Destroying the deep seas

June 23, 2006

Guest Post by Michael J.W. Stickings

According to the U.N. (via Guardian Unlimited), “[d]amage to the once pristine habitats of the deep oceans by pollution, litter and overfishing is running out of control”. Consider:

Last year some 85 million tonnes of wild fish were pulled from the global oceans, 100 million sharks and related species were butchered for their fins, some 250,000 turtles became tangled in fishing gear, and 300,000 seabirds, including 100,000 albatrosses, were killed by illegal longline fishing.

Into the water in their place went three billion individual pieces of litter — about eight million a day — joining the 46,000 pieces of discarded plastic that currently float on every square mile of ocean and kill another million seabirds each year. The water temperature rose and its alkalinity fell – both the result of climate change. Coral barriers off Australia and Belize are dying and newly discovered reefs in the Atlantic have already been destroyed by bottom trawling.

Are we not meant to be the stewards of our environment rather than its destroyers? It’s like we don’t care. And many of us — too many of us — don’t.

Misanthropy is fully justified, in my view. There is simply no excuse for what we’re doing.

What humanity is doing to the oceans is horrible. Just stupid and arrogant as all hell. I don’t believe that homo sapiens is evolving fast enough to comprehend that not everything on earth was put here either to be consumed or dumped on.

It’s almost impossible for man to speak of the phenomena of the oceans without sounding condescending. It’s a parallel planet we barely know and it’s filled with alien beings that rival absolutely anything that might drop in by spaceship from the outer galaxies.

A self-created day of reckoning is approaching. The finely balanced gift we call home will set itself right and humankind will find that it’s exalted opinion of itself was never worthy of the pedestal we placed ourselves on.

  • Considering we won’t stop piracy and we won’t stop illegal fishing, one wonders exactly what we have a blue water navy for.

    And now the International Whaling Commission is being taken over by the Japanese and they are getting ready to start commerical hunting of whales (after decades of ‘scientific’ hunting) at a time when Japanese consumption of whale meat is down.

    There are some really sick people out there. Apparently, for them, destruction of these very advanced mammals is important to save their “traditional” way of life.

  • A couple comments:

    People look back at the Easter Islands and wonder how they could have been so stupid to harvest all the timber.

    Navy. I used to be in the Navy and at sea EVERY night we threw all the trash overboard. Enough trash to support a crew of 3000 and about 110 helicipters. There was no limit, plastics, solvants, everything. And that was just one vessel.

  • Mother nature will not take this sitting down.
    +
    The Gaia hypothesis is strongly coupled to karma.
    +
    For all actions there are reactions.
    +
    And of course, you don’t get something for nothing.

    =

    I suspect a calamity will smote humanity.
    Something like bird flu.
    Something that is going to severely reduce the human population.

    Unless… humanity gets its act together in a hurry.

  • Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he can eat for a lifetime. Let a man use all the technology available to scour all forms of life from the ocean and he, and the rest of the fishermen, will succeed to the point of ultimate starvation.

  • Wait—did Michael just say that Misanthropy is justified? Does that include “longline boats, bottom-trawling ketches, and commercial whaling fleets?”

  • Not to worry…. When the oceans are dead McDonalds will have McSoylent Green burgers.

  • It’s becoming increasingly obvious that many people think that our highest aspirations are limited to eating, procreating, destroying, satisfying greed, pursuing power, glorifying ignorance, and hating anyone who thinks that being made in the image of god might suggest something more.

  • Where is Capt. Tripp when the earth needs him? Global warming just won’t happen fast enough to cure the earth of man.

  • People just don’t realize the damage being done. The only appropriate analogy is to imagine a gigantic net, football fields wide, pulled along by fleets of helicopters, which scours across the surface of the land, scooping up all of the animals in it’s path, and severely damaging the plant life. When the net is full of animals, the helicopters fly in formation to the industrial drop site, where the dead bodies are separated for marketable value, with most going to the grinder. Repeat this scenario 1000 times a day for 100 years.
    The forests are left silent. The lucky animals avoiding the carnage are so few and far between that their population will never recover.
    There is no way that the food industry would ever get away with such depopulation and habitat destruction on land.
    The destruction of water born life is the greatest tragedy ever wrought by mankind.

  • Life will continue on this planet regardless of what we do till the sun burns out. The point missed by many is that we humans are eliminating the foundations of humanity’s existence, not Nature’s. Microbes, Insects, rats and others will still exist without us.

    We humans have such a small concept of time. Yes there might be not much large scale life after we wipe it out for some two three or one hundred eons. But that is a blink of an eye in the life of planet earth. 65 million years ago, the most dominant animal family on the planet was wiped out by an asteroid. It took some 60 million years of evolution for the hairy four legged survivors, the precursors of rats and dogs, to reach critical mass and some 5 million years for bipedal apes to gain some intelligence. And it seems it will only take some 7000 years of civilization to wipe out the legacy of mammals.

    Like the Fools we are, we ignored the lessons or Rapa Nui/Easter Island or dismiss it as some kind of one off. One thing for certain, all the money in the world is gonna feed you if there’s nothing to eat.

    If a future archeologist are around to record this period of our existence, they will not have to look for our epitath which will probably boil down to:
    “Too Stupid to Live.” or “Soylent Green is Made of People”

  • lou…reference to “The Stand”?

    JC: Very vivid analogy! Out of sight, out of mind.

    I SCUBA dive and have recently enrolled in a program to help environmental groups monitor the status of local (California) waters. Surveys, sensus, clean-ups, that sort of thing. A drop in the bucket (easy metaphor), but at least I feel like I’m doing SOMETHING. The overal nearsightedness and greed of the human race will be the mechanism of our downfall.

  • It seems that we are shrinking the Earth so it can be drowned in a bath tub. But like Gore said, the planet will survive, it’s the people who won’t. It’s the abuse of the environment that will lead to the true end days and it ain’t gonna include no rapture.

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