[Coral-List] State of world's oceans

[Peter Sale]

Wow, Chuck,
What a depressing day you have contributed to (it is Thanksgiving today in Canada)!  On the same day the media are full of articles about the new IPCC report on the urgency to limit warming to 1.5oC, you bring Sheppard's 3-volume edited World Seas: An Environmental Evaluation to our attention.

This will be a comprehensive production judging by the authorship of many chapters (I have not seen it), but looking at the lists of chapters in each volume I was struck by how much marine environmental science has changed.  In 1957, Joel Hedgpeth's edited Treatise on Marine Ecology and Paleoecology, Volume 1, Ecology was published.  It was reprinted in 1966.  I know many readers of coral-list will think that a long time ago, but comparing the chapter headings, it is so long ago it is in a different universe.  While virtually every chapter abstract in World Seas deals principally with deleterious human impacts (judging by the abstracts), Hedgpeth's 1200-odd pages, 29 chapters and 37 taxon-specific bibliographies scarcely mention that.  Instead there were chapters titled Salinity, Particulate Organic Detritus, Estuaries and Lagoons, and, yes, Coral Reefs.  Each chapter set out understanding at that time of the selected topic.  It was a treatise on how the marine world worked.  Human interference in the way in which systems functioned was scarcely talked mentioned.  Even the annotated bibliographies on corals and on fishes contained nothing on diseases, bleaching or overfishing of reefs.  Times have really changed.

That I saw this stark difference on the same day as I saw coverage of the IPCC's latest report makes it hit home even more strongly than it otherwise would.  During the time of my own career, we have wrought immense damage on this planet, and environmental scientists can no longer spend time delighting in the wondrousness of coral reefs or rainforests - they are, rightly, too busy documenting our destructive actions, working to redress the damage, and seeking to raise awareness of the plight we are building for ourselves and the planet.

And we naively thought in 1998 that a circumtropical mass bleaching of reefs would surely be the dying canary that would wake the world to what we were doing.  How wrong we were.
Happy Thanksgiving.

Peter Sale
University of Windsor (Emeritus)
sale at uwindsor.ca<mailto:sale at uwindsor.ca>
www.petersalebooks.com<http://www.petersalebooks.com>