ABSTRACT
This book, the first publication of innovative new methods to reverse the major threats now destroying our ocean planet’s biodiversity and productivity, offers a ray of hope in an increasingly gloomy crisis� Here you will find new methods to greatly increase the settlement, growth, survival, and resistance to stress of marine ecosystems, fisheries, and eroding shorelines; to maintain biodiversity and productivity where it would be lost; to rapidly restore them in devastated places where there has been no natural recovery; and to create new methods for sustainable and biodiverse mariculture� If these proven technologies were applied on the scale that was needed, our major marine resource problems now spiraling downward could be reversed for a better future�
Reversing these negative trends is the critical issue for this century if we are to maintain and nurture our renewable marine resources� The accelerating crisis in the oceans is now widely known: impending mass extinction of coral-reef ecosystems from global warming and pollution; the crash of one fishery after another from overharvesting; disappearing species; the conversion of oceans from sinks of CO2 to sources; the impending billion or so people who will be flooded from coastal homes to become global sea-level-rise refugees, with whole nations disappearing beneath the waves; and more�
Reversing these looming catastrophes cannot be solved by the conventional solution to all marine management problems: marine-protected areas (MPAs) that exclude fishermen� The widely touted claims that these ecosystems are “resilient” and “will bounce back all by themselves,” thanks
CONTENTS
Crisis of the Oceans Can Be Reversed Only through Large-Scale Restoration ��������������������������������5 Louisiana: A Tragic History of Missed Opportunities ����������������������������������������������������������������������7 Synopsis of Chapters ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������9 Conclusions �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 10 References ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 10
to the sagacity of their managers, is in fact almost never observed in practice because most MPAs are intrinsically incapable of reversing the root causes of the major threats that are laying waste our habitats� Every coral reef MPA is full of dead or dying corals that no local management can prevent� But so strong is the lobby of governments, funding agencies, and big international nongovernmental organizations (BINGOs) for MPAs that their failure cannot be admitted� Active restoration solutions are rejected out of hand, because to admit their need would be an admission that money has been wasted and that existing policies are futile and will fail even more in the future as global warming, sea-level rise, and pollution escalate�
These man-made threats are based in our unwise overexploitation and disruption of the natural mechanisms that regulate our atmosphere, ecosystems, soils, water, and climate� While it is a wonderfully praiseworthy task to protect the few healthy marine ecosystems that still survive, if they cannot be protected from the real causes of mass mortality, they will die anyway, perhaps only a little later� And if we don’t restore the vast majority of the ecosystems that we have already destroyed or severely damaged, where will future fisheries come from? We are often told that restoration is pointless, because we can’t possibly restore it all� We answer that “we certainly can’t restore it all, but if we don’t restore all that we can, what else will we leave for future generations?”
