RIASSUNTO
ABSTRACT
This paper summarizes the results and recommendations of a two year Sea Grant supported study of the problems and potentials of open sea Mari Culture for the coming decades. The full report will be published in book form in the fall of 1974. Subject areas covered are: 1) various perspectives including technological, social, economic, legal and political; 2) the oceanic environment as it impacts open sea Mari culture; 3) applicable science and technology; and 4) recommendations for the initiation of a national scale Mari culture development program.
I. INTRODUCTION
A little over two and one-half years ago, the Oceanic Institute became the recipient of a modest Sea Grant to assess the potential feasibility of open sea Mari culture. NOAA's Sea Grant program has long been interested in aquaculture in general and marine (man)-culture in particular. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Sea Grant people should ponder the possibility of eventually culturing protein in that majority of the earth's surface volume -the open oceans.
In the beginning, we perceived the work as a short, low priority investigation into the major aspects of the problem, with the results being summarized in a brief report to the Sea Grant office. That the problem refused to remain within this modest concept is only partly attributable to our naiveté. The remainder of the blame rests with the problem itself. First, while open sea Mari culture is a term to which many people intuitively attach some meaning, it is (from this very fact) a term to which no two people attach the same meaning. Second, if open sea Mari culture is viewed not as just a vague concept but as a someday-to-be family of operating systems, then it becomes apparent that its feasibility can only be assessed in the context of whatever social, technological and economic conditions may prevail at the time open sea Mari culture might exist -- and these conditions are indeterminate. Lastly, the concept involves so many facets of science and technology that limiting a study of its potential feasibility to manageable proportions while still avoiding a level of generality so high as to be trivial is no mean task.
For these reasons and probably others, the project confounded all attempts to contain it. It flowed beyond the staff of the Oceanic Institute into the Association of Sea Grant Institutions. It then went beyond to the National Marine Fisheries Service and then on to other persons and groups in and beyond the marine science and technology community. And it stretched out in time until my superiors at the Oceanic Institute detected the odor of moribund albatross. But, after almost two years, we at last managed to surround the project, compile the results and derive conclusions and recommendations. This work was completed in late 1973 and is to be published later this year in book form by Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross, Inc. of Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. The title of the book and of this paper are the same with the kind permission of the publisher.