Present at the Future (23 page)

“So in time,” says Earle, “we will necessarily have to look to ways to cultivate what we take from aquatic systems for large amounts of protein, if we are to take aquatic creatures at all.”

We arrived at this crossroads because our culture teaches us that the oceans are boundless, that they are so vast and plentiful that they could never be depleted, says Earle. We believed many years ago that our forests and topsoils and watersheds were plentiful too, until the day came when they began to disappear. And we did something about protecting them.

“The [National] Park Service came into being to protect areas of natural beauty, our cultural, our historic, our natural heritage, and today, not just in North America but around the world. About twelve percent of the land enjoys some form of protection. In the ocean, it’s a tiny fraction of one percent, and that’s probably because we still have this attitude that the ocean is infinite and able to rebound no matter what we do. But in the ocean, we’re learning not only that it can be influenced by what we do but [also that] we can take positive actions to protect what’s there.”

Earle says we need to find these critical areas, these hot spots in the oceans, that are most vulnerable and try to protect them. Some of these places are the sea mounts, the tops of underwater mountains, extensive mountain ranges that run down the Atlantic, the Pacific, and Indian Oceans like giant backbones. They rise from the ocean floor a thousand meters or more, yet remain below the surface.

Though hidden from view, “they’re crowned with life. One of the special things about them is the apparent high degree of specific endemism, creatures that live there and nowhere else, not only in the ocean or the world but in the universe. We look at the Galapagos as a special place because it has creatures that occur there and nowhere else that we know about. The same appears to be true of these undersea islands. They don’t break the surface, but they’re islands nonetheless, separated from other places where such creatures can grow by many miles, and so they’ve developed their own character.”

They are teeming with a rich diversity of life. And it’s this biodiversity that makes the sea mounts very important, able to resist and recover from change. “Diversity has a really important place in the world. In terms of providing stability, when changes occur, if there’s great diversity, somebody’s going to be able to respond favorably to those changes. If you’ve got everybody basically responding in the same way, then the consequences can be really drastic.”

Yet even these sea mounts, located beyond any territorial waters, or economic zones, are under attack by forces that are destroying them. Earle likens them to “the Wild West—there’s little to inhibit people from doing just about anything they want to do out there.” A handful of nations, she says, are “disproportionately destroying something that we don’t know how to put back together again.” By that she means trawling, using heavy nets that scrape the sea floor, “like using a bulldozer to catch songbirds and squirrels, they’re knocking down ancient corals, sponges—the whole cross-section of life that is there, and it is simply thrown away, in order to capture a relatively small number of fish that feed not a lot of people but a high-end luxury market, people who are not really dependent on the sea for food but rather are willing to pay a high price. And all of us pay a high price because of the destruction that is brought about because of this action.”

Earle is hoping that the United Nations may take action, as it did in 1992, putting high seas drift nets off-limits in some areas “because they were found to be so destructive and disproportionately
favoring just a few industries and a few countries at a loss to all of us. Now that people are moving deeper and further offshore to get the last remaining pockets of protein in the sea, there is a similar concern that the cost of doing this, the cost to all of us for all time for the benefit of a few in the short term is just not worth it.”

The ocean is under attack in other ways, and a cause for great concern, she says. The increase in CO
₂
in the atmosphere is setting off a process that is making the ocean more acidic, a thought that is setting off alarms in the minds of marine biologists. Because a more acidic ocean means that corals may not get the calcium from seawater they need to build their homes. Nor may the other tiny, planktonlike creatures in the ocean be able to build the stony calcium-carbonate shells that are their homes.

“Now, the ocean has not gone acid yet, for heaven’s sake. It’s still pretty solidly on the basic side of things, but there is a trend, and just as we worry about looking at the decline of fish over the last hundred years, especially the last fifty, we’re seeing a trend now in the ocean that we ought to know about at least and have on the balance sheet when we think about what do we do next. We have acid rain. We don’t need acid ocean.”

Despite the sad state of the oceans, Earle is not pessimistic about the future. “There’s plenty of reason to be positive. After all, ten percent of the big fish are still there. They’re not all gone yet. Half the coral reefs are still in pretty good shape. Despite the fact that we’ve lost maybe thirty percent and another twenty percent are in bad shape, there’s still a chance. I am inspired by individuals.” Earle sees promising signs of cooperation around the world.

“Just a few years ago, we had a conference that pulled together representatives from twenty countries. We had seventy different organizations, only a hundred fifty people, that gave rise to something like an action plan for trying to come up with not just ‘Woe is me, here are the problems’ but [instead] here are some things we can do. And I see conservation organizations working together: World Wildlife Fund, Nature
Conservancy, Environmental Defense, NRDC [Natural Resources Defense Council]—a whole suite of organizations that are really pulling together, or they always have had common objectives but now there is increased motivation to try to get the job done, and that means working with industry because the solutions are there. Or working with governments, working with whatever it takes to find a common ground, to show the connection between a sound environment and a sound economy, a sound environment and health, a sound environment and all the things we hold near and dear, including life itself.”

It’s not an abstract concept, understanding how we are all in this together, says Earle. “It should be just basic to the way we think. You take care of your home. You take care of the air you breathe, the water you drink, the food that you consume.” It ain’t rocket science, just logic.

“The thing that worries me is that people seem to be getting increasingly detached from nature. We need to get reengaged, starting with the youngest kids and finding the kid in the oldest of us to realize that we’re all connected, first of all, as people, but all people are connected to nature.”

How to get reattached to nature? How about simply jumping into the ocean and getting reacquainted? “With knowing, there is the possibility that we can care. If you don’t know, you can’t care. So getting the word out, getting people to go jump in the ocean and see for themselves what’s out there is really critical, but especially kids.”

And if a simple splash on the beach is not enough to inspire you, Earle has a more ambitious idea: “I long for the day when you have little rent-a-sub places where you can go get your pickup truck and put a submarine on the back and go off to the dock or the beach of your choice or the boat. It’s almost there. You know, there are really dozens of options now that people do have. It’s not just for the handful of those who are occasionally lucky enough to penetrate the great depths. The doors are opening. There are passenger subs in Hawaii and Barbados and Bermuda, a few other places, where you can actually buy a ticket and submerge.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CRAIG VENTER GOES FISHING FOR GENES

We’re trying to create a giant database for everybody to use that gives us a chance to catalog the gene pool on planet Earth.

—CRAIG VENTER

There’s a lot of talk about sending humans to the moon and to Mars. These planets hold terrific fascination for us, first because we know so little about them and second because Mars holds the potential for harboring life, perhaps in a form we have never seen.

But if you want to explore a place we know virtually nothing about, you might try looking right here on Earth or more precisely, right here in our oceans.

“Here we are looking for life on Mars and we know less than one percent of life on the planet Earth,” says genomics pioneer Dr. J. Craig Venter, the man known more for his work on the human genome project than for his interest in life beneath the waves. It’s not enough to sequence the genes of humans; Venter will settle for nothing less
than the genes of the entire planet. And most of those genes have yet to be discovered, as tiny microorganisms in the oceans making up 70 percent of our planet. “Ninety-nine percent of the species in the ocean, people don’t even know they exist, let alone have a way to characterize them.”

Venter has created an unconventional expedition that he says was inspired by the voyages of Darwin’s Beagle and the HMS Challenger. And like Darwin, he set sail on the seas in the name of science. Venter and scientists aboard his yacht, the Sorcerer II, have been collecting microbes from deep in the ocean, from Maine to the Galapagos, to the South Pacific and back. Their mission: to sequence the genomes of entire microbial ecosystems.

“We’re trying to create a giant database for everybody to use that gives us a chance to catalog the gene pool on planet Earth.”

His 95-foot yacht circumnavigated the globe, collecting ocean samples every 200 miles. “Our view was why not try and get a first-ever assessment of the diversity in the oceans by doing a complete circumnavigation. We think it’s an important part of science education. We’re trying to show young people that science can be extremely fun and extremely rewarding in terms of the discoveries that can be made.”

Traveling the world filtering seawater sounds idyllic, but it’s very fruitful, judging by the results of his first test voyage. Sampling the Sargasso Sea off the coast of Bermuda, Venter and his colleagues discovered a million new genes and thousands of new species of microorganisms. “The biological diversity we found was so vast in the Sargasso Sea; even samples taken a mile apart and a day apart had totally different sets of species in it.”

The embarrassment of riches was highly unexpected. “The Sargasso was supposed to be a simple site. It’s very low-nutrient, so everybody was speculating there were very few species there. We thought, We’ll start with a simple site and make sure these methods really work well. What we found: it was far more complex than most ever
imagined.” The organisms in the Sargasso were breaking the rules of nature as we understand them. These organisms were thriving in abundance without the necessary nutrients—the food—that biologists thought that they would need. What Venter discovered was a system far more complex: the ability of the organisms to capture sunlight and use that energy to overcome the lack of nutrients. “So the thinking is now changing. Perhaps the low-nutrient sites might have more diversity” than sites where there’s an abundant source of food for the organisms.

“It means we’ve not really understood at all the biology of the oceans and that sunlight probably plays a far greater role in the most basic life forms than anybody ever imagined.”

It is common for biologists to collect live marine organisms from the ocean and try to keep them alive in the lab long enough to understand what contributions they make to the oceans’ ecosystem. But this technique will never work for the tiny microbes in the oceans. They do not readily survive in captivity. Venter hopes to overcome this limitation by using pioneering methods of gene sequencing he developed for the human genome project and applying them to unlock the genetic secrets of these ocean organisms. No need to grow the organisms in the lab; all you need is their genes.

“We take all the DNA from a section of the ocean—in the case of the Sargasso Sea, two million sequences—and we analyze it.” The highly successful technique, tested out on the Sargasso Sea organisms, will be applied to the rest of the microbes sampled around the world.

THE OCEANS: A SOLUTION TO GLOBAL WARMING?

In this era of renewed interest in global warming, Venter and his colleagues at the Institute for Biological and Energy Alternatives feel that the ocean creatures may hold a key to understanding and solving the role of the greenhouse gas CO
₂
. Scientists know that the ocean is one of the most important absorbers of CO
₂
. It plays an essential role in how nature moves carbon in and out of the atmosphere. “I think
one of the biggest findings we had” in studying marine organisms “is all these new photoreceptors,” genes that allow plants and organisms to soak up sunlight and inhale the CO
₂
to make food and energy. “Maybe half or more of the organisms deal with the sunlight for their source of energy or metabolism versus what was thought to be only a tiny handful of the organisms doing that.”

Venter believes that some of these organisms are so exciting that they’re going to give us a new view of life. “For example, we’re finding that a theme is used over and over and over again in evolution. It’s not like we have a million different solutions for each problem. These cells found something that worked really well. Each new cell, each new life form that came along picked up those same elements, modified them a little bit, but didn’t change them much over billions of years of evolution. So we think we can actually get down to maybe what was the basic working set in the gene pool that all life derived from.”

PART VIII

SCIENCE AND RELIGION