If a person was in a generous mood, they could say that Canadians are doing their part to protect the world’s oceans. Off the east coast of Nova Scotia, a 3,000 square kilometer underwater canyon has just been designated as a marine protected area because of its rich and diverse ecosystem. Off the west coast, more than $50 million has been set aside for the purchase of key marine protected areas. And new legislation on both coasts now requires ships to dump their ballast water far offshore to slow the spread of exotic species, while sophisticated Canadian technology tracks marine polluters and deep sea driftnetters as never before.

But the grim reality is that the problems facing the world’s oceans are so overwhelming it almost makes these efforts seem inconsequential. In fact, many leading scientists believe the world’s oceans are in a state if crisis. According to Elizabeth Mann-Borgese, Halifax based chairperson of the International Ocean Institute, "What we are doing is killing ourselves. It is the human race that will die out if we don’t do something."

The problems are not new; pollution, over fishing and rising ocean temperatures, but now there is a real concern that the oceans may be losing their capacity to generate the oxygen on which all life on earth depends.

Two prime indicators – the world’s coral and the world’s plankton – tell us something terribly wrong. They are dying.

Coral is the most sensitive living thing to temperature variations in the oceans. If ocean temperatures rise as little as one degree for a period of two months, coral dies; if temperatures rise two degrees, coral dies in one month. In vast areas of the Pacific and Indian oceans, 70 to 90 per cent of the coral died last year (1998). This is a marine tragedy on a grand scale. Coral reefs are 80 times richer in fish species than the rest of the ocean, supporting an estimated 93,000species, 25 percent of the worlds total, in just 0.3 percent of the space. Of even greater concern is that coral reefs help remove up to 10 percent of the carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. As such, they are major global temperature regulators.

Another indication a crises is looming, is that in huge areas of the world’s oceans, there has been an alarming drop in plankton levels. Off the US west coast and in the north-east Pacific, scientists estimate there has been a 70 percent drop in plankton levels since the 1950's. Through photosynthesis, plankton generates over half the oxygen released into the biosphere. Without that contribution life as we know it could not continue.

Canadians have a special interest in protecting the world’s oceans. Our 250,000 kilometer-long coastline is the longest coastline of any nation, and our oceans contribute 140,000 jobs and more than eight billion dollars annually toward our gross national domestic product. We export more than three billion dollars worth of seafood alone. But more than that, as one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, if Canadians cannot help solve the problems facing our world’s oceans, no one else is likely to.

That’s a sobering thought indeed, especially when our very lives depend on it.

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