future–unless…”

 We’ve seen the one hope for the future at Glover’s Reef:  an area where nets are banned and a smaller area where no fishing is allowed.  This is not anti-fishing; it’s just reality.  You can’t sell goods if you have only stores and no factories.  Glover’s Reef is one factory.  And these fishermen need a lot more of them.  Otherwise, we can kiss the fish and the fishermen, goodbye.

 But with some of area set aside, the reefs and their fish could survive.  If we let fish recover, we let fishing thrive.  We’ve glimpsed two versions of the future.  They’re ours to choose.

The story goes like this: It’s one of the largest, fastest, most gorgeous fish in the sea. Unfortunately, its extraordinary warm-bloodedness makes its muscle delicious to the strange seafood-loving creatures that live on land. The value of bluefin tuna meat goes up due to global demand for sushi and sashimi. As the price goes up, fishing increases. Too many fish are caught and the population collapses. Over the past 50 years bluefin fisheries have collapsed off Brazil, in the North Sea, and recently off the eastern U.S. and Canada.

The Commission tasked with managing Atlantic bluefin fisheries is completely broken. The 43-nation International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas met this month in, appropriately enough, Turkey, to discuss the fate of bluefin tuna in the Atlantic. Usually referred to by its acronym ICCAT-pronounced eye-cat- it should be called instead ICCAN’T. Or, keep the acronym and change its name to International Conspiracy to Catch All Tuna.

If that’s mildly amusing the Commission itself is the real joke. It’s stocked with ponderous self-important, cynical men who move and think like escargot. Their only concern, like most people, is money and politics. But because they’re bureaucrats not businessmen, these people are so short-sighted and dim-witted that they fail at both.

The same can be said for the fishers themselves, who, when it comes to bluefin tuna are represented by ideologues incapable of understanding that collapse is bad for business. They lobby the Commissioners very hard, and on the other end Japan, the main market for bluefin, does everything possible to keep quotas high and the science be damned.

So the Commission itself is an odd cross between a fishermen’s pit-bull and Japanese lap-dog. Last year, U.S. fishermen caught only 10 percent of their quota. By any measure, they’re going out of business. Because they consistently refused to discuss cutting their quota for the sake of conservation and their own future, their greed is bankrupting them. What have they and the Commissioners learned from the collapses? Apparently, nothing at all. In fact, in their 40-year history, they have never once managed a fish population sustainably or allowed a recovery. All the fish species under their “authority” are at historic lows, with one exception: North Atlantic Swordfish. But it took a chef’s boycott and a successful lawsuit to arrest and turn around that fish’s plummet.

The largest remaining Atlantic bluefin population-which breeds in the Mediterranean-is now also endangered with collapse. The quota for fishing in the eastern half of the Atlantic and in the Med is more than double what the Commission’s own scientists recommend. Moreover, recent catches have exceeded the limit by more than 50%. Actual catches are about 230% higher than scientists recommend, meaning that for every one fish that can be sustainably caught, fishermen are killing more than three. The population has halved since the 1970’s, with most of the decline occurring in the last 5-6 years. It’s the familiar Bluefin story: Illegal fishing is rampant, too many fish are being caught, and the population is headed for collapse.

At the recent Commission meeting the United States and Canada proposed a 3-year moratorium on bluefin fishing for eastern Atlantic fishing countries-i.e. exempting themselves-to allow member nations time to control illegal fishing and incorporate scientific recommendations. The proposal was quickly rejected. Despite obvious overfishing and decline, Commission delegates actually raised the quota slightly.

Nothing meaningful-at least nothing good-is ever done for bluefin tuna by ICCAN’T. Nevermind that the Commission’s own scientists have found that reducing catches and rebuilding the population could lead to substantially higher quotas in as few as 10 years.

Archeological evidence shows that people have been fishing bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean for at least 9,000 years. A three year break is not too much to ask to ensure that bluefin are around for the next 9,000.

As Andy Revkin reports in the New York Times, even though whale meat is unpopular in Japan, government officials have decided to expand their whale-hunting. This year they will kill 1,400 whales, and a new species will be openly on the menu: endangered Humpback Whales. Read his excellent article for the facts at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/weekinreview/25revkin.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin.

He notes, “The official line is that whales are no more intelligent or special than cows, their expanding numbers are depleting fisheries needed by humans, and any complaints about killing them are hypocritical and little more than cultural imperialism.”

Here they go again.

As the United States is the most irresponsible country in terms of energy waste and denial about global warming, Japan is the world’s worst country in its zeal to kill and consume wild nature. Japan is a major force in forest depletion worldwide because they are a major market for old-growth wood. Much of what used to be the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest of North America was exported to Japan as raw logs, where it was used wastefully to make throw-away concrete pouring molds for buildings.

Japan is the world’s driver of fishing for giant bluefin tuna, as well as setting quotas for bluefin tuna globally. Because of Japan, the giant tuna are depleted in all oceans, and Japan has been convicted in world court of intentionally overfishing its already-too-high, largely self-set quotas, and trying to hide it. A country where an endangered 700-pound fish can be auctioned wholesale for $174,000 is a country crazed. It is insane (or just dishonest) for Japan to suggest that whales are depleting fish supplies needed by humans because Japan’s global overfishing has probably done more to deplete fish supplies needed by humans than has any other single country.

Japan insists on killing whales and that the kill is sustainable. The main problem is: they lie. DNA tests of whale meat in Japan showed protected species labeled as minke whale, the only species Japan announced it would hunt. So the hunt is corrupt and the official line demonstrably unreliable.

Second, most large whales worldwide remain at extremely depressed numbers compared to their original population sizes. Whaling did that to them.

Third, there is no humane way to kill a whale. Two main differences between whales and cows are that cows can be killed humanely and cows are raised for the purpose so their numbers are not an issue. Cows are not endangered by hunting; whales are. People who grow cows own them. Japan does not own these whales. They steal them from the rest of us, in defiance of the spirit and intent of the International Whaling Commission’s global whaling ban.

Finally, Japan’s insistence on killing animals no one needs to eat, animals that are the largest that have ever lived, simply shows a disrespect for life so outsized as to be utterly indecent.