Our Planet: The High Seas and Other Thoughts

I recently finished watching Our Planet, a wonderful documentary series on Netflix.  Each episode is filled with surprising, often almost unbelievable, facts and photography.  I have seen many nature programs in my life but the cinematography in Our Planet surpasses all of them.  The shots are often breath-taking and sometimes leave me wondering how the hell they managed to capture particular video imagery.  The series is a visual and educational marvel.   
The series is hosted by the incomparable and ever-enduring David Attenborough, who has been writing and producing material on the natural world since the 1950’s (all of my life).  I was a big fan of his The Living Planet series back in the 1980’s.  I have the book Attenborough wrote for that series as well as the complete series on VHS tapes.   But, compared with that series, Our Planet is a major advance in both content and technical achievement. 

Our Planet caused a lot of controversy in Episode 2 which broadcasts the horrible sight of numerous Walrus’ falling to their death because, due to excessive ice melting, they are able to climb onto higher rock cliffs now but they don’t have the intelligence to climb back down from them.  That particular scene inspired a lot of headlines but it is only the tiniest part of the series and is only one of many incredible natural occurrences featured throughout the eight episodes.

This blog post will concern itself only with Episode 6, “The High Seas.”  It was one of those episodes where I wasn’t expecting much compared with other parts of the documentary with which I have more affinity, but I found my modest expectations greatly exceeded.  “The Hugh Seas” is not only a remarkable hour-long look a lesser understood aspect of nature, it also documents for the viewer the very cornerstone for life on Earth.  Simply put, without the High Seas life as we know it on our planet would not exist.

To quote the episode: “The ocean is the largest living space on Earth and two-thirds of it is owned by no one.  These are the high seas, beyond the reach of national laws….The high seas are vast and deep and dark.  The surface layers are home to more familiar creatures.  Albatross above, fish beneath, tiny krill and giant whales.  Which is most important to protect?  Perhaps it’s the plants.  Phytoplankton, the microscopic, floating plants of the high seas.  What they lack in size, they make up for in numbers.  Plankton blooms can be so dense and vast they can be seen from space.  They are so numerous, they create as much oxygen as all the world’s forests and grasslands combined. 

“In the high seas, essential nutrients are scarce and everything, plankton included, has a tendency to sink to the darkness below where no plant can grow.  Enter the whales.  They mix up the water, flicking the sinking plankton back into the sunlight.  Astonishingly, this mixing by marine animals, from whales to jellyfish, is locally equivalent to the mixing caused by winds and waves and tides.  Whales also make another contribution to the high seas’ circle of life.  They defecate at the surface, fertilizing the sunlit shallows, and fueling the growth of plankton.  The plankton feeds fish and krill, and the fish and krill feed whales.  The whales then recycle the nutrients back to where they are most needed.”

The episode points out that last century human beings almost wiped out the whales.  But we instituted protections just in time.  Still today, other species that contribute to this oceanic ‘circle of life’ are severely threatened.  Populations of Pacific Bluefin Tuna are down 95% in the last 50 years.  Sharks, down 90%.  Wandering Albatross are down 30% in 70 years.  The vast majority of these deaths are collateral damage to humanity’s massive fishing of the seas.  Recently, our dumping of plastics into this vast oceanic area is also a major contributor.  By 2050 there will be, by weight, more plastic in the oceans than marine life.  Overall, one-third of fish species are now extinct due to overfishing and pollution.

The threat to marine life that facilitates the growth of phytoplankton is most significant because this plankton produces half the world’s oxygen.  Astoundingly, phytoplankton are also an important ingredient in the formation of clouds at sea.  These microscopic organisms are actually lifted out of the water and into the air, forming the glue by which clouds form and grow into thunderstorms, which brings fresh water to the land masses to sustain animal and plant life, and makes agricultural enterprises possible.

So the semi-cliché concept of the ‘circle of life’ is not some dumbed-down or popularized notion to make our planet's delicate balance easier to appreciate.  It is reality. 

Inspired by this episode I contemplated the beginning of all food chains, as it were.  Lanternfish and krill are the most numerous animal species on the planet.  They depend upon plankton for their survival.  In turn, these multitudes of tiny fish feed everything from whales to sea birds.  The planet is truly dependent on these seemingly innumerable undersea swarms.  

If you take the ‘circle of life’ all the way back to its beginnings, you find whales and dolphins and tuna keeping the plankton stirred up and fertilized.  The tiny fish eat the plankton for survival and are, in turn, eaten by numerous predators from air and sea, many of which we consume for food.  If the predatory animals, many already threatened with extinction, ceased to exist, the churning and fertilizing of the plankton would cease too, the whole system would collapse.  Not only would a major source of food be lost, but the world’s supply of rain and oxygen would diminish as well.

This is not a recipe for survival.

For me, the big takeaway from this episode is that the smallest things, which are of no direct use to humanity, are nevertheless the most fundamental things for human survival.  According to Genesis, God gave humanity “dominion” over the earth.  If true, this was a mistake and God is not perfect.  For this dominion has been, and continues to be, the most destructive force on the planet, threatening every aspect of God’s creation including the very existence of humanity itself. Humanity's dominion is the madness of a self-conflicted god. 

A more pragmatic and legitimate approach would be for humans to be ‘stewards’ of the planet, to recognize the dominion of the ecosystems themselves.  Western civilization has developed under the influence of toxic behavior.  Being at the top of the food chain, we have no understanding or appreciation for the enormous responsibility that entails.  And we arrogantly assume nature is our servant when, in truth, it is ultimately the other way around. Ask the victims of earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes, of flooding and drought, if they feel empowered.

Yet, as I have mentioned before, humanity nevertheless controls nature to an unprecedented extent.  We have entered the Anthropocene, where we are largely in charge of the health and vitality of the earth.  While we as a species possess a greater understanding than ever before of the interrelationship of life on earth, that understanding is not widespread.  It is, in fact, limited to a few interested nature lovers and academic scholars.  

The mass of humanity knows nothing of the importance of plankton and laternfish.  We don’t eat them directly.  But this is our folly.  Because we collectively have yet to understand that we need to protect the entire habitats of the things we eat and the water we drink and the air we breathe.  As this episode of Our Planet documents, if we are going to be around 200 years from now we must start thinking holistically.  We must consider and protect things most of us never see or use – and that is a trait humanity as a whole does not possess in surplus.

So-called "tree-huggers" are mocked by the mass of humanity.  The cost and inconvenience of protecting habitats and of correcting our destructive behavior as a species is not factored in to our economic systems, which humans prize above everything else.  It isn’t just capitalism that has wrought such destruction.  Historically and all over the world communism and socialist economies historically have been far filthier and environmentally damaging than free market economies.  It is not the specific system that is the problem.  The problem is that the environmental costs of human activity, regardless of which philosophy it is based upon, does not factor the environment into account at all.

But there is hope.  People like Attenborough and TV series' like Our Planet are doing their part to enlighten the masses.  Many species have gone extinct due to human activity, but humanity is slowly learning to avoid the most essential extinctions.  A great number of threatened plants and animals are experiencing a rebound thanks to human protections.  Where our environment is concerned, human activity can be a curse or a blessing.

Fortunately, the earth is teeming with life and diversity.  Unfortunately, our learning process is slow.  So our hope is tinged with the knowledge that more human devastation of the environment is inevitable. And if we learn our lesson is survival in time, there will nevertheless be less diversity of life on earth in a couple of decades than there is today.  

Although Our Planet talks about the impact of human-made climate change through the series, I have not mentioned it in this post.  I wanted the reader to understand that we have fundamental challenges on the high seas and all over the globe even without the issue of climate change, though global warming certainly makes things even more complicated.

People either ‘believe’ in climate change or they don’t.  But there is no denying what Episode 6 is telling us.  The tiniest of things in the oceans are necessary for all life whether the planet heats up or enters a new ice age.  Even without the trendy headlines of melting polar ice caps and record-breaking high temperatures, Our Planet demonstrated in “The High Seas” episode, as with all of its episodes, that habitats are vital and fragile.  

Yet, they are also resilient.  Human protections for whales and other species and habitats have worked and are working to some degree.  We are simply at a point where our addiction to the demands of economic systems can longer be as myopic as it has been for the past 200 years.  Our Planet shows us the way toward addressing this and it shines a bright light on what we as species must do in order to adapt and change our carefree and reckless behavior if there is still to be a wild world out there supporting life itself.