Protect Biodiversity In Our Oceans or Else

SCIENTISTS UNDERSTAND biodiversity to refer to three very different aspects of the complex natural world. These are diversity at the genetic, species and habitat levels.

Yet when translated into policy, lawmakers too often play favorites. They focus on species diversity and ignore the others. They protect the surviving representatives of large, awe-inspiring animals like jaguars, eagles or whales.

Writing laws to protect species moves our attention away from the key two- thirds of the earth that is sea. For although a species like cod can crash due to overfishing (as in New England), it is uncommon for marine species to go extinct. As a result, the few laws relating to biodiversity, like the Endangered Species Act, are of little help in the marine setting.

It is easy to identify the leading threats to marine biodiversity. These include habitat destruction, overfishing and land-based pollution from many sources: farms, pesticide-laden suburban lawns and city streets, and contaminants from controlled-point sources such as sewer outfalls, factories and cars.

To guard the oceans, we have to move ``upstream.'' For example, rather then continuing to drill for oil offshore, we need to reduce our need for oil in the first place. We need to get off the dinosaur path and subsidize breakthrough en ergy technologies.

Similarly, we should apply exciting new concepts like Industrial Ecology, and Design for the Environment that use effluent from one industrial process as input for another. These generate profits through smarter, cheaper and more efficient business practices, and save the seas.

Furthermore, marine biodiversity protection requires genuine marine reserves. Our present few national marine sanctuaries are a start. But these are only illusory havens since overfishing is generally allowed within them.

Take California, with its 220,000 square miles of combined state and federal coastal ocean. The figures are just being compiled, but it seems that only 14 square miles, or a minuscule 0.006 percent, is set aside as off limits to all fishing. In contrast, of 156,000 square miles in terrestrial California, fully 6,109 square miles, or 4 percent, is protected.

Conserving marine biodiversity ultimately means protecting our sources of wealth. Overfishing in U.S. waters has produced an estimated $8 billion loss in annual revenues and cost us 300,000 jobs that would still be here had we managed our fisheries wisely.

For so many good reasons, both environmental and economical, we need to start protecting marine biodiversity.


Rob Wilder is the author of ``Listening to the Sea: The Politics of Improving Environmental Protection,''(University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998). He teaches in at the University of California at Santa Barbara. robw@msi.ucsb.edu