The marine realm has played a pivotal role in human development but remains a largely unknown world full of surprises to science and societies. This chapter reviews human impacts by moving from the surface to the deep sea and from the Paleolithic to the Modern. As much of life below water is not visible to us, humans have responded to problems only when they surfaced. It is argued that as top predators, humans rarely have had the perfect knowledge to conserve an ecosystem, much less so an ecosystem below water. Legacies of past exploitation and contamination pose challenges to future ocean management.
Cite this article:
Holm, Poul. “14 SDG 14 – Exploiting and Managing the Alien and Unseen World below Water.” In Before the UN Sustainable Development Goals: A Historical Companion, edited by Martin Gutmann and Daniel Gorman. Oxford University Press, 2022.
