(From the diaries -- Plutonium Page. This is a critical environmental issue that's often overlooked.)
Years after Douglas Adams had gained renown from his quirky sci-fi concoctions, he hit upon the idea of a new project. For this book, called Last Chance to See, Adams would visit creatures which were not only endangered, but down to the last of their numbers. Adams recognized quite well that his near universal celebrity was essential to the plan, and he took advantage of the opportunity to describe these animals, and their plight, with his signature mix of humor and insight.
Since the book came out, Adams himself has become extinct. Were he here today, he would not have had to travel so far to see creatures in danger of disappearing. He'd only have to stroll down to the beach, because it now seems that the oceans are dying.
I've got bills to pay and children who need clothes
I know there's fish out there but where God only knows
They say these waters aren't what they used to be
But I've got people back on land who count on me....
Downeastern Alexa, Billy Joel
In the mid nineteenth century, the Mississippi River was itself a huge fishery running through the center of the nation. Fishing trawlers from St. Louis, from Cairo, Illinois, and from Memphis all returned to port with decks groaning under loads of enormous sturgeon, massive channel catfish, and huge paddlefish with blades as long as a man's arm. The numbers of fish they produced were astounding, and with each year's figures moving up, even more boats were launched to get in on the apparently limitless numbers. Boats returned with hundreds, thousands, ten of thousands of mature fish. Then, with a suddenness that astounded everyone, the boats came back with fewer, smaller fish. No fish. In the space of a few years, the great fishery was gone.
By the 1950s, the cod fishery of Canada's Atlantic coast was the most productive in the world. Old styles of fishing boats were replaced by new "factory ships" that could stay out longer, collect more fish using immense stern nets, and keep the catch on ice. Most of these ships were not Canadian. They came from Germany, from Russia, from the UK... from everywhere. Rules at the time let them scrape by as close as 12 miles to the Canadian and United States coasts. They trawled back and forth, sucking up what seemed to be an unending bounty. In 1968 alone, these ships removed more than 800,000 tons of cod. But by 1975, the catch was down to less than 300,000 tons. In 1978, it was less than 150,000 tons. The response from the US and Canada was not to limit fishing, but to change the boundaries so that only their fisherman could participate. Using new ships with even larger nets dragged right over the spawning grounds of the Atlantic cod, US and Canadian fishermen upped their catch to around 250,000 tons. For the next ten years, more and more ships were launched, often helped by government programs that funded their purchase or construction. But the fish declined. Numerous warnings were given, and suggestions were made that the fishing be strictly controlled, but both governments made only modest changes. By 1992, the cod fishery was closed. There was nothing left to catch.
Now I drive my Downeaster Alexa
More and more miles from shore every year
Since they tell me I can't sell no stripers
And there's no luck in swordfishing here...
Downeastern Alexa, Billy Joel
The story is the same the world over. One after another, the fisheries that have fed locals through centuries (or even millennia) have become exhausted. In lakes or rivers, it was easy for locals to understand that the resource they were exploiting was not limitless. With populations of huge bays and banks, it was harder for even the fishermen tending the increasingly empty nets to accept that such a vast population could be so effectively eliminated. People were always convinced that the answer wasn't more rules, but less. If the government would just extend the season, increase the areas that could be fished, take the limits off tackle, then the huge old catches of the past would return. More and bigger boats went out each year chasing ever smaller catches.
Fishermen switched to other species, but those collapsed one after another. Some fishermen still hold on today by fishing for parasitic hagfish, which are about as attractive as their name, and which have a small market in Asia.
Even having watched one fishery collapse after another, it was still hard to think that this was a problem that extended beyond specific areas. After all, oceans cover more than two thirds of the world. Somewhere there was another huge population of cod. Somewhere the tuna still grew huge. Somewhere...
Only, no. The oceans are huge, yes, but they are not uniform. The areas of the ocean that can support large populations of fish are much more restricted. And if current trends contend, those areas will soon be exhausted.
If fishing around the world continues at its present pace, more and more species will vanish, marine ecosystems will unravel and there will be "global collapse" of all species currently fished, possibly as soon as mid-century, fisheries experts and ecologists are predicting.
Though the aim of the fishermen are the commercial species, the loss of those species threatens to tear the existing food webs. And over-fishing is not the only stress on the oceans. Perhaps even more than the land, the oceans are suffering from the increase in temperature, which effects the amount of oxygen and other materials that can be dissolved in the water. Add to that the fact that for the whole of human history, we've treated the oceans as the most convenient dumping ground for every form of sewage and waste.
Around the world, the most diverse ecosystems on Earth -- tropical reefs -- are falling to "reef bleaching." This phenomenon, in which corals that make up the core of the reef expel their symbiotic algae, leads to the death of the corals themselves and the collapse of the reef community. Bleaching has hit reefs in every ocean where they occur, and though studies have implicated local pollution as well as disease, the principle cause of these failures is likely related to increasing water temperatures.
If reefs are falling, then extremely simple communities are on the rise. In Australia, a strange "fireweed" has appeared. These purple-red balls of "hairy slime" has clogged bays and coated nets, ships, and docks. It burns the skin of anyone touching it, leaving behind festering sores and deep scars. When it dries, the powder it produces causes an allergic reaction so strong that it sends people running away in tears. Examination of the fireweed shows that it's not a weed at all, but colonies of a cyanobacteria, one of the simplest forms of life on Earth. Australia isn't alone.
In many places -- the atolls of the Pacific, the shrimp beds of the Eastern Seaboard, the fiords of Norway -- some of the most advanced forms of ocean life are struggling to survive while the most primitive are thriving and spreading. Fish, corals and marine mammals are dying while algae, bacteria and jellyfish are growing unchecked. Where this pattern is most pronounced, scientists evoke a scenario of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago.
In truth, it's not that evolution is being reversed. What's happening now is what has happened in every one of the great dyings that are recorded in Earth's history. What we are seeing is exactly what the fossil record shows to have happened over, and over again.
There is no driving force in evolution which favors the creation of complex life. That's one of the hardest concepts of many people -- biologists included -- to recognize. Evolution is certainly not random, but on a large scale, it might as well be. Life tends to vary toward the simple with just as much force as it varies toward the complex. Since there's a limit on the simplicity side (cyanobacteria would be very near that limit) but no known boundary to how complex life may become, the resulting distribution of life looks like a bell curve cut in half, with the thickest part of the chart representing the simple organisms, and the vanishing tail off to one side representing the more complex. In every age of the Earth, including right now, simple organisms have made up the vast bulk of all the biomass on the planet. Most life is single-celled life, and it always has been.
Complex life is rare. Large plants, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals -- including humans -- are the tiny little tip at the edge of the graph of Earth's living population.
Even if when the system was stressed, all sections of the biomass were affected equally, the effect would still be most evident on the complex. We simply have fewer species and fewer organisms to lose. Worse, all the history of life shows that the blow doesn't fall equally. Complex life gets hit harder. This is likely because complexity is often a measure of specialization. A single-celled algae may live anywhere the water is above freezing. A banana tree as much more demanding requirements.
Between 100,000 and 10,000 years ago, human hunters and shifting climate so stressed land ecosystems that about three quarters of large animals on land became extinct. Sixty-five million years ago, a prolonged period of volcanism, climate change, and bombardment from space sickened the planet's ecosystems enough that seventy-five percent of all species -- land and sea -- died. Dinosaurs went out then, but they had a lot of company. 205 million years ago, a mass extinction took an almost identical bite out of Earth's diversity -- opening the door for the dinosaurs to become prominent. 245 million years ago, at the end of the Permian Period, an astounding 96% of all species on Earth were lost. Life came very close to vanishing entirely. In every one of these extinctions, complex life took the greatest fall.
The causes for these previous die offs are difficult to discern. From a few trace isotopes in rocks, from tiny spheres of volcanic glass, and from the patterns of the extinction themselves, scientists try to ferret out the causes. But certainty is rare. Even the best known extinction -- that of the dinosaurs -- whose cause was supposedly laid at the feet of a massive asteroid, is back in doubt. Further research has shown that the Earth took blows from similar asteroids at least three times in the five million years before the dinosaurs disappeared, and those collisions caused no clear record of species loss. The truth is, that every one of these great extinctions likely had a number of causes. Ecosystems don't fall to one blow, they fall from a flurry of blows.
When we look at the failure of our oceans, we shouldn't think that over fishing is the cause. Or that global warming is the cause. Or that oil spills and toxic dumping are the cause. All those things are the cause.
I was a bayman like my father was before
Can't make a living as a bayman anymore
There ain't much future for a man who works the sea
But there ain't no island left for islanders like me
Downeastern Alexa, Billy Joel
The sad thing is that there could have been a future for the men of the sea. If the government, in it's eternal support of corporations, had not pushed for larger ships, more ships, factory ships... If, when faced with evidence of the fisheries pending failure, they had not responded with policy so timid as to be useless... If expansion of territorial waters had been seen as a chance to preserve rather than exploit...
Enough of the "ifs." We may be a disaster, but we're not yet a great dying. And unlike an asteroid or an ice age, we can learn from what we've done.
To save the fish, it's going to take tough rules on industries as diverse as fishing, manufacturing, and power production. It's going to take a program to save not just the fish, but the fishermen. And it's going to take a commitment to live by these new rules before we go out and demand that other nations do the same.
Originally posted at Political Cortex Which didn't force me to chop the intro into nonsense by setting a limit more than a hundred characters short of what the on-screen prompt says, damn it. |