A sinking feeling

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/06/2024 (520 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For most of us, especially here on the Prairies, the oceans aren’t much more than merely a concept. Even if we fly over them, cruise through them, swim/snorkel near their shores or eat their bounty, we know very little about them. They’re wide, deep, blue, beautiful at the edges and perhaps intimidating. Out of sight, out of mind.

For people like us, Olive Heffernan has written a very special book.

The High Seas: Greed, Power and the Battle for the Unclaimed Ocean is a startling, important revelation, especially for anyone concerned about the environment. We humans are not only wreaking havoc on the land, we’ve now turned our rapacious attention to the oceans.

Heffernan was trained and worked as a marine biologist before becoming a science journalist. Among her many publications are essays on oceans and climate change for Nature, Wired, Scientific American, National Geographic and others. She was the editor-in-chief of the Marine Science Magazine as well as the founding editor-in-chief of Nature Climate Change. She knows full well what she’s talking about, and she travels far and wide to get the facts.

In each of the 10 chapters that make up the book, Heffernan details a different way that our oceans are under threat. Many of us can guess at a couple of causes: overfishing and pollution, for example. But the details, the extent, the culprits and the scary looming problems are what give this book its importance.

Fortunately, Heffernan is a gifted storyteller and stylist. The High Seas is never intimidatingly unreadable, dry or boring.

She begins Chapter Nine, for instance, with an account of the splash-down of Mir, the Soviet Space Station into the South Pacific Ocean. Interesting details are provided: on March 22, 2001 at 17:58 local time, the 165-ton spacecraft broke up on re-entry into 1,500 pieces, some the size of a car. It was viewed by spectators in two planes who paid $1.8 million to watch the event. And it occurred at Point Nemo, the “Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility,” the place that is farthest from land — 4,800 kilometres east of New Zealand.

Currently, there are between 4,500 and 6,500 satellites circling us in space, Heffernan notes, 36 per cent of them the products of SpaceX, the company owned by Elon Musk. That company plans on launching as many as 1,000 new satellites each year in the coming future. When they are no longer useful, they are likely destined for similar controlled or uncontrolled re-entry into this remote space-debris dump. They will join Mir and the 2,400 satellites that have met the same fate there since 1957.

In other words, even the farthest reaches of the ocean are being massively, uncaringly polluted. The chemical consequences of their deterioration are incalculable. Out of sight, out of mind.

Add to them the discarded plastics, farm waste, sewage, garbage, fishing debris and industrial chemicals that are excreted into the oceans every day. We have created 700 dead zones in the oceans.

Each chapter begins and proceeds as such: Heffernan relays an interesting story gleaned by travelling extensively and interviewing the principles personally, followed by research into the strange schemes that some have devised for future exploitation.

The top layers of the oceans have been depleted, so plans are underway to fish the more inaccessible mid-layers and below; to mine for ores and possible medically useful resources; to salt the oceans with iron sulphate to lessen climate change; to tow icebergs to arid countries, and so on — all with sketchy regard for their scary consequences.

There are agencies (especially the UN) trying to regulate the high seas. But the scofflaws are many — sneaky and determined. Laws are undermined; protections are compromised.

Heffernan offers some hope in her final chapter but, as she says, international interventions and individual, personal actions are required.

The High Seas is a marvelous book, timely and vital.

Gene Walz is a Winnipeg writer deeply concerned about what we’ve done to our world.