By John G. Field, Gotthilf Hempel and Collin P. Summerhayes
Washington, D.C.: Island Press
Put together after a 1999 United Nations conference on the oceans, this is essentially a serial book, published after the once-a-decade or so UN conferences on ocean trends. This past decade brought the largest worldwide impacts of man upon the oceans, as well as the greatest scientific advances in the history of our species, both of which at least make for interesting reading.
The book presents an in-depth and specific list of what a multi-disciplinary panel of ocean scientists believe will be the most important issues in marine science, coastal management, fisheries policy and offshore industrial development. Specific predictions include the development of better fisheries models that will allow for better policy, breaking the chain of depletion, the continued advancement of remarkable instruments that are gathering data seemingly faster than we can process it, and a greater recognition of the global importance of the newly discovered sea-floor bacterial communities, which may make up as much as 10 percent of life on earth.
One of the most interesting parts of the book was the short analysis of the issues that were not identified at the last conference, which makes one wonder what big marine issues will come up unexpectedly in the next decade. Most of the missed predictions had to do with underestimating the pace and accuracy of data collection, such as the now widespread and fine-scale ocean color satellites that enable much more accurate understanding of plankton abundance, or the ability, now established, to map and analyze DNA of marine populations.
Living as we all do on the shores of the Gulf of Maine, the book makes one more aware that the wide Atlantic, and the rest of the oceans, are really only a wave or two away. World climactic changes are likely, if the most dire predictions come true, to change our lives by changing the animals under the surface in our backyards and altering the atmospheric weather. On a more localized note, the predicted improvements in biologic modeling and understanding could assist in coming years in finding questions to such vital local questions such as why are there so many lobsters when the scientists think there should not be, or where all our herring have gone. Somewhat surprisingly, our part of the northwest Atlantic also has issues: the coastal zone population explosion, deep-water coral protection, sea bed mining, oil and gas development. Indeed, for anyone interested in living with the ocean, even just as an observer from the deck of the house, this book exposes issues that may become visible over the coming decade to more than just keen scientific observers.
I look forward to the changes in the next book a decade hence, a decade which will, one hopes, turn the corner on marine degradation, and begin to show the benefits of the remarkable scientific advances outlined in this publication.