[Coral-List] Rebuilding marine life

sealab at earthlink.net sealab at earthlink.net
Mon Feb 1 17:49:30 UTC 2021



Hi David,

Thank you for your response.

What I liked most about this paper is that the authors frame this effort as a “Grand Challenge” to humanity.

In doing so, they have created something that could take any number of abstract, disconnected ideas and turns them into achievable, practical and codified goals. Beyond that, unlike what has been loosely termed as “ocean optimism”, this proposition spells it out clearly - in order to rebuild our marine ecosystems we must go beyond our current restorative efforts to effectively address the stressors involved. That seems to be a simple and obvious premise, but up until now it has somehow avoided becoming a consistent, unambiguous and prominent affirmation.

Of course, you’re right about the need to formalize our commitment to sustainability. What I find here in the United States is that there still remains many who see the new administration’s initiatives to that end as threats to our economy. That, and the fact that humans seem to be wired to fear change. So, although we still have a lot of work to do, it is reassuring to know that there are legitimate reasons for optimism.

Even if it will take a generation . . . or two!

Warm regards,

Steve Mussman

On 2/1/21, 1:41 AM, David Obura via Coral-List <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:

Hi Steve,

… can’t believe I’m going to be the first to reply (at least as far as I can tell!!) … must be the weekend!!

In answer to your question "Is substantially rebuilding marine life within a human generation largely achievable, if the required actions, prominently mitigating climate change, are deployed at scale??” … I’d have to answer a resounding YES!!.

The source behind this is Carlos Duarte and colleagues recent paper “Rebuilding marine life” - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2146-7 - which basically says yes, this is possible in a 30 year timeframe. And I think our own intuitions and knowledge that if natural systems are given a chance they certainly have an ability to recover from past impacts.

Of course, there are devils in the details - what is ’substantial’ and what is ‘largely achievable’?

The paradigm coming forward in the context of the Anthropocene is that of course we can’t ‘rebuild’ nature to where it was given the climate change that is already committed and humanity’s capture of so many earth system processes (nutrients, protein production, water, etc). And given global population and the need for a good quality of life for the half the world that does not have one, it will be very hard to reduce humanity’s footprint to much less than a ‘full planet’ under the planetary footprint idea. But nature certainly has the capacity to regenerate to what we’d probably recognise as a balanced, mature, ‘good' system under these new conditions, if we reduce our negative influences to the extent that we can. And of course certain things take much longer than human generations to come to that state.

But if, given the potential for good action (finally!) in the US system, and in others, sufficient commitment and effort are made towards sustainability, then I think we should have very high confidence that we can "rebuild marine life within a human generation” that would have wonderful implications on nature and on all of us!! So yes, it would be worth it to invest in that change - but we still have a lot of convincing to do, your new administration notwithstanding!!

cheers,

David

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