Among the challenges we face in the 21st century is how to address the repercussions of large scale sustained and punctuated events that diminish the productivity, resilience, and biological diversity of coastal and marine ecosystems. Productivity here refers to ecological production of biomass, from microbes to megafauna. Resilience -- a term bandied about much in the press, studied by the National Academy of Science, and addressed by the White House in the National Drought Resilience Partnership announced in November 2013-refers to the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure. Biological diversity refers to the variation in types of organisms and their functional role in ecosystems. These attributes are closely intertwined. Intensive fishing, for instance, while decreasing fisheries productivity can also cause declines in species diversity by removing important functional groups (i.e., top-level predators), with sometimes catastrophic consequences (e.g., trophic cascades). A threshold is crossed and recovery is compromised. Anything that affects all three attributes, then, affects the provision of essential ecosystem services - protecting shorelines, purifying air and water, detoxifying wastes, among many others-and ultimately impacts human health and economies and the sustainability of natural resources.