Fortunately, many students today take a different attitude. Like medical doctors, they want to save their patients, not write their obituaries. Even the media dictum of “if it bleeds, it leads” seems to be losing its grip as the public tires of reading stories of doom and gloom. But is there any good news to report? When we started organizing our “Beyond the Obituaries” symposium at the Smithsonian Institute in 2009, several of our colleagues wondered if we could even fill a program. Yet there is good news—reasons for hope and evidence of positive change—to be found if you hunt for it.
First, all is not lost. Relatively few extinctions have occurred in the sea, so most pieces of marine ecosystems remain. Yes, we have lost the giant auk, the sea mink, and the Caribbean monk seal, but bluefin tunas are still with us, at least for now. Moreover, in some remote places too far from human settlements to be worth exploiting, quasi-pristine marine ecosystems remain. The remarkable trophic structures of the Northern Line Islands and northwestern Hawaiian Islands, dominated by top predators in a way once thought to be energetically impossible, show us what ecosystems look like when people don’t eat everything big. Second, many once-dire situations have substantially improved. Sea otters and some seabirds, whales, turtles, and fishes like the striped bass have increased in numbers, in some cases markedly so. Shellfish beds, also, are coming back in many places, and even a few coral populations are showing signs of rebounding.
Cool name. And a necessary organization.
