Why We Need a "Sea Ethic"

By Carl Safina

Editor's Note: The following article was adapted from Carl Safina's recent book, Song for the Blue OceanEncounters Along the World's Coasts and Beneath the Seas (1998, Henry Holt & Co., N.Y.).

Today many people are sensing that the seas need protection and that people who rely on the seas need decisive action. In many ways the 1990s emerged as the decade when people finally began discovering the oceans. In 1995, National Geographic's ten million subscribers worldwide read about the imperiled state of the world's seas. Time magazine's October 1996 international edition featured corals and fishes on its cover, as well as 12 pages of articles to go with the cover headline, "Global AgendaTreasures of the SeasWe've plundered the oceans' gifts. Can we now protect them?"

Good question. A better one would be, "Will we choose to?" And perhaps we can help answer that by posing another question: "What if we don't?"

It has been said that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. Certainly, the salmon fishers in the Northwest know thisand live it. The reef fishers in Palau and Sulu and elsewhere are struggling to bring their life into line with this realization as they strive to protect and restore their corals, their economy, their sense of place, their future. When people speak of "saving the oceans," then, I offer this: We need the seas more than they need us.

But something else is needed in addition to a better understanding of services provided. People will seldom protect things having no perceived economic value, but people sometimes display an active unwillingness to protect even things with economic value. What values, then, do we really have? What values do we really need?

Today many typical people who do not particularly think of themselves as active conservationists or environmentalists apply the notion of "live and let live" to most species. Even if human use of species is deemed desirable, extermination is generally held unacceptable. Thus many people implicitly include nonhuman life in an unstated sense of extended community. They would not question a hawk's place in the sky, nor ask what good is a gazelle, nor wonder whether the world really needs wild orchids. Without stating it, they intuitively acknowledge other species' uncontested right to struggle for existence in life's harsh fabric.

©1982 Bob Talbot

Blue sharks are common in the offshore waters of the Sanctuary.

Yet when told of the plight of, say, sharks, many of these same people still think it quite reasonable to inquire, "What good are they? Why do we need them?"

In the 1940s, a forester named Aldo Leopold wrote of a "search for a durable scale of values." He called for extending our sense of community responsibilities beyond isolated humanity to encompass the whole living landscape, and he called this extension the "land ethic." Why? If for no other reason, to maintain a place for humanity. Such a notion was revolutionary at the time, but it has since become the core of conservation and environmental thought. Leopold loved to hunt and fish and use wood, but he sensed one inflection point: An action is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of a living community, and wrong when it tends to do otherwise. In other words, rightness lies in recognizing "enough," so that the future may be safeguarded.

What good, then, are sharks? Let's put all question of uses, products, and ecological significance aside for a moment. Perhaps we most need sharksand seaweeds, sea stars, sea slugs, squid, salmon, swordfish, seabirds, and singing cetaceansto test our ability to differentiate between right and wrong. If this answer seems silly, if refusing to answer the question of the value of sea creatures from an

Alolkoy, Spring 1998