The War Against the Natural World #3 Losing the once bright mirror of biodiversity
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 surface will look much the same. But beneath the waves no life will be present. The mirror will have lost its shine, its capacity to reward the eye with the spectacle of near infinite variety. The loss of biodiversity, which, in the words of the celebrated writer Barry Lopez, “ threatens all life with extinction.”
Extirpation is a good word for what’s going on, both in coastal regions — where trawlers and dredgers take such an apocalyptic toll — and further out in the often lawless realm of international waters. The removal of life right down to its very roots, so that the ocean floor becomes as barren as the surface of the Moon. The often overstated threat posed by AI is largely irrelevant. Our species will meet its doom, arriving at its own rendezvous with genetic obsolescence, long before rogue computer programmes do us in. For without life in the oceans there can be no life on the land. And a world with lifeless seas is truly a desert.
With grateful thanks to Catherine Kennedy for the use of her image Into the Sea II.
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