There's Barely Any Wild Ocean Left Out There

Congratulations, humans, we’ve outdone ourselves yet again. Our beloved oceans, you know, only the stuff that covers 70 percent of our planet, is now so damaged that when scientists looked under the waves, they found that nearly all marine wilderness—areas untouched by humans—was gone.

In the first systemic analysis of its kind, the study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Current Biology, discovered that only 13 percent of the ocean was still untouched by humans. Since the whole ocean stretches 361.1 million kilometer square, then what remains of its wilderness is only roughly the size of the North and South America continent.

"We were astonished by just how little marine wilderness remains," said Kendall Jones, a doctoral researcher at Australia's University of Queensland and one of the authors of the study. "The ocean is immense, covering over 70 percent of our planet, but we've managed to significantly impact almost all of this vast ecosystem."

What's to blame? Jones and his team studied data stemming from 19 different things we humans are doing that puts an added strain on marine ecosystems. This includes stuff like the shipping and commercial fishing industries. They also looked into some stuff you might not even realize impacts the oceans, like fertilizer use and sediment runoff.

All together, human activity has disrupted all but 13 percent of marine wilderness out there. But at least we have that last 13 percent to take care of, right? I wish. The remaining wilderness, much of it in the Arctic, Antarctic, and far Pacific, is under threat as well (especially in the tropics).

Here in Indonesia, the study found 16 million kilometers of marine wilderness in a portion of the ocean called the Warm Indo-Pacific, which includes Indonesia, as well as parts of the Indian and Pacific oceans. That's 8.6 of all marine wilderness left in the world.

That's great, right? Not really when you consider how precarious this balance actually is. President Joko Widodo wants to develop 10 new locations as tourist spots across the country—basically making 10 new Balis—that's surely going to bring humans to some of this wilderness.

And our impact on the environment goes far beyond our marine borders. Indonesia is currently the world's second-biggest marine polluter, after China. Every year, Indonesia is responsible for 3.22 million metric tons of waste into the oceans. That's 10 percent of all the marine pollution out there.

But it's not all garbage's fault. Commercial shipping hurts marine life as well. Not only do these ships pollute the ocean, they also create noise and physical barriers to larger marine creatures like whales and dolphins. Overfishing and destructive fishing techniques (with dynamite, for example) also contributes to the fact that marine wilderness basically doesn’t exist anymore in Indonesia.

“In Indonesia, the Philippines, Southeast Asia, in some ways the best so-called wilderness is actually areas that are being actively protected,” Alan White, the chief party of USAID Sustainable Ecosystem Advanced Project based in Jakarta, told VICE. “Because if it’s not being protected, it’s being fished. So in that sense, there’s no real wilderness left in this part of the world because everything is being fished.”

The Indonesian government have been saying that it’s working to set aside 20 million hectares of marine protected area by 2020 for years. But while it has set aside a lot of protected areas in recent years, the reality is that a significant chunk of them are mere “paper parks"—marine parks that exist only on paper. White told VICE that out of the 20 million hectares the government claims are protected, only about 10 percent of them are actually protected areas.

“One thing that people don’t understand is that’s only legal declaration,” White said. “They do that by declaring an area protected but it doesn’t mean that it’s actually protected. I don’t know how many people know this but Pulau Seribu, for example, is a national marine park. But if you go there, you wouldn’t really know that, right?”

And while Jokowi’s plan to make new "Balis" may impact places that really don't have much marine wilderness anymore, tourism is still vital to marine protection efforts. The ship has long sailed in Bali, where decades of environmentally unsustainable tourism has left the island with an ocean of plastic waste that looks like lifeless jellyfish, deprived the entire island of groundwater, and severely damaged its coral reefs. But in less degraded places, tourism could actually raise awareness about marine ecosystems that need protection.

“Well, the hope is that the tourism actually brings incentives to people to protect their marine life,” White said. “Because it’s very costly to protect these areas. You have to have people, you have to have boats, you have to have radar, it needs a lot of things that the government generally cannot afford.”

But, none of that cost as much as the price we'll pay once we destroy all of the ocean.