Last week, the Department of Systems Ecology at Stockholm University played host to back-to-back seminars by Profs. Jeremy Jackson and Nancy Knowlton. This was a rare opportunity to listen to two of the absolute greats in the field of marine ecology and conservation and an experience that threw the audience between hopeless projections of gloom to real encouraging examples of marine ecosystems revival.
Jeremy Jackson's, of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, current work focuses on the future of the world’s oceans, given overfishing, habitat destruction and ocean warming, which have fundamentally changed marine ecosystems and led to "the rise of slime." His seminar, available here (and as a shorter TED talk) - The future of the ocean past - painted a bleak picture of how humans have thoroughly trashed the worlds oceans. But, although Jackson's work describes grim circumstances, even garnering him the nickname Dr. Doom, he believes that successful management and conservation strategies can renew the ocean’s health.
The hope that things can slowly be turned around toward a better future have caused Jackson and his wife Nancy Knowlton, current holder of the Sant Chair in Marine Science at the Smithsonian Institute, to begin hosting a series of one-day "success story" sessions at different conferences. Most recently, at the second International Marine Conservation Congress in Victoria they ran the session "Beyond the Obituaries: Success Stories in Marine Conservation" to highlight some of really encouraging examples of advances and successes in the field of marine conservation - including the return of apex predators in southern Californian waters and the successful restoration of oyster reefs in Chesapeake Bay. Kieran Mulvaney recently ran an excellent summary of this event at Discovery News.
However, according to Nancy Knowlton herself, the absolute highlight of the day was the tear-jerking performance of "Shallow Waters" by 10-yr old Ta'Kaiya Blaney at an evening film session. Ta'Kaiya is from the Sliammon First Nation and the song was written to raise awareness of the proposed 1,170 kilometer-long Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline project that would stretch from the Alberta Tar Sands to a marine terminal at Kitimat, resulting in an estimated 225 crude oil and condensate tankers a year traveling through the pristine waters of the Central and North Pacific.
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In the end, as written in the blurb of the new book "The Death & Life of Monterey Bay" by Steve Palumbi (also a participant in the "Beyond the Obituaries" session) what will revive the marine environment is human passion and the extraordinary acts of ordinary people, like Ta'Kaiya Blaney.
