Making Waves

"The only stakeholders I recognize are our grandchildren – the rest of us are users,” says noted marine scientist Bill Ballantine

By Marc Ethier and Lisa Archer

Kamo High School in the northern quarter of New Zealand’s North Island has only 1,200 students. But for the past 16 years the tiny school – with the aid and encouragement of one of the world’s foremost marine scientists – has behaved as if it were riding a tidal wave of popular support.

Bill Ballantine smiles, an ironical wisp of a half-smile, when he speaks of Kamo, whose studentry recently achieved its decade-long goal of establishing a marine reserve in the harbor of Whangarei, 170 kilometers north of Auckland. The semi-retired former professor enjoys talking about the grassroots – or to be more precise, classroots – movement he encouraged and supported, and maybe on some level, even fomented, as Kamo's students tirelessly campaigned to establish 237 hectares of highly protected reserve.

It was, Ballantine says, the first time a group of children moved public policy to permanently protect marine habitat. “A couple years ago they put in a formal proposal for three pieces of highly protected marine reserve in Whangarei Harbor,” Ballantine says, “but the dear old Powers that Be” – here a rolling of the eyes, a return of the half-smile – “cut out the middle chunk and okayed the two smaller pieces. So we do have a marine reserve of two pieces, which was proposed successfully by a school. I know of no other.”

Kamo’s efforts resulted, by Ballantine’s count, in the 30^th marine reserve in New Zealand. The Goldman Award winner (link), a former professor at Auckland University, has been involved with most, as well as more than a few around the world, over the years.

His work began in the mid-1960s and culminated, in a way, with Goat Island (link), the Pacific nation’s first reserve and in many ways a model for succeeding generations of reserves around the world.

The concept of the marine reserve, now taken for granted, had its apotheosis in Goat Island (link). After a dozen years of wrangling with bureaucrats, politicians, vested interests and academics, the 547-hectare parcel was finally set up in 1977. “The first 12 years to get the first one was a process of, What did we mean by a marine reserve?” Ballantine says. “We were inventing the idea as we went along.” Now well established, the idea has been an irrefutable success. Snapper thrive at Goat Island. Exotic specimens like blue maomao and stripy parore mingle within sight of beachcombers. Water visibility is commonly 10 meters or better, revealing sponges, crayfish, boarfish, stingrays and dolphins.

The area is prodigiously populated not just by animals, but by their admirers: one of the salutary – and quite unexpected – side effects of the reserve was a huge jump in visitation, from around 3,000 in the late 1970s to more than 300,000 in 2005.

Goat Island was the first reserve to put into practice the “no-take” ethos: no fishing and little to no human interference of any kind is allowed. In the intervening years, Ballantine has lectured to experts and the public all over the world about “no-take,” and about the fluctuations and mysteries of the ocean biota – the profound caprice, almost impossible to measure in a quantifiable way, of underwater ecosystems. It’s a message he continues to expound today, living in semi-retirement in his home outside Leigh, near Goat Island.

“You start by the simple fact that there’s an awful lot of sea, with an awful lot of life in it. This life is not just abundant, it’s extremely varied, very complicated, and so different from land life that we have great difficulty in even thinking about it,” he says. “For example, most of the plants in the sea are microscopic. It’s hard to believe that in a teaspoon of clear water there are at least 500 plants. You can therefore have large numbers of animals in the sea that just sit there and sieve it – well, there aren’t any animals like that on land.

“So if you have all this rich, varied, complicated life, it’s not too difficult to believe that if 70 percent of the planet is covered with water, and there’s huge amounts of life in it doing all sorts of things, it probably matters.”

Ballantine eagerly elucidates his conclusion, reached early in his professional life, back in the mid-1960s when he and his colleagues were “inventing” as they went along: that the only way of practically insuring the continued health of a marine area is to leave it alone.

It’s a lesson well learned by the students of Kamo High School, who listened each year as Ballantine urged them to action. In the end, through the work of hundreds of students, just shy of 240 hectares of open sea and mangrove were protected – a square kilometer of fierce tidal currents and another two of closed harbor.

Not much, but more than there would have been otherwise – a result that brings another smile to Bill Ballantine’s face.

“If you think up some beautifully logical, sensible argument that would in theory convince somebody, they can dodge it. So what you do is snowstorm them,” Ballantine says, “bury them, so while they’re fighting off this one bit, you hit them in six more ways. It’s the shotgun approach. You use the media, you use public platforms, you write letters, you sign petitions. You do whatever you can to bring the issue to the fore.

“Children are good at it. They see it.”