The Ocean's Whistleblower by David Grémillet

Author:David Grémillet [Grémillet, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771647557
Publisher: GreyStone
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

IN MANILA, DANIEL spent time with scientists from other research centers associated with CGIAR, particularly agronomists from the International Rice Research Institute. He noticed that they didn’t hesitate to analyze rice production on a global scale, whereas fisheries research was still largely a local or, at best, regional affair. With help from Villy Christensen, Daniel decided to “rectify this shortcoming by reviewing the state of, and potential for, catches of fisheries for the entire world,” arguing that this was only logical “since fish were a globally traded commodity.” 2

Feeding the world—that was a serious occupation for agronomists, especially since the creation of the Club of Rome in 1968, which led to the publication of The Limits to Growth, a founding document of the political ecology movement. That same year, Paul and Anne Ehrlich of Stanford University published an explosive pamphlet entitled The Population Bomb to inform the public of the consequences of exponential human population growth. In the years after that, the couple attacked the problem of estimating how much of the world’s natural resources were being consumed by humans. In 1986, they partnered with Peter Vitousek, also of Stanford, and Pamela Matson of NASA to estimate the proportion of energy produced by plants (using the sun’s rays) that was being appropriated by humans worldwide.3 The team reached the unsettling conclusion that during the latter half of the 1980s, humanity had consumed 35 to 45 percent of the products of photosynthesis. For the oceans, on the other hand, Vitousek and his colleagues estimated a much lower percentage (only 2.2 percent) and concluded that “human use of marine productivity is relatively small . . . It is unlikely to prove broadly catastrophic for oceanic ecosystems.”4

Daniel and Villy were intrigued but skeptical. They agreed, however, that calculating the mass of phytoplankton needed to feed all the inhabitants of the world’s fisheries would indeed be an excellent way to illustrate humanity’s impact on marine resources. They began by using the Stanford team’s calculations, considerably revising their methods along the way. For instance, Vitousek and his colleagues had based their work on an “average fish” with a trophic level of three, as if every fishery on the planet only captured a single species with a single, uniform diet. As we saw earlier, the trophic level of phytoplankton and algae is equal to one (as they are the foundation of the ecosystem), that of herbivores is equal to two, and predatory fish who eat herbivores have a trophic level of three. In reality, though, the trophic level of an exploited species can vary between 2.1 (in the case of mussels and other bivalves) and 4.2 (for bluefin tuna, swordfish, and other superpredators).

So Daniel and Villy set up a model of an exploited ocean which, instead of being a huge bathtub filled with a single fish species, consisted of six major types of ecosystems (coastal, ocean, coral reef, freshwater, et cetera), inhabited by thirty-nine “model” species of exploited marine organisms of various trophic levels. The duo

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