Coral gardens and ocean blues
Wayne Ellwood checks the health of the sea.

Tourism time bomb
What happens to the sea when the vacation is over? Sue Wells and Nick Hanna investigate.

Voices of the sea
Four testimonies from around the world by people who depend on the ocean.

Sleepwaves and dreamtides
A personal reflection on the myth and meaning of the sea by writer Sharon Doubiago.

THE SEA - THE FACTS

Blue Revolution
Rick Boychuk asks whether farming the seas can feed the hungry.

Simply - how to clean up the sea

Toxic tides and toilet wastes
Reports on coastal pollution from Australia, Canada and the Philippines.

Vacuuming the oceans
Factory fishing is wiping out the world's fish stocks argue Kieran Mulvaney and James Carr.

The squid, the cod and who we are
Rick Rogers on the war against nature.

My most intense memory of the sea is a harrowing hovercraft crossing of the English Channel. We rode 15-metre waves like a rollercoaster all the way to Calais and my passport was soaked with cold sweat as I lurched through customs. Since then I've flown over the ocean a great deal but never spent much time in it, or on it. So that's what I decided to do to prepare myself for this issue - to get my toes wet so to speak.

That's hard to do if you live, as I do, in the middle of the North American continent. For me the ocean was the stuff of romance - and a long-distance romance at that. My initial plan was to join a Greenpeace expedition to get some first-hand experience of the sea and of the work of the major activist group campaigning on marine ecology issues. Greenpeace was keen, but to my frustration, the timing didn't work out.

Trying to get a sense of ocean issues in the Third World was easier. I decided to look at one country - the Philippines. The more I read, the more it seemed the ideal choice. And when I got there my suspicions were confirmed. The challenge was to figure out what to focus on.

Back home the collapse of Canada's Atlantic cod fishery was front-page news. As I was coming to grips with sea cucumbers, cephalopods and tectonic plates, Newfoundland fishing communities took to the sea to protest what they saw as overfishing by foreign trawlers outside the country's 200-mile limit.

At the same time, the Canadian Government quietly deep-sixed the International Centre for Ocean Development (ICOD). This small Nova Scotia-based agency was mandated to help Third World countries manage their ocean resources sustainability. ICOD was unique among Western aid agencies in that its grassroots approach focussed exclusively on the sea. The Government defended its move as a cost-cutting measure needed to trim the deficit. In fact ICOD's budget was insignificant: the agency was gutted to please the ideological demands of the business community for less government 'meddling' in the economy. With no domestic constituency it was an easy target: the lessons of politics are always instructive.

The interests of the politically-powerful are a central barrier to change in the Philippines too. Still, my time there did help me understand more clearly the environmental crisis facing the world's seas - and the urgency of doing something about it. However, it was the late Rachel Carson's insight into our human origins (which I've quoted at length at the top of page four) that made me feel the need to do something about it. Human blood, she wrote, has roughly the same chemical composition as sea water. Let me take you on a sea cruise - into yourself. Makes you think, doesn't it?

Letters
Letter from Lahore
Updates
Reviews: plus Robin Norwood classic
Curiosities
Endpiece: by Carla Power
Country profile: Brazil

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