The worlds’ oceans have changed dramatically in the 50+ years that marine ecologist Jeremy Jackson has been studying them. Overfishing, pollution, and climate change have converted once-thriving ecosystems like coral reefs and mangrove forests into slime-covered wastelands. But Dr. Jackson has shed his former nickname of ”Dr. Doom” and now focuses on the remarkable resilience of the oceans–if only humans can give them time and space to recover.
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JEREMY JACKSON (EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF OCEANOGRAPHY, SCRIPPS INSTITUTION OF OCEANOGRAPHY; RESEARCH PALEOBIOLOGIST, AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY): Good evening, everybody. I want to do something slightly different tonight. I want to talk about how the oceans have changed in the 55 to 60 years that I’ve been looking at the oceans as a scientist, and it’s a kind of a personal story, a metamorphosis from being a young kid who is excited by the mystery and beauty of the ocean and trying to understand how ecosystems worked, to watching those things start to change while I was still in my 30s and getting really angry and depressed about it. And working on coral reefs is not the most optimistic thing to be doing right now. And then sort of coming out of that and trying to get over the history and think about what are the prospects for the ocean in the future, what we can do about it, and not cry about the past but really try and move on. So that’s what I’m going to try to do today.
I began there in the summer of 1968, that shack on the beach. The Discovery Bay Marine Laboratory is where modern coral reef science began. And utterly transformational in terms of the understanding of how coral reefs work. And it was founded by a great guy named Tom Goreau and situated where it was because that was what you could see when you went diving immediately offshore.
That is something that nobody can see today. Those are reefs from five meters down to 25 meters, with 50, 60, 70, even 90 percent cover of live coral. And I’ll show you pictures of what they look like today, and it’s really very sad. I studied stuff that was exciting to maybe 12 people in the whole world. I was really interested in—well, given that the whole reef was covered by living coral, if one thing’s going to grow, something else has got to get smaller or die.
And so I spent about 15 years of my life studying the competitive interactions for space among corals and sponges and things called bryozoans, and it’s really baroque and it’s really complicated, and it was a lot of fun. Coral is overgrowing that sponge, very carefully not touching it, because if it touches, the sponge is toxic to the coral. But it eventually overgrows it and it wins.
And then these things in the bottom which are called bryozoans, think of them as species A, B and C. They’re like a game of rock, paper, scissors, because A beats B; B beats C; but C beats A. and the discovery of these things which we called competitive networks played a major role in the understanding of the maintenance of diversity on coral reefs, why competition doesn’t eliminate all but a few species.
And it wasn’t static, like in those pictures. So this is a world about this big, over one year, from June 1983 to May 1984, and it doesn’t matter what those organisms are, but you can see they‘ve moved around, some of them have been eaten, some have overgrown. Other things, some have poisoned their neighbors. It’s a very aggressive picture, and it was a hell of a lot of fun to study.
But then in the summer of 1980, we had a storm, Hurricane Alan, the second-strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Western Atlantic. The picture in the upper left was taken from my wife’s and my house, where we put up about 40 of the scientists at the lab. Looking down from a hill, those trees are about 70 or 80 feet high, and that wave in the center is a hell of a lot taller than those trees.
As a consequence of that storm, the next day the whole bay smelled of death. There were new islands that were formed of the carcasses, the skeletons of the corals, and in the bottom left you can see these things that were just rolled around like soccer balls or something. And if you look at the pictures on the right, on the left is before the storm and on the right is after the storm, and you can see the hurricane was much worse for branching corals that are more fragile than massive ones.
Well, we thought we were really smart. We’d been studying coral reefs for a long time. We thought we understood what was going on. And of course hurricanes are a natural phenomenon. They’ve been happening for billions of years on the earth. And so we wrote this paper that was published in Science about all the damage caused by the storm, and then we confidently predicted how the coral reefs would recover from it, because after all, they had always recovered for millions of years. But we got it all wrong, because the coral reefs didn’t recover.
And so what that did, that was like the light bulb going off, the epiphany of realizing that the reason the corals weren’t recovering was because of all these things that people had been doing that were impacting the oceans, that had been slowly accumulating. And so when a natural disturbance happened, rather than having the natural succession of replacement and the rebuilding of the coral reefs, it just went downhill really bad.
Now, one of the reasons that happened was because of overfishing. These are amazing photographs. I actually grew up in Miami for a while, and in the 1950s, people would go out for one afternoon in a day boat in Key West and come back, and they would put the biggest fish they caught on that board. Well, this woman, Lauren McClennahan, who was my student, she discovered the 70-year record of daily photographs, and she analyzed them. So in the 1950s you couldn’t win a prize if your fish didn’t weigh 200 or 250 pounds. By the 1970s, you don’t see any of those really big fish, but it still looks really cool. And then by 2007, a couple years before the paper was written, you’ve got minnows.
And the irony is that people were paying more in 1950 dollars to catch minnows than they were paying in the past to catch these gigantic fish, and they had no idea of how it’s changed. It’s what we call shifting baselines, that everybody thinks the way the world is when they’re 15 years old is natural. And everything that happens afterwards is unnatural, which is why I’m more depressing than the young people in this room.
But since we all know that kids never listen to their parents, they make the same damn mistakes. And they think that natural is the way it was when they were 15 years old. And so generation by generation, we really screw up nature because we have no inkling of the way things were before.
Now, that’s just on coral reefs in Key West, but try the entire Atlantic Ocean. So what you have here is a reconstructed history of fish abundance, from 1900 to 2000. Red is really good. Pale blue is really bad. Let’s see if I can do this without turning it off again. No, I can’t see it.
Two world wars were fought about the cod in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. I mean, the British beat the French twice. They gave it back once and they kept it the second time, because cod was the second most valuable commodity in the world after sugar, for over 100 years. And look at it now. And yet, fishers still talk about how there’s a lot of fish out there and we don’t need to be regulated, but I think the picture makes it pretty clear they’re wrong.
There are dead zones forming in the coastal ocean, and they’re really, really spooky. So every one of those red dots is something called a dead zone. So what’s a dead zone? We’ve got all this fertilizer coming down into the ocean and rivers because of modern agriculture, which uses way too much fertilizer, totally unnecessary. And so all this nitrogen and phosphorus comes into the coastal zones, and in a lot of developing countries or in New York City until not that long ago, the poop just went right into the river.
And as a consequence of all that, you get—you know if you put fertilizer on a lawn, if you have a lawn, the grass grows better. Well, if you put all that nitrogen and phosphorus into the coastal ocean, the phytoplankton and the seaweed grow better. And it grows so much better, and so fast, that the things that eat them can’t keep up.
So they do a very unnatural thing: they die of old age. And then they sink to the bottom and then the bacteria find them and they start to break them down. In other words, they rot. But as a consequence of rotting, the bacteria used up all the oxygen, and before you know it, there’s no oxygen or very little oxygen in the deep water. And as a consequence, anything that can’t swim away is dead.
And when I started giving these charming, optimistic talks, there were about 250 dead zones. There are now close to 600 dead zones. And if you look where they are, it’s pretty clear that modern capitalistic industrial economies are the driving force, because the entire East and Gulf Coast of the United States, Western Europe, Japan, Brazil is getting there—and it’s just happening and happening and happening. Everywhere. And it’s bad news.
There’s also this phenomenon of diseases that are starting to appear. Now, in that picture on the left, I took that picture about—in, my God, in 1981 or 1982, and there were still these abundant black sea urchins, which we really didn’t like very much because the spines hurt like hell if you got them. And you can see there are like 15 of them in that picture, and you cannot see any seaweed, because those sea urchins are grazing on the seaweed.
And then in 2003, actually while my wife and I were back here in New York to get married, the epidemic disease hit in Jamaica and all the sea urchins died. Just died. In one year, it moved around the entire Caribbean, and trillions—who knows how many sea urchins—died. And that was really bad in terms of explosions of algae.
And then what you see on the bottom, I mean, the colors are really beautiful, but that’s death. That’s black band disease on the left and yellow band disease on the right. And what those are, are corals that are dying of these diseases we barely understand. And there were diseases before, but all of a sudden this is happening all over. In St. Croix, most of the corals are sick from disease, and it seems to get worse.
And then the last in this litany of charming stuff is coral bleaching. Because as the oceans are getting warmer, all they have to do is get a little bit warmer, like say two degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the normal maximum. And if they stay that way for a month or so, corals start to bleach. Now, what does that mean?
A coral is a symbiosis between the coral animal that you see, all those tiny polyps, the colonies that make the coral, and algae. Actually they’re dinoflaggelates that live symbiotically within the tissue of the coral. And it’s a bargain. The corals provide nutrients for the plants, like fertilizer for those algae, and provides protection from predators; and the algae feed junk food to the corals.
They photosynthesize, they make sugar. And most of the sugar they make goes to the coral. The corals can’t live without it, which is really bad, because if it gets a little bit too hot, the algae can’t make the sugar and give it to the corals. And the corals then say, you didn’t pay the rent. And so they kick them out, and that’s coral bleaching, because they look white, because the color from the symbiants is gone.
And if it doesn’t cool off and if there isn’t the opportunity for algae to re-colonize the corals, they’re dead. And you may have heard about the great bleaching on the north coast of Australia a year and a half ago. It was pretty awful. So as a result, my Caribbean reefs that used to look like that picture in the upper left, or in Florida, the upper right, now look like this. And so you’ve gone from 50, 70 percent live coral to 80, 90 percent live seaweed and slime.
And I wrote a paper about this which I called “The Rise of Slime,” because basically the history of people in relation to the oceans was, there used to be a lot of big animals. Well, we got them. We ate ‘em. And there used to be a lot of three-dimensional structures: coral reefs, mangrove forests, sea grass beds, kelp forests, things like that. Well, they’ve sort of disappeared, and what’s replacing them? Jellyfish and bacteria. It’s like we’re reversing half a billion years of evolution, going back to the beginning of the Cambrian, and we’ve done it in 100 years. Aren’t people amazing.
Okay. I spent about 13, 14 years before I gave this talk, going around talking about this stuff. So I gave this TED Talk and they called me Dr. Doom. It was all over after that. Okay. But the problem is, it doesn’t do a lot of good to just dwell on what was. And so the question is—and this is something a lot of us “old” people are really struggling with. I mean, there are still young people who go out and dive on a coral reef and there’s a little bit of living coral and there’s some beautiful sponges, and say, oh, my God, it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw. And the little gobies that are this big are really brightly colored, and they say wow, look at that. Old copies of Skin Diver magazine had vistas of coral reefs as far as the light would allow you to take the picture. Now they’re all close-ups of little tiny things in places with bright colors, because you couldn’t take those pictures anymore.
So at any rate, I guess what I want to emphasize is it’s not all bad news. And this cartoon, which is from a paper actually that a bunch of us wrote, it was called, “Are U.S. Coral Reefs On a Slippery Slope to Slime?” And the answer of course was yes. And then the question was, what can we do about it? And so we talked about the things that were more tractable or not.
But it really is sort of a model of the way the ocean has changed. You’ve got all that nice stuff and clear water on the left, and you’ve got this mess on the right. And so can we get out of the right? Can we go to the left? I’d like to think we could really go to the left, but that’s another story. Okay.
Okay, so the poster child of extraordinary success is this little place called Cabo Pulmo in the southern tip of Baja, California. A little village of people who have been fishing for hundreds of years. And there were basically no fish left, and they were all going to leave.
And then they said, why don’t we do something. Why don’t we stop fishing. And so they stopped fishing—and how they survived I’m not entirely sure; maybe they got a grant, I don’t know. But they stopped fishing, and if anybody came in and tried to fish, well, let’s say their boats went under water and people didn’t come back.
And in 10 years—in 10 years, there was a 500 percent increase in the abundance of fish. I’m going to show you pictures in a second. It is gorgeous. And the income, the average income, and that includes kids, went up to $18,000 a year, because people like some of you in this room were willing to pay a ton of money to go dive in this place that looked the way it should have looked like, but almost no place looks like that anymore.
And here, you can see it in the pictures. So that’s the very arid climate of Southern Baja, California. The upper right, those are schools of sharks that are longer than I am tall. That may spook you, but that is a sign of health in the ocean. That is like an A-plus sign of a healthy ecosystem. That’s not a staged photograph. That’s not in an aquarium. That lower left photograph is the abundance of the fishes at Cabo Pulmo.
And you know, I work on corals, and for a long time people argued about whether or not corals could make it in the Gulf of California; it was too cold. Well, maybe it was because it was screwed up, because the corals are doing really well in Cabo Pulmo where the fish are protected. Okay.
Sharks are worth a hell of a lot more alive than dead. Palau is a tiny little country with some of the most beautiful seascapes in the world, and dive tourism is almost 40 percent of the gross domestic product of that country. So they did a study, and some Australians came in and helped them with it, and they figured out that economically, in terms of people who came to Palau to do nothing but to dive with sharks—which is a questionable desire, but there are people who like to do it—and it turned out that a shark was worth $1.9 million in its lifetime in terms of what people were willing to pay for the thrill of diving with them. A dead shark was worth $108 for the fins and the meat. That’s a more than 17,000-fold difference.
Well, this has really caught on. Northern Australia has a $25 million-a-year business, which is exploding, to go dive with sharks on the Great Barrier Reef. Fiji is in on it, Malaysia. And in the United States, people are now wanting to go diving with sharks. Although we’ve done a really good job of pretty much eliminating them in U.S. waters.
We are among the worst of all the American countries. Our track record is like an F-minus in terms of coral reef conservation. Jamaica is doing better, and they’re poor and they’re hungry. Anyway…and that’s sort of like whales, right? People pay a lot of money to be in a boat and to be as far as I am from you who is nodding, from a gigantic whale. It’s a thrill. It’s really cool. And it’s a basis of economy.
The sea urchins are coming back. We don’t fully understand why, but my wife wrote this great paper about something called the Allee effect, which is, these kinds of animals don’t copulate. They just throw out their sperm and they throw out their eggs, and if they meet, then they make a baby, and they have a chance, a one-in-a-million chance of growing into a sea urchin.
So if there’s one sea urchin over here, Mary, and there’s another one, John, over there, the chances of their egg and sperm actually ever getting together are almost zero. And so you have to get over this hill, this critical density, and it seems like that’s happening.
So look at the picture on the left, 1999. What you see is a forest of algae and one dead Acropora palmata, Elkhorn coral. Two years later, the algae are completely gone. The sea urchins are all over the place, and little baby corals are growing and collecting everywhere. So it’s very cool, actually.
The other organisms that play a major role in getting rid of algae on seaweeds are parrot fish. This exquisite thing is a spotlight parrot fish, it’s like this. And you can hear them eating because they like to eat cement, and they come and they eat the algae on the cement and they go, crunch, crunch, crunch. And when they swim away, they poop sand. And so if you have a school of 50 of these fish, you see an almost simultaneous pooping of sand as they swim off in the distance.
But the point is, where you gotta love this parrot fish—and those aren’t even parrot fish above; those are trigger fish. But where you have a lot of parrot fish—that’s a picture in Curacao very recently—coral reefs look great. Where you gill net them and they’re the kind of stuff in the bottom, you have no coral. You have nothing but seaweed. Duh, right? Okay.
Now, this is an amazing story. This guy named Nick Graham, diving in the central Pacific—you know, these are good jobs we’ve got. You get to do stuff like that. And he was working in the central Pacific and he realized that when he went to islands that were infested by rats, there were no seabirds and the coral reefs looked awful and there were very few fish.
But when he went to islands that had no rats, either because they got rid of them or they just never got there, there were tons of birds. And of course the birds feed all over in the ocean. They come back, they poop, and some of that goes into the water and it gives nutrients, and there’s much higher productivity.
These connections are amazing. Who would have thought that coral reef health depended on whether or not an island was rat-infested? These are the kinds of complex interactions we’re discovering. But we can fix it. They’re getting rid of the goats in the Galapagos; we can get rid of rats. New York can’t, but on an island, you can. Okay.
This is an example that my wife gave me. So, Tampa Bay is a place that for some reason I’ve never understood, people like to go. And it’s the largest embayment in Florida. It’s gigantic. And it used to be covered all along the shores by this sea grass you see in the upper left.
But they didn’t do a lot about their sewage, and as the population grew from 100,000 to half a million to a million to 2 million, and the bay got loaded with nitrogen, and I already told you about dead zones, the sea grass died. And in the upper right you see the algal slime that replaced it, and it stank. And that was really not good for property values and all the rest. And actually, that stuff is sort of toxic and not good for your health at all.
So they decided to do something. And this podium is in the way, but in the 1980s when there was practically no sea grass left, they got their act together. And the town and the counties and everything cleaned up sewage treatment and they did everything they were supposed to do. And there is now as much sea grass in Tampa Bay as there was in 1950, before the problem began. We can do this in New York Harbor.
Okay. This is an amazing thing—I’m almost done—this is an amazing thing that’s happening which I never thought could happen. You know, most of the oceans is what we call the “high seas.” The high seas are the area of the ocean which are beyond national jurisdiction.
So we have an exclusive economic zone, an EEZ, which goes out 200 miles from our coast. The United States has the largest exclusive economic zone of any country in the world, because all those islands that we took when we defeated Japan, we forgot to give them back. And so we can draw 200-mile-out circles around little postage stamps in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and it belongs to us.
Okay, so, but people fish the high seas, and there’s a lot of concern about extinction of very vulnerable species and whatever. And when you talk to the people who do it, it’s just like the corn farmers in Iowa. They tell you, we’re doing it to feed the hungry hordes, right? It’s for world food security.
Well, that turns out to be a really big lie. So the key is, black indicates species that only are on the high seas. Dark blue is species that are both on the high seas and in the exclusive economic zones. And then the lighter blue-gray is, species are only in the exclusive economic zones.
You can see in terms of [attacks] of less than 2 percent only occur on the high seas. In terms of the catch weight, less than a tenth of a percent occurs on the high seas. And in terms of dollar value, the difference is even greater. And what you can see is most of the value, more than three-quarters of the value—well, a little less than three-quarters of the value is for the species that occur in both.
So people started to say, what if we just banned fishing on the high seas? Then most of the ocean would be a marine-protected area. It would allow those species that occur both on the high seas and in the coastal zone to prosper and become more abundant, and then we’d have more fish to catch in the coastal zone. What an idea. And the high seas’ catch is about 2 percent of global seafood production, which should increase greatly if we stop fishing the high seas.
The only reason we aren’t doing this is because there are half a dozen countries in the world that can afford to fish out there. They subsidize the fisheries. But I think the train has left the station and this is going to happen. And it’s going to be incredibly good news.
Okay, the last point I want to make, and I think fundamentally it’s the most important thing, and especially like this wonderful audience of you all here, you’re here I think because you care about science and you care about the environment. There is a quiet revolution happening in terms of the public understanding of the extraordinary beauty and complexity and just phenomenal aspects of ocean life.
For me, the critical contribution was Carl Safina’s great book, The Eye of the Albatross. This one albatross that he called Amelia, and he anthropomorphized Amelia. Had a transmitter in her.
And so what Carl described is Amelia takes off. She goes up to the Aleutian Islands—this is from the Hawaiian Islands—she flies up to the Aleutian Islands, hangs out, goes down into the east central Pacific catching squid or whatever. It’s all in her gut. She comes back, she regurgitates all that stuff into her chick, and 15 minutes later, she takes off again. This amazing bird, which flies the entire northern Pacific, and it’s just a quite remarkable story. And I think people read that book and they never think about an albatross the same way again.
And what’s happening, what this on the right is—well, the pioneer in all this is this rockstar woman named Barbara Block, who is the person with the hypodermic sticking a transmitter into a bluefin tuna. Barbara is the queen of bluefin tuna ecology. And this is a result of her and colleagues’ work over more than 10 years.
What that is showing, the different colors are different kinds of fish or sea turtles or whatever. The sort of light blue-gray that goes from Northern California to Japan, that’s bluefin tuna. So those tunas decide, I’m tired of California and they swim to Japan. They just go. And then they come back.
And so what you see are these records of all these different kinds of organisms, and you can see different species are very different. Some hang out very close to shore; some move around. You can go on her website; she has something called the White Shark Café. It’s a place 500 miles off of Monterey, California, where she lives and works.
You can go on that site and you can see what George the Shark has been doing for the last five years. Or I strongly encourage you to do this, it’s absolutely—or you can see Terry the Tuna who does trans Pacific—goes back and forth and back and forth. But this has a great scientific significance. If we close the high seas, you can see there’s a huge hole in the middle of the Pacific that would be safe for these things to build up their populations.
But it’s more than that. It’s the beginning—and you know, people love octopuses now. I feel guilty, I don’t eat octopus anymore. I think it’s really delicious. But you know the story about the octopus that is in an aquarium and there’s a bunch of fish in another aquarium—this is a true story. So the octopus at night climbs out of the aquarium, puts the top back on the aquarium. Crawls across the floor. Goes up to the other aquarium, catches a fish, eats the fish. Puts the top back on the aquarium and goes all the way back.
Now, that animal—I mean, hey, my kids couldn’t do something that smart. And when you realize this stuff, it’s really deep. It’s really important. You develop a kind of affection and an understanding of what we’re doing, and how important it is to do this.
And I would simply say that…I mean, I haven’t talked about climate change and whatever, but our health and our wellbeing is utterly dependent on the health and the wellbeing of the oceans. And if we don’t change these kinds of things I’ve been talking about, it’s going to be really bad for us.
So I want to close by saying there’s a whole lot of really good news. Oh, you like that, huh? Did you hear what the very stable genius said in England yesterday? He said, “There’s good and bad about climate change.” Well, okay. Maybe—yeah, okay. Maybe Mar-a-Lago will be under water. It will be under water, actually, very soon. Okay. Okay. But, it’s easy to poke fun and it’s easy to say the government has to solve this for me, right? It’s the government’s job. We need more regulation. We need better laws. That ain’t gonna do it.
If everybody here in this room doesn’t change their habits, if you don’t stop consuming all the crap you consume, if we don’t abolish Walmarts—who needs, what, 90 percent of what’s in a Walmart? And that’s our whole balance of payments mess and all the rest of it.
We have to fundamentally change the way we live. We have to think about whether we should eat meat. We have to think about whether or not we should drive a gasoline car. You realize that if nobody bought a new gasoline car after today—they kept their cars as long as they want, but the next car they bought was an electric car—something like 40 percent of our total emissions would disappear. Okay? And it’s a very simple thing to do.
So please go away thinking about, there’s all this bad news, there’s this good news. But it’s really, really up to you. There’s no easy way out of this. We need to undergo a profound cultural change to get there. And so that’s it. And if you want to know more about this stuff, read this great book I wrote with Steve Chapple. We could really use your support. Thank you very much.
Moderator: Thank you so much for that amazing talk. We’re going to take a few questions from the audience.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: I also don’t eat octopus anymore, ever since I read The Soul of an Octopus. I’m sure—
JACKSON: Yeah, I think there are other books about—I don’t understand the popularity of that book, but it obviously had an effect on you, right?
AUDIENCE QUESTION: It did. It did. I was wondering, do you also recommend we stop eating fish? You were just talking about that at the end. What is your viewpoint on what kinds of fish, all fish—what can really make an impact?
JACKSON: First of all, at least half a billion people in the world depend on fish for their major source of animal protein. And they don’t have the designer vegetarian opportunities we have in New York. So it’s just a nonstarter, that the world is going to stop eating fish.
And I believe—for example, the salmon industry in Alaska: those fishermen are really trying hard to make their fisheries sustainable. They self-regulate, and I eat their product. Because they are stewards of their resource and they have a respect for it. It is my business, so I know who the good guys and the bad guys are. But if you eat low on the food chain…
Now, I know most people like flounder and tuna and whatever. Don’t eat tuna. I mean, you really shouldn’t eat tuna. You can eat all the sardines and anchovies you want. Now, I personally love sardines and anchovies and mackerel. They’re low on the food chain. But I think for me personally and philosophically, the right answer is that we should be able to eat fish if we’re not ethically opposed to that. But we should be doing it only in a responsible way.
I think one of the ways out is aquaculture, and the United States has lagged really far behind on that. If you go to a rice paddy in Vietnam or China, you’ll see that when they harvest the rice, they take out one or two tons of fish that have been growing there while the rice is. They throw 50 of them in a bucket, they replant the rice. They throw the 50 back in, and they get all this protein. And shellfish aquaculture is very responsible.
So there’s an ethical issue and there’s a pragmatic, human wellbeing issue, and I think that latter argues for continuing to consume fish in a responsible way. But that’s my opinion, and other people are different.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: What about the plastics in the ocean? How is that affecting the—I know it’s a big question.
JACKSON: Thank you for bringing it up, because I didn’t go there. But it’s—and I used to think it wasn’t that big a problem until I realized how much of it is. What really scares me is the broken-up stuff, which is in all of us. And some of it’s not particularly good for us.
But what’s driving that? I mean, this is a really good example of behavioral change. You can buy a jar of peanut butter in a plastic jar or you can buy a jar of peanut butter in a glass jar. And so if you look at how much of the plastic that’s being produced, especially in wealthy countries like here, there’s no reason for like 85 percent of it or something. I just made that number up. But the bulk of it, we wouldn’t need to use. And then we could save the plastic for the really valuable things that it’s almost irreplaceable in modern civilization.
So we as consumers, we as citizens, could dramatically decrease plastic pollution by boycotting products that—I mean, why is it so difficult to open a pack of batteries? I mean, it’s stronger than Fort Knox. You have to get out scissors to open it. Why? They used to come in a little paper package or something, a little box. So that’s a big part of it.
It’s a huge problem. It’s getting worse and worse. I edit a journal, I do all the ocean biology editing for it, and we get countless manuscripts about this stuff. And some of them are really good. But it’s not going to go away only because somebody passes a law. It’s only going to go away of people stand up and say, I’m not going to buy your product. I think that’s really important.
The next person?
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you. If humans don’t change their ways, how long do you think that the ocean has?
JACKSON: Okay, well, I’ll give you the dark side of Jeremy Jackson. Sea level rise is almost certainly going to be six feet or more by 2100. The lower third of this island will be under water. Even Zillow, which is not the World Wildlife Fund, is estimating a trillion dollars in housing losses of things being under water. So my personal belief is the ocean is going to get us before we get it.
We’re going to do a lot of damage. We’re going to continue to do a lot of damage. As long as the amazing genius is in power, we will do even more damage. But the fact of the matter is that we’re living in a fool’s paradise. We have no idea what is about to hit us. And even the little economic blip, recession, seven or eight years ago, and fossil fuel consumption went down 10 percent. I mean, we are very vulnerable.
And so of course I worry about it. I worry about too many people. I worry about all of this stuff. I try to be optimistic and give talks like this. But I do really believe that we are about to be hammered, and that that might almost be a good thing, because getting smart about our natural environment and being smart about ourselves I think are integrally related to each other.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hi. Thank you for the talk, it’s great. I’ve read a little bit about where they’re trying to re-grow coral outside of the ocean and then implant it to kind of spark re-growth. Do you see any hope there, or is that a viable option without—
JACKSON: Yeah, a lot, and in fact my wife was just on a big National Academy committee looking at reef restoration. And something that started out as sort of very well-meaning people sort of at a playing-with-toys level has turned into something real.
The problem with it is that if we don’t fix the environmental problem that killed the corals in the first place, what are we gonna do? We’re gonna breed these corals and then we’re going to put them back out there to die. So Florida is obviously a very bad place for corals right now, because of all the incredible harmful stuff that Florida does to its ocean environment.
But if we could clean that up a little bit, we could jumpstart. And there are some very serious scientists working, doing genetic analysis, thinking about being able to breed more resistant corals to higher temperature. We know corals flourished when the earth was a lot warmer than it is today. But it didn’t happen in 100 years. And so the genetic engineering approach would be to say, since we don’t have 10,000 years for them to adapt, could we speed it up. That’s now serious science, and I think all of us have a lot of hope that it can do something.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thanks for the talk. It was brilliant. Excellent way to end the year for all of us who have been here the entire year. And incredibly topical. I had a question about bio\-mimicry. If you’re aware of any efforts that have been made that are helping areas by humans utilizing what they know about bio-mimicry and using it to recover and return to…I don’t know what the original stasis was for some of the areas.
For example, here in New York I know that there’s something going on with—what was it, barnacles? I don’t know, maybe somebody knows. Was it Oysters?
JACKSON: Oysters, yeah.
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
I don’t know my shellfish.
JACKSON: I don’t know what that has to do with bio-mimicry, but I’ll tell you that the Billion Oyster Project is a really, really cool thing. And so think about this. You have an oyster reef. It pumps the equivalent of all the water above it every 24 hours. It is a Millipore filter. It is a natural cleaning phenomenon. We ate the oysters, they’re really delicious. But as a consequence, we get the pollution that New York Harbor had and Chesapeake Bay.
I’m not answering your question because I didn’t fully understand it. And I apologize for that. But the example you gave of the oysters is an amazing thing, which is happening here in New York. Because it’s also associated with a school and a lot of education about the oceans. And it is a major—the oyster reefs used to protect the coast.
We allowed people to fill in the marshland. The financial district is built on swamp, okay, and it used to be protected by oyster reefs, but we ate the oysters. So now we’re talking about going back to 1800 and allowing marshes to develop and to allow these oyster reefs to develop because it provides some degree of protection.
Where is that last question? Okay.
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
I’ve got actually two questions.
JACKSON: Aw, you’re cheating. You’re keeping me from my Manhattan, but that’s okay.
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
The first one was, you had mentioned that corals expel the algae and they get re-colonized by another one. I wanted to know if that leads to re-colonization from algae that are better suited for the temperature.
The second question was basically—
JACKSON: Let me answer the first one. Actually, where Nancy and I used to work—in fact, she was one of the people who played a major role in this—it has been discovered that there are different strains of these algae, and some of them are more and less resilient to higher temperatures. And that discovery is actually the basis of the answer about that question about thinking about trying to do some genetic manipulation or whatever, to select for these traits that would be more favorable.
What’s your second question?
AUDIENCE QUESTION: The second one was really based on Georgia’s bank, which of course the fishery there collapsed, I think it was in the ‘80s. And—
JACKSON: Oh, they really collapsed a long time ago, shifting baselines. Go on.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: But my question was, it seems to have never really recovered to the distribution of the species that it had before the overfishing. And how much is that going to be something that we should be concerned about with the rest of the ocean if—
JACKSON: Well, there are a lot of things going on. First of all, it used to be dominated by cod, but the water is getting a little warmer and cod like cold water. So even if we do all the protection we should do, fish will definitely come back, but it probably won’t be cod. Because you can’t go home again. The world changes in other ways. It’s not just the overfishing. So the climate change is a big part of that.
But then we also never really stopped fishing enough. If you look at all the liberal senators from Massachusetts, people I greatly admire, and you look at how they vote about fishing regulations, it’s all controlled by New Bedford, Massachusetts, and they vote the wrong way every time. There’s that power of local interest, local fishing industries, that have still to be sort of…be regulated. Thank you very much.
MODERATOR: That’s all the time we’ve got tonight. Please join me in thanking Dr. Jeremy Jackson. Thank you very much.
This SciCafe took place at the Museum on June 5, 2019.