We also will be recalculating the national and global scores regularly using better data as they become available. This flexibility to adapt to the best available science was intentional, and we hope it makes the Ocean Health Index useful in local, regional and international contexts for years to come. We also hope the index helps change the way people think about ocean conservation and management, and the kinds of information that need to be collected to inform a more accurate assessment of ocean health and guide strategic conservation and management decisions. For example, there is surprisingly little information in most parts of the world on the amount of coastal tourism and recreation as well as the degree to which the activities are being done sustainably, despite the sizeable economic and cultural importance of these industries.
We are not the first to face the controversy of explicitly including humans in setting conservation priorities. Other experts have made similar arguments and faced equal resistance from people who hold nature as sacred. Peter Kareiva, the lead scientist for the Nature Conservancy, recently published a paper advocating this point of view and has received no shortage of unsympathetic responses. Like many other global citizens, I am in awe of the diversity and complexity of life on Earth, and I wince at the thought of losing any of it. With more than seven billion people on the planet, however, there is no place left untouched by humans and little room left for unachievable idealism. The challenge of meaningful conservation will only increase as billions more people are added to the planet. Goals of pristine nature are not only untenable but can be counterproductive because they ignore what most people actually care about. For example, attempting to create a marine protected area for biodiversity protection without consulting local fishermen can lead to a paper park at best and at worst no protection at all.
Management is about altering people's behavior, not controlling nature. True change requires embracing people as part of the solution, improving their security and well-being, and empowering them to make strategic choices for an increasingly sustainable and beneficial future. Demonizing humans as the problem, and nothing more, will do little to motivate most people to action. We need to educate citizens about what is necessary for oceans to function sustainably and what is possible to achieve (because few people have personal experience with truly healthy oceans), but we also must meet people where they are. People need to eat and have jobs, want to recreate, cherish the identity that comes from interacting with a place, and deeply value spiritual connections to the sea. If we deny those values and focus only on excluding people from nature, conservation is doomed to fail.
Such pragmatism is not fatalistic. Instead, it requires us to focus on delivering the full range of human goals for a healthy ocean sustainably. Doing so will necessarily include protection in the more traditional sense, but will also require novel ways of thinking that promote and coordinate sustainable use of the ocean with ambitious but reasonable targets, rather than pristine ones. Such pragmatism requires us to recognize that people are a fundamental part of all ecosystems that make up Planet Earth, including the sea. This paradigm shift is happening on land as well as for the ocean, but slowly, perhaps too slowly. The Ocean Health Index offers a tool to help transform the conversation.
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8 Comments
Add CommentIt sounds like you are trying to address too many issues with one standard. It seems like you are trying to rate sustainability, ecosystem health and human impact all with one index. You can't. They are different. The solution is simple, use separate metrics. Ultimately the lands being rated likely require different metrics anyway. If you are rating fishing grounds, what does it matter what the human impact is? You know it is going to be huge compared to a wildlife preserve. You rate it on sustainability. The same with national parks, they are not going to be pristine. They are open to the public. But are they healthy? Can species within the park maintain their populations or is the human impact so great that populations decline. In regards to wildlife preserves, places that humans are not allowed to enter, such as mangroves or coral reefs to protect fish nurseries you need to look at human impact and minimizing that as much as possible to maximize the return from these scarce resources. I know that it is easier if you can rate everything by slapping a happy or sad face on it but if the use cases are different than use a different standard.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"I say this from experience...."..wow. Talk about ego.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou know all this from experience. I've been a geologist for 35 years and my experience is that I don't know a tenth of even the niche of science that I study.
Motherhood statements and ideals are not science. It's speculation. You can't go putting all these arbitrary ratings on eleusive variables that are themselves arbitrarily measured. Speculation built on speculation.
Lets at least celebrate the fact that people are beginning to realize the fallacy of ecosystems without human impact Cronin pointed this out in his work ""Changes in the Land" 20 years ago. The myth of wildness will serve as a poor model for dealing with our crowded planet. Clearly we can take steps to minimize the damage of the most destructive impacts but humans have been terraforming the planet since the beginning of our species and will continue to do so and that is not all bad.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSounds like they're trying to set it up so that human impact on Earth can be considered justifiable homicide.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat we humans basically lack is humility and reverence for our source of life - which is Nature, in it's pure form, providing water, seeds, plants, and animal meats for us.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe are currently faced with rapidly changing environmental conditions, which, btw, were predicted by the indigenous people whose lands we have (and continue to) swallowed up in our race to dominate Nature. We were warned, but the urge for fame and especially fortune, appears to supersede all such considerations. Add the nowadays short national attention span to that and what to you get...
... a new set of scientists that try to fit our mis-behavior into something that's natural and excusable. No thanks. Nice try, but I don't think this paper will make us feel well and fuzzy.
It's our own species' lack of humility, starting with our Western outlook that Nature was to be shaped and dominated by us. That was a big mistake. We lost sight that we are only a part of nature, not it's bosses. Then there came the resulting materialism, and it's ever-increasing greed. Just look around the world: international mega-corporations are now busy buying up the lands (or battling with their inhabitants) for our last global water and mineral resources that can produce any profits for them in the next decade. They follow the golden cow, to the detriment of all of us and the earth itself. She is showing us that we will have hell to pay for this abuse.
You are correct. They have been trying to justify grooming the entire Species Planet now for decades. Scientist are sometime the easiest people to be fooled by resource harvesters.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMore pushers of the "new" ecology? Shame!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBiology is the study of life. Conservationists conserve. What do conservation biologist conserve? Good question! The so-called "new" school conservationists such as B. S. Halpern say that the world is done and it might as well be dead. They say humans must be part of the solution when, in fact, humans are messing up the system already.
If we really have to turn the henhouse over to the fox, then there is no hope. (The henhouse = the natural world and the fox = humans.) Halpern says there is no hope without humans, but without hope and understanding in and of the natural world's abilities the Species Planet is doomed. In short, do not listen to the expeditious and practical "new" ecologists. They say the glass is half empty; we say the glass is half full.
The Evolution Planet cannot maintain itself under human grooming. We must return many acres to the sole control of natural forces and processes or the Species Planet is indeed doomed.
A human influential scale is indeed needed to assess the human interference and damage to the natural landscape and seascape; that is true. However, using that scale to justify more human management is shameful.
Interesting. His human activity scale for oceans sounds remarkably like the NLATS (natural landscape abutter threat scale) which rates human intrusion into the forest.
I read this article with great interest. I am a biologist for an Indian Tribe on the west coast of the US that has a very long history of harvesting and using resources from local intertidal areas. Recently, there has been a mandate to set aside some of these marine areas for protection by banning various types of harvest. When I raised the scientific and ecological concept that humans have been a top predator in this system since time immemorial and it would be more unnatural than natural to stop that predation, I was met with blank stares from the ecologists that were designing the network of proposed marine reserves. The idea that humans (all of us, not just indigenous) are part of something, and in some cases are as necessary as wolves in Yellowstone for ecosystems to be "natural" has not sunk in. Native Americans here actively managed salmon harvest, intertidal gathering, and landscape (through burning). Yet, the western ideal wilderness goal is "untrammelled by man" (e.g. Wilderness Act).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, the Tribe here was told that they would no longer be able to harvest in areas that nearly a 10,000 year record of being harvested so that these areas and the animals would be protected. Needless to say, this has people pretty upset. I note that areas in other parts of the world (Mediterranean, South Africa) have over 100,000 years of continuous marine harvest.
The idea that human management is a recently developed western idea is flat out wrong; the Tribe I work for has been "managing" things through cultural practices, ceremonies, social taboos, etc. since time immemorial.
The points I make above in no way justify the degradation or overexploitation of any ecosystem, it is simply to say that humans are a legitimate part of the functioning of ecosystems throughout the world. "Natural" includes humans, and to say otherwise ignores indigenous peoples and their practices around the world.