Ocean conservationists — and by that I mean anyone who cares about the sea, from individuals walking along a shoreline to multinational organisations — understand what’s really at stake. Oblivion. The irreversible erasure of every species that lives in the sea in this age of manmade mass extinctions, in the era of the Anthropocene. The oceans used to feed the world but now that generational harvest is almost at an end. As others have noted, when the ocean is fished-out its su

“As I gazed at the ocean, I had a sense that this creature was me — the quicksilver form that crested the waves as if friction was nothing more than an abstract concept — from a time before the Earth got old and the land grew tired of watching the sea as it slowly died.” The Earth is really two planets, one laid over the other like a geological palimpsest; there are continents, the familiar land masses, but mostly there is water. Enough to cover seven tenths of the surface

In the pages of Odyssey magazine we have often discussed Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic series of novels and short stories about the terraforming of Mars. The trilogy of novels culminates in Blue Mars when terraforming allows the creation of rivers and oceans on the planet’s surface. Presumably the seeding of these bodies of water came about as a result of fish stocks originating in the oceans of Earth. Fish and other aquatic animals that came from the settler’s home world. Plan