Healthy Oceans Are Critical to Our Economy

The following speech was given Oct. 14 at the Metropolitan Club in New York City by Stephen M. Coen, Ph.D., president and CEO of Sea Research Foundation, Inc., the parent organization of Mystic Aquarium:

Sea Research Foundation has a unique mission. Our role is to inspire people to care about and protect our ocean planet through research, education and exploration. We operate Mystic Aquarium where threatened marine animals are protected and rehabilitated and where people can learn about the oceans; Institute for Exploration with the expedition vessel Nautilus, led by famed oceanographer Robert Ballard, as well as Immersion Learning and the JASON Project, which reach 2 million students globally teaching ocean science.

Today, I would like to talk to you about what it means to be an ocean planet and to highlight some key reasons why we need to protect our oceans, which by the way are intricately connected to lakes, streams, marshlands, tidal areas and rivers, creating a water system that covers 70 percent of the Earth’s surface.

I need hardly tell you that water is essential to our existence, and that its health is critically important to our health. The health of our oceans and water environments is also critical to our economic well-being.

Tourism, Ports, Food

Allow me to provide three examples. First, tourism is the second largest contributor to America’s GDP, and 85 percent of that tourism is focused on our coastal regions. Last year, the Deepwater Horizon event devastated the tourism economies of four states.

Secondly, deep water ports and major river systems are vital economic engines for our nation. The Mississippi River alone is the highway for more than 470 million tons of commodities annually in just its lower half. That translates into $6 billion in annual revenues and some 30,000 jobs. When a river like the Mississippi is shut down because of flooding or navigational hazards, including growth of non native plants or algae blooms, it wreaks havoc.

Thirdly, we humans consume over 100 million tons of food from aquatic environments every year.

This translates into 18 percent of our protein intake. When fish stocks are threatened, and they are, a major source of food is in jeopardy leading to rising poverty and hunger.

The temperature of the oceans is in severe fluctuation and the height of tides is increasing at a very fast rate. A foot rise in average tides over a 30-year period, which is predicted along much of the Eastern Seaboard, will have serious consequences on a normal day. And it will have exponential consequences during severe weather such as hurricanes, tornados and winter storms.

I am sure everyone in this room experienced tropical storm Irene in some way or another when it hit this region in late August. New York City was spared its fury, which fell instead on parts of New Jersey, upstate New York, Connecticut and Vermont.

And yet, as terrible as the damage was in those areas, I shudder to think what would have happened if Irene had not downgraded to a tropical storm, stayed on its predicted path and hit this city with full hurricane force.

Coastal zones are population centers

This is a planetary problem. Forty percent of the world’s population lives within a coastal zone, and a quarter of that total live in a low-lying coastal area. More severe storms are going to lead to more flooding of those areas, destroying homes and businesses and wreaking economic havoc.

Keep in mind that when I talk about coastal living, it is not just farms or fishing villages. By far, the most common kind of development is what you see here in New York as well as Singapore, San Francisco, Hong Kong and just about every major populated area.

The new norm is density. And it is increasing. The number of mega-cities located in a coastal area has increased from just one in 1950 to more than 14 in 2011. And the trend is to keep developing in this fashion with few, if any, changes in engineering, architecture and coastal zone landscaping to mitigate the environmental impact.

We must consider what we have learned from our river systems. Almost without exception, we have polluted or severely altered virtually every major river system in the United States and around the world.

Today, the Colorado River, which is a water source for 25 million people in southern California, has been altered so much through dams and aqueducts that its flow has been reduced to merely a trickle by the time it reaches its mouth in the Sea of Cortez.

The over trapping, over damming, and complete alteration of the Colorado River’s natural flow is contributing to severe shortages of water supplies in California, and pitting states in the southwest against each other as they compete for access to water.

More powerful fertilizers

The Mississippi River is one of the best case studies for understanding the interconnection of water systems in our environment, as well as the economic, social and political issues related to protecting our ocean planet.

The Mississippi River cuts through some of America’s largest farms, and those farms are of immense value to our nation. But in an effort to maximize productivity, wetlands that once buffered the river from the land have been filled in.

In the last 25 years, more and more powerful fertilizers have been used to increase crop yields. Without wetlands to filter out the fertilizers, the chemicals and nutrients go directly into the waterway and are washed downstream and out into the Gulf of Mexico.

This agricultural runoff happens not just in the Mississippi, but all across the nation, and not just from farming, but also from lawn and garden products. And it happens not just in rivers, but in all water systems.

These agricultural runoffs produce high levels of phosphates and nitrates that create areas with very low oxygen called hypoxic environments. The result is an adverse chain of events that includes the immediate kill-off of fish that ingest the chemicals, algae blooms that cause navigational problems, the breakdown of the natural ecosystem, and finally what are called “dead zones,” which are places that are essentially the end of the line for run-off and pollution.

These dead zones are the toxic junk yards of oceans and waterways, places where virtually nothing can survive. One dead zone, with an area about the size of the state of New Jersey, is at the end of the Mississippi out in the Gulf of Mexico. Lake Erie has several dead zones as does the Chesapeake Bay.

Flooding

Over many decades, the Mississippi has been an experimental site for controlling flood waters. Levees have been built up and down the river, and they have succeeded in limiting flooding in certain areas, at least under normative conditions.

For example, Dubuque, Iowa, has a levee system, with big, unattractive concrete walls on both sides of the river that are designed to keep the water fl owing rather than spilling into the streets.

But the water has to go somewhere. And so it moves downstream and gushes out at the next stop on the river where there are no levees. One of the next stops after Dubuque is Davenport, where citizens have repeatedly turned down proposals to build levees because of the high cost.

Now, as you might predict, Davenport frequently gets flooding that is destructive and costly. But what no one expected is that in 2008 levees up and down the Mississippi overflowed– including in places like Dubuque.

Lessons

The lessons from the Mississippi are myriad and include at least the following:

First, we cannot possibly tame the world’s oceans, rivers, lakes, streams or weather patterns. It is a fool’s errand to think that we can build higher sea walls and better levees to completely protect ourselves from nature’s elements.

Secondly, nature itself provides a solution. In the case of flooding, pollution and rising tides, wetlands and marshlands provide natural filtration and buffering. We have destroyed these environments because we did not understand their significance. We must restore them for our own protection.

Thirdly, we must weigh the cost and benefit of building levees to protect existing urban centers while allowing major coastline or river line expansion. Mere consideration of these issues as opposed to unchecked development would greatly improve the current scenario. Note that I am in favor of incremental steps while many call for more radical changes given what is at stake.

Finally, there is no question that we must take steps to reduce the output of waste including fertilizers and chemicals going into our water systems. While agriculture is the biggest offender, elimination of these products on our lawns and gardens would have a powerful impact on the health of Long Island Sound, the Hudson, the East River and other water systems in areas like New York City.

The Boston Model

If all of these steps were taken because we are in complete agreement and without competing economic choices, our task would be easy. The cleanup of Boston Harbor, once dubbed the world’s dirtiest, is instructive. The multi-billion dollar cleanup was brought about by an individual who sued the state government because the beach he jogged on was littered with sewage.

For decades, the Charles River – which was the subject of the famous song, “Love that Dirty Water” – sent sewage out into Boston Harbor, as did most of the catch basins throughout the area. Beaches were contaminated and water consumption was exceeding the capacity of existing reservoirs and supplies.

One plan was to tap into the Connecticut River in the middle of the state, taking water flowing from Vermont and diverting it miles away to Boston.

But over a 20-year period, a different combination of actions, directed by court order, led to vast improvements. The steps included:.

1. Aggressive enforcement of existing laws under the federal Clean Water Act;
2. Significant increases in water and sewer usage rates that changed consumer behavior and reduced water consumption and sewage discharge;
3. Reconstruction of a major urban sewage system, including cleansing sewage;
4. Designation of marine-protected areas outside Boston Harbor.

Today, the beaches are open again, the Charles River is nearly pristine, and islands in the harbor that were once abandoned or used as garbage dumps are now part of a national park system. Fishing stocks are rebounding on George’s Bank and existing reservoirs are meeting water demand.

The Boston model was expensive but it also pioneered new technologies. In Orange County, California, effective planning and embracing such technologies have cut dependency on the Colorado River by recycling water coming into the sewage system, not unlike what wetlands do in the natural environment.

Singapore, which for decades was dependent on neighboring Malaysia for its water, has developed a similar system with an eye towards national defense. Success with water recycling technology in Singapore has led to a focus on developing a more efficient and environmentally sound means of aquaculture with a goal of having capacity to provide enough food to sustain the nation’s population if necessary.

Ninety percent of the oceans are unexplored

While we have much to do along rivers and coastal zones, we must not limit our vision to these areas alone. We must also focus on exploration of the deep-ocean environment. Ninety percent of the oceans are unexplored. The deep ocean has abundant natural resources that can be used for energy, food and medicine, to name a few.

We must pay attention to the food chain in our oceans and waterways. We have depleted large stocks of fish, and many of the ocean’s top predators—including whales and sharks—are endangered. These animals are sentinels of the sea. If we listen, they will tell us what is happening in the ocean environment. Understanding their immune systems can help us prepare for and react to adverse changes in our own environments.

We must organize ourselves to find solutions as simple as reducing our use of bottled water or fertilizers, and as complex as effectively leveraging industry clusters interested in economic development. Sea Research Foundation is a member of the North American Marine Environment Protection Association, founded by Clay Maitland and Carleen Lyden-Kluss. This group is holding conversations and developing action steps amongst the world’s maritime industries to promote economic activity in ways that protect the ocean environment.

We are an ocean planet, and so we must think about what surrounds us. We cannot take it for granted if we seek to thrive as a species. And we must each endeavor to protect our oceans by thinking about them, caring for them and taking steps to be more in harmony with them.