World Ocean Day 2008 is coming up on June 8th. Whether you live along the coastline or inland from the sea, you are connected to the ocean in a number of ways.

As countless individuals do not live along the coast, it is sometimes hard for many to realize their personal connection to the ocean. But there are a myriad of reasons for why we should all celebrate the ocean. After all, the world’s ocean: generates most of the oxygen we breathe, helps to feed us, regulates our climate, cleans the water we drink, offers potential medicinal cures, and provides us with inspiration!

Save Our Shores will be hosting many events throughout the month of June to celebrate World Ocean Day and to educate the public on the more pressing marine issues of our time. Please visit our calendar to refer to upcoming events and for education on issues such as marine debris.

World Ocean Day is not just an opportunity to celebrate and reinforce our connection to the sea, but it is also a chance to take stock of the state of our ocean in order to strive for ways to help preserve it.

Taking Stock: Pressing Ocean Issues in 2008

Pelagic Plastic: Stories of the North Pacific Gyre

In 2007, Americans used two million plastic beverage bottles every five minutes. That translates into 210,240,000,000 bottles per year. That same year, Americans used 60,000 plastic bags every five seconds. That translates into 589,680,000,000 bags per year. The U.S. is a consuming culture; a culture often out of touch from the warning signs of an environment out of balance.

It wasn’t until the late 1970s, when the first photographs of the hole in the ozone layer hit the public circuit that our collective consciousness began to grasp the true extent of our actions. Photos sometimes can speak a thousand words.

Today, whispers of an environmental catastrophe of similar magnitude are beginning to circulate. Unfortunately, researchers are hard pressed to get a photo. After all, this time around we are dealing with a “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean. A trash soup that is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of Texas.

Charles Moore, an oceanographer and sailor, who discovered the North Pacific Gyre, noted that because the sea of trash was largely translucent and is located just below the surface of the water, it is not detectable in satellite photographs.

Moore stumbled across the Gyre back in 1997 when he decided to take a short cut home during a yacht race from Los Angeles to Hawaii. He sailed into the ‘North Pacific Gyre’- an area where the ocean currents circulate slowly due to minimal wind and extreme high pressure systems.

The North Pacific Gyre is a vast expanse of debris that is held in place by underwater currents. It extends from about 500 nautical miles off the California coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii, and nearly to Japan.

Moore believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region.  Moore founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation as a means to generate awareness and research

 Algalita’s research studies have shown that plastic pieces outweigh surface zooplankton in the central North Pacific Gyre by a factor of 6-1. In other words, 6 pounds of plastic for every 1 pound of zooplankton.
For more information on this environmental catastrophe, please see the Save Our Shores article 'Pelagic Plastic' which details the most recent Algalita expedition as well as  provides more detailed information on the problem.

 
Overfishing:

Overfishing means catching fish faster than they can reproduce. Overfishing causes excessive loss of fish counts until that population either goes extinct or are so few in number that they no longer fill their ecological niche within the food web they once formed part.

Often times, people refer to the act of fishing as ‘harvesting’, a term that infers that something is being placed back into the ocean, not just taken away. Sylvia Earle, from the Deep Ocean Exploration and Research group, argues that when we talk about harvesting the sea we are exercising a vast misuse of the word as “We don’t plant fish in the ocean. We go out like hunters and gatherers, track them down, find them, extract them.  In half a century we have lost on the order of 90 percent of the big fish in the ocean. I say lost, actually, we haven’t lost them. We’ve consumed them. We’ve eaten them. We’ve captured them.”

While fishing markets still give the impression of a flourishing supply, in reality, we are now consuming the final 10 percent of the world’s fisheries. According to Roger Payne from Ocean Alliance, “One point eight billion people have as their principal source of animal protein fish from the sea, seafood basically, and what happens if you remove from those 1.8 billion people their major source of animal protein? Well I think you have a problem.”   

Fishermen around the world are finding themselves in a dire situation. Many of them know first hand that fish counts are down, but their livelihoods depend on them catching increased numbers. Today, thousands of 400-foot trawlers canvass our ocean for depleted fish supplies. As noted by PBS in their Ocean Series, “With nine thousand foot nets sweeping up everything in their path, these ocean monsters are literally clean-cutting the deep sea. They can catch as much as one million pounds of fish in a single day.”

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, one in four marine animals caught in fishing gear dies.  Fishermen toss out thousands of fish, dead or dying, because they are not the species the fisherman wanted to catch. This is referred to as bycatch.  It is estimated that about a quarter of everything that is caught in the ocean is rendered bycatch and discarded (Blue Ocean Institutes, 2008).

The urgency of the overfishing problem presents us with many challenges.   As consumers, we have the power to be part of the solution to the overfishing problem by exercising educated consumer choices.  For example, we can choose fish for our dinner that are not in danger of being overfished and have not been fished in a detrimental way, such as through trawling nets. This type of information is important to ask fish retailers.  Other avenues for education include the Monterey Bay Aquarium that has a resource page about overfishing and related problems which also includes best-fish/worst-fish pocket guides by US region.

Oil Spills

On November 7, 2007, a 900-foot Cosco Busan cargo ship hit the bridge tower of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and spilled 58,000 gallons of fuel oil into the Bay. The oil quickly spread around the Bay and into coastal waters beyond the Golden Gate, with oil washing up as far as 40 miles north of San Francisco.

The spill killed 2,000 birds, including marbled murrelets and Western grebes. Oil is particularly threatening to birds as it coasts their feathers, making it impossible to stay warm when they get into the chilly bay water.  According to Dr. Mike Ziccardi, director of the Oiled Wildlife Care Network, “The bird’s first response is to get out of the water during a spill. They have a high metabolism and need to eat frequently. They can become severely debilitated and can die unless brought into rehabilitation.” Other marine animals such as otters, which depend on the insulation of their thick fur to keep them warm also suffer from oil spills.

The environmental devastation associated with oil spills is hard to quantify. While this last oil spill in the San Francisco Bay did not compare to the Exxon Valdez 1989 disaster in Alaska, where 11 million gallons of oil spilled, countless wildlife species and habitats were threatened just the same.

While such larger oil spills garner huge media coverage, most people don’t know that the amount of oil that reaches our ocean as runoff from our roads and from leaking boats contaminates our ocean far more than the less frequent major oil spills.

There are a myriad of ways for people to get involved with combating the oil contamination of our ocean. For example, just by driving less, you are decreasing the amount of oil residue left of the street by your vehicle, which could eventually get washed down the storm drain into the sea. Another way is by educating yourself on oil preparedness techniques or becoming a volunteer for our Dockwalker program here at Save Our Shores. To learn more about this program please visit the Dockwalker program page or contact Kate Purcell.

The urgency to avoid the loss of our precious marine resources presents many complex challenges. By reinforcing our individual connection to the sea and by taking a proactive stance on education and action, we can all make a difference. Please stay  updated for upcoming Save Our Shores events, as we believe everyday should be Ocean Day!