The way things are going, more people around the world will soon be eating farmed seafood that was reared on Antarctic krill. Aquaculture is the fastest-growing sector in the food industry. In the past few decades, the global annual catch of wild fish has stagnated and levelled off; since the late 1980s, it has fluctuated between roughly eighty and ninety million metric tons. At the same time, aquaculture has been relentlessly rising year on year. Today, approximately half of all the aquatic animals people eat come from the wild, and the other half from aquaculture, including a lot of species that are fed meal made from wild-caught ocean species. Krill are in high demand for meal because other species have already been overexploited and can no longer be caught in large enough quantities. Apparently, krill also make ideal food for farmed salmon and shrimp, the two most popular species in ocean farming: krill enhances these species’ growth, resulting in high-quality products. A push for more krill fishing in the remote waters of Antarctica would strengthen the view that the ocean exists chiefly as a resource for humans to use by whatever methods generate the most profit.
Similarly, within the next few years, an entirely new industry could begin exploiting more ocean resources. Mining magnates are intent on establishing the world’s first deep-sea mines and becoming the first people to extract profits from the immense depths of the ocean. They dream of a future ocean with gigantic machinery working over the deep seabed to excavate rocks containing metal ores. These are not the first plans for mining the deep. For a time in the mid-twentieth century, this was just one of many futuristic fantasies of how people might operate in the ocean, alongside building human colonies in the abyss and learning to talk to whales. Earlier deep-sea mining schemes fizzled out when fluctuating ore prices, political uncertainties, and a lack of technological know-how put investors and technocrats off. Now it’s been forced back onto the global agenda by governments and corporations determined to make it happen this time.
A glimpse of this future ocean appeared recently, when a prominent mining corporation, the Metals Company, sent a ship to the central Pacific to test mining equipment designed to excavate seabed rocks, known as polymetallic nodules, which look like misshapen lumps of coal. These nodules take millions of years to accrete and grow from chemicals in seawater, in one of the slowest known geological processes on earth. If they’re stripped away by miners, these nodules won’t return for millennia, and the unique, biodiverse ecosystems they support will be lost—the ghostly-white octopuses and tiny “water bear” tardigrades, the lemon-yellow sea cucumbers, the delicate corals and sponges, plus thousands of other, as yet undiscovered life forms that inhabit the nodule fields.
Late in 2022, the Metals Company dragged up more than three thousand metric tons of nodules from the abyss to its surface production vessel, the Hidden Gem, during its test operation in the Pacific. Scientists hired to work with the company leaked video footage showing dirty plumes of sediment being discharged over the side of the Hidden Gem into the ocean after the rocks were processed on board.
The Maldives’ floating city, the Ocean Cleanup’s capture of floating plastic, plans to expand industrial Antarctic krill fishing, and deep-sea mining are just four possible solutions to four of the most important problems humanity faces in terms of the future ocean: how to live by the changing ocean, how to clean it up, how to feed people, and how (and whether) to extract other ocean resources. All four solutions are part of what’s becoming a prevailing way of thinking. They adopt largely techno-centric perspectives, based on the belief that humans can invent their way out of trouble. And they adopt the implicit assumption of continuing business as usual. These visions of the future do nothing about the underlying problems that are causing the ocean to change; they lean instead towards adaptation and making the best of a bad situation, and some of them forge ahead with new versions of the problems that created this mess in the first place. And to a greater or lesser extent, they tend to be highly unequal in the winners and losers they create. Under these and similar scenarios, some people and some parts of the living ocean will do very well, while many more will do a whole lot worse.
Decisions such as these are not inevitable, no matter what industrialists and devotees of unrelenting economic growth might claim. There are other options, other ways of doing things and other decisions that can still be made for the future of the ocean. The accelerating pace of climate change and the biodiversity crisis is making the need to act ever more urgent. Meanwhile, powerful vested interests in damaging industries will fight tooth and nail to resist changes to the status quo that threaten to undermine their profits. Pushing against them will not be easy, but it’s by no means impossible. Action is happening, and alternative views for how to use and protect the ocean are taking hold. Many exist in small ways and can be amplified and grown; others are already forging a bold path ahead. The final pages of this book outline some of these options. They are not intended to be a complete blueprint but rather an invitation to think differently and be part of a push for a better future for the ocean.
How to Live by the Changing Ocean
In 2015, a final shipload of soil arrived at the English county of Essex after it was dug from beneath the streets of London to build tunnels for a new underground railway line. In all, more than three million metric tons of material was excavated and transported forty miles to the estuary, where it was used to raise up the level of the land by five feet and make a network of winding creeks, mudflats, and shallow lagoons. Centuries ago, Wallasea Island was part of wildlife-rich marshlands that wove along the Essex coast until they were dug up, enclosed in seawalls, and converted into farmland. The aim of the current project is to begin bringing back those marshlands and help future-proof the low-lying coast. It’s one of Europe’s most ambitious plans to re-create coastal wetlands that act as natural sea defences. Close to two thousand acres of farmland have been transformed into grasslands and salt marsh. Samphire, sea lavender, and other salt-tolerant plants are the botanical engineers creating the foundation for the ecosystem, which slows down water flow and makes coasts less prone to erosion and flooding.
The edges of the ocean have always played a deep-rooted part in human lives, now more than ever. In recent decades, many coastlines have become heavily industrialised and far more densely populated than the hinterland. Urban areas on low-lying coasts are expanding fastest, especially in Southeast Asia and China. Most megacities are coastal, from Los Angeles to Tokyo, Shanghai to Mumbai, Lagos to New York.
Across the world’s populated coastlines, one billion people live on land that lies at most thirty feet above the current high-tide lines, and 230 million people live below three feet of elevation. These places are all prone to flooding and storm damage, and those risks are only going to get worse as the climate crisis worsens. Sea levels are rising and speeding up as they go. The twentieth century saw the seas rise by approximately a hand’s span with fingers splayed out. So far this century, levels have already risen by a pinky finger’s length; by century’s end they are expected to rise by around an arm’s length, and ten feet or more can’t be ruled out, depending on what happens with the breakup of Antarctica’s ice sheet. For people living along coasts, what matters isn’t simply the incremental rise in seas but the way it raises the chances of extreme flooding, especially when high tides and storm surges combine. What used to be once-in-a-century extreme high water will become annual events in low-lying areas by mid-century and along most coasts by 2100—even if global warming is kept under 1.5 degrees Celsius. In the tropics, as the seas warm, they feed hurricanes, creating more intense and devastating storms with more rainfall, causing even more flooding.
Deciding what to do about all this is one of the greatest challenges that humanity faces in the coming years. Up until now, the standard strategy has been to build higher and stronger walls between people and the ocean. Seawalls, surge barriers, levees, and other engineered installations can work predictably and very well, right up until the moment when they don’t anymore. In New Orleans in August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina ripped through, more than fifty failures in the levee system flooded most of the city for weeks. African-American neighbourhoods were most severely damaged, and people living in them, alongside elderly people and poorer members of the city’s communities, were the ones most likely to die from the disaster.
These types of hard infrastructure often don’t solve a problem but pass it on, interrupting natural flows of sediment and causing coastlines to erode elsewhere. They’re also unaffordable outside of densely populated cities in wealthy countries. In poorer regions, hard engineering is generally not a realistic option, and neither are floating cities or any other big-ticket substitutes for coastal life as it used to be.
An alternative mind-set is beginning to gain traction around the world. Instead of pitting humans against the changing ocean, more ecological and equitable solutions are coming into play, and people are tuning in to the possibilities of protecting coastlines with tidal wetlands that grow between the high and low tide marks on the shore. Along temperate shores, salt marshes such as those at Wallasea Island are important wetlands. On tropical shores, mangrove trees grow at the edges of the sea with their roots dipped in salt water. Both these wetland habitats act as storm buffers. They dampen the power and height of waves, and the plants trap sediments among their roots and stems, which reduces the chances of coastlines eroding and getting washed away. And unlike hard engineering, these living systems have the potential, given the right conditions, to grow upwards and inland and keep pace as the seas continue to rise.
Roughly a third of the human population currently living on low-lying coasts already gains protection from wetlands, with the majority of those coastal dwellers living in China, Vietnam, India, Germany, and the Netherlands. The most obvious way to help protect those people is to keep existing wetlands as intact and healthy as possible. A huge opportunity exists to safeguard such coastal habitats growing in and around cities. From Port Harcourt in the Niger delta of Nigeria to Surabaya in Indonesia, Chattogram in Bangladesh to Haikou in China, urban wetlands will continue to benefit city dwellers if they are well looked after and, ideally, given space inland to move into and expand landwards as sea levels rise.
A trickier matter is deciding how to re-establish wetlands that are already degraded or were lost long ago, or even to create entirely new areas of habitat. There’s no simple formula for how to restore and nurture wetlands to protect people and coastlines. Much depends on the local conditions, the species of plants, and the kinds of storms that strike. The best way forwards is to embrace that uncertainty. Rather than marching in with a fixed idea of what to do, restoration projects can be more experimental, with monitoring and testing along the way to see what’s working and what’s not.
How to Clean the Ocean
Walk into a supermarket in France, and there will be displays of fresh vegetables and fruits arranged loosely in colourful piles. Shoppers help themselves, filling bags brought from home or paper sacks from the store. Since January 1, 2022, there has been a national ban on plastic packaging for fresh produce, with some exceptions, including tender varieties like blueberries and cherry tomatoes. Manufacturers have a few more years to find suitable alternatives for those, and by 2026, all whole fruits and vegetables will be plastic-free across the country.
The fight against single-use plastics is the most successful and high-profile ocean campaign globally in recent times. Plastic pollution is capturing attention and stimulating action because it’s impossible to ignore the ugly mess it makes of the world around us, and it’s obvious where all the plastic is coming from. The award-winning image of a seahorse with its tail wrapped around a plastic Q-tip, taken by nature photographer Justin Hofman, portrays the absurdity in a nutshell.
Plastic manufacture kicked into gear after the end of the Second World War, and since then, more than eighty-three hundred megatons of this synthetic, durable wonder stuff have been produced; more than half of it has been made since 2002. Currently, four hundred million metric tons of new plastics are made each year; less than 10 per cent of the total is recycled, and much of the rest is used just once and then thrown away, often ending up in the ocean. Fortunately, more people than ever are disgusted by this and want plastic pollution to end. A 2022 survey of more than twenty thousand people in twenty-eight countries showed that, on average, eight out of ten support a ban on single-use plastics. Immense pressure from the public has already forced many countries to impose bans and restrictions on throwaway items like grocery bags. Countries such as France are showing it is possible to stand up to the petrochemical giants that are behind the surge in plastic production. Coal, oil, and natural gas are the raw materials used to make more than 98 per cent of all synthetic plastics. Corporations extracting those resources have made a calculated pivot away from producing fossil fuels, largely owing to falling demand as the green-energy sector expands, and instead are making more plastics and deliberately stimulating demand for copious amounts of cheap, single-use products. Oil and gas giants are addicted to the outrageous profits they’re making—in the hundreds of billions of dollars each year—and they will do whatever they can to keep those profits coming. Pushing against that is a huge challenge, especially given the massive lobbying powers of the petrochemical industry, but it is happening. Local and national campaigns against plastic pollution have been a gateway to expanding the issue, and a global rebellion against plastics is stepping up a gear.
In 2022, negotiations began at the United Nations for an international treaty on plastics. An early round of discussions in Paris showed that most nations want to limit the production of plastics and are in favour of banning the most harmful types as well as the toxic additives that are used to make products colourful, inflammable, flexible, or tough, including polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), or “forever chemicals.” The majority of nations also insist the treaty should be not voluntary but global and legally binding. Even some major users of plastics are in favour of tough regulations, including Coca-Cola and Unilever, both of which have come under increasing public scrutiny for the plastic pollution their products create.
A plastics treaty wouldn’t be the first time a blanket ban has been imposed on pollution that threatens the health of people and the planet. In the 1980s, the growing hole in the ozone layer led to rapid global action and the universal adoption of the Montreal Protocol, which phased out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in aerosol sprays and refrigerators. Alternatives to CFCs were found, and the ozone layer over Antarctica is slowly healing.
Of course, there is resistance to a binding plastics treaty from a powerful minority of plastic-producing nations, including India, China, and the United States. And rather than limiting production and banning the worst of the offending materials, manufacturers want the focus to be on recycling. Overall, however, governments around the world are taking the issue of plastic pollution seriously, and if the negotiations stay on course, by the end of 2024 a new, binding treaty will be in place to start to bring the plastic juggernaut under control.
The means to do this already exist. Boosting the reuse and recycling of products offers the chance to bring down plastic production worldwide by around 50 per cent. Bottle-return schemes drastically increase recycling rates, especially when the price is right. Across the United States, for instance, the average recycling rate for plastic bottles is 17 per cent. In the states of Massachusetts and Connecticut, where manufacturers, distributors, and retailers jointly pay five cents for every bottle returned, the recycling rate is around 40 per cent. In Oregon and Michigan, where the per-bottle deposit is ten cents, the return rate is closer to 90 per cent.
Another important mechanism for curbing plastic pollution will be for governments to stop paying out subsidies that prop up the fossil fuel industry. Analysis by the International Monetary Fund showed that in 2020, global subsidies were close to $6 trillion—or $11 million a minute—in the form of tax breaks or direct payments to reduce the costs of producing coal, oil, and gas; fixing artificially low fossil fuel prices; and subsidising exploration and development of new oil and gas fields. There is tremendous pushback from oil and gas giants that risk seeing their profits take a knock, but progress has been made, and dozens of countries are reforming their subsidy policies. In 2023, US president Joe Biden unveiled a budget proposal to scrap oil and gas subsidies—which, whether or not it makes it through Congress, sends a strong signal from the White House.
Low-impact alternatives to fossil-fuel-based plastics are already in development around the world. For instance, a German start-up, Traceless, is making rigid plastics, films, and coatings that, in two to nine weeks, break down completely in a home compost heap or municipal facility, leaving only carbon dioxide and water. The materials used, though plant-based, don’t require additional land to grow crops but come from existing agricultural wastes and residues left over from the brewing industry, all of which would otherwise be thrown away. And if these bioplastics do escape into the environment, they will cause no harm to animals that eat them.
Cutting worldwide plastic production by 80 per cent by 2040 is practical and affordable—it would cost a lot, around $65 billion a year, but that’s roughly half the sum currently invested in the plastics industry worldwide. What’s more, it would bring benefits worth trillions of dollars by reducing the harm done to people and the environment. It would save countless human lives, reduce suffering, and undo enormous inequalities. Diseases and debilitating conditions are rife among those who work in plastics manufacturing and disposal industries and those who live in neighbourhoods near those facilities; they face increased risks of lung and breast cancer, leukaemia, lymphoma, cardiovascular disease, premature births, reduced fertility, and much more. The world’s poorest nations will benefit the most from reductions in plastic pollution, as will people living in disempowered and marginalised communities, especially indigenous groups, women, and children. These people are the least responsible for creating the problem of plastics; they gain the least from them, and they suffer the most. Many rely on seafood for nutrition, which exposes them to plastics and toxic chemicals in their contaminated food. And many live in communities that are threatened by more severe and frequent flooding, because plastic trash blocks drainage systems, and on small island nations with beaches strewn in plastics that float in from far away.
A vision of the cleaner ocean is well within sight, now that the public and governments have woken up to the problem and are taking action. Once the tide has turned on new plastics pouring into the environment, the ocean itself will help reduce and remove existing pollution. Sunlight breaks plastics into smaller pieces, and naturally occurring bacteria get to work. Scientists have found plastic-eating bacteria living in the ocean, and their studies suggest these may fully break down at least 1 per cent of the available plastics per year. While these and other bacteria and enzymes could one day be used to help remove difficult-to-recycle plastics from landfills nobody is seriously considering releasing engineered bacteria into the ocean to speed up plastic degradation. The risks of something going wrong are simply too high. However, even without enhancing the natural breakdown, by the end of the century, the ocean could be much less polluted than today.
How to Fish in the Anthropocene Ocean
Along the coast of the US state of Maine, shellfish and seaweed farms are popping up, many of them owned and run by women, and together they’re changing the way seafood is locally produced and consumed. Festoons of golden kelp and other seaweeds are strung from lines at the sea surface; suspended wire cages contain oysters and scallops, and mussels cling to hanging ropes.
Lady Shuckers is a company that sells and markets oysters from sixteen of the twenty-three Maine oyster farms that are owned by women, including Amanda Moeser of Lanes Island Oysters in Yarmouth, Emily Selinger of Emily’s Oysters in Freeport, and Kim Grindle of the Islesboro Oyster Company. Among the ocean farmers encouraging people to include more nutritious seaweed in their diet is Briana Warner, chief executive officer of Atlantic Sea Farms, which produces kimchi, salads, and veggie burgers made of kelp.
Maine’s female ocean farmers give various reasons why they participate much more in aquaculture than in the lobster industry, which has dominated the state for decades; women own fewer than 5 per cent of the lobster-fishing licences but close to a quarter of the permits for oyster and seaweed farms. Many see their farms as a chance to operate in a supportive and diverse workplace, with fewer barriers to participation. Women make up to half of the members of local aquaculture associations and advisory councils—while there’s good reason the other organisations are generally called lobstermen’s associations. Some women ocean farmers speak of feeling drawn to growing rather than hunting. As one farmer said, “I see seaweed as a way for women to enter this realm because the history of fisheries is all exploitation, and that’s not a female quality.” Also present in the minds of many women involved in aquaculture are the growing threats to the lobster industry from overfishing and climate change and the need to find alternative approaches to producing seafood. “It is time to transfer to more of a female approach to the ocean,” one of the women said. “It needs a mentality of cultivation and investment.”
Elsewhere, many more women are pioneering this new generation of ocean farms. The United Kingdom’s largest offshore seaweed farm, SeaGrown, based in the North Sea coastal town of Scarborough, was cofounded by marine scientist professor Laura Robinson. Tomi Marsh had been fishing the seas of Alaska from her own vessels for decades before setting up OceansAlaska in Ketchikan, where a seaweed farm and hatchery for oysters and geoducks supplies other ocean farms. In San Diego, Leslie Booher cofounded Sunken Seaweed, where she works closely with academics to study how her farm is cleaning up local waterways.
These women are not only helping to shift the ingrained gender bias in the seafood industry; they’re leading the way in a global movement to make aquaculture more ecologically sustainable. Instead of rearing animals like salmon and shrimp that are fed on meal made from wild-caught fish, they focus on growing seafood that feeds itself and in the process cleans the ocean. Bivalve molluscs, such as oysters and mussels, are filter feeders, drawing plankton from the seawater around them. Seaweeds produce their own food from sunlight and nutrients naturally dissolved in seawater. This type of aquaculture has many benefits. It improves water quality by removing excess nitrates and phosphates pouring off farmland and from sewage outfalls, it sequesters carbon, and it buffers against local ocean acidification.
Regenerative ocean farms like these are among the kinds of operations that need to be the focus for the future of seafood—together with well-run, sustainable fisheries—rather than the destructive, industrial-scale operations that are causing so much damage to the planet. Thousands of industrial vessels ply the ocean, ranging from eighty-foot longliners to four-hundred-foot supertrawlers. They have the greatest fishing power and use the most environmentally brutal types of fishing gear; they drag huge, heavy trawl nets across the seabed, wiping out thousand-year-old deep-water corals and all other life forms in their path; they set out miles of longlines and draw in purse seines that trap, hook, and kill millions of endangered sharks, dolphins, and sea turtles every year. And they burn colossal quantities of fossil fuel, giving the food they produce a super-high carbon footprint.
For the future ocean to sustainably feed as many people as possible—crucially, people who rely most on the seas for nutrition—industrial fishing needs to radically change and ideally be dramatically scaled back, most urgently for certain types of fishing operations in certain places.
Corporations from a handful of wealthy countries dominate industrial fishing and have aggressive lobbying powers and vested interests. Despite that, fishery reforms are gradually happening and showing that change is possible.
After decades of campaigns and negotiations, in 2022 an agreement was reached at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to rein in the subsidies governments pay to prop up industrial fisheries. These subsidies, worth billions of dollars a year, have been a massive driving force behind overfishing. Much of the money subsidises fuel costs and boosts destructive fishing capacity by encouraging the building of bigger boats with bigger engines, privileging larger companies over smaller-scale producers, and facilitating the behemoths such as those that hoover up Antarctic krill and deplete more of the ocean’s vital, living biomass, ton by ton.
The 2022 WTO agreement didn’t include everything conservationists and scientists were hoping for. At the last minute, several key points were dropped in order to get all 164 member states to agree, including any specific mention of subsidies that encourage overfishing. These may be addressed at a later date. Nevertheless, this was a major milestone, the first binding, multilateral agreement to help reduce fishing impacts globally, and experts expect it will stimulate further action as it begins to push fisheries in the right direction.
For now, the WTO will focus on prohibiting subsidies for vessels that target depleted populations of animals and those that operate in the high seas, the remote waters beyond national boundaries that cover two-thirds of the global ocean. Subsidies are keeping afloat many high-seas fisheries that would otherwise not turn a profit.
Under the new agreement, nations will also be required to crack down on subsidies supporting illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. These kinds of fisheries are notorious for flouting rules aimed at protecting endangered species, such as the vessels that trespass into the Galápagos Marine Reserve and leave with their holds full of sharks.
