I worry about marine pollution. That it is less obvious to us than air pollution – the much talked about carbon problem, but that water is at least as important to life and we don’t know what harm we’re causing thousands of metres below the surface. Think of that hundreds of miles-wide Great Pacific garbage patch or the worryingly rapid depletion of fish throughout our world’s oceans.
The Great Pacific Garbage patch, its size
largely unknown
I have visited seas and rivers in the World which teem with wildlife. In Alaska (close to where the Kodiak brown bears catch salmon), you can put down a fishing rod and come up with all matter and size of fish. And in the Pantanal in Brazil, the Rio Negro in a short stretch has kingfisher, piranhas, giant otters, herons, cayman, catfish . . . . What is common to these two places? The absence of humans. Alaska is a third the size of the whole US, but with a population of under a million. And each ranch in the Pantanal covers an area the size of an English County or two.
Brown bear catching salmon in in Katmai National
Park
We no longer know this sort of diversity in the UK. But recently Europe updated its approach to fishing quotas, with an agreement from the representatives of the European Parliament, the EU Council, and the European Commission after two years of negotiations, a move applauded by campaigners such as Greenpeace. This, however, is only the first step in marathon negotiations to reform the controversial Common Fisheries Policy.
The deal formed an obligation to end overfishing by 2015 and a commitment to rebuild fish stocks. In future, the number of fish that can be discarded at sea will be significantly reduced. Instead of the large fishing vessels ditching dead fish so that only those landed – and most marketable – count towards their quota, the fishermen will be required to count all fish caught rather than just those brought to shore.
Let us hope that this does a little to restore fishing stocks in the vicinity of the UK and elsewhere in Europe.
Policies on biological life will work more easily if people (consumers) understand biology better.
Baroness Valentine,
I am pleased you bring this topic up here. HRH Prince Charles and his sons have been committed to discussing and acting on environmental issues. However, to be credible many things must be undertaken at all levels and certainly a post on this blog is one of those issues.
The Gulf Coast and Gulf of Mexico south of Louisiana is a giant engine of economic activity only equaled by a handful of locations in the world. It is also a place of environmental riches, biodiversity and “conservationism” equaled by only a few regions in the world. This is a constant struggle and work near the center of most lives here. It is the spot of the BP-Trans-Ocean Leak at the Macondo Well.
The struggle for restoration will go on for decades and despite all BP has paid and may pay will cost many others more jointly in losses, donations, deferred opportunities and loss of joy in the sacred. On the other hand the Pacific Garbage Patch is largely the result of callous disregard of everything and without remedy in the councils of power. South Louisiana also has only less than a dozen subterranean features of size, These are Salt domes but now two have been destroyed by oil companies. The newest by Texas Brine in such a way as to create an aquatic and possible potential marine threat as well. There is no real or serious sense in which any compensation approaching the real loss is being considered.
The gross incompetence of the modern world is evident to millions not in power. But those drunk on the cheap wine of our era’s ideologies may well destroy us all before their global debauchery ends.
Thank you, for “worrying about marine pollution” and “overfishing”-“under-re-stocking”
yet the ‘new facts’ show us that, as Professors Jonathan Stone and David Smith said in the Australian Environmental Studies open-university course (c1998)
“We humans have literally become a plague on Earth”;
and
“Somebody has to get it through to the Economists that they’ve got a fundamental equation wrong somewhere”.
—————————–
{We
(you leaders that is)
need to revisit all of that work,
especially since the world population of mouths and destructive-tools is set to balloon out to 11 billion by 2050,
and has already exceeded this Earth-One’s human-carrying-capacity limit, by at least 200% (at 7 billion)}