The Importance of Rewilding the Seas
The first twenty years of the 21st century brought the concept of rewilding into the mainstream which radically altered how conservationists think about stewarding the Biosphere. Rewilding does not prescribe goals for conservation projects to strive towards. Instead of relying on human hands to bring life back to dying ecosystems, rewilding leverages the antifragility of nature by giving them the space to regenerate themselves. By bringing back the large herbivores and carnivores to landscapes emptied of them by human over-exploitation, extremely biologically productive and energetically efficient savanna and mixed grassland-forest ecosystems are being reconstituted in the present day. Prominent examples of ongoing rewilding projects include Knepp Estate, on the site of a onetime industrial farm in southeastern England, Oostvaardersplassen, a wildlife preserve set on land reclaimed from the ocean in the Netherlands, and the vast Pleistocene Park, in what used to be barren tundra in northeastern Siberia. These groundbreaking (literally) initiatives show how when nature is left to do its own bidding, with some initial help from humans in reintroducing key ecosystem engineers, it achieves "conservation" goals far more rapidly than human stewardship can. It also surprises with new ideas about what flora and fauna can emerge in our wild areas, shifting the baseline of what a thriving nature looks like. Simply allowing life to do what it does best ? survive ? surpasses "rationally" planned conservation strategies and gives life the flexibility to evolve and adapt to our rapidly-changing Gaia.
The Roaring Twenty-First Century Twenties will see the initiation of many marine rewilding projects. Just this past year, the first Rewilding the Sea conference was hosted by the Blue Marine Foundation. The key theme hit on at this meeting was that increasing the number and size of marine protected areas is an effective way to combat climate change, ocean acidification, overfishing, and coastal pollution along with the many other ailments troubling the global ocean. Rewilded regions would serve as havens for drastically declining fish populations by allowing them a safe place to breed and live while also giving fishermen access to a sustainable source of catch, since marine life can enter and exit these zones unhindered. Because the ocean is an interconnected whole, endangered life which bounce back in rewilded zones could seed itself across the vast expanses of blue much more quickly than on land. By bringing back whale populations which were hunted to extinction or near extinction during the age of industrial whaling, top-down trophic cascades would activate which in turn could stimulate a more vigorous and biodiverse marine Biosphere. Re-seeding bays and estuaries with oyster colonies would help mitigate coastal eutrophication as these creatures are tremendous natural filterers.Expanding the range of coastal mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, and kelp forests would help contribute to combating climate change by harnessing the massive carbon drawdown potential of Blue Carbon while also creating niches that increase coastal biodiversity.
The rapid increase in ocean-observing data sources, ranging from vast networks of buoys monitoring temperature, salinity, and biogeochemical tracers to increasing numbers of satellites supplying synoptic remote sensing data, will be extremely helpful in identifying regions of the seas ripe for rewilding. Marine climate technologies have only recently begun picking up steam. The potential for marine rewilding technologies is greater even than these, as they address many more environmental ills in addition to the wicked problem of climate change.
The ocean is suffering. But will not "die". Life is much too resilient for that. If our deep blue seas were just given more space to regenerate, we would be surprised at how quickly they could bounce back stronger than before. Rewild the high seas!
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David Valerio is a masters student at Rice University studying marine biogeochemistry. He is developing a computational model of the triple oxygen isotope composition of atmospheric oxygen to help advance the use of stable isotope measurements of oxygen in seawater as a proxy for marine primary productivity. After finishing his degree this coming August, he will be moving into the business world to support rewilding efforts that regenerate the Biosphere while also drawing down carbon from the atmosphere.