National Radio Project

MAKING CONTACT

Transcript: #41-03 Trouble at Sea: The State of the World's Oceans
October 8, 2003

Program description, guest contact information and audio files at http://www.radioproject.org/archive/2003/4103.html

POMERLEAU: This week on Making Contact: EARLE: Trawls that are dragged across the sea floor, really act much like bulldozers that take the whole forest, when all you really want are the birds and squirrels. RUFE: The amount of oil, for example, that came from the Exxon Valdez spill – which was nearly 11 million gallons of oil – ends up every 8 months in our waters just coming from our streets and driveways. POMERLEAU: While seemingly indestructible, the ocean is a fragile eco-system. And it’s increasingly under threat from over-fishing, coastal development and pollution. On this edition, we’ll take a look at the over-all health of the ocean today, along with a close-up of the impact of cruise ships and shrimp farming.

I'm Aimee Pomerleau, your host this week on Making Contact, an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas, and important information.

Marine scientist Sylvia Earle, also known as Her Deepness, has been diving since the 1950s. She’s held many prestigious positions including Explorer in residence at National Geographic and Chief Scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Earle has lived underwater for weeks at a time, and even has a sea urchin and a marine plant named after her.

EARLE: As a child I was knocked over by a wave when I was playing along the beach in New Jersey. The ocean really got my attention. But what has held my attention for my entire life was not just the water, and not just the beauty of it and the thrill of it, but the life in the ocean. POMERLEAU: As she followed her passion for the ocean, she gradually realized that the places she loved to visit were disappearing, and that the ocean is in big trouble.

EARLE: From when I began diving in the early 1950’s, through the 60’s and 70’s, I saw a sea change, literally, in the state of the ocean. Creatures that I had known when I was a kid that I don’t see in those same areas any more. In the Tampa Bay area, I just remember seeing creatures right there in what was my backyard sea urchins in sea grass beds, little sea horses, little pygmy sea horses were only about half an inch long, that I could just go out there and wade in water, knee deep and find them. They’re just not there any more. Can’t blame them--the water is foul as compared to what it was when I was a kid. It has an aroma to it because of all the things that we’ve put in the ocean. It isn’t clear. It’s murky.This is just a small example, but it’s reflected all over the world.

POMERLEAU: Ninety-seven percent of the earth’s water is the ocean. Home to about half of all creatures, only five percent of it has been seen by humans, let alone explored. And yet before we even have a chance to explore it, it’s being exploited.

EARLE: About fifty thousand undersea mountains occur in the waters of the world—the oceans, the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Indian Ocean. And the waters around our Polar seas are studded with these undersea islands. They haven’t reached the surface yet--some never will. But they’re like Galapagos islands, but thousands of them with an average unique percentage of animal life of about thirty-five percent. Can you imagine that? Thirty-five percent unique to each and every one of these undersea mountains based on the sample that we’ve taken so far. Which means that every time one of these mountains is trawled--the coral forests are knocked down, the fish are captured--we’re imperiling the future of these unique creatures.

POMERLEAU: Roger Rufe, president of the Ocean Conservancy, says the state of the ocean is much worse than people think.

RUFE: The number one threat to ocean health right now is overfishing, and the destructive fishing practices that come with large scale commercial fishing operations.

POMERLEAU: Rufe says that science has been ignored in favor of short-term economic gains and as a result, the long-term economic health of the fishing Industry and the health of the ocean have been damaged. There have been fishery collapses around the world.

RUFE: Some examples of that are, just recently, the Great Cod Fishery that has sustained Newfoundland, the Newfoundland economy for hundreds of years, and has maintained thousands of jobs in that area, was closed down by the Canadian government because the fish stocks were so heavily fished in the 80’s and early 90’s. And despite temporary closures for a number of years, they haven’t come back. So now that great fishery has been closed completely. In our own waters in New England, we’ve had collapses of the ground fish stocks in that area – cod, haddock and yellow tail flounder – which were the bread and butter of the fishing industry in New England for the better part of this century, have collapsed. And now there are large areas of the Gulf of Maine that have been closed to fishing--five thousand square miles. Similarly, on the west coast just recently, this year in fact, about 10 thousand square miles of ocean off the coast of California, Oregon and Washington have been closed to fishing for rockfish. .

POMERLEAU: Rockfish, unlike the cod and flounder in New England, matures very slowly. Scientists predict that it will take decades, or even a hundred years for the fish population to replenish.

Ransom Myers is a professor of biology at D.H. University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. One of his primary goals is to understand what the sea was like before industrial fishing. He says the exploitation of most of the world’s oceans, is a process that will likely drive many species into extinction. MYERS: When we use industrial methods to catch fish, it’s like using industrial methods to catch rabbits, or deer.The populations very rapidly decline. They declined around the North Sea, around Japan, around New England and the Gulf of Mexico, probably a hundred years ago. More isolated areas, like the southern ocean and the more isolated areas in Canada, these declines occurred fifty years ago. In some areas, it occurred more recently. For example, the Gulf of Thailand was first affected by modern trawlers in 1963, and in a similar time, when we had Antarctic Islands. But now, we have virtually nothing left except the very deep oceans, because now we have trawlers that can trawl down to 6000 feet, and remove very slow-growing deep-sea sharks and other species.

POMERLEAU: Myers, along with scientist Boris Worm, assessed fisheries around the world and found that ninety percent of big fish are gone from the ocean. That means only ten percent of big fish like tuna, swordfish, marlin, cod, halibut, skates, and flounder, are left in the sea. He published his alarming research results in the May 2003 issue of Nature. He suggests global fishing be reduced by at least fifty percent.

MYERS: We can obtain more fish from the ocean by fishing less, and we’ll allow the more sensitive species to survive, and this will be to everyone’s benefit, both from a conservation and from an economic point of view.

POMERLEAU: In the United States, the Pew Commission Oceans report, released in May 2003, is the first look at U.S. controlled ocean, in over 30 years. Rufe was a member on this commission, which included scientists, environmentalists, politicians, and fishing industry representatives. What they found mirrors many of the problems found across the globe. Besides over-fishing, coastal development, invasive species and global warming are also harming the ocean. Rufe says another big problem is non-point pollution—such as fertilizer and nitrogen pouring in from places far from the ocean. RUFE: In the Midwest as an example, the excess manure that comes from feed lots of large combined feeding operations--hog farms, chicken farms, operations of that nature; fertilizer that comes from your lawn and my lawn, that comes from golf courses; the oil that ends up on our city streets and other pollutants that are on our city streets that get washed in rain water down into storm drains and end up in pathways to the oceans. All of that has a cumulative effect on coastal and ocean waters. The amount of oil for instance, that came from the Exxon Valdez spill – which was nearly 11 million gallons of oil – ends up every 8 months in our waters, just coming from our streets and driveways. The nitrogen that comes from as far inland as I said, the Midwest, ends up in the Gulf of Mexico. And we now have a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that is the size of Massachusetts. And that is caused by this nitrogen-causing algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico that robs the waters of all oxygen. So marine life can’t live in these areas.

POMERLEAU: National Geographic’s Earle says coral reefs are a good indicator of the overall health of the ocean. Coral reefs, which dot the world’s coastlines, are a major fish breeding ground and play an important role in the ocean’s eco-system. According to the report Reefs at Risk, ten percent of the world’s coral reefs are already gone, and another twenty seven percent are at high risk of being lost in the next few decades if threats to the ocean are not reduced.

EARLE: If coral reefs that have been around for millions of years are in trouble, it says something about the state of the oceans as a whole. It means that the ocean, and I say ocean as a singular in this case because they all tie together. You can talk about the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, the Polar seas, but it’s one all-embracing ocean. It’s the matrix within which the continents rest. It is the matrix within which our past, our present and our future rest. If we are stressing the ocean, we are putting at risk the future of all of life on earth, including our own.

MUSIC BREAK

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Attracting over 9 million passengers a year, cruise ship vacations have been called the fastest growing segment of leisure travel. The United States Environmental Protection Agency estimates that each passenger generates 100 gallons of wastewater and sewage per day. Many activists are questioning cruise ships’ environmental impacts, the working conditions on board and the lack of regulations governing their operations. Correspondent Diane Solomon reports.

SOLOMON As large as 100,000 tons, with 18 decks, cruise ships carry millions of people each year to some of the world's most pristine and sensitive ecosystems. Essentially floating cities, complete with their own zip codes, they aren’t subject to the same waste water regulations that govern cities of a comparable size. They discharge huge amounts of waste directly into the water.

Kaitilin Gaffney is the Program Manager at the Santa Cruz Field Office of the Ocean Conservancy, an organization which is monitoring cruise ships’ impact on the environment. GAFFNEY: It has all of the same kinds of activities and all the same kinds of waste streams that our towns on land have, except they are occurring in the ocean. So you have photo labs with all of the toxic materials that we know are associated with those. There are dry cleaning facilities on board these ships. There’s dentist offices, medical offices. As well as of course, the more standard things: Ship operations creating oily bilge water and materials like that; as well as kitchens, sinks, bathrooms. So the waste streams really are comparable to what you see on land, except most of those wastes end up in the ocean, without the same kinds of treatment requirements that apply to towns on land and the waste that is produced there.

SOLOMON The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that a ship with 5,000 passengers and crew produces almost 500,000 gallons of wastewater including 50,000 gallons of sewage every day. Royal Caribbean International estimates that during a typical seven day voyage a ship generates 141 gallons of photo chemicals, 7 gallons of dry-cleaning waste, 13 gallons of used paints, and 5 pounds of batteries. Not to mention oily bilge water, medical waste and daily diesel exhaust that is equivalent to that produced by over 12,000 automobiles! A lot of this finds its way, untreated into the ocean which is harmful to the marine biota and to the health of fish.

Ships may discharge raw sewage anywhere beyond three miles of the United States coastline. The U.S. enforces environmental regulations governing discharges through the use of fines. Fines have been assessed against cruise ships not only for the discharge of waste but for falsifying records relating to the discharge of pollutants.

Russell Long, the Founder and Director of the Bluewater Network says that cruise ships are being fined repeatedly, yet cruise ships are not changing their ways. LONG: It’s harmful to the marine environment and to human health exposures when you dump toilet waste directly into the water that people are swimming in and that marine life is dependent upon as well. That’s why we have municipal treatment facilities for sewage in all the cities in the United States. To allow a cruise ship to be exempt from that just because nobody really has the regulatory authority or capability of going out there and following them around with little boats taking water samples is ridiculous. SOLOMON Although cruise ships are required to have a Coast Guard- certified marine sanitation device on board, and Coast Guard inspectors certify waste treatment equipment during inspections, they are not required to test discharges to determine whether or not these devices and equipment comply with mandated water quality standards or other environmental regulations. Most discharges occur at night, underwater.

Kaitilin Gaffney says it’s very difficult to monitor and no one is looking…

GAFFNEY: My understanding is a typical inspection is twenty or thirty minutes long on again, a thousand foot long ship, with 10-12-18 decks and typically the inspections are announced in advance. So, this isn’t a surprise inspection where you might at least find something going on if there are problems. But, instead, it’s a very cursory inspection and essentially, at least historically has been, “Do you have the waste treatment equipment on board? Check!” You know, as long as you’ve got the machine, you get full marks. Some of the problems that we have seen in the past with cruise ships, you know, committing fraud, by-passing their pollution control equipment have been very deliberate efforts to fool the Coast Guard inspectors by changing things out so that during the inspection it looks pretty good and then as soon as the coast guard inspectors step off the ship they switch it back and just dump the material directly without treating it.

SOLOMON By registering in countries outside of the U.S., like Panama and the Bahamas, owners are able to greatly lower their operating costs because they also avoid paying U.S. income taxes, undergo fewer inspections, and are subject to more lenient safety standards.

While the word is getting out about cruise ships’ environmental record, less is known about working conditions. Referring to themselves as “fun ships” and “party boats”, cruise lines are reporting record profits while their workers are not fairing as well. Called floating sweat shops or sweatships by labor activists, cruise ship owners are able to avoid paying U.S. minimum wages by registering their ships outside of the United States.

A large cruise ship may have as many as 1,000 workers, most of whom are from developing nations. Service workers, who perform physically strenuous work in the dining rooms and cabins, routinely work 10 to 12 hours days seven days a week for most of the year. Most earn less than $1,000 per month and living conditions are not good. Some workers are required to provide their own uniforms and supplies. Others are not paid unless they reach certain sales targets.

The International Transport Workers Federation reports that the work intensity has lead to a second economy on board. A cabin steward, for example, may pay a laundry worker to make the beds in his or her set of cabins, even if it means a 14 hour or more day. This saves the company from having to hire the number of workers actually needed. Workers also complain of sexual harassment and exploitation. Ross Klein is a self professed former cruise ship junkie, an industry analyst and the author of Cruise Ship Blues

KLEIN: I’ve heard both male and female workers complain about the demand for sexual favors. A supervisor will expect, if you want to keep your job, or if you want to be advanced in your job, there will be an expectation of sexual favors. I’ve also heard lots of complaints, particularly on ships where workers are depending on tips about what’s called, taxing of tips. That is, the worker takes the money they get from tips, but then they are expected by the supervisor to share those tips. The International Transport Workers Federation has documented maitre’dees, who can earn $14,000 to $20,000, per month, just by skimming the tips of the workers below them.

Based on what workers are earning at home, their take home income is respectable. But what they put up with to earn that income, in many ways can be demeaning and difficult. SOLOMON Although most cruise ships have an International Transport Workers Federation approved contract in place, governing minimum wage and working conditions, contracts are often not followed.

KLEIN: It’s difficult for the ITF to enforce the contract because the workers aren’t free to complain about the problems in the workplace. Most workers know that if you complain, you’re going to be seen as a malcontent and you’re going to be fired. You’re going to lose your job. So, they have to live with the inequities and live with what’s unfair.

SOLOMON Cruise ships aren’t governed by the same laws that would be in effect if they were operating on land. Taking advantage of a lack of regulations and monitoring, they don’t engage in good employment and environmental practices. The International Transport Workers Federation has a cruise ship campaign to improve pay and working conditions. The Bluewater Network is working to enact legislation that governs cruise ship environmental practices in U.S. waters. Bluewater Network’s Russell Long says that the governing body that needs to regulate this industry and international shipping, is the International Maritime Organization. This is a United Nations agency based in London.

LONG: We need to reform the international maritime organization if any laws are ever going to have any teeth in them, in the future. This holds for air pollution from big ships, on a global basis, to all forms of water pollution, to monitoring and observation programs. But the international maritime organization doesn’t want to go there because they are really working at the behest of the shipping industry to begin with.

SOLOMON: For Making Contact, this is Diane Solomon in Santa Cruz, California

POMERLEAU: In recent years, people in the United States have been spending more money on, and eating more pounds of, shrimp than any other seafood -- even tuna. The majority of this shrimp isn’t coming from the open sea, where wild shrimp stocks have declined. Instead they are raised in shrimp farms and exported cheaply to the U.S. But at what cost? Ellen Horne reports.

HORNE: Accounting for 3.6 billion dollars in annual imports to the U.S., farmed shrimp is big business. But consumers are often unaware of where their shrimp comes from and the impact that shrimp farming has on the environment. Cheap to produce in Latin America and Asia, Dr. Khushi Kabir says shrimp farming is destructive to surrounding lands and crops. Kabir is the director of Nijera Kori, an organization that works with the landless poor in Bangladesh.

KABIR: Once the saline water comes in and shrimp farming goes on for a while, the salinity seeps down and the trees die--there’s no way of--no place to keep cattle or poultry. You lose all your crops, you lose all your vegetables and you’re virtually left completely destitute in your own land.

HORNE: And other issues of environmental concern are the destruction of mangroves, damage to coral reefs and the use of antibiotics. Mangroves once covered three-quarters of all tropical and sub-tropical coastlines. But now, more than half of those forests have been destroyed. Since mangroves feed or shelter seventy-five percent of the world’s fish stocks, their loss has far-reaching implications. As mangroves act as filters for rain water run-off, their loss impacts coastal water-quality as well. Environmentalists attribute nearly forty percent of all mangrove loss to shrimp farming. As often, shrimp ponds are dug out of mangrove wetlands. Becky Goldberg, a senior scientist at Environmental Defense, says another problem with shrimp farming, is shrimp-pond water-waste.

GOLDBERG:Shrimp farms generally don’t treat their waste water which is laden with shrimp faeces, uneaten feed and can be quite polluting. Shrimp farms have spread around the world various viral shrimp diseases that are devastating on the farm. There is some concern that the spread of shrimp viruses may ultimately affect wild shrimp populations, which, at least in theory, can also be affected by these viruses.

ROSENBERRY:Every environmental organization in the world is out to get shrimp farming.

HORNE:That’s Bob Rosenberry, a shrimp-farming industry advocate and publisher of Shrimp News International.

ROSENBERRY: Environmentalists are just—have been after shrimp farmers for a decade now. They are not particularly interested in the environment, but they recognize the shrimp industry, particularly the shrimp-farming industry, as a wealthy industry, an industry with money, and therefore, worthy of attack because it helps them raise money. And that they are much more interested in their own sustenance, their own salaries, the maintaining of their own organizations which consume outrageous amounts of money and most of the money that we as Americans contribute to environmental organizations gets consumed by the infrastructure of the organization itself.

HORNE: However, he concedes the issue of waste-water pollution.

ROSENBERRY: In my mind, that’s a serious issue. And that we as farmers do not have the right to use the commons in that way.

HORNE: The excess nutrients in this waste threaten coral reefs, home to a quarter of all marine life. Many shrimp farms release a flow of waste that runs straight out onto the reef. By encouraging the growth of algae, sewage is a contributing factor to the global crisis facing coral reefs. Unless trends are reversed, scientists expect 40 – 60% of the world’s reefs to be dead in our lifetimes.

As disease is a common problem when shrimp feed and live in confined spaces, anti-biotics are commonly used to fight bacteria. Take for example, Thailand, the world’s number one producer of shrimp. A study, published in the Journal of Food Science and Technology, in March, 2003, found that seventy-four percent of Thai shrimp farmers use anti-biotics. In the US, the Food and Drug Administration monitors for the residue of anti-biotics on our shrimp imports. But the concern may go deeper than what can be rinsed off. While Rosenberry is not in favor of preventative anti-biotic use, he thinks that the health concerns of environmentalists are exaggerated.

ROSENBERRY: The antibiotic issue is also a highly politicized issue, and has almost nothing to do with human health at all, because at these levels that we are talking about tenths of parts per billion. That’s like looking for a needle in a haystack that’s been removed, and your just trying to find those places where it’s just leaning against the hay--there’s nothing there.

HORNE: But Environmental Defense’s Goldberg, thinks that antibiotics are a major issue. She’s concerned about the use of antibiotics, fed to shrimp during growth, especially in the quantities used in Thai shrimp ponds.

GOLDBERG: In a sense, Thai shrimp farmers are playing with fire because when we use antibiotics in large quantities in farming, we encourage bacteria to evolve resistance to these drugs. And that resistance can come back to haunt human beings. When people develop infections with bacteria that are resistant to drugs, those infections can be very difficult or, even at times impossible for doctors to treat. So the price of using antibiotics, especially routinely using antibiotics in shrimp farming and other types of animal agriculture, is quite a high one in terms of human health.

HORNE: But environmentalists say that wild-caught shrimp aren’t necessarily the solution. Trawlers make a wreck of the sea floor, and the collateral damage of by-catch, is 5 lbs of fish wasted for every lb of shrimp harvested.

Jen Dianto, Seafood-Watch Manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium says that seafood consumers can help change the industry. While tropical shrimp at this time, may not be the most environmentally friendly choice on the menu, she says there are options for sustainable seafood, such as wild Alaskan salmon and farmed catfish. Dianto, a long-time advocate for the fishing industry, encourages people who eat seafood to find out which local fisheries have the best record.

DIANTO: When you are talking to your seafood purveyor, when you are talking to someone in a restaurant, to attack, to be aggressive, you are going to get the same attitude or response. People are not going to welcome that. But instead, encourage. “Where is this from? I really love the local product! I’d really like it to be wild-caught.” You know, really talk, immerse your servers in conversation. Let them know it’s important to you.

HORNE: Both Environmental Defense and the Monterey Bay Aquarium post recommendations for sustainable seafood on their websites at:environmentaldefense.org or mbayaq.org. While farmed shrimp isn’t on the list of recommended seafood on these websites today, there are technologies being developed, like closed-system tanks where waste water is treated, these new systems may hold the potential to bring shrimp to the market place, at a lower cost to the environment. For Making Contact, I’m Ellen Horne in New York.

POMERLEAU: That's it for this edition of Making Contact, Trouble at Sea: The State of the World's Oceans program #41-03. Thanks for listening. Special thanks to Myra Chachkin, April Johnson, and Susanna Hines for production assistance. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter trio.

If you’d like an information packet or for a cassette or CD copy of the program, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. That's 800-529-5736. You can also visit our website at radioproject.org.

Lisa Rudman is our executive director. Peggy Law, founding director. Managing Producer, Phillip Babich. Office Manager, Rosalyn Fay. Associate Manager, Susanna Hines. Senior advisor, Norman Solomon. National adviser, David Barsamian. And, I'm your host and Associate Producer, Aimee Pomerleau. Until next time.