Ben Halpern ’95 featured in UC Santa Barbara Magazine for marine ecology work
Halpern majored in biology at Carleton.
Ben Halpern ’95 was featured in UC Santa Barbara Magazine in a piece titled, “Ben Halpern wants us to prove him wrong.”
Ben Halpern hopes he isn’t right, not about this. When the time comes — a scant 25 years from now — the marine ecologist would much rather look back on this era as the moment we decided to band together and avert disaster. It could be remembered as the time we, through collective and consistent action, slowed the accelerating degradation of the ocean and helped prevent the environmental, economic and food security crises that might otherwise have followed.
“We’ll have gotten it wrong in the sense that we fixed it before this happened,” he says. “And I think that that’s possible.”
Alas, for now, we don’t have the luxury of such hindsight. And the data is sobering: In a recent study published in the journal Science, Halpern and fellow scientists at UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) predict that cumulative human impacts on the ocean could double between now and midcentury. In some places they could triple, driven primarily by ocean warming and heavy fishing, but also by other factors such as pollution.
That human impacts on the ocean were increasing was not surprising, given the current age of global warming and its myriad effects, such as habitat loss and sea level rise, Halpern says. What was a surprise is the accelerated rate of change between now and 2050. We’re at a dangerous threshold.