In It For Life

Everyone knows what the third wish is for. A magical apparition appears from a bottle and grants you three wishes. An exciting opportunity, but daunting at the same time. The thrill of having wishes fulfilled tempered by the fear that the opportunity could go to waste if you don’t choose with care.

The first wish might be for relief from some long-held personal obstacle. The second might be for some sweeping change for the good of the universe or, at the very least, human-kind. Or maybe not. But the third wish is always reserved for the same request no matter who is doing the wishing. The third wish is always for more wishes. If you’re the restrained type you might wish for three more, the greedy, or more ruthless might wish for some extravagant number– a million more perhaps– to lock-in the good fortune, or just to save time.

Nobody ever stops to ask if the supply of wishes can run out, or what would happen if it did. Nobody asks what would happen if you made your customary wish for more and the answer came back– sorry, we’re all out.

Once at the peak, the biggest lesson, and starkest contrast of all, can be found by just using your eyes. The contrast in numbers of personnel, economic clout and sheer physical size of the defenders of the natural world in this context compared to all that stands to cause it harm.

A modern cruise ship of the type that makes is way up the BC coast to Alaska can weigh over 100,000 tonnes and be 60metres high from the waterline to the tip of its communication mast. I’m guessing that the average volunteer at Eagle Eye is about 170cm and 55kgs, and their boat? It’s an inflatable. Pretty snazzy but tiny compared to a cruise ship, smaller than pretty much everything else on the water, and not really that much bigger than a kayak.

The volunteers at Eagle Eye do have something on their side, however– the high ground.

Eagle Eye is the lookout facility maintained and operated by CETUS, a small Canadian NGO focused on protecting whales in the coastal waters of British Columbia (BC). It is located in a commanding position on top of a cliff-face overlooking not only one of the busiest stretches of water in BC– the Johnstone Strait– but more specifically, a protected area designed to provide some refuge to Northern Resident (fish-eating) Orca travelling up and down the coast– the Robson Bight Ecological Reserve. The whales go into the shallows of the Bight to rub themselves on the bottom.

That Eagle Eye exists at all is an inspiration. It would be easy to underplay how impressive the place is in words– A lookout point with high-powered tripod-mounted binoculars, a fire-pit, a cookhouse, and wooden platforms built over the rocky terrain to allow tents to be pitched– living quarters for the volunteers. Transferring people, gear, and supplies ashore from small boats in tidal wilderness areas can be tricky, but a clever jetty-and-pully system has been set-up with professional attention to detail allowing it all to happen in an organized way. Everything is then hiked up to the peak via a fairly short but steep single-file trail, over the rocks, and through the trees. Eagle Eye doesn’t sound like much on paper, but there is an air of easy, outbound efficiency about the place. It’s a campsite, but an orderly, conscientiously built and organized campsite.

The volunteers are happy, enthusiastic, level-headed, and, in the most part, young. Students from local universities and elsewhere. The mission is serious but there is room for fun as well. The view of the Strait below, the boat traffic and the Bight beyond offset by a signpost to one side of the fire-pit pointing to the many places around the world from which CETUS volunteers have traveled for the privilege of standing watch to defend the whales’ right to occupy the Bight without being disturbed.

You can learn a lot about how a place like Eagle Eye runs by talking to the volunteers there– and I recommend you make the effort– a limited number of visitors make the trip every summer with the help of a kayak tour operator based at Telegraph cove.

Once at the peak, the biggest lesson, and starkest contrast of all, can be found by just using your eyes. The contrast in numbers of personnel, economic clout and sheer physical size of the defenders of the natural world in this context compared to all that stands to cause it harm.

Stand atop Eagle Eye and the David (or Deborah- most of those present when I was there were women) and Goliath nature of this story is plain to see. A handful of volunteers, living in tents, charged with responsibility for making sure that literally millions of tonnes of ship and boat traffic plays by the rules and stays out of the reserve.

At this point it is tempting to pinpoint the various Goliaths of the story– candidates are easy to pick out given that many of them fill the volunteers’ binoculars. The cruise ship industry, and commercial shipping moving huge vessels at speed; swarming commercial and private fishing vessels. Pleasure boaters, and tourist operators including, yes, whale watching boats. And the unseen challenges– salmon farms that are almost certainly having a detrimental impact on the area’s food web.

Stories are being written daily about the specific horrors.

The real Goliath though is, of course, money. We’ve spoken with fishermen and tourism operators and scientists and technologists working with the shipping industry and we can tell you, there is no evil monster lurking in the wheelhouses of their boats. Can grey areas be large? Yes, they can. Can isolated infractions or examples of thoughtlessness or incompetence cause much damage? Yes, they can. Is it disappointing when incidents of this kind go uncensured? Yes, it is.

I’m not saying that individuals shouldn’t be held to account. I not saying that money itself is evil either. What I am saying is that we aren’t going to get real justice or progress until we address the fundamental imbalance of the game as a whole. Robson Bight is a fractal part of a much bigger picture that puts forward an eerily similar form. We’re pitting a handful of enthusiasts against every ship out there.

Around the same time that we spoke with the volunteers at Eagle Eye, I also spoke with a wilderness guide and diving instructor by the name of Timothy Stevenson. Timothy divides his time between Tofino on the West Coast of Vancouver Island and God’s Pocket off the island’s northern tip.

One of the stories that Timothy told us was of a report he filed regarding an open-pen salmon farm that was being moved during rough weather in the Clayoquot Sound area. Open-pen salmon farms look like networks of metal jetties with submerged nets or pens, and are typically moored not too far from shore in relatively sheltered areas. They are designed to be moveable in favourable conditions, but they are fragile and can be torn apart relatively easily. Tim described to us how the farm in question began to disintegrate as it was being towed through heavy chop, leaving a trail of plastic debris– the remains of the jetty floatation system presumably– in its wake. He also described how he attempted to report the incident but didn’t get very far. The coastguard suggested he and the other witnesses contact Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO). DFO told them to contact the police. The police recommended that they inform the Coast Guard. Imagine if we just empowered Timothy and people like him.

I discussed a lot of stuff with Timothy, the salmon, the farms, the whales, the tourism business, the health of the ecosystem as a whole. He is exactly the kind of person we set out to speak with when we started Sealives. He’s out on the water all the time and he sees what’s going-on.

People like Timothy and the volunteers at Eagle Eye are conscientious people. They do their work which makes them happy because it gives them the opportunity to spend time in the environments they love, but they are concerned about those environments, the flora and fauna that live there and the damage they see being inflicted every day, not through evil but through a lack of care or concern or knowledge in others that might as well amount to evil.

Imagine if these conscientious people were backed to the same level that oil companies, shipping concerns and the aquaculture industry are. Imagine if we made it their job.

Sealives set out on a mission to talk to individuals so that these daily perspectives could be captured, but in aggregate it is striking how these individual voices are so often ranged against forces in our world that prevail not because people are bad but through ignorance and inertia, and because it is just the way things are.

Well, there is at this point no reason to be ignorant.

Robson Bight is an example of a marine reserve that works in part due to the care and vigilance of small numbers of highly dedicated people. And when it comes to marine reserves nationwide, Canada is doing pretty well. Marco Lamertini, Director General of the World Wildlife Fund congratulated Canada via Twitter a few days ago for exceeding the internationally agreed UN target of 10% of national waters under protection. Canada is now at 14% in part due to a few large Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) off Canada’s northern coast. This is a good thing– large MPAs are more effective than small ones because they keep more protected ocean volume further away from unprotected areas.

A recent study by researchers at MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute provides early evidence that area-based management tools like MPAs can be effective in supporting highly mobile pelagic (ocean-going as opposed to inshore) species, in this case, various species of tuna. This is potentially big news. Scientists have long thought that MPAs can help support populations of inshore species by providing a refuge for fish that would be fished out of the water elsewhere. That MPAs can also perform this function for highly mobile species is a big deal. It also opens up the possibility that other pelagic megafauna (big ocean animals) can be supported using these same techniques. In short, MPAs are a really good idea.

Having understood that protective measures are needed, finding knowledge on how best to go about implementing them is easily to-hand. Want to establish an MPA to protect sharks and rays? The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has a fantastic guide on how to do just that.

And there’s no need to be ignorant about the fact that both deep sea and inshore animals need our protection. I just mentioned tuna, over 100,000,000 sharks are killed annually and a quarter of all shark species are threatened with extinction according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Shark finning has, at last, become a well-publicized issue thanks to high profile campaigns in countries where shark-fin soup is a traditional dish. Despite this, shark finning still continues, and the emphasis on the practice of finning, while important, has in some ways helped to disguise the fact that many people around the world still see sharks as a legitimate fisheries resources as long as the practice of finning is avoided. In addition, many thousands are caught illegally and thousands more are swept up by accident as bycatch. And then you have people like this.

Some say that sport-fishing for sharks helps science. Collections of taxidermy heads in museums tell us that people used to think that way about rhinos as well.

Studies have found that a shark is worth far more alive than dead. A reef shark in Palau is worth around $180,000 over its lifetime but only about $100 for its fin. There’s no reason to be ignorant about that either. Rays, a close relative of the shark are also under threat, perhaps even more-so.

Having understood that protective measures are needed, finding knowledge on how best to go about implementing them is easily to-hand. Want to establish an MPA to protect sharks and rays? The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has a fantastic guide on how to do just that. Already established one, or lack basic data for shark species in your area? The WWF can also provide a detailed guide to assess how sharks are doing. There are now multiple examples of protected areas around the world that can be studied and learned from in every aspect.

Technology like Global Fishing Watch can track vessels to help you to understand if MPA restrictions are being violated and blockchain solutions can help to track the seafood that does get caught so that its provenance can be verified.

All kinds of people are deploying small-scale and make-shift technological solutions to good effect. The Misool Foundation in Indonesia is using an inexpensive fixed-wing drone to monitor the waters of the privately run marine reserve (an area of South Raja Ampat twice the size of Singapore) that has been established there.

I’ve spoken a lot about the high seas and sharks in particular, but you can quickly zoom-out to the big picture via this recently published report by Dan Laffoley– Principle Advisor for Marine Science at the IUCN and a board director of the Sylvia Earl Alliance/Mission Blue– and others, outlining the eight most pressing action points for ocean health distilled from responses to a survey of ocean experts in science, policy, law and economics from around the world. Having done that you can zoom back into any one, or all of those points in detail. Overall the report can be taken as a clear plan of action for global ocean conservation.

And if it is time to say that there’s no reason to be ignorant, it has to be time to say that there’s no excuse for inertia.

The young people of every era are like society’s third wish. The good-news story that the older generation use to convince themselves that the problems of the present will be somehow fixed in the future. Old people look at young people and in their mind’s-eye they envision one more wish to save the environment, a wish that will turn into yet more after that, and on, and on, ad-infinitum as the centuries scroll by.

But the opportunity that each generation has to correct the mistakes of their forebears is not wished into existence by us or anyone else. It is conferred on them by a living planet, a closed ecosystem that we now know only has so many opportunities to give. Many so-called grown-ups of this era are still anticipating their third wish, but read the evidence and you can hear the answer coming back– sorry, we’re all out.

The inertia can only be cured by a radical rebalancing of forces– an effort to redress the kind of epic asymmetry that we witness every day in coastal communities around the world. In Canada and in Mexico I have witnessed first hand how students working with tiny NGOs that have next to no resources are standing up against not just the specific injustices of specific large-scale players– however newsworthy those details may be– but, in aggregate, the massive weight of a status quo that never learned to include future consequences into current decision-making in any meaningful way until it was too late. I feel lucky to live in a country where volunteers like those at CETUS can do this work in relative safety. I have spoken with students doing conservation research in Mexico and makers of environmentally conscious media in Peru– much more dangerous places to speak-out. Worldwide over 1,500 activists have been killed in the last 15 years.

The good news is that some of the grown-ups have got the message and rather than spend time looking for their third wish are actually taking action.

I’ve mentioned the forthcoming new treaty for the High Seas in recent posts– the meeting to create the final draft is taking place at the end of the month. The prospect holds tremendous opportunities for a whole new attitude towards life in the ocean, and will almost certainly include long-needed provisions for the design and implementation of area-based management tools to help pelagic species and ecosystems.

The Conference of the Parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) is reconvening this month as well in Geneva. Increased measures to restrict trade in sharks and rays, along with proposals to increase protections regarding other species are firmly on the agenda. Between them, the High Seas treaty, CITES, the Convention on Biological Diversity and UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) form a matrix of protections, mechanisms and targets that support movement in the right direction, but they are far from perfect and actions taken under their auspices need to occur with adequate speed and heft. Agreements of this kind also include opportunities for exploitation under the banner of sustainable development, a label the truth of which can often only be understood in retrospect– many of the practices that one generation judges to be sustainable are proved to not be so sustainable by the next. How-to documents like those distributed by the WWF show that efforts are being made to learn the lessons of turning high-flying policy goals into properly established protections.

Anyone who takes the trek up to Eagle Eye can see that the real Goliath of the story is money, or, to be more specific, the resource imbalance between the protectors and the forces that set us back, deliberately or otherwise.

It is not the job of the younger generation to console their elders with what they may do in the future– that they will provide this consolation anyway is a testament to human nature and something that every generation should be thankful for. It is the job of the older generation to help make that future a reality by supplying actual resources to create the roles, the science, ecology, and conservation-focused jobs, that will be needed to do the work, to balance the equation, to overcome both ignorance and inertia and make change happen.

It is not ok that we are expecting tiny NGOs, students, and concerned individuals to shoulder this much responsibility for our future, using makeshift technology, however ingenious. We’re going to pay for all this destruction one way or another, why don’t we start paying young people in much greater numbers to prevent as much damage as possible right now? If nothing else it might make the environmental narrative more fun, more inspiring. It might even work. When we employ people we get the chance to make them into heroes. What kind of heroes do we want our society to make?

Time to wake up and realize we’re all in this fight together. The eight strategic insights of the report by Laffoley et-al aren’t just good ideas, they’re a job creation plan. Time to get Goliath on-side.