While OpEdge is on a two-week
hiatus, we are running some of the more evergreen columns from past years. This
blog entry originally appeared on October 14, 2013.
If even just half of what Lisa-ann Gershwin reports in Stung! is true, then many younger
readers may be telling their grandchildren stories about the long ago days when
humans caught ocean fish and ate them. Stung!
gives the depressing news about how we’ve managed to pollute the oceans
probably beyond saving. By beyond saving, Gershwin means a return to Earth’s
oceans some 500 million years ago when disgustingly slimy and stingy jellyfish
ruled.
Gershwin catalogues overfished areas, red tides, jellyfish
blooms, heated and oxygen deprived waters, waters polluted by fertilizer and
other human wastes and man-made catastrophes that collectively are killing many
fish species and destroying the ocean’s delicate cycle of life. She gives copious examples of all the
problems we have created:
·
Over-fishing, which means taking so many fish
out of the water that a species is doomed to extinction. Included in overfishing is the problem of
bycatch, which occurs when fishing for one species leads to the capture and
destruction of other species. There is
also bottom trawling, which essentially runs a large rake across the water’s
floor, picking up delicacies like shrimp but destroying plant and other animal
life.
·
Eutrophication, which is a type of pollution
caused by excessive fertilizer and sewage runoff causing an accelerated growth
of algae and other plant life, leading to a disturbance in the balance of
underwater life.
·
Other kinds of pollution which causes
deformities or contaminates fish and other sea creatures.
·
The decline in oxygen levels in the oceans,
which leads to the death of virtually all higher forms of life.
·
The increasing acidification of the ocean, which
dissolves shells. Particularly alarming is the fact that ocean acidification
destroys diatoms, tiny creatures at the base of the food chain of higher order
animals like fish, whales and penguins. Acidification also makes it more
conducive for the type of tiny creatures upon which jellyfish love to graze.
·
Climate change, which is warming the waters,
again upsetting nature’s balance and leading to the imminent extinction of many
sea dwellers.
As it turns out, each of these conditions makes the waters
more conducive to jellyfish, since jellyfish can live in many environments and
adapt well to a lack of oxygen.
Moreover, once jellyfish get a hold on a body of water, they multiply to
the point of crowding out other life forms.
Stung! holds out
absolutely no hope that we can fix the oceans. Gershwin’s last words in the
book are “If you are waiting for me to offer some great insight, some morsel of
wisdom, some words of advice…okay then…Adapt.”
But what does adaptation mean? I’m guessing that it means
giving up on eating any creature from the ocean and figuring out how to eliminate
the pollution from industrial fisheries, which right now contribute to the
problem by dumping waste matter from production into the water. We’ll have to
limit water sports to pools and other manmade structures, which we can keep
clean of pollutants and jellyfish. We’ll
have to figure out how to keep jellyfish from destroying the filters of a
variety of operations sited on bodies of water. It might mean developing
technologies that actively clean carbon-dioxide out of the ocean water. It
certainly will mean ending our dependence on burning fossil fuels, which is
both warming the waters and injecting carbon into them.
Another recent book, Countdown
by Alan Weisman, tells us what else we have to do: reduce the human
population. We currently have about 7 billion people in the world and counting.
Some biologists think we can sustain 1.5 billion people living
the kind of life we live in industrialized countries. My own
back-of-the-envelope, seat-of-my-pants, pulled-out-of-thin-air estimate of the
earth’s carrying capacity for humans is 1.0 billion. I pick that number because
it’s the number of people on the earth in 1800.
My own belief—and it is only a belief—is that humans are so
smart that we will survive, even if that means a return to living lives that,
as Thomas Hobbes once put it, are “poor,
nasty, brutish, and short.” I assume that survival of humans will only
come at the cost of a great decline in our population. My only question is
whether war, epidemics, famine and chemical poisoning—the four horsemen of the
Apocalypse—will cause the decline in our numbers or if we will take matters
into our own hands and do it through birth control and family planning.
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