DIRECTOR'S FOREWORD

In a paper1 whose importance cannot be over-emphasized, Dr Jeremy Jackson, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and his numerous co-authors, demonstrated that humans have impacted on the diversity of the oceans for thousands of years. However, these impacts were limited to vulnerable coastal species which could be readily hunted or collected. Although their local extirpation and sometimes extinction had long-term consequences reaching into the present, it is only with the onset of modernity that humans and the first wave of globalization –the global colonial enterprises conducted by European powers from the 16th century onwards – that widespread impacts on marine biodiversity became visible. This is not only because this globalization encouraged the international trade of products obtained from the exploitation of coastal areas, but also because the sailing vessels which the European powers deployed in this period carried onboard alert observers of nature, i.e., captains and naturalists, whose narratives of their voyages contain a wealth of observations on the biodiversity they observed.

This contribution is the second of a series which uses ‘content analysis’ to convert these observations into numbers that can be analyzed using various statistical methods. The first, pertaining to the Falkland Islands2, clearly indicated that over time, observations on various animal groups in those remote islands used the word ‘abundance’ or ‘common’ (or their equivalent) less frequently, while those indicating rarity became more frequent. The same results were obtained here, thousands of miles from the Falkland Islands, in a totally different cultural and biological context – one subjected, however, to the same drivers of change.

In both the Falkland Islands and the larger Raja Ampat Archipelago, local population increase and the increase of its footprint appear to have a strong effect on local biodiversity. However, in both cases, the biggest impact is due to the external (international) demand for certain products, e.g., fur seal skins and whale oil from the Falklands, for consumption in Europe and North America, and tripang (i.e., sea cucumber), pearls and turtles from the Raja Ampat Archipelago, consumed in both China and Europe. Though exploitation rates were to increase tenfold and more in the second half of the 20th century, the earlier exploitation rates, e.g., those prevailing in the 19th century, already had an impact on biodiversity, as demonstrated here.

This report, thus, confirms that content analysis can indeed be applied at various scales, and that well-stocked libraries, such as UBC’s, can be used to reconstruct aspects of the history of biodiversity of far-away lands and seas. It is ironic that this conceptual tool is being successfully deployed in the 21st century, in which, it seems, we will be finishing off the biodiversity that we should, instead, be handing over to the next generations.

Daniel Pauly
Director Fisheries Centre, UBC
09 October 2006

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