Ocean exploitation has exploded. Massive abandoned nets drift with the currents, entangling and strangling over half a million marine mammals each year. Factory ships stay out at sea for weeks, devastating fisheries. Much like the controversial fishing method of bottom trawling, deep sea mining technology being developed will obliterate seabed ecosystems. With the growing scale of destruction, why do scientific pursuits seem to have stood still? According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), even today only 5% of the oceans have been explored. But based on current trends that 5% and more is ripe for exploitation and ecological damage.
Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans by Sylvia Earle shows how, despite knowledge that the ocean hosts incredible diversity, progress on studying and cataloging our seas has been outstripped by the race to exploit them. The troubling bit? It was written three decades ago, and is more relevant than ever.
Sylvia Earle’s resume is impressive. Her background is biological, with her receiving her Master’s and PhD degrees in Botany, with a focus in ocean plant life, at Duke University. Earle co-founded Deep Ocean Engineering (a submersible development company) and was Chief Scientist at NOAA. As a major player in the world of deep sea scientific exploration, she holds the record for the deepest untethered dive completed by a woman.
Sea Change is part memoir, part crash course in ocean science. It weaves together Earle’s personal experiences, scientific insights, and a call to recognize the ocean’s vital role in sustaining life on Earth. The book begins with her journey into the deep through scientific dives, and underwater living experiments. Despite Earle’s passion for preserving the ocean, she has led numerous ocean submersible engineering projects that were commissioned by big oil companies for offshore oil platform maintenance. She then details human threats to the ocean, including overfishing and oil spills. Finally, Earle attempts to bring hope to an otherwise dark tale with whispers of restoration and progress.
Throughout the book, Sylvia Earle’s style is gorgeous and heart wrenching. She tackles her own philosophy of life, writing: “Today is different from yesterday and all the tomorrows of the future, in part because of the presence of every living thing, large and small”. Earle makes clear, at times through poetic language, that she is concerned with more than human’s relationship with the watery world. She is focused on the drivers behind our actions and that humans are not all knowing or all powerful. We, like the dinosaurs, are but a blip in the history of this planet.
This book’s message is identical to the current state of our oceans: humans are damaging it with ruthless efficiency, threatening not only marine ecosystems but our future as well. Earle considers the Horseshoe crab; a 445 million year old living fossil used in the biomedical industry and as bait for eels. She tracks the threats to these not-so-crabby arthropods and identifies coastal water pollution as the biggest threat to their survival. Nowadays, the Horseshoe crab is even worse off. This year, the Center for Biological Diversity published a press release calling for the American Horseshoe crab to be added to the Endangered Species Act. Currently, much of their population is being “bled” for their blue blood, used to make vaccines, which often goes unregulated and has become increasingly industrialized. Both environmental degradation and overharvesting can have unknown impacts on individual species and ecosystems years down the road. And their effect on humankind is only now starting to be realized.
Atlantic Horseshoe Crab
The Horseshoe crab is not alone. Earle highlights the consequences of human driven mass extinctions that are destabilizing ecosystems and decreasing diversity worldwide — what is now termed the “The Anthropocene Extinction”. Animals are adapted to their specific niche and while they can tolerate slight changes, the speed and intensity of human expansion and innovation is proving to be too much to handle. Living fossils like the Horseshoe Crab are unable to cope with drastic environmental changes driven by chemical pollution, overharvesting, and development. The Chinese Paddlefish, a 200 million year old behemoth of a fish, was declared extinct in 2020 due to dams blocking their spawning migrations. The problem clearly has not disappeared, in fact, it’s become much worse.
A photo of the Chinese Paddlefish from 1993, the year they were though to have become “functionally extinct”. Photograph by Qiwei Wei.
Earle highlights the importance of people who interact with the ocean and steward it. One such example is a group of Japanese women free-divers called the Ama. The Ama have a centuries old tradition of free diving to collect seafood, shells, and algae for sustenance. In South Korea, a group of women similar to the Ama, called Haenyeo, also free-dive for a living. But, a 2024 documentary reveals that less young women are willing to take up the diving culture, preferring more relaxed careers and that the threats of overfishing and nuclear waste have changed the types of sea life that Haenyeo encounter under the waves. The divers have dwindled to a tenth of their numbers from only 80 years ago. Unsustainable fishing and toxic waste aren’t just wiping out fish–they are destroying cultures.
Haenyeo with octopus.
The biggest shortcoming of this book is Earle’s ideas about how to solve these problems. While her discussions of rewilding and creating protected areas are in line with modern practices, she suggests that the individual is most impactful, writing: “Not only do the actions of individuals matter; only what individuals do matter.” This is a beautiful sentiment, but it doesn’t grapple with the reality of making systemic change. Creating a marine protected area requires countless collaborators across governments, scientific institutions, and impacted communities. Reducing pollution requires both a systemic shift in a company’s production practices and changes in consumer behavior towards multi-use containers and products that are certified sustainable.
In addition to conservation being collaborative by nature, pollution and overfishing are primarily caused by companies and conglomerates. Currently, 100 companies are the source of 71% of emissions since human driven climate change was recognized. Individuals’ choices to ride a bike to work or take public transportation are steps in the right direction on the marathon to human sustainability, but factories becoming emission-free would move the world miles closer to the finish line. An individual’s choice to pluck a piece of plastic from the beach is, quite literally, a drop in the ocean by comparison. Without major change, this mindset will allow Sea Change to still be relevant in another thirty years.