Diving for pearls of marine wisdom

To any rational alien observer our planet would be identified as Ocean rather than Earth. The oceans are the dominant environment, containing the bulk of living organisms and the greatest diversity in terms of body patterns and life cycles. The oceans were the cradle of life and indeed provided the only habitat for life on the planet for the first three billion years or so. Life on the solid earth is a relatively recent phenomenon. However it is difficult for land-bound humans to experience life in the sea at first hand and we suffer from a profound ignorance of its beauty, and its importance. The aim of Sylvia Earle is to enable us to experience the oceans as she has done and to be made aware of the damage that is being inflicted on our behalf. For her, the key issue is our ignorance of the oceans and our "belief that the sea is a place apart from, not fundamental to, the basic earth processes that make human life possible".

The book is a personal odyssey rather than an autobiography since we are only given tantalising glimpses of what is clearly a very rich and eventful personal life. There are cameos of the chauvinism that she overcame as she fought her way to an eminent position in what was fundamentally a male domain. With over 6,000 hours of diving experience, she has spent much of her time literally immersed in her subject. While these facets help to define the woman and establish her authority, they are almost incidental to the main theme of the book. This unfolds through personal discovery as a profoundly disturbing view of the state of the oceans. The book is structured in three sections that draw us inexorably into the world's most important environment and make us face the consequences of our ambivalent, and often disdainful attitude to its exploitation.

The first section ("Sea of Eden") deals with Earle's growing awareness of the uncanny beauty of marine life and her consequent obsession with gaining access to the deep sea through advanced underwater technologies. To pursue this quest she becomes an entrepreneur - "making a difference while making a profit".

She provides much detailed information on the trials and tribulations of vessel design which will appeal mainly to aficionados who will already be aware that this is a highly personal and selective view, albeit from a leading expert. But access to the deep sea is a double-edged weapon. While physical presence will help dispel ignorance and lead to understanding it also facilitates intrusion. Earle herself becomes an unwitting victim of this dichotomy when the language of exploitation intrudes inevitably while she is weaving arguments for increased funding for underwater exploration.

The narrative is leavened by excellent graphic accounts of person-animal encounters and points out some interesting contradictions. In 1992, for example, the United States government raised the total income to the National Underwater Research Programme to $19 million, while at the same time allocating some $26 million to the development of a toilet for the space shuttle.

The second section ("Paradise lost") catalogues the consequences of our own attitude to the sea, ranging from ambivalence to schizophrenia. "Out of sight and out of mind" is too mild a description of the sad litany that unfolds since this implies benign neglect. The famous Russian translation of this phrase as "blind and stupid" is far closer to the mark. Her message is clear and uncompromising. Over a generation, since the second world war, the health of the oceans has gone into critical decline because advanced technology and the power of market forces have turned thoughtless exploitation into ruthless depredation.

In condemning our indifference to the marine environment, she is superb - erudite, forceful and totally committed. From the brilliant accounts of the exotic Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo to the harrowing descriptions of sudden death in the Hadean landscape of postwar Kuwait or in the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster she leads us through a sequence of decline and destruction: a short day's journey into night.

Many of the examples will have a familiar ring given the recent publicity over the Braer, the Brent Spar, the Sea Empress and the decline of our own fishing industries. Our shortcoming is that we have not comprehended the implications of these events.

To most of us they are little local difficulties, confined in space and time: isolated problems with individual solutions, and with little impact on our future. It is the complacency that is born of such ignorance that Earle is trying to puncture.

The final section ("Sea change") demands just that, a sea change in our attitudes to life in the ocean. In this section Earle is intense and passionate, but unfortunately her arguments lack the power that the situation demands.

She states her key argument thus: "The single most frightening and dangerous threat to the health of the oceans, the one that stands alone yet is at the base of all others is ignorance: lack of understanding, a failure to relate our destiny to that of the sea, or to make the connection between the health of the coral reefs and our own health, between the fate of the great whales and the future of mankind."

But the link is not made in her text. She has alluded to "the network of life that ultimately supports mankind" but in her wish to involve her readers in the beauty of marine life she has focused on the large animals, the tactile experiences and the creatures that excite. She has not told us how the oceans work. In only a few places does she allude to those "billions of largely unappreciated microbes whose contribution to the healthy functioning of the planet remains largely unexplored".

Consequently, she misses the key systems that link the oceans to the atmosphere, that provide feedbacks through heat exchange, greenhouse gas exchange and cloud cover and thereby profoundly influence our climate.

Here is a wealth of intriguing science, and a host of allies to strengthen her view that "protecting and maintaining existing healthy ecosytems should command our highest priority" (her italics). She instead draws strength from a terrestrial analogy: "So important are insectsI that if all were to disappear, humanity could not last more than a few months."

We are not yet in the position to make a similar statement for the oceans and instead she bases her arguments on the need for a global insurance policy since "the diversity of the systems themselves, enhances the likelihood that stability will be maintained throughout the ups and downs of I change".

The other difficulty is that she does not tackle head-on the need for a restructuring of our current economic paradigm, based on market forces, exploitable resources and short-term balancing of the books.

She gets to the nub of the problem when she states that "current accounting practices assume that fish and other sea creatures have value only when dead, and that live fish in the sea represent a 'wasted resource'".

Unfortunately she does not develop this argument. But this review must not end on a negative note. Sea Change proclaims with authority and passion the absolute necessity for a fundamental change in our attitude to the marine environment. This is a message that we must all take to heart if we are to maintain intact our global life support system.

Michael Whitfield is director, Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom.