The winter sea ice at the village of Ulġuniq has crumpled against the shoreline into ridges, slabs, and blocks – testimony to the power of wind against ice. Deep twilight engulfs this Arctic coast – the sun will not show itself until January. Enough light bends over the horizon though, for me to see the blue surface of the ice and the deep shadows between slabs and blocks as I climb through the maze, the village lights receding behind me.
I pay attention to the shadows. A polar bear – nanuq – can easily hide in the folds of this frozen sea, even though a male nanuq may be ten feet long. A double-layered white or creamy coat camouflages the bear’s black skin, except for the nose, and makes it nearly impossible for me to see in the jumbled ice. Polar bears are top predators, usually hunting ringed seals through the seals’ breathing holes in the ice surface. But their prey list also includes humans, and they sometimes come into coastal villages. I understand the risk, but I can’t resist wandering among the shadows and the tilted, chaotic surface. The possibility of meeting nanuq has honed my vigilance: In the blue twilight, I scrutinize every shadow, and each seems to hide at least one bear; I listen for paws on ice but hear only the squeak of boots on snow on ice.
Under my boots, this ice and the waters below form a vast and rich ecosystem that has supported the Iñupiat and Yup’ik residents of the Arctic coast for thousands of years. Now, in the face of climate disruption and ocean change, a key to retaining its productivity is to protect and carefully manage large areas of the Arctic Ocean, paying particular attention to key habitats, migration corridors, durable physiographic features, and areas important for traditional activities. It is this combination of vast, protectively managed areas of still-thriving ecosystems that provides resilience for ecosystem functions and sustainable uses by people. And it is the cornerstone of our Marine Conservation Initiative’s work in the Arctic.
By focusing on healthy ecosystems and securing protections for big portions of those ecosystems, a variety of benefits follow.
For one, reducing the number and extent of human-caused impacts gives ecosystems greater capacity to rebound or adjust to impacts that we cannot avoid – the continuing effects of climate disruption and ocean change, for example. Second, by limiting unsustainable impacts by people, we retain the opportunity to understand and measure changes from the huge climate experiment that is underway. Planning for and protecting large areas means that these healthy ecosystems can continue to support the sustainable uses on which coastal communities depend.
This approach is serving conservation well in British Columbia. In what has become known in the Province and around the world as the majestic “Great Bear Sea” and “Great Bear Rainforest,” thriving environments and large, carefully managed areas have been keys to success. On the ocean side of the work, British Columbia marine plans together cover nearly all of Canada’s Pacific coast, and the plans from the Marine Plan Partnership (MaPP) – the largest of three ocean planning efforts supported by the foundation in British Columbia – include 241 Protection Management Zones. These protected zones cover a sizable portion of this extraordinary expanse of marine waters and habitat.
In fact, when one considers that many small coastal communities whose existence is inextricably tied to a seasonal round of sustainable harvesting activities, the distinction between ocean and forest habitats seems artificial. Many organisms – like Pacific salmon species and marbled murrelets – are likewise creatures of both the ocean and the forest. And when we include the Great Bear Rainforest’s 64,000 square kilometers to the protections offered by the areas to be protected in British Columbia’s marine waters, we are looking at one of the largest intact rainforest and ocean ecosystem complexes in the world. It personifies the large area protection of thriving ecosystems that is a hallmark of the Moore Foundation’s environmental work.
Other Environmental Conservation Program initiatives have also pursued conservation goals by protecting vast ecosystem areas that are still thriving. Our Wild Salmon Ecosystem Initiative and the Andes Amazon Initiative have both demonstrated the value of this approach. Like the foundation’s marine conservation work in British Columbia and the North American Arctic, both our salmon and Andes-Amazon initiatives have recognized and supported the integral role of indigenous peoples and other communities in the planning, decisions, management and monitoring of the areas to be protected.
Now, please return with me for a moment to the jumbled ice blocks and ridges of the Chukchi Sea in Alaska’s Arctic. I’m still on the sea ice, you may recall, and I’m hoping to find my way back to shore at the village of Ulġuniq.
As it turned out, I did not meet nanuq as I clambered through the icy maze. Otherwise, I probably would not be writing this Perspective. I did, however, encounter both the Arctic Ocean’s vastness and its vulnerability. For the ice is not just a frozen skin over the sea; it is a living part of Arctic marine ecosystems that connect this village with nanuq, ice seals, Arctic cod and mollusks, and the zooplankton and phytoplankton that drive this food web as they bloom when the sun returns with the spring.
This ocean place is the air conditioner for the world; and what happens in this ocean does not stay in the Arctic.
When I climb over the last ridge, the lights of Ulġuniq are inviting and warm. To my left, the village scatters its houses, boats and snow machines that crowd the shore; to my right the frozen Arctic Ocean stretches to Russia. And between is an intact, thriving ecosystem that requires the shared intervention of humankind to protect it on a big scale – both as a kind of “insurance policy” for tiny villages like this one but also for the Arctic’s contribution to all of us.
Denny Takahashi-Kelso, Ph.D, J.D. is the program director of the Marine Conservation Initiative at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
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