Adv 1 – Leadership
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- US ocean science investment is key to environmentally sustainable mining norms Conathan 13
- With or without the U
- There is a real opportunity for our nation
- Ocean biodiversity collapse causes extinction Craig ‘3
- There’s an invisible threshold – uncertainty means you default aff Young
- we don’t know which species are the keystones !
- what back-up plan would we have
- more biodiverse
- our survival on this planet
REM mining add-onREM mining is inevitable and will wreck ocean biodiversity Grant 13, Kevin Douglas, Senior Editor of Special Reports at GlobalPost, M.A. in Online Journalism from the University of Southern California's Annenberg School, where he was a Dean's Scholar and the founding Executive Editor of Annenberg's thriving 24/7 news organization Neon Tommy, “Deep-sea mining could make 'largest footprint of any single human activity on the planet',” December 19th, http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/groundtruth/undersea-mining-boom-hawaii-pacific Modern technologies like cell phones, laptops, wind turbines and hybrid vehicles all require rare minerals, often difficult and expensive to extract from the earth. As demand for these kinds of products surges globally and more accessible deposits of those minerals are depleted, Civil Beat reported Wednesday, countries around the world are flocking to Hawaii to explore a vast undersea area believed to contain massive mineral deposits worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The area is called the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone, and organizations from countries including Japan, Great Britain, Russia, South Korea, China, France, Germany and the US are now using Honolulu as a departure point for exploration. Though the zone is just one of several in the sights of deep-sea mineral industry pioneers, researchers involved believe it holds great promise. Their expeditions are mapping parts of the zone about 500 miles southeast of Hawaii, which covers a total estimated area of 6 million total square miles. The treasured minerals include "nickel, copper, cobalt and rare earth elements with tongue-twisting names like praseodymium, ytterbium and neodymium," Civil Beat reports, believed to lie among the ocean bed in the form of "polymetallic nodules." As the Wall Street Journal reported last year, "a team of Japanese scientists said that they found an estimated 80 billion to 100 billion metric tons of rare-earth deposits in the Pacific Ocean, or nearly a thousand times more than current proven recoverable onshore rare-earth reserves." “This mining, when it occurs, is going to be just massive in scale. It probably will have the largest footprint of any single human activity on the planet,” said Craig Smith, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii, which is helping to facilitate exploration. He believes the mining could begin as soon as 2018, though the underwater minerals industry remains in its infancy with specialized technology — like the business model for undersea mining — that is largely untested. Despite the significant economic and environmental risks associated with undersea mining, the sheer size of the anticipated deposits have attracted a range of companies ranging from giants like Lockheed Martin to smaller upstarts like Nautilus Minerals. In endorsing a Pacific Ocean exploration partnership between Lockheed the British government in March, Prime Minister David Cameron said, "The UK is leading the way in this exciting new industry which has the potential to create specialist and supply chain jobs across the country and is expected to be worth up to £40 billion [$65.5 billion] to the UK economy over the next 30 years." The environmental cost, like that of deep-sea drilling campaigns now being planned in the Arctic, is difficult to calculate because relatively little is known about the planet's deep sea ecosystem. “The deep sea is the most prevalent ecosystem on the planet, but people know very little about it because it’s so big and it’s expensive to explore,” said Jack Kittinger, a science advisor for Conservation International’s Hawaii Fish Trust program and fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Ocean Solutions." It could impact thousands of species, including deep sea fish, cucumbers, worms and crustaceans. These are systems that are characterized by high biodiversity.” US ocean science investment is key to environmentally sustainable mining norms Conathan 13, Michael, Director of Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress, “Space Exploration Dollars Dwarf Ocean Spending,” June 20th, http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/06/20/space-exploration-dollars-dwarf-ocean-spending/ As a result, the facts about ocean exploration are pretty bleak. Humans have laid eyes on less than 5 percent of the ocean, and we have better maps of the surface of Mars than we do of America’s exclusive economic zone—the undersea territory reaching out 200 miles from our shores. Sure, space is sexy. But the oceans are too. To those intrigued by the quest for alien life, consider this: Scientists estimate that we still have not discovered 91 percent of the species that live in our oceans. And some of them look pretty outlandish. Go ahead and Google the deepsea hatchetfish, frill shark, or Bathynomus giganteus. In a time of shrinking budgets and increased scrutiny on the return for our investments, we should be taking a long, hard look at how we are prioritizing our exploration dollars. If the goal of government spending is to spur growth in the private sector, entrepreneurs are far more likely to find inspiration down in the depths of the ocean than up in the heavens. The ocean already provides us with about half the oxygen we breathe, our single largest source of protein, a wealth of mineral resources, key ingredients for pharmaceuticals, and marine biotechnology. Of course space exportation does have benefits beyond the “cool factor” of putting people on the moon and astronaut-bards playing David Bowie covers in space. Inventions created to facilitate space travel have become ubiquitous in our lives—cell-phone cameras, scratch-resistant lenses, and water-filtration systems, just to name a few—and research conducted in outer space has led to breakthroughs here on earth in the technological and medical fields. Yet despite far-fetched plans to mine asteroids for rare metals, the only tangible goods brought back from space to date remain a few piles of moon rocks. The deep seabed is a much more likely source of so-called rare-earth metals than distant asteroids. Earlier this year the United Nations published its first plan for management of mineral resources beneath the high seas that are outside the jurisdiction of any individual country. The United States has not been able to participate in negotiations around this policy because we are not among the 185 nations that have ratified the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which governs such activity. With or without the United States on board, the potential for economic development in the most remote places on the planet is vast and about to leap to the next level. Earlier this year Japan announced that it has discovered a massive supply of rare earth both within its exclusive economic zone and in international waters. This follows reports in 2011 that China sent at least one exploratory mission to the seabed beneath international waters in the Pacific Ocean. There is a real opportunity for our nation to lead in this area, but we must invest and join the rest of the world in creating the governance structure for these activities. Ocean biodiversity collapse causes extinction Craig ‘3 – Assc Prof Law Indiana. (34 McGeorge Law Rev 155, 2003 ln) Biodiversity and ecosystem function arguments for conserving marine ecosystems also exist, just as they do for terrestrial ecosystems, but these arguments have thus far rarely been raised in political debates. For example, besides significant tourism values - the most economically valuable ecosystem service coral reefs provide, worldwide - coral reefs protect against storms and dampen other environmental fluctuations, services worth more than ten times the reefs' value for food production. n856 Waste treatment is another significant, non-extractive ecosystem function that intact coral reef ecosystems provide. n857 More generally, "ocean ecosystems play a major role in the global geochemical cycling of all the elements that represent the basic building blocks of living organisms, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, as well as other less abundant but necessary elements." n858 In a very real and direct sense, therefore, human degradation of marine ecosystems impairs the planet's ability to support life. Maintaining biodiversity is often critical to maintaining the functions of marine ecosystems. Current evidence shows that, in general, an ecosystem's ability to keep functioning in the face of disturbance is strongly dependent on its biodiversity, "indicating that more diverse ecosystems are more stable." n859 Coral reef ecosystems are particularly dependent on their biodiversity. [*265] Most ecologists agree that the complexity of interactions and degree of interrelatedness among component species is higher on coral reefs than in any other marine environment. This implies that the ecosystem functioning that produces the most highly valued components is also complex and that many otherwise insignificant species have strong effects on sustaining the rest of the reef system. n860 Thus, maintaining and restoring the biodiversity of marine ecosystems is critical to maintaining and restoring the ecosystem services that they provide. Non-use biodiversity values for marine ecosystems have been calculated in the wake of marine disasters, like the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. n861 Similar calculations could derive preservation values for marine wilderness. However, economic value, or economic value equivalents, should not be "the sole or even primary justification for conservation of ocean ecosystems. Ethical arguments also have considerable force and merit." n862 At the forefront of such arguments should be a recognition of how little we know about the sea - and about the actual effect of human activities on marine ecosystems. The United States has traditionally failed to protect marine ecosystems because it was difficult to detect anthropogenic harm to the oceans, but we now know that such harm is occurring - even though we are not completely sure about causation or about how to fix every problem. Ecosystems like the NWHI coral reef ecosystem should inspire lawmakers and policymakers to admit that most of the time we really do not know what we are doing to the sea and hence should be preserving marine wilderness whenever we can - especially when the United States has within its territory relatively pristine marine ecosystems that may be unique in the world. We may not know much about the sea, but we do know this much: if we kill the ocean we kill ourselves, and we will take most of the biosphere with us. There’s an invisible threshold – uncertainty means you default aff Young, PhD coastal marine ecology, 10 [Ruth, “Biodiversity: what it is and why it’s important”, February 9th, http://www.talkingnature.com/2010/02/biodiversity/biodiversity-what-and-why/] Different species within ecosystems fill particular roles, they all have a function, they all have a niche. They interact with each other and the physical environment to provide ecosystem services that are vital for our survival. For example plant species convert carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and energy from the sun into useful things such as food, medicines and timber. Pollination carried out by insects such as bees enables the production of ⅓ of our food crops. Diverse mangrove and coral reef ecosystems provide a wide variety of habitats that are essential for many fishery species. To make it simpler for economists to comprehend the magnitude of services offered by biodiversity, a team of researchers estimated their value – it amounted to $US33 trillion per year. “By protecting biodiversity we maintain ecosystem services” Certain species play a “keystone” role in maintaining ecosystem services. Similar to the removal of a keystone from an arch, the removal of these species can result in the collapse of an ecosystem and the subsequent removal of ecosystem services. The most well known example of this occurred during the 19th century when sea otters were almost hunted to extinction by fur traders along the west coast of the USA. This led to a population explosion in the sea otters’ main source of prey, sea urchins. Because the urchins graze on kelp their booming population decimated the underwater kelp forests. This loss of habitat led to declines in local fish populations. Sea otters are a keystone species once hunted for their fur (Image: Mike Baird) Eventually a treaty protecting sea otters allowed the numbers of otters to increase which inturn controlled the urchin population, leading to the recovery of the kelp forests and fish stocks. In other cases, ecosystem services are maintained by entire functional groups, such as apex predators (See Jeremy Hance’s post at Mongabay). During the last 35 years, over fishing of large shark species along the US Atlantic coast has led to a population explosion of skates and rays. These skates and rays eat bay scallops and their out of control population has led to the closure of a century long scallop fishery. These are just two examples demonstrating how biodiversity can maintain the services that ecosystems provide for us, such as fisheries. One could argue that to maintain ecosystem services we don’t need to protect biodiversity but rather, we only need to protect the species and functional groups that fill the keystone roles. However, there are a couple of problems with this idea. First of all, for most ecosystems we don’t know which species are the keystones! Ecosystems are so complex that we are still discovering which species play vital roles in maintaining them. In some cases its groups of species not just one species that are vital for the ecosystem. Second, even if we did complete the enormous task of identifying and protecting all keystone species, what back-up plan would we have if an unforseen event (e.g. pollution or disease) led to the demise of these ‘keystone’ species? Would there be another species to save the day and take over this role? Classifying some species as ‘keystone’ implies that the others are not important. This may lead to the non-keystone species being considered ecologically worthless and subsequently over-exploited. Sometimes we may not even know which species are likely to fill the keystone roles. An example of this was discovered on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. This research examined what would happen to a coral reef if it were over-fished. The “over-fishing” was simulated by fencing off coral bommies thereby excluding and removing fish from them for three years. By the end of the experiment, the reefs had changed from a coral to an algae dominated ecosystem – the coral became overgrown with algae. When the time came to remove the fences the researchers expected herbivorous species of fish like the parrot fish (Scarus spp.) to eat the algae and enable the reef to switch back to a coral dominated ecosystem. But, surprisingly, the shift back to coral was driven by a supposed ‘unimportant’ species – the bat fish (Platax pinnatus). The bat fish was previously thought to feed on invertebrates – small crabs and shrimp, but when offered a big patch of algae it turned into a hungry herbivore – a cow of the sea – grazing the algae in no time. So a fish previously thought to be ‘unimportant’ is actually a keystone species in the recovery of coral reefs overgrown by algae! Who knows how many other species are out there with unknown ecosystem roles! In some cases it’s easy to see who the keystone species are but in many ecosystems seemingly unimportant or redundant species are also capable of changing niches and maintaining ecosystems. The more biodiverse an ecosystem is, the more likely these species will be present and the more resilient an ecosystem is to future impacts. Presently we’re only scratching the surface of understanding the full importance of biodiversity and how it helps maintain ecosystem function. The scope of this task is immense. In the meantime, a wise insurance policy for maintaining ecosystem services would be to conserve biodiversity. In doing so, we increase the chance of maintaining our ecosystem services in the event of future impacts such as disease, invasive species and of course, climate change. This is the international year of biodiversity – a time to recognize that biodiversity makes our survival on this planet possible and that our protection of biodiversity maintains this service. 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