By Mark Spalding

There is a strange slow-motion battle going on in the Southern Ocean as I'm writing this in early spring 2008.

A Japanese whaling fleet is hunting minke, fin and humpback whales. Direct-action conservation organizations are trying find the fleet and stop the hunt. It is an odd, tense affair — the Japanese operating covertly, in hiding, while their “hunters” are offering web-cams and blogs and 24-hour Internet coverage.

But this battle is symptomatic of a much, much broader dynamic. The high seas — the area beyond any nation's jurisdiction, and 50 percent of the Earth's surface — have no owner and no steward.

And we have abused this wilderness with quite shocking indifference as human populations and demands have grown. The next big idea in conservation should be protecting the high seas.

Do the High Seas Belong to No One — Or Everyone?

The great whales were the first victims of this abuse, with many species driven close to extinction.

Today, new victims include tuna, sharks, swordfish and albatrosses:

• Commercial trawlers are plowing up the fantastic habitats of seamounts and in all likelihood driving new extinctions before scientists can even begin to explore these places.
   
•  And albatrosses — the world’s most magnificent fliers — are in a tight spiral of decline as they drown on the hooks of long-lining fishing techniques.

Meanwhile, minerals companies are also looking to the high seas as new frontiers for oil, gas and other commodities. But who will control their activities?

Protected areas now cover about 12 percent of land on Earth, perhaps the largest single land-use allocation on the planet. But the protected figure for coastal waters is only about 4 percent — and in the high seas, it is zero, absolutely nothing.

Whether you like their approach or not, the direct-action conservationists and their chase of the whalers raise an important issue. Who “owns” those whales? Can anyone kill them? Or can anyone prevent their being killed?

Do the high seas really belong to no one? Or to everyone?

Can We Afford to Wait for a Few Extinctions?

Concerned citizens need to realize that conservation has so far only worked on 50 percent of the planet's surface. To take on the rest, we can only work internationally — ideally collaboratively:

• First, we need our governments to play hard on this issue. There are agreements in place to protect the seas, but many lack teeth. Science is for the most part monitoring a slow-motion decline of the oceans, looking on aghast as seamount after seamount is stripped bare.
   
• But governments will only do what the public demands. We ourselves need to make a claim for the oceans — not in a political or legal sense, but in the sense of feeling a shared ownership. And we need to make the demands to look after this resource that arise from such ownership.
   
• Conservation organizations have a tremendous role to play in education — not just through adventures on the high seas, but in persuading the public, the politicians, the fisheries, scientists and economists to act.
   
  Consumers need to be empowered to choose, for example, sustainably caught seafood, while governments must take with them solid science and solutions as they attend trade talks and international treaty negotiations.

Economics shows that there are already alternatives to our destructive practices: Whale-watching is already employing more people and bringing much greater economic benefits than commercial whaling could ever generate.

Well-managed fish stocks would be larger and produce more fish, more jobs, more recreational fishing opportunities and more money than the current free-for-all.

As with climate change, protecting the high seas is really just a question of whether humanity can pull together before it’s too late.

Should we wait for a few extinctions first? Or can we grasp this challenge now? 

Nature picture credits (left to right): © Mark Godfrey/TNC (Fishing boat in the Pacific Ocean); © Mark Spalding/TNC (Mark Spalding)