The ocean used to seem infinite in its bounty. Now it needs care and maintenance,
writes Edward Carr

THE eviction of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden marked the end of man as a hunter-gatherer. For most of history, mankind had survived on berries, nuts and wild animals, but as numbers grew and food became scarce, people were reduced to farming. As God told Adam, "The earth will be cursed. You will get your food from it only by labour all the days of your life." After the freedom of the forests and the plains, it was back-breaking work. The first farmers suffered from rotten teeth and stunted bones. Farming was the antithesis to the nomadic way of life, bringing with it a domesticated landscape, a settled existence, ownership, and laws to protect it.

Something similar is now happening to the ocean. Where once it seemed infinite in its bounty, it is suffering from overfishing and pollution. Wherever humanity meets the sea, the sea comes off worse. Two-thirds of the world's 5.5 billion people live within 50 miles (80km) of the coast, and much of the pollution from the land runs to the sea. Residents, tourists, commercial interests and wildlife are all fighting for their corner of the garden.

After decades of expansion, many of the world's fishing grounds are already overfished, and many more soon will be. The scale of the hunt is awesome. In a study published in the journal Nature, Daniel Pauly and Villi Christensen, then both working at the International Centre for Living Aquatic Resources Management (ICLARM), a non-profit research centre in Manila, tried to measure how much of the tiny marine plants, called phytoplankton, is needed to support the life that man extracts from the sea. They concluded that people take 25-35% of the output of the richest areas of the sea: the continental shelf and the places where currents saturated in nutrients well up from the deep. Although these areas are small, less than a tenth of the ocean surface, the finding is alarming. Mankind's share of the output of the land, at 35-40%, is not that much higher—and look how irrevocably the land has been changed by this exploitation.

Then there is global warming with all its uncertainties. Tens of millions of people—most of them poor—who live only a few metres above the high-tide mark have much to fear from even a slight rise in the sea level. Hundreds of millions more who have settled on the coast will also suffer if today's Prosperos end up creating more or wilder storms.

"The sea is not landscape. It is the experience of eternity," wrote the German novelist Thomas Mann. Yet the fringes of eternity are polluted with nitrates and blooms of foetid algae. Immensity and fecundity were once the ocean's defining characteristics. Now the sea turns out to be just another environment under threat. What the British poet W.H. Auden called "the alpha of existence, the symbol of potentiality" seems tired and worn.

THERE WAS NO MORE SEA

The time has come for people to change the way they think about the sea. Hunter-gatherers were never banished from the salt water. Although coastal states control the waters to 200 miles off shore they find it hard to exert their authority there. Most of the deep sea is subject to the even frailer rule of international law. Scientific ignorance and the sea's lack of natural boundries further frustrate the task of designing institutions to manage the marine environment. Little is known about the precise effects of, say, the changing climate on fish stocks or the remote consequences of estuarine pollution.

Despite being badly governed, the sea provides vast benefits. For some, these are measured in jobs—fishing, along with processing and marketing on land, for example, employs about 200m people. To many more the benefits are food, recreation and protection against storms. And everyone needs the sea for shipping and to wash away waste, recyle water, and provide a habitat for wildlife. In a recent paper, Robert Costanza of the University of Maryland put a value of $21 trillion on these services, compared with $12 trillion for what the land offers. The numbers are debatable, but the idea behind them makes sense. Environmentalists would like the sea to be a pristine environment; others treat it as a waste-dump: in fact it is a resource that must be preserved and harvested.

To enhance its uses, the water must become ever more like the land, with owners, laws and limits. Fishermen must behave more like ranchers than hunters. Polluters should pay something for the damage caused by their pollution. Planners will have to balance the natural habitat against development and prepare, if necessary, for a rapid rise in sea-level. Should the world's population double, mankind may have to treat the coastal waters like prime agricultural land.

It will not be easy to extend fallible laws and regulations to a realm that has stood for freedoms dating from before civilisation. Attempts to "manage" the sea are seen as somehow unnatural. Yet the laws and regulations are coming all the same. Byron was right in 1817 when he wrote: "Roll on thou deep and dark blue ocean—roll! Man marks the earth with ruin—his control stops with the shore." But he is right no longer.

This has been declared the year of the ocean: a time for glossy display, including an Expo that has just opened in Lisbon. Few want to think about the sea's fall from grace, its loss of infinity; and no one likes to pay for resources that had always been considered free. The second fall will no more feel like progress than did the first.

This is:  http://www.oocities.org/RainForest/6783/TheSea.html