“As Arthur C. Clarke has observed: ‘How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is ocean.’ Nearly three-quarters of the Earth’s surface is sea. . .”
—James Lovelock
A year ago I wrote a piece titled “Ocean Love” while I was fascinated by the international Blue Carbon Initiative in my grad school study about sustainable development. A year later, as I read this piece again after a road trip to the Atlantic Ocean, I have more faith in the blue recovery than before. Simply because we human beings can’t survive without healthy oceans. Nevertheless, the oceans of the Earth can exist without us.
The ocean plays a leading role in the Earth’s climate. Warm ocean waters provide the energy to fuel storm systems that provide fresh water vital to all living things. In grade school geography, I’ve learned that about three quarters of the Earth is water, leaving only one quarter as land. Given the fact that our shorelines around the globe are eroding fast and furious and ocean acidification resulting from the burning of fossil fuels is threatening marine biodiversity and our food security, does this ratio still stand today?
The blue recovery, or the blue economy if you’d prefer the World Bank’s term, that aims to restore marine ecosystems and promote the sustainable use of ocean resources is a financial leverage to turn adverse effects of climate change into long-term benefits. For some years both the U.S. and China have boasted their own “blue Silicon Valley”—in Monterey Bay, California and Qingdao, Shandong—dedicated to driving innovation in the two superpowers’ blue economies. In other words, on land we need green recovery; at sea we also need blue recovery. I second Michel Serres, a French philosopher and mathematician’s viewpoint that climate change is an economic issue. Climate action can be viewed as an economic action that requires global standardization with diversity and inclusion in mind.
Taking a layman’s look into China’s green finance policies from renewable energy projects and water treatment plants to waste management facilities and the newly-launched national carbon trading scheme, we cannot disagree that these initiatives are public-private partnership efforts to promote long-term growth, precisely, the economic activities of sustainable development.
Action speaks louder than words. I still remember this line in the script of my undergrad speech contest. Regardless of the effectiveness of these economic actions taken place in China—some may still be in the beta stage while others may have impressed the world, I haven’t seen other emerging markets that might test the waters of green finance have aroused quake-shaking attention to the developed countries like China has.
If China was not the world’s most populous country and one of the world’s top five largest countries in total area, do you think China’s economic development would have as much global impact? The size of a country is like the size of a person. For a small person, he or she has a disadvantage to impress their love interests and future employers in many cultures. Big-size countries tend to have bigger say in global affairs and even get “excused” for not following international rules. For instance, Russia is illegally occupying Ukraine’s Crimea, the U.S. is closing an illegal 20-year war in Afghanistan, and China’s key role in recycling the world’s electronic waste is now shifting to low-income developing countries such as Ghana and Bangladesh. China’s foreign investment includes building coal-fired power plants and exploiting natural resources abroad. Poor countries with unstable governments such as Laos and South Sudan perhaps will never recover from the loss of biodiversity and deforestation. Can poor countries say no to foreign money if they have to monetize natural resources and wildlife excessively?
If history is a lesson for humanity, I can see that humans are taking resources from Mother Nature faster than she can conserve or replace them. With the help of new technologies, humans can exploit natural resources faster in greater amounts. Can we switch the gear to slow down our pace of consumption? Can we manage our nonrenewable resources like we do with our retirement benefits? Can we let Mother Nature take a break from time to time without asking so much from her for providing us goods and services? Can you start from today to reduce, reuse and recycle? Our favorite Sir David Attenborough has narrated the timely documentary film “The Year Earth Changed” about how wildlife responded to a year of global lockdown of 2020.
Many of us who don’t live or work by the sea may think very little about how life-threatening marine litter is to our survival until the time for summer vacation comes or our favorite seafood is sold at a higher price due to scarcity. This summer when I revisited the Atlantic Ocean, I noticed the shoreline had changed. Higher sand dunes were built as a measure to reduce erosion and damage of coastal homes and facilities. I couldn’t find as many of the big seashells as I used to. The sand was so scorching hot that I had to put on my flip-flops instead of walking barefoot when I walk on it.
Marine litter reminds me of a new phrase I learn from reading Donovan Hohn’s investigative nonfiction book “Moby-Duck.” The word is “garbage patches,” meaning the convergence zones in the ocean where currents converge and spiral inward, collecting what’s floating on the surface. Hohn’s book which was published a decade ago revisited an even older environmental case. A massive container ship mishap in 1992 led to 28,000 plastic bath toys lost at sea. The plague of plastic in the ocean is not a new example of humans impact on the environment. In fact, according to marine scientists, one can see concentrated marine debris, mostly plastic, in the most famous garbage patch located in the North Pacific Gyre between Hawaii and California.
Well, are human beings one of, if not the most, polluting living creatures on earth? On land we have unsustainable amounts of electronic waste, at sea we have marine debris, and even in space we have space debris. In economics, there is a central principle called “fungibility,” meaning the ability of a good or asset to be interchanged with other individual goods or assets of the same type. That’s to say, if I can’t get a chocolate ice-cream, I can still get a strawberry one. The powerful Google search engine can provide many alternatives under the keyword “smoking substitutes.” So, with the help of new technologies, if marine debris can become a valuable commodity like a pirate’s treasure chest, will there be more daredevils set sail to these garbage patches? Do not complain we need more data. We’ve already known about how detrimental marine litter is to our food security and marine biodiversity. Can we start from today to stop leaving garbage behind after our seaside vacation? Most important, can we design a mechanism similar to a carbon trading scheme to reinvest and reuse the plastic marine debris?
We often hear the wish that if the big member states of the United Nations can work together on the basis of human and wildlife coexistence to deal with sustainable development issues, small countries like Kiribati in the same grouping of “Vulnerable Member States of the United Nations” will have a fair chance of not only making ends meet but leapfrogging with the help of new technologies into a sustainable economy.
And while these elephant member states are flexing their muscles to decide other small countries’ fate, nature-based solutions to climate change—these are low-cost, big-return investments—will help every community, especially the underserved and vulnerable people to buy time. Above all, if our mind is set to do good deeds for Mother Nature, starting from today you can change your lifestyle to live more healthily and happily. Facing the dual crises—the Covid pandemic and climate change, we all need to be a combat optimist, no?
“The Earth existed without our unimaginable ancestors, could well exist today without us, will exist tomorrow or later still, without any of our possible descendants, whereas we cannot exist without it. Thus we must indeed place things in the center and us at the periphery, or better still, things all around and us within them like parasites.“
—Michel Serres, author of “The Natural Contract”