Song For The Blue Ocean
Encounters Along The World's Coast and Beneath The Seas

By: Dr. Carl Safina
Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
New York, New York $30.00 458 pp.

Tammy L. Shaw, 2L

Dr. Carl Safina's Song For The Blue Ocean, is a moving and passionate account of the plight of the world's oceans. From his boyhood days spent fishing in Long Island Sound to a successful career as a research ecologist, Safina has spent his life in or near the ocean. Through this time, he came to realize that something was happening to the creatures of the sea - they were disappearing. "The oceans were being depopulated; the creatures were not just being used - they were being used up." Safina likened this occurrence to the disappearance of the buffalo [bison] of North America; to him it seemed that "a last buffalo hunt was occurring on the rolling blue prairies of the ocean."

Song For The Blue Ocean is a journey in search of the oceans' message, a "chorus" for voices to tell their stories of the oceans. As scientist, fisherman, tourist, and guide, Safina explores beyond the ocean horizon to the scientists, the fisherpersons, the charter boat captains, and the exporters who make their living from the sea.

Safina's research has taken him from the eastern seaboard of North America, to the Pacific Northwest, to the Palau Islands. In each region, he interviews many men and women by becoming a member of their crew, a contributor to their research, or a visitor in their community. Seeking to understand what these individuals know about the ocean, the marine environment, and the sea creatures, Safina explores each viewpoint, attempting to reconcile them with his own observations. He seeks the truth in the many differing predictions and observations of the oceans' health by asking the same question of everyone: "Are there fewer fish today than in the past?"

The Northeast

Safina begins his dialogue off the eastern seaboard of the United States in the Gulf of Maine. He first observes not from the water but from the air with pilot-fisherman Charlie Horton. Horton is a different kind of fisherman, a professional fish spotter circling the waters in a plane in search of bluefin tuna and swordfish, guiding commercial fishing boats to them. Horton has agreed to take Safina "fishing" (as he refers to his flying) to give Safina a bird's eye view of fish populations that Horton believes are abundant and increasing. With an experienced eye, Horton skims miles of ocean for a glimpse of the tell-tale signs of giant bluefin tuna. Maneuvering his plane in tight circles, he points out a school of 100 or more bluefin traveling just below the surface. By Horton's approximation some of the tuna weigh more than 500 pounds, a sight that Safina admits strains the concept of fish.

The author describes these giants as peaceful warriors, with sickle-shaped tails propelling them through the water at astonishing speeds. A product of evolution that is almost perfected, the bluefin is among the most migratory of animals. Spawning in the Gulf of Mexico, bluefins range from Nova Scotia to the tropics and inhabit the Atlantic and Pacific. They are skillful predators with bodies built for efficiency and speed and, unlike most fish, are able to regulate their body temperature, giving them a predatory advantage in deeper, colder waters. Safina notes that the bluefin is a highly revered animal, not only by the scientists and conservationists but also by the men and women who make their living hunting them. Horton is no exception, even as he notes the location of these schools, he admits that he supports anybody who will save these resources. He explains that "[i]t's possible we could wipe the fish out, just like it's possible to wipe out any species."

Safina listens to many sides of the bluefin debate. In what must sometimes seem like throwing himself to the wolves, this research ecologist and scientist spends days aboard the boats of commercial fishermen and ambitious fish dealers. He is regaled with tales of the abundance of the bluefin and other fish, but finds that when their guard is down, they admit that fishing today is but a shadow of what it was in the past. As one captain put it, "When one fish declines, tremendous pressure gets shifted onto some other." According to Safina, scientists calculate that the bluefin population off the eastern seaboard has declined nearly 90 percent since the 1970's.

Even as these east coast fishermen steadfastly refuse to admit that there is a problem for the bluefin populations, they all agree that conditions in the Gulf of Mexico are important for spawning. Experts believe that they gather in large numbers in the gulf waters, commingling eggs and sperm to ensure fertilization of more eggs. The large number of these animals in a group is important to spawning, making practices that deplete the population dangerous, such as longlining and policies that encourage high catches, dangerous. Longlining is a fishing practice that runs hook-laden lines out for miles and miles, taking many fish at one time. This reduces the number of mature fish and the chances for spawning. According to Roger Hillhouse, another pilot-fisherman who has logged more hours looking at tuna from an airplane than anyone else in the world, it is the longliners who are interfering with the tuna. "My contention," Roger says, "is that longliners picking them in the Gulf are disrupting spawning, keeping them from getting together in large schools. We're not seeing the babies--we are not seeing the spawning."

While longlining in the Gulf of Mexico increases yearly, Safina notes that our national policies can have an equally detrimental impact. Safina points to the Fisheries Service requirement that vessels bringing in bluefin must also bring in twenty-five hundred pounds of other fish. Attempting to make bluefin a by-catch of other fisheries, the policy has resulted in open fishing with longliners bringing in sharks, yellowfin tuna, sunfish, and even billfish just to meet the requirement. Since it is the bluefin that is the desired catch, these other fish are usually dumped overboard at days end.

The Northwest

In the second section of Song For The Blue Ocean, Safina reports that the Northwest United States and Pacific Canada have become the world's extinction epicenter for ocean fishes. In this region, pacific salmon have disappeared from about 40 percent of their breeding range in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and California. Salmon are one of the world's most complicated fishes, spending their young lives in freshwater, their middle years in the oceans, and returning far upriver to spawn in freshwater before dying. They require enormous physical changes and navigational skills that are far more advanced than any living thing. Seeking the cause of salmon depletion, Safina begins at the edge of the Pacific but soon realizes, "come here seeking the sea, and you will soon find yourself inland seeking to understand the forces transforming it." While overfishing has been a major threat to salmon for over 100 years, many new dangers lurk inland: dams, deforestation, and irrigation and grazing practices.

In the Northwest, control of major rivers and their tributaries is accomplished through a system of dams, pumps, and reservoirs. Six thousand miles of salmon spawning habitat has been reduced to three hundred. Before dams, a trip from Idaho to the mouth of the Columbia River took three weeks for a migrating salmon. The dams have increased the length of that trip to seven weeks. Even if the salmon successfully run the gauntlet of dams, stream quality upstream may still endanger survival.

The author again takes to the sky to get an aerial view of one of the salmon's major threats. Massive timber clear-cutting in Oregon has wiped out hundreds of thousands of acres of old-growth forests leaving a scarred landscape that fills streams and rivers with silt and exposes the rivers to sunlight raising the temperature in the rivers, making salmon spawning impossible. From the air, Safina sees miles and miles of waterfront piled high with logs awaiting export to Asia. Finally, Safina notes that irrigation practices lower the water levels in the rivers and streams, draining crucial spawning grounds, and grazing often results in pollution and contributes to the silting in of these same rivers and streams.

Safina sees firsthand the impact of these practices on a small fishing town that is showing signs of economic collapse. Community members recount to the author experiences such as losing their boats, life savings, and homes. Willow Burch, a part Cherokee grandmother, speaks in the town auditorium, explaining "I've lost everything. I have nothing left." Fishermen still hope for better times, lamenting "[m]aybe tomorrow will be a better day. Better days are coming. . . ."

The Far Pacific

In the final section of Song for the Blue Ocean, Safina travels to the Indo-Pacific to the islands of Palau, a "Fertile Triangle" with more species of fish, coral, algae, and sponges than anywhere else in the world. Describing the underwater scene as a "blackened-blue aquatic madhouse," Safina dives in to witness the schools of parrotfish, rainbow runners, and damselfish that depend on the reef's survival for their own and is confronted with the realities of the destruction of the vast coral reefs. Beside the areas brimming with reef fishes, other areas are beginning to deteriorate because of cyanide fishing. In an effort to capture live fish for export to Hong Kong markets, native fishermen expel cyanide into the reef habitat. The poison temporarily stuns the fish, allowing them to be captured with little effort and minimal damage to their appearance. Where it is used, the cyanide kills the coral reefs that can take many centuries to replace.

To understand Hong Kong's increasing demand for live fish, Safina visits Hong Kong's live fish markets finding an endless variety of coral reef fish confined in tanks and tubs waiting for sale to nearby restaurants. As the guest of a successful fish broker, Safina sees the insatiability of Hong Kong's demand for live fish. In a lavish show for affluent businessmen, huge platters of Napoleon wrasse, coral trout, red grouper, stonefish, and other delicacies are brought to the table and later taken away, mostly uneaten. This demand for live fish perpetuates destructive cyanide fishing practices as marketeers deliver the poison to island fishermen.

Fortunately, Safina notes that some communities recognize that these destructive fishing practices inhibit a sustainable fishing economy. Visiting the island of Mindanao, in the Philippines, Safina learns that young fishermen do not know alternatives to cyanide fishing. To change this, the community sought out an international team to teach them how to coax the fish out of the reef crevices into nets and to use abandoned methods such as hook and line fishing. An islander explained to Safina how the new sustainable practices are changing his community for the better. He explains, "[b]efore, when they were blast fishing with explosives made of fertilizer, our people could hardly afford paddle boats. Now with hook and line fishing, we can afford to send our children to school."
 

Conclusion

Safina concludes that to protect the oceans, mankind must begin to think of the animals beneath the sea surfaces as a part of our community, creating a "sea ethic" in our thinking and policy-making. The author relays the warning signs: an expanding fishery that poisons reefs with sodium cyanide engulfing the richest one-third of the world's coral habitat; salmon runs on the Pacific Northwest fading into extinction on almost a daily basis; and schools of bluefin tuna disappearing like the American bison. Yet, he writes the book to deliver a message of hope. "The greatest mystery of nature is its power to generate life, and life's regenerative power responds generously whenever people find within themselves the will to allow it. The only requirement: heart, hope, and unusual courage."

University of Mississippi