Professor Loren McClenachan’s lecture, “Historical Marine Ecology: Informing the Future by Learning from the Past,” was one of my favorite lectures this semester. I don’t know much about historical marine ecology, but Professor McClenachan was able to make this topic relevant to me. Professor McClenachan is a marine ecologist that looks at the historical changes of marine animal populations, more specifically in the Florida Keys.
She began the lecture by showing us pictures of two different environments and asked us if we could tell which has been degraded. Typically, when you think of environmental destruction it is pretty obvious and the effects are made easy to spot. But in one of her examples both of the pictures looked fine, you would only be able to spot which environment has been bothered by looking beyond the surface. The idea of looking beyond the surface resonated with me because often times, people won’t believe about the hazardous effects we have on the environment because they don’t see the effects directly. In order to truly understand and start making progress in the fight against climate change and environmental degradation, we need to go beyond our normal and start acknowledging the subtle destruction we are causing to our planet.
In the lecture Professor Loren McClenachan sums up what I was saying previously with the term, shifting baselines syndrome. What this means is that people assume that the state of the environment at the start of the careers is “natural” and all change afterward is “unnatural”. This complete disregard of historical changes is extremely dangerous because without understand our position in relations to the past, we will continue destroying our environment to the point of no return. Professor McClenachan stated that we are living in a 10% world. What this means is that there has been such a decline in the ecology on earth over the years and we are living in the remnants. The thought of that is scary to me because before this I too considered the world we live in now as “normal”.
Professor McClenachan research looked at the historical ecology of the Florida Keyes and specifically analyzed the changes in large trophy fish, coral reefs, and sponges. What she found was that for large trophy fish, using pictures from the 1950s, there has been a 90% decline in the size of large trophy fish. For coral reefs, she found a 52% loss over 240 years and the estimates for coral change with a focus on areas of extant coral are around 80% (which is a severe underestimate). Lastly, for sponges, she found that there has been a huge decline in sponge populations due to the fact that it is part of an over-capitalized boom and bust export fisheries market.
During the question and answers portion of the lecture, someone asked whether or not there has been effort to get previous fishing photos out to the public, to inform communities about the impact trophy fishing has on the environment. Professor McClenachan response by saying that there were but different places have different openness to hearing about the damage fishing has, and that many don’t want to hear the story. This ambivalence to hearing about how we are systematically destroying our environment is the reason why we need to continue reflecting on how our actions have consequences, whether it be from the past or present.