Alanna Mitchell

Wonder and Wisdom

Alanna Mitchell hits readers with two remarkable facts in the opening pages of her book Sea Sick. First, although it is convenient to speak of Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, the global ocean is really a single interconnected system, and in sum makes up ninety-nine percent of the living space on the planet. Second, plankton produces half the oxygen that we breathe, or as Mitchell puts it, ‘every second breath we take’. In this light, human beings obviously have a vested interest in studying the wellbeing of the ocean, and in Sea Sick, Mitchell has provided a sustained look at what various scientists are uncovering in their research.

It turns out that there are many indications that global climate change and human activity generally are beginning to have a measurable effect on how the ocean works. Formerly the environmental reporter for the Globe and Mail, Mitchell explains how carbon dioxide is entering the ocean at an elevated rate, and the water is absorbing much of the heat generated by climate change. The results of the increase of carbon dioxide and heat in the water include changes to the acidity of the ocean, temperature and volume fluctuations, and perhaps actual alterations to the physical structure of currents. Much of the research into these phenomena is still tentative, but Mitchell aims to ‘read the vital signs’ by speaking with scientists who are pioneering this research on five separate continents.

The book is arranged with ten chapters, each one focusing on a different problem cropping up in a different part of the world, from Australia to Panama, Tanzania to China. Mitchell spent more than two and a half years conducting research for the book. One of the most interesting chapters is her examination of the ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico near New Orleans, a substantial volume of water in which oxygen is largely absent. According to Mitchell, who joined a group of American scientists on an expedition to examine the area, this particular ‘dead zone’ is caused by the disruption of the activity of phytoplankton, an occurrence brought on by the impact of chemical fertilizer run-off from the farms along the Mississippi River.

To date there have been four hundred seven dead zones recognized in the ocean. In each case, there is a disruption of the activity of the plankton. What is most interesting is that the cause of these zones is not always obvious. “The problem,” Mitchell says, “is that three of the four hundred seven dead zones that have been identified in the global ocean are caused not by point-source pollution, as they call it, not by something where A=B. They are caused instead by changes to the global climate that reproduce or mimic this same phenomenon.” The fear is that this suggests a fundamental change in how the ocean and the atmosphere interact. The implications are potentially severe. Indeed, there is the potential for these dead zones to spread exponentially.

Throughout the book, Mitchell emphasizes how the ocean contains ‘the switch of life’, and how without the maintenance of a certain balance, this switch may be turned off. She explains this thought by referencing the ‘Great Dying’, an event that occurred approximately two hundred fifty million years ago at the end of the Permian era. This period witnessed the largest mass extinction that the earth has ever known, triggered apparently by a lack of oxygen in the ocean. In conversation recently at her home in Toronto, Mitchell explained the significance of the ‘Great Dying’ to our own times in the following way: “Three things happened: the ocean got warm, it got acidic, and it lost oxygen across big swaths. Together those elements of the ocean seem to represent ‘the switch’. If those three things happen, the switch of life turns off, and it’s clear that those three things are happening now.”

Much of the evidence that Mitchell presents indicates that human activity is driving the chemistry and biology of the sea to a point at which life in the ocean and on land may not continue in the fashion to which we are accustomed. It is extremely difficult to know what to make of such findings. It would be understandable if readers of Sea Sick wound up feeling genuinely helpless, but the significance of the subject matter demands careful thought. At the end of the book, Mitchell makes ‘a call for wisdom’. It is an interesting conclusion to a study that sounds a bell loudly, calling people to look closely at the vitality of the ocean. The following interview provides an entry point to the complicated issues involved.

CI: Although Sea Sick presents a wide range of scientific findings drawn from your conversations with scientists around the globe, the starting point is a bit prior to that, and I think it is a certain sense of wonder at what is involved. You mention in the book that, as you were completing your last book [Dancing at the Dead Sea], you started to get this interest in the oceans. How specifically did that fascination with the oceans take hold?

AM: I think it came from hubris, because I think I thought I understood! When I was writing my first book, which is about how humans are altering the landscape and species and the climate, I thought I understood how it all worked. I wrote a whole book talking about it, and I had written for years for a newspaper, and got to the very end of it and realized that I really knew nothing about how the whole global system worked! It just drove me to try to understand it, and as I began to try to understand it, I just became filled with awe at how the whole thing works. There is a tremendous amount of it that I don’t understand. Scientists are still beginning to think of which questions to ask. But I just needed to understand it.

CI: Throughout the book there is the recurring idea that the ocean contains the ‘switch of life’, and as you track the vital signs of the global ocean, you start to uncover how this switch might be turned off. How do you explain this in simple terms, the idea of a ‘switch’ in the ocean?

AM: That was one of the great challenges of the book. The way I began to think of it was by looking at the Permian extinction, which was the ‘Great Dying’ two hundred fifty million years ago. Scientists have been able to reconstruct part of what happened then, and it seems as though the ocean was involved in that extinction. Three things happened: the ocean got warm, it got acidic, and it lost oxygen across big swaths. Together those elements of the ocean seem to represent the ‘switch’. If those three things happen, the switch of life turns off, and it’s clear that those three things are happening now. Whether they’ve gone far enough for the switch to actually be flipped is a whole other question.

CI: In the prologue to the book, you mention that the fourth Global Conference on Oceans, Coasts and Islands held in Hanoi in April 2008 was the first major international scientific conference to bill itself as being about the connection between the climate and the ocean. You comment also that, as you met with scientists working on different projects, you were shocked to find that each group was actually surprised at what you had been finding out in your discussions with other scientists. Has this situation changed at all? Is there some awareness of the larger picture in the research community?

AM: Yes. That has changed to some degree. There have been two really interesting declarations in the last year. One was the Monaco Declaration, which happened earlier this year, 2009, in Monaco. It was a gathering of marine scientists who, for the first time, put together a statement about the dangers of ocean acidification, and said ‘look, we are together on this: there is a critical problem here with the potential for extinction because the oceans are becoming more acidic from carbon dioxide gas in the air.’ So they did a declaration. There was another one, the Manado Declaration, which came in a more political form just a couple months ago, where politicians and marine scientists got together and said ‘you know, we really think you ought to think about taking into consideration the ocean when you talk about carbon dioxide emissions.’ This was really aimed at the Copenhagen talks in December [the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen].

CI: In the second chapter (called ‘Reading the Vital Signs: Oxygen’), when you’re on a ship in the Gulf of Mexico near New Orleans where the Mississippi River empties out, you describe this ‘dead zone’ in the water. In that area there is what you refer to as a ‘blob’, a layer of water that is short on oxygen and, as you put it, ‘settled thickly on 17,000 square kilometres of the Gulf’s sea floor and in places rising nearly to the surface in an unmixable mass.’ The sheer size of this thing sort of surprised me when I read about it, and to hear that there are more than four hundred of these zones worldwide is alarming. What are the primary causes of these low-oxygen zones? What do scientists feel that the implications of these zones will be if they continue to expand?

AM: The zones are caused by phytoplankton in the ocean going crazy for various reasons. There are different triggers for that. The Gulf of Mexico blob, or dead zone, is caused by synthetic chemical fertilizers that farmers up and down the Mississippi use to fertilize their crops. They’re trying to make their plants grow on land, but some of these fertilizers sweep off the land and flow down the Mississippi, and go off into the mouth of the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico. But it is still plant food, and it’s like super-food for plants. These little tiny microscopic plants that live on the surface of the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico go crazy on this food, and reproduce like nuts, way ahead of any of the things that could eat them up. They die, fall to the bottom of the seabed, and there the second part of this process takes over, which is that the bacteria decompose all of these dead phytoplankton. As they decompose them, the bacteria have their own feast, and as they do that they use up the dissolved oxygen in the water from the seabed up, and across. What starts as one little spot on the seabed of a low or no-oxygen zone spreads into this huge 17,000 square kilometre blob. Now, 17,000 square kilometres only represents the area, not the volume. Nobody has ever measured the volume. In some places, as I said, it was right up to the surface. It is unmixable except by hurricanes, strangely enough.

There are phenomena like that, four hundred seven that we know about, in the global ocean. Not all of them are that big. Most of them are smaller than that, but they are caused by some form of that same phenomenon. Something makes the phytoplankton go crazy. If the dead zones were only caused by chemicals, point-source chemicals that we know about – so we know that this is caused by this phenomenon upstream - conceptually we could stop the phenomenon upstream and stop the dead zone. Whether the life would come back to the dead zone is a whole other question, but just in terms of stopping the phenomenon, we could do that.

The problem is that three of the four hundred seven dead zones that have been identified in the global ocean are caused not by point-source pollution, as they call it, not by something where A=B. They are caused instead by changes to the global climate that reproduce or mimic this same phenomenon. Something changes in the temperature of the water, in the current structure, to feed these plankton so that they go crazy, fall to the bottom, and again there is this huge dead zone. Now we know of three massive current systems, one off the coast of Oregon, which have been caused just by climate change. It is not simple point-source pollution anymore. This is fundamental change in the system of the ocean and the atmosphere and how they interact. The implications of that are immense because it means that these types of dead zones could spread exponentially. They could spread slowly. They could spread not at all. It is a complete unknown, and that’s what makes it so terrifying.

CI: You state that this particular dead zone (in the Gulf of Mexico) is the second largest in the world and one of the most highly studied, basically because the Gulf of Mexico is a very rich fishing area with nearly $1B worth of fish and shellfish caught there each year. Some of the funding for research has come from the U.S. government to identify what impact this dead zone might have on the fishery. Did you find that a lot of the research was being funded primarily for economic reasons like that, or is there more and more funding being made available to researchers strictly for environmental investigations?

AM: There is less and less funding being given for strictly environmental or scientific reasons. There is more and more for economic or military reasons. The history of scientific inquiry in the ocean has been founded on either military intelligence or on the issue that the fishery stays vibrant. Those are the two phenomena. You would like to think that there is more research because of the risks that change in the ocean pose to life on the planet, but that’s just not happening.

CI: In connection with the fisheries, maybe the most interesting chapter for Canadians is the one where you examine what a few scientists down at Dalhousie University are doing on the issue. One of the scientists, Boris Worm, published a paper in 2006 called ‘Impacts of biodiversity loss on ocean ecosystem services’ in which he suggested that there could be a total collapse of commercial fisheries by 2048. In that chapter called ‘Life Force’, you take the time to give a bit of historical sweep to the story of overfishing, and the largest impact has been in the last fifty years. Why did you take the time to show the centuries-long development of overfishing? My guess is that you wanted to be able to show that some of these deadlines, like 2048, do not seem as sudden when you take it in that long perspective, that there may in fact be an end point where we have gone too far with our fishing practices.

AM: That’s partly it. It’s partly because I wanted to track the patterns of human behaviour. I wanted to find out, psychologically, why do we do this? What is it telling us about how we function? What we have got is a series of extinctions that we have caused, and extirpations that we have caused, in fisheries over time, for thousands of years. It’s the same pattern of exploitation. We have taken the same mentality that we had two thousand years ago, except we are applying it now on a much larger scale with much better equipment, to not only the inshore fishery but also the open-ocean fishery. The final frontier is lower down in the ocean. We are fishing further out from shore and further down, and this is a pattern that humans have conducted over time. The problem is that, at some point, there is an end.

There is a final insult that is too much to the system. We discovered that with the cod. We’re discovering it to some degree probably with salmon in the Pacific. There are points at which there are limits: if you push a species or a life form past a limit, it doesn’t bounce back the way you would expect. It’s another switch. I was trying to show that, and to some degree I was trying to put forward the 2048 date – which is very controversial. This is not a given. 2048 was just a footnote in his paper, and extremely controversial, but if you think about it in terms of two thousand years of exploitation, we’re almost at the end.

CI: This may be a funny question, but there are many points in the book where you refer to your surroundings in terms of aesthetic qualities. In the chapter on pH (called ‘Reading the Vital Signs: pH’), when you’re snorkeling at La Parguera Natural Reserve in Puerto Rico, you write about the ‘beauty and majesty’ of the coral, despite the fact that it has been damaged. Did you find that, in your discussions with scientists, they were equally willing to talk about aesthetic qualities, the ‘beauty and majesty’ of the phenomena that they were studying, or did they have to keep themselves more removed from what they were studying?

AM: The scientists that I interviewed for this book were absolutely caught up in the wonder of what they were studying. To a person, it was just this sense of awe at what is there. They were like little kids at Christmas! The image was so strong in my head. Under the tree, let’s see what’s there, let’s unwrap it, let’s see how it all fits together – just this sense that it’s four o’clock in the morning on Christmas morning, can we open it up, can we open it up? It drives them. Of course, if you’re studying something live, it’s a different phenomenon than if you’re studying something dead in a lab, but still there is a sense of exploration. These are our pioneers, the people that are making some of the final journeys in our world, and I think they’re conscious of it. They are driven by it.

CI: Throughout the book there is the medical analogy of reading the vital signs of the ocean, and the comparison of medical doctors with scientists, in this case scientists studying the ocean and trying to diagnose what the problems with it might be. Are there any limits to that comparison for you?

AM: Yes, absolutely! There are many limits. It’s very artificial, of course. It was just my way of understanding a very, very complex system, because you can look at our body as a whole system, a whole environment in itself, a whole universe in itself, and it’s very complex. There are lots of things that we don’t understand about how the human body works. We don’t understand why a woman goes into labour at the moment she does precisely. We don’t know what the triggers are, for example. There are many, many things that we don’t understand, so I think it’s a good parallel on that. But we know a lot more about the human body than we know about the global ocean, so it’s also very flawed.

I kept thinking about how we judge the health of something. … You can look at just one signal or one phenomena in the global ocean and say ‘well, that’s doing okay, or that’s not doing okay’, but there has not been a sense of having put all these things together to describe a condition. I thought to myself, if I go to the doctor, and they say to me that my cholesterol is too high or my blood pressure is too high, they give me a range of different sets of information that describe to me how my body is working. There is a general trend line that we can figure out from all those data points. I figured that there had to be some way of trying to collect those data points about the global ocean that would probably point in different directions, but would give me an overall picture of what was happening in the ocean. It wasn’t until late in the process of writing the book that I realized that that was what I’d been doing. I’d been trying to think about what is happening with temperature, what is happening with pH, what is happening with dissolved oxygen, what is happening with its ability to reproduce, what is happening with its future ability to reproduce, what did it look like the last time it was sick like this, how did it heal last time? So, it struck me as a good-enough analogy.

CI: One surprising statistic that you note, just to get back to fisheries for a moment – and I saw a bit of an intersection here with a book like Jeff Rubin’s Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller – is the statistic about how much energy is consumed by commercial fishing: 1.2% of the oil used around the globe every year, and government subsidies offset some of the cost of fuel. What did you find as far as the engagement of governments on the issue of the ocean, or on the issue of fisheries? It would seem that a fairly simple fix would be to start slowly backing off the subsidies for fuel and maybe weaning people off some of the fish that are expensive to catch, and damaging environmentally to be overfishing. Did you have much time to look at policy? In Canada or the United States, for example, what is the current thinking?

AM: What you are talking about is logical and intelligent, and it is completely absent from the discourse around this issue in North America - and everywhere else I went! There has been very little, if any, discussion at any policy levels about any of the things you just talked about. It’s absent. Instead, we tend to focus on one little tiny shard of this big huge debate, which is ‘oh, these fishermen can’t make enough money this season to get through the winter’, which is just a tiny portion of this enormous global picture. We tend to see these issues not only in regional, but local, contexts. For what you described to happen, we would have to take a global view of what is happening to the ocean. We would have to be forward thinking. We would have to think about the energy consumption and production of a global fishery. We would have to think about long-term consequences. We are so far from that that we are not even talking at this point about the damage to the global ocean from the carbon dioxide emissions that are coming from the boats that are fishing out the seas. Even that connection has not been made. We are not making the connection between the carbon dioxide that we are producing as a civilization and how that is endangering life on the planet because it is acidifying the ocean. We haven’t even made those much more simple connections, much less the big holistic connections that you’re talking about.

CI: The reason that I ask is that it would seem that there is a possibility there for a renewed internationalism around the issue of the health of the ocean. Obviously it impacts everybody. It connects all nations and all peoples, and it would be nice to see Canadian politicians take the lead on trying to set something up, maybe an international body, or working toward an accord on what we are going to permit as far as the oceans are concerned.

AM: I’m with you all the way! It would be fantastic. This is exactly the kind of role that Canada could play, and should play, and that I think Canadians would approve of, but let me tell you the reality. The reality is that I was up in Ottawa in April speaking with a bunch of politicians, including our federal Minister of Fisheries and Oceans. I had a meeting with her for about fifteen minutes, and when I said the words ‘climate change’ to her, she shut down totally. … Based on that, I don’t think that there is an overall analysis, based on science, of what is happening. I could be wrong. Maybe she was having a bad day! But when I went later to talk to members of the department and give them a talk on this, they mentioned that this was new information for them.

CI: Interestingly, at the end of the book, you write that ‘the final vital sign of the global ocean is how the agent of destruction – us – will react’. I thought it was an effective way to situate human beings in these circumstances to recognize that it is our outlook and our way of thinking that is going to determine how all this goes. Is the most fundamental concern just the remoteness of the ocean to most people? It is hard to get people to think about how plankton generates half the oxygen that we breathe in. Is that the first challenge – getting people to understand the ocean?

AM: It’s like a black box, but in fact it’s the engine of biology on the planet. We are fully dependent for life on what happens in the global ocean. One of the scientists put it to me – it was Boris Worm – he said that if everything on land were to die tomorrow, everything in the ocean would be fine, but if everything in the ocean died tomorrow, we would die too because we are fully dependent on the chemical functions of the ocean to survive. There was no life on earth until there was life in the ocean, and that altered the chemistry of the atmosphere and the ocean enough to make a platform for the life that we see around us now. So yes, it is remote, it is abstract, it’s difficult to understand, it’s phenomenally complex, it’s a very new field of scientific inquiry. Really it is only in the last fifty years that some of the major breakthroughs have been made, mainly because of military needs. They didn’t want a nuclear submarine that had gone to the bottom of the ocean and crashed to be accessible to the Russians or something, so they financed some exploration. So it’s still a very new field.

I think it’s a larger problem than that, though. It’s connecting the dots that human behaviour has become so pernicious on the planet that we are changing the chemistry not only of the atmosphere, but also the ocean, and chemistry determines biology. Human behaviour is determining chemistry, which is determining biology. We are setting the table for the sixth mass extinction on the planet – only the sixth ever in the whole history of the planet. It is our actions, not only our understanding, but also our actions that must change if we are to avert that. Where do you start?

CI: At the very end of the book, you make what you refer to as ‘a call for wisdom’, and ask the question of each reader, ‘what do you stand for?’ What are you hoping the answer to that might be in reference to our understanding of what is going on in the ocean?

AM: I would hope that we would stand for life over death, that we would stand for preserving and healing the planet and helping to preserve the creatures that have fought so hard to evolve to get here. What we stand for now is death. We read in the newspapers the ‘triumph’ of the fact that the Chinese government has now invested in the tar sands, which are one of the top emitters of carbon dioxide. We are not putting that together with the other effects. It’s like looking at a balance sheet and only looking at your assets and not looking at your debits. Sure, you might have assets of $2.4 M, but when you have a budgetary deficit of $100 B, the $2.4 M doesn’t look like very much. In economic terms, it’s like reading only half the balance sheet, and it seems to me to be quite shortsighted.

The thing is that we humans have the ability to plan, to look into the past and into the future, and conceptually we have the ability to decide what we want. That is what separates us from the plankton, and separates us from other forms of life that we know of on earth. We know of no other form of life on earth that has the ability to plan. When I say ‘a call to wisdom’, I guess I’m calling for us to be fully human, to use this great gift that we have of being able to plan to be able to take the planet seriously, what it’s telling us, because it’s telling us a story, and if we ignore that story, there may be death.

Date of Interview: 09/04/2009
Location: Toronto, ON
Link: www.alannamitchell.com