Cry Of The Ancient Mariner

By Carl Safina

At the lonely center of the North Pacific Ocean, farther from just about everything than just about anywhere, lies Midway Atoll. I've come with Canadian writer Nancy Baron to the world's largest Laysan albatross colony--400,000 exquisite masters of the air--a feathered nation convened to breed, cramming an isle a mile by two.

Ravenous, goose-size chicks so jam the landscape that it resembles a poultry farm. Many have waited more than a week for a meal, while both parents forage the ocean's vast expanse. An adult glides in on 7-ft. (2-m) wings. After flying perhaps 2,000 miles (3,200 km) non-stop to return here, in 10 minutes she will be gone again, searching for more food. She surveys the scene through lovely dark pastel-shadowed eyes, then calls, "Eh-eh-eh." Every nearby chick answers, but she recognizes her own chick's voice and weaves toward it.

Aggressive with hunger, the whining chick bites its parent's bill to stimulate her into regurgitating her payload. The adult hunches, retching, pumping out fish eggs and several squid. The chick swallows in seconds what its parent logged 4,000 miles (6,400 km) to get. The chick begs for more. The adult arches her neck and retches again. Nothing comes. We whisper, "What's wrong?"

Slowly comes the surreal sight of a green plastic toothbrush emerging from the bird's gullet. With her neck arched, the mother cannot fully pass the straight brush. She tries several times to disgorge it, but can't. Nancy and I can hardly bear this. The albatross reswallows and, with the brush stuck inside, wanders away.

In the world in which albatrosses originated, the birds swallowed pieces of floating pumice for the fish eggs stuck to them. Albatrosses transferred this survival strategy to toothbrushes, bottle caps, nylon netting, toys and other floating junk. Where chicks die, a pile of colorful plastic particles that used to be in their stomachs often marks their graves.

Through the intimate bond between parent and offspring flows the continuity of life itself. That our human trash stream crosses even this sacred bond is evidence of a world wounded and out of round, its relationships disfigured. The albatross's message: consumer culture permeates every watery point on the compass. From sun-bleached coral reefs to icy polar waters, no place, no creature, remains apart.

If albatrosses' eating plastic seems surprising, so do many of the oceans' problems. Like elusive fish, facts often defy common perceptions. Examples:

--Most people think oil spills cause the most harm to ocean life. They don't. Fishing does. When a tanker wrecks, news crews flock to film gooey beaches and dying animals. Journalists rush right past the picturesque fishing boats whose huge nets and 1,000-hook long-lines wreak far more havoc on the marine world than spilled oil.

Fishing annually extracts more than 80 million tons of sea creatures worldwide. An additional 20 million tons of unwanted fish, seabirds, marine mammals and turtles get thrown overboard, dead. Overfishing has depleted major populations of cod, swordfish, tuna, snapper, grouper and sharks. Instead of sensibly living off nature's interest, many fisheries have mined the wild capital, and famous fishing banks lie bankrupt, including the revered cod grounds of New England and Atlantic Canada.

Enforcing fishing limits--to give the most devastated fish populations a chance to rebuild--could ultimately enable us to catch at least 10 million more tons of sea life than we do now. Government-subsidized shipbuilders and fleets drive much of the overfishing. Eliminating those subsidies--as New Zealand has already done--would mean paying less to get more in the long run.

--Most ocean pollution doesn't come from ships. It comes from land. Gravity is the sea's enemy. Silt running off dirt roads and clear-cut forest land ruins coral reefs and U.S. salmon rivers. Pesticides and other toxics sprayed into the air and washed into rivers find the ocean. (Midway's albatrosses have in their tissues as much of the industrial chemicals called PCBs as do Great Lakes bald eagles.) The biggest sources of coastal pollution are waste from farm animals, fertilizers and human sewage. They can spawn red tides and other harmful algal blooms that rob oxygen from the water, killing sea life. The Mississippi River, whose fine heartland silt once built fertile delta wetlands, now builds in the Gulf of Mexico a spreading dead zone--almost devoid of marine life--the size of New Jersey. Improving sewage treatment and cleaning up the runoff from farms will be increasingly vital to preserving coastal water quality.

--Fish farming--aquaculture--doesn't take pressure off wild fish. Many farms use large numbers of cheap, wild-caught fish as feed to raise fewer shrimp and fish of more lucrative varieties. And industrial-scale fish- and shrimp-aquaculture operations sometimes damage the coastlines where the facilities are located. The farms can foul the water, destroy mangroves and marshes, drive local fishers out of business and serve as breeding grounds for fish diseases. In places such as Bangladesh, Thailand and India, which grow shrimp mainly for export to richer countries, diseases and pollution usually limit a farm's life to 10 years. The companies then move and start again.

To avoid becoming just another environmental headache, aquaculture needs standards. Raising fish species alien to the local habitat should be discouraged, since escapees can drive out native fish or infect them with disease. Penning fish in open waterways is also problematic. Even when the impact on the environment is minimized--as it is with well-run Maine salmon farms--rows of large fish corrals in natural waterways can be eyesores. Fish farming is best done in indoor, onshore facilities. The fish rarely escape, and the wastewater can be treated before being released. Growing vegetarian species such as tilapia is ideal, since they don't have to be fed wild fish.

--The biologically richest stretches of ocean are more disrupted than the richest places on land. Continents still have roadless wilderness areas where motorized vehicles have never gone. But on the world's continental shelves it is hard to find places where boats dragging nets haven't etched tracks into sea-floor habitats. In Europe's North Sea and along New England's Georges Bank and Australia's Queensland coast, trawlers may scour the bottom four to eight times every year. And the U.S. National Marine Sanctuaries hardly deserve the name. Commercial and recreational fishing with lines, traps or nets is allowed almost everywhere in these "sanctuaries."

New Zealand and the Philippines are among the countries that have established reserves in which fish are actually left alone. Marine life tends to recover in these areas, then disperse beyond them, providing cheap insurance against overfishing outside the reserves.

Though the oceans' woes can seem overwhelming, solutions are emerging and attitudes are changing. Most people have shed the fantasy that the sea can inexhaustibly provide food, dilute endless pollution and accept unlimited trash. In 1996 the U.S. passed the Sustainable Fisheries Act, which mandates rules against overfishing--a recognition that protecting sea life is good business. Some fish, such as striped bass and redfish, are recovering because of catch limits. Alaskan, Falkland, Australian and New Zealand longline boats are taking care not to kill albatrosses. Turtles are being saved by trapdoors in shrimp nets.

The oceans' future depends most of all on international cooperation. Working through the U.N., the world's nations have banned giant drift nets and drafted a fishing treaty to bring responsibility to the high seas. But it won't go into force until 30 nations ratify it; 25 have done so. Among top fishing nations, Japan is noticeably absent. The country relies heavily on seafood and yet is exceptionally disrespectful toward the ocean. It has disregarded international quotas on catches of southern bluefin tuna and used "scientific research" as a bogus justification for hunting whales in the International Whaling Commission's Antarctic Sanctuary. A 1997 study revealed that of 109 plastic objects found in Midway's albatrosses, 108 had come from Japan. A world leader in so many ways, Japan would greatly improve its moral stature by helping to heal the seas.

A good place to start would be to give albatrosses a future with more food and less plastic trash to swallow. A U.N. marine-pollution treaty makes dumping plastics illegal, but policing at sea is impractical. Nonetheless, ships could be required to carry up-to-date equipment for handling garbage and storing liquid waste that might otherwise be dumped into the water. Routine discharges put more oil into the sea than major spills.

We should expand our concept of zoning from land to sea. Instead of an ocean free-for-all, we should designate some areas for fishing only with traps and hooks and line, and others as wildlife sanctuaries. As we've seen with once rich cod grounds, if we don't declare some areas closed by foresight, they will declare themselves closed by collapse. The map of the land has many colors, while in most minds the sea is still the blank space between continents. Let's start coloring in that blue expanse and map a more sensible future for the sea.

Four centuries ago, poet John Donne wrote that no man is an island entire to himself. On Midway an albatross gagging on a toothbrush taught me that no island is an island. The lesson of finiteness is not merely one of limits but also of potential. In the oceans, less is truly more: less trash, less habitat destruction and catching fewer fish now will mean more food later on for both humanity and wildlife. The oceans make our planet habitable, and the wealth of oceans spans nutritional, climatological, biological, aesthetic, spiritual, emotional and ethical realms. Like the albatross, we need the seas more than the seas need us. Will we understand this well enough to reap all the riches that a little restraint, cooperation and compassion could bring?

Safina, founder of the National Audubon Society's Living Oceans Program, is author of Song for the Blue Ocean