Late last summer the United Nations Environment Program published an unusual book: the first accurate atlas of the world's coral reefs. It showed that many reefs are in very bad shape, even the ones that aren't being dynamited as a fishing method. "Coral reefs are under assault," the program's executive director, Klaus Toepfer, said. "They are rapidly being degraded by human activities. They are overfished, bombed, and poisoned." The atlas was released on September 11. It did not get front-page coverage.
Not that it would have; it does not take terrorist mass murder or envelopes full of anthrax to make us forget the ocean. We have always paid it little heed—always treated it, a little paradoxically, as both an infinite food store and an infinite garbage can. But this past year we began to face up to its real limits. The coral atlas, for all its beautiful color, was not nearly so vivid as the European Union's decision last February to close a fifth of the North Sea to cod fishing during the spawning season; that hit the British right in their fish and chips. After the collapse of the Grand Banks fishery off Newfoundland in 1992 and the Georges Bank fishery in 1994, all the great stocks of Atlantic cod—the fish that fed the expansion of European civilization to America, the very fish people had in mind when they claimed the sea was inexhaustible—are close to exhausted.
And yet there is reason for optimism. Simply because we are beginning to understand the full extent of what we've been doing to the ocean, 2001 was a year full of hope—hope that we may finally be ready to slow the destruction.
