After a daring, 900-mile chase across the Bering Sea, the captain of the Sherman received permission to open fire if necessary. The crew of the Coast Guard cutter swiftly uncovered its machine guns and began manning battle stations.

The target was not a boat full of terrorists or drug smugglers. It was the Arctic Wind, a Korean-owned, Russian-crewed, Honduras- registered fishing boat that had been using illegal, 8-mile-long drift nets in American waters off the coast of Alaska. When the Sherman finally got serious, the Arctic Wind quickly backed down and let the Coast Guard seize its illegal catch.

This incident illustrates several problems afflicting the ocean. The Arctic Wind was flying under a flag of convenience that provided little if no oversight. Its owners viewed the ocean as a vast commons from which they could take whatever they wanted. And the Arctic Wind's nets contained much bycatch -- dead sharks, puffins, albatross, porpoises -- in addition to the illegal salmon.

Like the owners of the Arctic Wind, most humans have long viewed the oceans' bounty as limitless and thought of the oceans' capacity to absorb waste as infinite. Lord Byron expressed the sentiment two hundred years ago:

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean -- roll!

Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;

Man marks the earth with ruin -- his control

Stops with the shore.

But the poet never encountered rockhopper gear, global positioning systems or persistent organic pollutants. Today, the shore no longer provides a meaningful boundary. In January 1998, 1,600 marine scientists, fishery biologists and oceanographers authored a joint statement that the oceans are in serious trouble and that trouble is mostly traceable to human abuse.

Congress subsequently created yet another commission to advise it what to do about the ocean's failing health. The Commission on Ocean Policy, which has held hearings all over the country, was in Seattle this month, listening to fishing interests, shipping executives, environmentalists, coastal officials, tribes, scholars and others. Although witnesses sometimes disagreed sharply about the best solutions, they displayed a remarkable consensus on the nature of the problems.

Wild fisheries are shrinking

Several salmon and steelhead populations were recently listed as threatened or endangered in the Pacific Northwest. Similar collapses have affected many other major fisheries, from New England cod to Peruvian anchovies. In recent years, the global wild fish catch has fallen in all but two of the world's 15 major marine fishing regions.

This bleak situation has been masked by two factors that have keep total worldwide fish "tonnage" relatively stable. From the mid-1980s to 2000, aquaculture production grew from 7 million metric tons to 36 million metric tons. Second, fishers are turning to smaller, less valuable fish (pilchard, mackerel, pollock, dogfish, monkfish and other species) that once were considered trash. They are fishing their way down the food chain; the South Pacific catch of orange roughy fell 70 percent in six years.

Fish are at the top of the marine policy agenda because they are an important part of human diets and regional economies. Worldwide, humans obtain more of their animal protein from fish than either beef or pork.

Nearly 1 billion people in Asia, island states and coastal Africa get most of their animal protein from fish. They are having increasing difficulty competing for fish in a global economic marketplace where most of the world's commercial catch -- 83 percent by value -- is exported to industrial countries.

Trawlers are "clear-cutting"

Bottom trawling is analogous to clear-cutting ancient forests: Both activities completely destroy complex, stable ecosystems. While you are reading this, European trawlers are mindlessly obliterating 4,500-year-old cold water corals off the coasts of Scotland, Ireland and Norway. Norway has already lost more than half its coral.

There are, however, two important differences between trawling and clear-cutting. First, bottom trawling is invisible to anyone who is not hundreds of yards under the surface of the ocean. As the rock group America sang in "A Horse with No Name," "The ocean is a desert with its life underground, and the perfect disguise above." There are no protesters camping out on the ocean floor or chaining themselves to trawlers.

Second, the scope of bottom trawling is vastly greater than that of clear-cutting. Each year, trawling disrupts 150 times as much area as is clear-cut around the world. Advances in fishing technology have essentially eliminated what were once de facto refuges from trawling.

A flood of pollution

A vast flood of fertilizer, feed-lot run-off, pesticides and industrial pollutants courses down virtually every river in the world. Most of the world's population and most of the biggest cities are on coastlines, where sewage, oil, heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, artificial hormones and other biologically disruptive substances flow directly into the sea.

In a particularly dramatic example, the drainage basin of the Mississippi River touches nearly every state from the Rockies to the Appalachians. The flood of pollution has created a "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico that, at its summer peak, is about the size of New Jersey. With the dead zone utterly devoid of oxygen, anything living in this huge region must flee or die.

If an 8,000-square-mile "dead zone" popped up on land, it would get fixed in a year. But there is no similar level of urgency for problems at sea.

Climate change

Climate change is the issue the oil industry most wants to forget. In the Bush administration, the Ocean Commission will be under pressure not to mention global warming. But trying to tackle ocean issues while ignoring climate change is like discussing urban design without mentioning the automobile.

At some point, global warming will shut down the North Atlantic Current. Historically, this shutdown has taken about 10 years to accomplish, and millennia to reverse. It renders much of Europe uninhabitable.

At some point, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will collapse, raising all the world's oceans 16 feet to 20 feet. The last time this ice sheet disappeared, the world was 4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today. Scientists believe the Earth's temperature could increase by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit this century.

Climate change has already been tied to widespread death of coral reefs and more intense tropical hurricanes. In the Northwest, a decline in winter snowpack will likely to have traumatic consequences for Pacific salmon.

The future of the world's oceans is intimately bound up with the future of the world's climate.

The list of problems goes on and on. A few solutions enjoy broad support.