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| EXTENDED
INTERVIEW: JOHN OGDEN |
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 December 2004  |
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John Ogden, director of the
Florida Institute of Oceanography, discusses what scientists can learn
about coral reefs using the Aquarius Undersea Laboratory and how zoning
can help reefs survive.
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BETTY ANN BOWSER: Let's talk about the Aquarius (Undersea Laboratory). Explain what is so unique about it and also what it allows scientists to do. JOHN OGDEN: Well, in the Aquarius is, essentially like an oceanographic ship or like a marine lab, is one of the tools that marine scientists use to understand how the ocean works. And one, scuba diving for example was a wonderful step forward in, in allowing the investigator to go under the sea to look at animals, to put instruments out and collect data. But you only have, at the most, at any reasonable depth, an hour of scuba diving time and you have to come to the surface. The Aquarius essentially allows you to extend that time at depth indefinitely. So you can make much more detailed observations. You can put instruments out that require constant tending and you can be there to tend them, and you can wire your instruments back to the habitat to collect the data, as we say, in the site, in-site too. And this makes a tremendous difference in our level of understanding about how things work. BETTY ANN BOWSER: What have you learned from this project? I operated the hydro lab which is the predecessor of the Aquarius in
the Virgin Islands for about 10 years. And it was a 16 foot long, 8
foot diameter tank and as your crew will see when they, they go into
the Aquarius later on in the week, the Aquarius is a luxury hotel compared
to the hydro lab. JOHN OGDEN: Well, scientists pursue investigations for a variety of reasons. We learn about the world in small incremental steps that are largely driven by human curiosity. And this is the great wondrous thing that we, as scientists, and we as a nation and we as a family of nations dare not lose because we can't be always practically driven. We need to have inspiration about just an idea. How does the world work? And we, I would imagine, I've always imagined that mankind has asked him or herself that question from time in memorial. So, there is this basic underlying curiosity that added on top of that, and I think most recently with the relentless growth, particularly of coastal human populations in the world is the ability and the necessity to study very practical problems, that matter to the average person. Can I go out and catch a fish? Can I swim in the water without getting an ear infection? Can I see what amounts to an untrammeled environment in the sense of our national parks, that kind of thing. And so science has a very definite role to play in that whole process, and so it's a matter of -- it isn't one thing or the other. It's an activity that proceeds, in both senses. |
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| Value of coral reefs | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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BETTY ANN BOWSER: Why should people care about coral reefs? JOHN OGDEN: Well you know, we've had essentially ongoing discussions as scientists, as conservationists, as managers about this very question for a long time. And it's absolutely clear that coral reefs for local economies are critical. Here in the Florida Keys for example, there are 3 million tourists coming down here annually. What do those tourists want to do by and large? I mean you know as well as I do that, that a great many of them want to swim out and see a coral reef because they've read about it in a diving magazine or have heard about it from a travel agent, or whatever. So this is a tremendous input to our economy. Actually it's estimated on the order of something like $4 billion a year in the Florida economy. So, we can make other economic arguments that are perhaps a little bit more obscure, for example, coral reefs are the source of a great many biomedical materials. We call it bioprospecting, going out, finding these organisms which have chemicals of certain activity and so on. This of course is very valuable economically, and so it's something that we want to encourage. Coral reefs are -- protect our coasts. BETTY ANN BOWSER: So we were talking of the biodiversity. JOHN OGDEN: Yes. One other economic return from coral reefs has to do and relatively recently with bioprospecting. There are several projects that are funded by our national cancer institute that send out teams all around the world to prospect on reefs for compounds which are, which have activity against tumors, against AIDS, against other physiological diseases in human beings. And so some of these compounds, there have been some anti-cancer compounds, some sun block-type of compounds, corals actually had built in their own sun block. And you may have heard about this when you were in Australia, and so there, there are a variety of things like that, and here in the Florida Keys. In fact, just last week, there was an expedition from Harbor Branch going along the reef collecting organisms ... for the purpose of looking for drugs from the sea. BETTY ANN BOWSER: So the potential out there is to develop new drugs that can attack some of the really bad things that hit -- JOHN OGDEN: Absolutely. The degree to which that potential will be realized, may be something less than it was for the rainforest of the world, because animals and plants in the rainforest are very tightly co-evolved. The plant produces a poison which most of our pharmacologically active compounds are, which defends it from an insect that eats at the insect, essentially develops or evolves a way of overcoming that poison. The plants fights back and this, what we call these co-evolutionary races take place on land. This is relatively rarer in the sea because organisms are not so specified. Most of the biological diversity on land is insects and flowering plants. In the ocean, the biological diversity is spread across vastly greater array of different kinds of organisms. So, we don't think that it'll be quite the way it was for rainforests, but nonetheless, the potential is there. BETTY ANN BOWSER: People don't get it when you talk to them about rainforests, and why it's important that we don't lose them. This is really sort of the ocean's version of that. JOHN OGDEN: Right. BETTY ANN BOWSER: But there's not as much -- JOHN OGDEN: You know, I'd have to say that when, when some newspaper report comes out that something has happened on the Great Barrier Reef or that a coral bleaching event has taken place that has killed or destroyed corals, and my phone starts ringing because reporters know that people are going to be interested and curious about this. And let's, let's understand. I think the average person hears about rainforests sort of in the abstract. They'd like to go there perhaps maybe, but how many people actually get to go? Very few people. In a sense, I think that interest in coral reefs is the same kind of thing, which really brings me to the last point about why I think coral reefs are valuable, and that is that they are a absolutely singular in the ocean, manifestation of the work of evolution, of the grand display of what life on this planet is really all about. And about how organisms evolve these fantastic color, color schemes, these fantastic interrelationships which you know we couldn't, even a clever person couldn't invent if they tried to, and so it's a moral point of view. Around the tables where people really care about conservation, we talk about the economic value. We talk about how reefs provide 10 percent of the global fisheries and this goes into people in the third world who are, who really need it and all of these very practical things that my own personal point of view is that it boils down to a moral stance that we have to take, that is, we are fellow travelers on the great blue orb and what right do we have to essentially disenfranchise those others? We may be cutting our own throats doing that, too. That's true. We don't know, that is all of the ecosystems that we depend on, we don't know exactly what those interdependencies are. And so there are certainly practical reasons, but I think they're also very strong moral ones. BETTY ANN BOWSER: To save the coral reefs? JOHN OGDEN: To save the coral reefs of the world. |
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| Assessing the condition of reefs | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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BETTY ANN BOWSER: How much trouble are they in? JOHN OGDEN: Recently, there's been an effort to assess, essentially the state of health of the coral reefs of the world. It's a very coordinated effort involving a, a global network of people, going out and looking and sampling, and I think the general conclusion is that there is virtually no reef in the world that has escaped impact from what I like to call the big three -- overfishing, land-based sources of pollution and global climate change. All over the world there's been an effort in the last -- it began about 10 years ago, to assess the health of coral reefs everywhere. And the outcome of that is that there is virtually no reef in the world that isn't essentially under some form of human disturbance, by one or more of what I call the big three: overfishing, land-based sources of pollution and global climate change. Now, those are sort of, of course they're not just things that operate in coral reef areas of the world, they also operate in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Maine and anywhere else where there are coastal human populations which depend upon, one way or another, their resources. For tourism, income, for fishes, for nice places to build houses and all of that. So, the big three, it's essentially when managers get together are essentially saying, "What can we do to manage?" We don't manage nature, but we manage human behavior for the benefit of nature. And it boils down to that. And they're very, very different things and require very, very different tools, so it's a complicated activity, and in some ways people aren't used to thinking about the ocean in these terms. And the ocean has always been vast and deep and mysterious, and full of life and full of potential and the place to explore and to benefit from the resources of, and all of these kinds of things. And it's just a very hard change for people to sort of hear someone like me say, "Look, the oceans, the sources are being used up right before our very eyes, and we have to do something about it." BETTY ANN BOWSER: So let's say you can wave a magic wand and you could, scientists as well as people like (inaudible), start managing the situation, what would that look like and how would you -- JOHN OGDEN: What would it look like? That's a good question and a fair one. It's a complicated one, but let me try to. This isn't necessary -- what I'm going to tell you isn't necessarily the only thing, but I think it's a secret, it's a point of view. We can learn from land. What did we do on land to essentially create a reasonable quality of life, not that a reasonable quality of life exists everywhere, but where, think of a place where, "Hey, this is a beautiful place. I'd like to live there." What, what are the characteristics of that place? You have places where people's houses are. You have places where industry is. You have a place far removed where there's waste disposal. You have a place where business can set up. Small businesses can set up. You have parks where people can walk out into untrammeled nature or some semblance thereof and have a different experience entirely. The tool that we have used to create that quality of life where it really does work well on land, is called planning. And the main tool that we use is zoning. Excuse me. Now, some people would say that zoning is one of the more -- most contentious things there is, and that is true. Zoning variances fight with the planning board office, all of those things are true, but only because people really care about those spaces, and they'll defend them. What do we do in the oceans that we don't do anything. Partly because we're seduced by this idea that the oceans are deep, dark mysterious with -- we can't see where the best place would be to put the tourism or the industry, or the park. That's nonsense. We have an enormous amount of information about this and certainly the Florida Keys are a place where we've accumulated over time a lot of information. So what we need is a planning process, I call it ocean use planning because we're not talking about locking up the seas for sources, what we're talking about is creating the kind of situation which will allow sustainable use of those resources at some level from now forever, basically. |
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| Zoning the sea | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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BETTY ANN BOWSER: So in other words, you would argue that the sea should be zoned? JOHN OGDEN: I argue that the sea should be zoned. And, what am I talking about when I say the sea? What is that sea? The United States essentially has staked its claim to sovereignty over a piece of the world's ocean which extends from the shore line to 200 miles offshore. This is our ocean. We don't technically own it under international law, but we might as well. We own the economic resources therein and have sovereignty over those resources. So, what I'd like to say is that the real United States consists of the something like 9 million square kilometers if I've got that right of the land, plus the 20 percent, 120 percent increment which is represented by the ocean. That's the real United States. We've planned in a reasonable way or sometimes an unreasonable way and a contentious way, but anyway, we do land use planning. We've done no ocean use planning, yet everyone who is involved in this game would say what we need is planning of this sort. BETTY ANN BOWSER: So hypothetically, there would be a zone where divers could go and a zone where people could fish. JOHN OGDEN: Exactly. BETTY ANN BOWSER: And what else? JOHN OGDEN: A zone where fiber optic cables would come into coast carrying IT information. Pipelines would come into the coast. Corridors for ships to make transfers, places, burrow pits where sand is mined to renourish beaches. Don't forget the national parks. We've got to have the national parks. We've got to have places where fishing is zoned in and controlled in various kinds of ways. So it would look not unlike a land use plan. BETTY ANN BOWSER: So why is that a free for all, wouldn't you say typically what you've got? JOHN OGDEN: We have been living, it is exactly like the land, the Oklahoma land rush of 1879. Everybody's out there. I'm going to get mine. I own it. It's mine, but I had no responsibility for it. and that has to change. We have to become stewards of this, as we are in fact of the land. As we've become by sad experience, stewards of the land. We need to become now, to take that, take the sad out of that experience and move the positive into this. And this is not going to be easy. This is not something that happens tomorrow, and it isn't something that happens without everybody essentially having a stake in it. If I'm not talking too long, I'll give you an example. You've been to Australia. When Australia in 1975 conceived of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, the principle tool that they used was a zoning plan. They wanted what's called a stakeholder input into this zoning plan. So they made a big map, big maps. They actually, you roll them out they were about 10 feet long, of the great barrier reef and they sent that to every single Australian citizen, because this was their resource and they were involved in it. Not only that, they sent it to everybody in the world who'd ever used quote unquote the Great Barrier Reef for some reason. That included me. I had been, I had made a research trip of the Great Barrier Reef and I got this map. And I rolled it out and it said how do you use the Great Barrier Reef? I mean in so many words. And I dutifully filled that out and sent it back in and the result of that enormously participatory process was the zoning plan of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Now that was 19 -- roughly the late '70s, into the early '80s, that plan went through a revision about two years ago and guess what, I got a packet of maps from Canberra, just as I had 20 years previous, this time it was a much bigger packet of maps, and when you unopened it out, it was much longer, but the question was still the same. We've had a zoning plan. How do you think it's working? What would you do to change it? And so on and so on. And again, they, Australia has just very recently signed off on a zoning plan which has increased the level of protection of the Great Barrier Reef from roughly 5 percent to 35 percent, something like that. Protection is, by that I mean fishing exclusion and, and human extraction exclusion. Nobody can go in and take the sand, take the organisms, take the fish, what have you. BETTY ANN BOWSER: What you're suggesting is that somebody should do something to give the American public ownership of this resource. JOHN OGDEN: Well, in fact, we already own it, but what we need to do -- that's right -- that stewardship mentality, exactly. I think the average person who, who does a little bit of traveling in the United States understands that they own and appreciate the national parks. They're the most visited, I mean look at the people who go. I mean and the park service of course underfunded as it is, can't keep up with the level of visitation. But people love the national parks. My assertion is with absolute conviction is that people will love those marine parks when we have them and we will have them. But I think put within the context of this planning process, it's going to be something that everybody can take pride in, having had their ideas aired. There are no losers in this game. There are, there is compromise but there are no losers. Everybody is going to gain. If we keep up on the way, on the road that we're on right now, we're all going to be losers. That particular point of view, I think would be shared by almost everybody who thought about it. We cannot keep going the way we're going. BETTY ANN BOWSER: Are you an optimist? JOHN OGDEN: I am definitely an optimist because I -- and one of the things that made me so is having participated in the construction of the management plan of the Key Sanctuary. And this plan is exemplary. It's both good and bad examples, you understand, but it's exemplary nonetheless. And it shows me that the original advisory council which was a cross section of Florida citizens, sat down together and we butted heads for six years over this thing. Our lives were threatened. My windshield was broken, my tires were slashed by angry people with no other way to express their anger than striking out at somebody. Fortunately no one was -- we're not talking about violence, we're talking about just frustration. How can you take away my livelihood of 20 years? I understand that. It's the same, it's been the same issue in the old growth forest in the Pacific Northwest. It is true that there is, there's compromise, but I know that a lot of the people who's fishing activities were perhaps compromised are now leading turbos out to the reef and making as good, if not better money. Granted, they're not necessarily fishermen anymore, and that means something but again there's a give and a take that has to happen for this to go forward. And it happened here and I believe it can happen in the United States. One other, one final point or one other point is that we have the Commission on Ocean Policy Report going to the president now. ... As you're well aware and as most of your viewers would be well aware, the Commission on Ocean Policy Report has been issued after two-and-a-half years of work by a similar broad cross section of Americans. This report has gone to the governors for review and will shortly be going to final draft and will be on the desk of the president. This is a report which, on the surface, might horrify somebody. It's hundreds of pages long. It's a weighty document. It sort of looks like the federal budget but, believe me, I think everybody ought to read at least the executive summary which in the draft, at least, is only 12 pages. And you will see that in there is the outline, a very broad outline of what amounts to a national dedication to the conservation and management of our ocean resources that the changes, not abruptly, but over time the way we do business and the way we approach the oceans. And it doesn't have that bluntly articulated zoning plan that I came up with you, but it's called ecosystem management. And what ecosystem management is, is that we're going to try to preserve the health of the oceans, not by managing the oceans. We can't manage the oceans. We manage ourselves. We manage our behavior vis-a-vis these resources on which we depend in a variety of ways. And that I think is one of the principle conclusions of the Commission on Ocean Policy Report. It's the conclusion, for example, that our governor, Governor Bush, has taken on board in a letter to the Gulf states governors saying, let's get together and try to craft through an ocean initiative, an ecosystem management plan for the Gulf of Mexico. So I believe that other states governors are going to see this, follow suit, come up with their own ideas, and I think we're going to be set on a different course. |
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| Raising awareness | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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BETTY ANN BOWSER: Would you like to see a Cabinet position created, a department to support that like we have in the Environmental Protection Agency? JOHN OGDEN: Well, you know, ultimately speaking very frankly and personally, I would. But I think it's unrealistic to expect that to happen at this particular time with this particular report. I mean we've got some initial steps that we can take that aren't quite so dramatic and that will set the stage that will energize people that will bring them on board, bring the political force necessary to make the administration and the Congress realize that people care about the ocean. Not just, this isn't about conservation, it's about fishing and it's about shipping and it's about sailing and it's about tourism and all of the kinds of things that we, all of us, as a nation are engaged in and depend upon in the ocean. And to get that group of so-called stakeholders together and to speak with that voice to the Congress. And my contention is, look, this is a democracy. It's messy, it's ugly some people say. It's the sausage factory, but this kind of stakeholder involvement process has pushed forward remarkable things and remarkable change in our history, and I believe that the oceans are important enough for that revolution to take place. To be energized and to take place. And it's going to require a lot of work, but we're a nation of organizations. And you know as Garrison Keillor says, the National Federation of Associations. I mean there are associations of all different kinds that deal with the oceans, the Sport Fishing Associations and Tourism Associations and Cruise Ship Associations. These are places where this kind of discussion can take place, where the partnerships can be drawn and where the political process goes forward. BETTY ANN BOWSER: Where do you think this reef out here ought to be, what kind of shape is it going to be in 30 years? JOHN OGDEN: Well, it's a good question, it's a fair question, it's one that would occur to anyone to ask. You know, I don't know, I'm a scientist. I've worked on reefs all my life. I've read thousands of papers by my colleagues who have written brilliantly about what makes this reef work and so on. But as in any environmental issue, there is no scientific certainty here of that, that our ability to undertake steps will lead to an outcome. But I like the medical analogy and here it is. The health of an ecosystem, the health of a coral reef is not unlike your health. You go to the doctor and he measures blood pressure and he draws a sample of blood and he puts it on an EKG and so on, and he does all of these things. And he says to you, you know, you're leading a stressful life. You know, there's certain things that you can do to reduce stress. Reduction of stress is good. Cut out the coffee, don't drink all those beers at night. I'm not suggesting that you do. Get rid of that high stress job. Get a lot of sleep. Well, maybe you can't get rid of that high stress job, so you can take care of three out of four, whatever that was. That's not bad. And what's the net result of that on the average person's health? It's an improvement in health. A demonstrable improvement in health. The same thing goes for the coral reef. There are certain things that we know we can do. We can reduce and control land-based sources of pollution. We can control overfishing. We can create the marine protected areas that allow big fish to grow up and make the disproportionately large number of young that will help our harvest and take a fish outside from now and into the future. We can do these kinds of things to reduce stress. As in human beings, the reduction of stress is good. That third stress of the big three, though, is the one that -- it's like the high stress job. It's the one that we're going to have the most difficulty dealing with and that's global climate change. Global climate change, which -- I accept the judgment of the 2,500 scientists in the world who have come to the conclusion that, look, we have a problem with global climate change and its greenhouse gases. This is not, the greenhouse is a fact. The degree to which human disturbance is influencing -- that is a controversial point -- but I believe at least that it's fact. We're going to have a great deal of difficulty doing that. But if we can reduce stresses in these other areas where we know we can do something, that's good, and it will allow these systems better able to cope with those things that we cannot or won't perhaps, as a family of nations deal with. I mean I hope we do deal with global climate change. Personal point of view, but you know, I suppose one has to hold our a possibility that we won't in any reasonable time. BETTY ANN BOWSER: When you are, certain people in this country talk about saving the redwoods and then they get (inaudible) as tree huggers, OK, right? And when you talk about preserving certain things in the mountains, you know you're a conservationist and in this particular case, what are people like you? Are you a conservationist or are you one of these people that says, we should -- JOHN OGDEN: Well, I mean, look. We're all human beings. We have our selfish points of view. I study coral reefs and I'd like to have them around so I have something to do. I'm not, I suppose, unlike a fisherman who sort of says, look, I'm a fisherman, I catch fish for a living. I'd like to have some around so that I can be in business and perhaps my son or daughter following can be in business. We're not so easily labeled in this way, conservationists. I mean, what I am is a person who has seen enough in their life to know that we as human beings are having this highly damaging effect on a resource which I know I and my friends and our society in the very broadest sense depends. We depend on this. A healthy ocean is the key to the economy of the United States, to the future health of -- economic health of coast states and to the future sort of, in my terms, of moral well being if you will. I mean, all kinds of reasons. So, we need to get on top of this issue. We need to be planning it. We need to be engaged by it. If that makes me a conservationist, then I guess I am one. |
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The NewsHour Science Unit is funded by a grant from:  The National Science Foundation. Reports are produced solely by the NewsHour and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. |
