Into the abyss: The case for saving our deep seas

Into the abyss: The case for saving our deep seas

Vegan Society of Canada News

September 20th 2024

Oceans cover over 70% of the earth, and as of June 2024, only 26.1% of the sea floor had been mapped. There are various reasons for this, one being the costs since a vast majority of the seafloor is at ranges of 3,000 to 6,000 meters, which is difficult to explore with current means. Scientists also believe that about 91% of species in the oceans have yet to be identified.

As a species, we haven’t been good stewards of the earth, putting our own survival at risk with climate change, in addition to the countless species we have already driven into extinction. The corollary to this is that, as the least explored part of the earth, the oceans still hold some of the most pristine and unspoiled environments on Earth, and beyond; even space is not immune to our foolishness, as space junk has the potential to turn space into a garbage dump.

We recently began to get a better understanding of deep-sea coral environments, which we still know very little about. Unlike their shallow-water counterparts that have been largely destroyed by our foolishness, the deep water has generally been out of reach. However, many have been destroyed already, specifically those that existed at shallower depths accessible by fisheries that do bottom-trawling.

While the deep sea has been spared most of our foolishness, attacks are getting worse every year. For example, deep-sea drilling technologies have advanced and drilling can now occur at depths of 3,400 meters. Our current economic system encourages the privatization of profit and the socialization of losses, and many countries, including the US and Canada, have been struggling with corporations neglecting their responsibilities for the cleanup of their business activities. For example, in just one province in Canada, citizens could be on the hook for 33 billion dollars or more in clean-up fees for abandoned wells. The story is much the same with leftover clean-up costs from mining activities.

The more technological advancement we have the more in danger our deep sea becomes. The oceans are subject to the nefarious effect of various human-animal activities like fishing and resource extraction, but one of the latest threats comes from deep-sea mining. Beyond the challenges of the economic zones of countries, protecting sea life is made exponentially more difficult to regulate due to a mishmash of international frameworks.

To make things worse, often these international agreements give equal rights to all countries, but some countries can be exploited by businesses. Many small countries are struggling to deal with the financial consequences of various crises that they had little to do with in the first place, like climate change. When faced with the opportunity to get funds, for example for carbon credit schemes or as a sponsoring state for deep-sea mining, they are all too eager to proceed without the proper tools to fully manage and understand the long-term consequences of those activities. Those are problems we have in part created and where there is no easy solution, but it will once again require significant changes to our current business-as-usual ways of doing things.

Marine animals are the most abundant forms of animals on earth. If vegan organizations represented animals proportionally, we would spend the majority of our time on marine animals and/or arthropods. Those are only the animals we know; there is still so much we don’t know about the oceans, and scientists speculate there are about 1.75 million species that remain unknown. As a society, compassion is not our strong suit and we only seem to care about other living beings with respect to their ability to do anything for us. On that front there is good news: various researchers have found troves of interesting compounds in the deep sea that could save our lives.

When it comes to the imminent danger of antibiotic-resistant bacteria caused in part by animal agriculture, it seems the deep ocean might be able to partly rescue us from our own foolishness via various compounds found around deep sea vents, fungi, sediments, etc. Researchers found seven promising isolates linked with Ascomycota and Basidiomycota that exhibited antibacterial activity against Staphylococcus aureus and/or Escherichia coli.

In addition, there could be applications related to cancer. For example, a derived compound from the Streptomyces bacteria holds some promise for its anti-proliferative capabilities against leukemia cells and another one derived from Salinispora holds multiple anticancer properties in the treatment of lung cancer, brain tumours and melanoma.

There are various other compounds that have shown effectiveness for both antibacterial and anticancer properties, like various compounds derived from Marinispora that are still actively researched today. This is but a brief overview of various ongoing efforts at learning from the deep sea and applying the results for the benefit of human animals.

The deep sea, as one of the last explored frontiers of our planet, can still be saved from our foolishness. We must not use our traditional modus operandi and simply hope or rely on incomplete evidence that our activities will not impact the environment.

Current activities proposed are mainly mining for minerals used in batteries, but technology tells us that non-lithium-based solid-state batteries will likely be the future. There has been great progress made to address the main issues that lithium is fairly rare, expensive and not a poster child of engineering stability. New technology like sodium-based solid-state batteries makes both lithium and nickel a story of the past.

It would be unwise to authorize disturbing an environment in ways we don’t completely understand—one that is still fairly untouched—to extract resources for products that will likely be, at best, a niche product in the future.

Once more, in the short history of our species, we are given a chance to properly consider if, how, why and when we should interfere with an untouched ecosystem. Are we going to seize this opportunity?