“Fix the sea to save man”: how to cope with the declared ocean disaster

special edition. It took man centuries to master the sea, he gradually began to move away from the shores in flimsy boats, fearing the wrath of Poseidon, the god of the sea in Greek mythology. Then he set out on the vast road of the “liquid plains”, like the sailors of the Pacific Ocean, who, thousands of kilometers away, on their rafts, gathered the Marquesas Islands to Easter Island.

On the other side of the earth, the Vikings played against all the storms and showed the way to America. Then, at the end of the Middle Ages, Iberian navigators discovered the continents and proved that the earth is round, surrounded by their galleons.

The planet became, for the most powerful empires, a land of conquest, where their armadas clashed, and control of the oceans allowed the West to enrich itself through colonization and slavery for centuries. After mastering the oceans, the sea became a resource for industrial fishing and a dustbin for waste. Man has created the sea in his own image, dug canals for better trade or created artificial islands to better protect himself and secure his sovereignty.

“There is no spare ocean!” »

Today, the shores are decorated with wind turbines and the cliffs are crumbling. Islanders who already have their feet in the water move to more hospitable countries. Factory boats scrape the bottom to control the rest of the fish. Sea routes have become highways for container ships, while submarines play cat and mouse in the depths.

Large cetaceans wash up on beaches where summer will soon be as hot in the water as it is out of the water. This incomplete and hopeless enumeration shows that, of course, man has mastered the sea, but is in the process of destroying it.

The sea is our mirror. You could say, to paraphrase Charles Baudelaire, that if you don’t love it, you have to fix it. In this mirror is seen global warming that causes the water to rise, the destruction of biodiversity that threatens the marine ecosystem, plastic that poisons fish and birds – there are 24,400 billion plastic microparticles in the seas, drowning migrants. In this special issue of the Rendez-Vous de l’histoire de Blois, whose theme is the sea, historian Christian Boucher warns: “We won’t have a spare ocean!” »