Blue in green: It's time to put greens in their place

Economist.com 10 Dec 07;

EVERY day the world we live in seems to get a little greener. There are green politics, green economics, green living and, well, Green.view. The colour is used as a synonym for environmentalism.

This is bad. Whilst chlorophyll is, without doubt, hugely significant to life on this planet, the anthropocentric, terrestrialist view of the world that dubs those that care as "green" needs to be challenged.

Simply because those who would save the planet have feet and not flippers, and breathe air rather than water, they've called themselves greens rather than blues. Yet Earth is mostly water. As any schoolchild can tell you, the planet is blue. When did you last hear of the Earth from space described as the "Green marble"? Never, that's when.

Such terrestrialism has had serious consequences. We've spent decades following a green agenda that has ignored some of the biggest environmental issues and most important places on the planet.

We've spent years listening to greens complaining about the loss of the rainforests, acid rain, and extinctions of mammals, birds and plants. All serious issues. But while we’ve been worrying about them, we have eaten 90% of the world’s large fish, destroyed much of the world’s coral and nurtured algal blooms the size of entire American states.

The trouble is that because people don't see what goes on in the water, they don't identify with it. Caring about green stuff, even green stuff on the other side of the planet, is a kind of planet-scale nimbyism.

Green stuff is in our back yard, and blue stuff is not. Green stuff is recognisable and feeds our drive to conserve. Given the choice, what conservation flagship species would you chose to cosy up to: the cuddly giant panda or the slimy giant squid?

This columnist would happily eat deep-fried panda nuggets if it would help draw attention to the absurd lack of focus on ocean conservation. Luckily she might not have to, because the agenda is starting to change anyway, thanks to technology that is allowing us to open up the black (or maybe very dark blue) box that is the ocean.

Overhead satellites, diving robotic probes, buoys, sonar mapping, floating and underwater observatories and tagged ocean animals (whose tags email scientists every day with an update as to where they've been and what they've been doing) allow scientists to see more of the oceans than ever before.

Today scientists are starting to map the planet's living marine highways, as well as the ocean's physical environment. As a result, a new, blue agenda on over-fishing, pollution and ocean warming is emerging. Really big issues are starting to swim into focus.

Concern about destructive fishing practices such as trawling and blast fishing is mounting. Trawling cuts the living material from the sea bottom, and reduces the future productivity of the ocean. It stirs up a lot of sediment: sediment plumes can now be seen on Google Earth.

Blast fishing involves blowing up reefs in order to harvest fish. When was the last time someone decided to harvest land animals by blowing up entire forests?

Increasingly, the blues are taking a leaf out of the green book, and campaigning for nature reserves to improve fish stocks and aid marine conservation. Last year, President Bush responded to such concerns by creating the world's largest ocean sanctuary around Hawaii, surpassing the Great Barrier Reef park in size.

Still, marine conservation is in its infancy. Terrestrial conservation has a massive head start: Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, was created in America in 1872. Less than 1% of the ocean is protected by marine parks. That compares with 12% of the land.

One way of getting blue issues on the agenda is to put more effort into finding out what is going on down there. To this end, a group calling itself the Partnership for Observation of Global Oceans (POGO), says it wants up to $3 billion to set up a proper global marine monitoring system which actually looks at what is going on under the ocean. Will it happen? Not if it is up to the Greens to decide.