I meet world-renowned undersea photojournalist Brian Skerry at Legal Seafoods, across from the New England Aquarium, where he's the explorer in residence. He orders a chicken Caesar salad.
"I refrain from eating much seafood due to environmental concerns," he explains, before launching into a depressing litany of problems facing the world's marine ecosystems. "I have to remain optimistic, because I do believe there's always hope," says Skerry, who spends more than half of every year underwater, diving with harp seals in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and green sea turtles in Kiribati. "That said, it's very discouraging what I'm seeing."
What he's seeing are oceans in crisis, their health potentially at a tipping point: gratuitously destructive overfishing, endangered underwater "big game" (100 million sharks killed each year), dying coral reefs, and subtle but potentially catastrophic shifts that are almost certainly due to climate change. Once upon a time, North Atlantic right whales were so plentiful that, as one Pilgrim wrote in his log book, "a man could almost walk across Cape Cod Bay upon their backs." It wasn't too long ago, either, that Atlantic cod teemed so thick in Boston Harbor one could simply toss a net into the water and pull up a writhing, silvery haul.
Today, there are barely 400 North Atlantic right whales left on the planet. Ocean scientists say that Atlantic cod has been fished down to the last 10 percent of its population, and that those stocks may never be restored. Much of that degradation has taken place in only 50 years or so, since the advent of mechanized fishing.
But it's not just ruthless whaling and foolhardy fishing practices that are plaguing the world's oceans. Underwater, things are bad all over — from the acidifying Atlantic to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A perfect storm of climate change, pollution, and rapacious global fishing practices has the potential to gravely imperil Earth's oceans and their intricate, highly sensitive ecosystems.
