Excerpt from The Extreme Life of the Sea (2021) by Anthony R. Palumbi and Stephen R. Palumbi.

1. 175
Epilogue Agrandbargain
A wooden skiff with a splintering hull and faded blue paint churns along
under stormy skies. The coughing outboard engine takes it through warm,
gentle Philippine waters. First green, then gray with reflected clouds, and
finally dark with submerged reefs. Laden with heavy SCUBA gear, you swivel
your head to the mossy crag overlooking the lagoon. Apo Island’s steep volca-
nic slopes shelter a small village from strong South Pacific winds. A flotilla of
fishing boats surrounds your skiff as the reedy pilot approaches your destina-
tion. All these fishing boats are a poor omen to start a dive; a sign of skittish
and depleted marine life below.
Securing the mask over your face, you sink your teeth into the regulator’s
rubber and drop over the side. Sinking slowly through the clear, blue-tinged
water, you get your first look at the reef. Your worries up above were bless-
edly premature. Countless fish swarm and twist through the reef, stunning in
their colors and diversity. Bumphead wrasses sit in repose under coral heads,
emerging on your approach. Three or four feet in length, they stake out terri-
tory and angrily posture. Friendlier fish flash past: green-and-purple parrot-
fish, platter-sized rays, and an armada of silver jacks that’s grown legendary
in local waters. This is a thriving reef, nowhere near decline.
Apo Island’s reef is a rare and precious gem set in the heart of the Phil-
ippine archipelago—a region that has suffered heavy marine depletion.
The large, healthy fish and the thriving corals sprawled beneath your feet
sprouted from a single prescient decision. Decades ago, the island’s small
sheltered village decided to stop fishing on one part of the reef. It wasn’t to

2. 176 Epilogue
be touched for any reason, nor anything taken: it became what ecologists
would term a marine protected area. The safe zone wasn’t very big, and fish-
ermen were allowed to fish right up to its invisible boundaries. Neverthe-
less, the impact of this small change on the reef was stupendous. Inside the
protected zone, fish across the food chain could live a long time, growing to
enormous size like the furious bumpheads. Instead of being taken immedi-
ately, they lived for years into maturity, cranking out millions of offspring.
Many reef fish confine themselves to a home range the size of a swimming
pool, so the lucky ones in protected areas can grow old and die without ever
seeing a hook.1
Outside the zone, existence is nasty, brutish, and short. Fish
are snapped out of the water by the dense fishing fleet, and the fish stocks
are all but gone. But the folks from Apo Island go home most nights with
solid catches, taken from reefs just outside the protected zone. The pro-
tected area’s immense productivity, left untouched, can replace what the
fishermen take elsewhere.2
At this point in natural history, the oceans are cracking under our spe-
cies’ collective strain, but they have not truly broken. As we look forward to
the year 2100, when the children of today will be grandparents, two broadly
different futures swim into focus. One is the course we are on now, with
CO2 endlessly piling up in the atmosphere and oceans.3
If by 2100 we’re still
pumping out carbon at our present rate or above (the top line in our accom-
panying graph), the oceans will not be salvageable, not returnable to their
present state. By that point they will be too acidified, too warm, too high,
and too stormy. And the amount of time that it will take for these climate
changes to abate will be so long that by 2100, the damage is likely to be very
long term.
But we can put ourselves onto a different CO2 curve. If we do make the
needed policy changes, then the oceans of the year 2100 may still be suffer-
ing—but they will not be ruined, and the long planet-cleansing process of
reducing CO2 will be underway. If emissions are tamed by 2050, then CO2 in
the atmosphere might begin to drop by 2100. The heat, storms, and acidifi-
cation would then slowly begin to abate. It won’t be pretty, but the point is
that it will be getting better, not horribly worse, and the damage will be much
shorter lived.
Scientists and the conservation community cannot put our society on a
different CO2 path. We are left with a grand challenge and a difficult bargain.
The bargain is this: the economic forces, industries, and citizens of the world

3. A Grand Bargain 177
must work to do whatever it takes to stop the rise of CO2 emissions by 2050
and return them to lower, tolerable levels by 2100. A different global energy
source besides fossil fuels seems central to this success, but the shift does not
have to be immediate. We have a generation to make this happen.
In return, the scientists and environmental engineers must do their best to
save as much of the world’s wild habitats, in the oceans and on land, into the
next century, when conditions will improve. As many of the world’s extreme
and varied species as possible must be saved for the next century. When the
climate begins to improve through the efforts and sacrifices and triumph of
the global community, conservationists must promise to have a wild world
ready to regrow.
Marine scientists know how to do their part. Protection and even recov-
ery is already happening in places like Apo Island, where the big fish have
returned, and California’s Monterey Bay, where a single marine protected area
became a foothold for sea otters to reconquer their old coastal haunts. Ocean
life—extreme or not—is ready and able to thrive for us. The very same bio-
logical energy that makes the Productivity Bomb so terrifying can also repair
CO
2
concentration
(parts
per
million)
1000
900
800
700
600
500
400
300
RCP2.6
RCP4.5
RCP6
RCP8.5
2000 2025 2050 2075 2100
CO
2
emissions
(gigatons
of
carbon)
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
–5
2000 2025 2050 2075 2100
Predictions of CO2 emissions (left) and atmospheric concentrations of CO2 (right) based on var-
ious future scenarios of global response to climate change. The RCP 8.5 scenario (left figure,
black solid line) is currently the most likely, as it represents no future controls on emissions. This
scenario would lead to an exponential increase in oceanic CO2 (right figure, black solid line)
with serious impacts on ocean life from the year 2100 onward. Only if CO2 emissions were to
begin to decline by 2020 (for example, under the RCP 2.6 scenario, left figure dotted line) would
CO2 in the oceans begin to decrease by the year 2100. Intermediate scenarios (RCP 4.5 and RCP
6.0) would still see CO2 in the oceans increasing for the foreseeable future

4. 178 Epilogue
the damage we’ve caused. The ocean itself is our single greatest tool when
properly harnessed and leveraged. That tool sits ready, and we have a good
idea how to use it through protecting habitats, employing sustainable fish-
ing, guarding against discarded fertilizer and other coastal pollution, and kin-
dling respect for the value of healthy oceans. No matter what we do, the seas
of 2100 will teem with life. In lockstep with efforts to skid climate change to a
halt, we still can choose to have the life of the sea be the whales, the tuna, the
coral reefs, the jetting squid, the sea turtles, and smiling vaquitas.