Introduction: The Importance of Shifting Baselines
Exploding out of Africa just seventy thousand years ago, human beings colonized every continent but Antarctica before the end of the last ice age. In the process, we drove three-quarters of the land animals larger than 100 pounds extinct—a truly remarkabl
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Exploding out of Africa just seventy thousand years ago, human beings colonized every continent but Antarctica before the end of the last ice age. In the process, we drove three-quarters of the land animals larger than 100 pounds extinct—a truly remarkable achievement for fewer than five million people armed with sticks and rocks. The oceans were still largely safe, but heaps of bones and shells along the shoreline augured what was soon to come. Then about ten thousand years ago, people began to settle down and invent agriculture and trade, towns, cities, and bureaucracies. Armies soon followed. The familiar pattern of conquest, expansion, environmental destruction, and the rise and fall of empires was firmly established a few thousand years later. Fishing also intensified, and the numbers of shellfish, fish, sea turtles, sea cows, and seals began to drop worldwide. Persian stone friezes in the Louvre vividly depict abundant sea turtles, marine mammals, and fish at the time of Sargon the Great, around 700 BCE, but by the time of the Romans most of these animals were growing scarce. Romans cast their nets and built factories all the way from the northern Black Sea to Britain to meet an ever-growing demand for fish and fish products. Similar stories abound from the Americas, where middens tell us that people shifted to tinier and tinier prey for subsistence, or they targeted fish that 1
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were harder to catch or farther away. The human population was somewhere between two and three hundred million. Fast-forward to the great maritime empires of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, when the oceans became a vast new fishing ground and a superhighway to move people and commodities. Bigger and better ships took to the open oceans to catch herring, cod, and great whales en masse. One of the first casualties was the Atlantic gray whale, hunted to extinction by the eighteenth century. Herring and cod were said to be inexhaustible. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, ships were fishing farther and farther out to sea with increasingly sophisticated gear, but catches of even the mighty cod showed evidence of steep decline. Similar stories abound for oysters, shad, and alewives from New England to the Chesapeake Bay, and sea turtles and monk seals from the Caribbean. Chemical pollution and invasions of nonnative species also increased, and entire estuaries and coastal ecosystems were devastated by 1900. Meanwhile, human population increased to about 1.5 billion by the end of the nineteenth century. But the real damage had only just begun. What had previously been a series of local or regional problems were rapidly becoming global. The driving force was our relentless quest for progress and the necessity for growing economies to feed, govern, and placate increasing billions of people. The engine ran on cheap energy from a seemingly endless supply of fossil fuels. Despite the carnage of two great world wars, humans increased to 2.5 billion by 1950. Since then, the oceans as we knew them have begun to die. M
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