- What marine nature and marine life mean to us
- > Marine biological communities are a part of nature, to which people assign very different values. Depending on where we were born, the culture we grew up in and how close we live to or with the oceans, we assign different meanings to marine life. Different perspectives result in disparate approaches to nature, which explains why successes in marine protection up to now are few and far between.
Time for rapprochement
A new awareness of the value of the oceans and their populations of species
People’s perceptions of nature, and thus of the oceans, take manifold forms. They experience natural spaces, animals and plants in diverse ways and therefore interact with them in a great variety of manners. For instance, while some people view tiger sharks as nothing other than terrors of the seas, others lobby for the conservation of the majestic predators whose hunting forays safeguard flourishing seagrass meadows in many tropical and subtropical regions of the oceans.
The different perceptions of and interactions with nature give rise to disparate views of nature’s role as the very foundation of people’s lives and their quality of life. This, in turn, results in a multitude of types of value attributed by people to nature.
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has found that people often have one of four types of relationship to nature. They either live from nature, with nature or in nature, or see themselves as an intrinsic part of nature. To which of these types an individual belongs depends on that person’s world-view and on the knowledge systems used and the values and value indicators applied by that person.
While all this sounds highly abstract on paper, it exerts huge practical relevance. After all, it is people’s very own relationship to nature and the oceans that determines their decisions on how to treat nature – at all levels, individual, political and economic.
IPBES concludes in its Methodological Assessment Report on the Diverse Values and Valuation of Nature that both political and economic decision-makers up to now only take account of a narrow set of largely market-based values of nature. This is why their decisions are frequently at the expense of nature and thus also at the cost of society and future generations.
This is amplified by the circumstance that, in the course of advancing industrialization and urbanization, people are losing direct contact to the natural environment. The result is a disconnection from nature, in tandem with a severe loss of knowledge about the species diversity, the roles and the needs of natural biotic communities on land and in the oceans. To halt species extinction and bolster the integrity of the natural environment, it will be essential that decision-makers at all levels, in the private sector and in public policy alike, shed past convictions and develop a new awareness of nature. Neglected values and local and indigenous knowledge need to be given consideration in decisions, and the vital role of healthy natural spaces needs to be communicated across all sectors of society. For the fact is: people will only protect and preserve what they know and understand.