Saving the Seas.

• Position: Essay

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Perhaps the worst part of spending a hot, oily summer in the Gulf reporting on the BP disaster was knowing that the 205-million-gallon spill was relatively minor. Not for the people, wildlife, of ecosystems of the region, but in the larger context of our global ocean at risk.

In the last half century (the blink of an eye in which I've lived my life), the ocean--the crucible of life on our blue marble planet--has been devastated by a series of cascading disasters. These include industrial overfishing for the global seafood market that has seen 90 percent of the large open ocean fish killed off, as well as the possible extinction of edible species of fish by 2048.

Oil, chemical, and plastic pollution of the seas has also become ubiquitous. A 2008 study in the journal Science reports 40 percent of the seas are heavily impacted, while only 4 percent remain pristine. Coastal sprawl and loss of habitat are also reducing our ability to restore our seas. Add to this the effects of fossil-fuel-fired climate change--including warming, rising seas, polar melting, and ocean acidification that make it harder for shell-forming critters from krill to corals to survive--and it's understandable why some leading marine scientists have begun to despair.

Personally, I'm more frustrated than despairing because we know what the solutions are. Fish tend to grow back once you stop killing them faster than they can reproduce. We don't need to produce 100 million metric tons of single-use plastic a year if much of that ends up in the ocean killing seabirds and turtles. Protecting coastal wetlands, reefs, and mangroves also protects human populations from storm impacts while providing livelihoods in fishing, tourism, and other industries (plus, they sequester carbon). Coal and oil are the leading energy systems of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. We're now in the twenty-first. And it's worth noting that no Louisiana bayou was ever destroyed by a wind spill or turbine-turning tide.

The problem is not in identifying solutions. (I wrote a whole book of them, 50 Ways to Save the Ocean .) It's creating the political will to implement practical solutions.

Surprisingly, some progress is being made. On July 19, President Obama signed an executive order establishing a new (really the first) ocean policy for the United States. It was based on the recommendations of two blue ribbon commissions that had reported in 2003 and 2004 during the Bush...