Tom Philpott - Are Our Oceans on a Collision Course?
June 6, 2012 Back in 2006, a team of scientists from Canada, the United States, Sweden, and Panama published a landmark report [1]in the prestigious journal Science on the state of the oceans. The researchers highlighted what they called an "ongoing erosion of diversity" in sea-life that, if left unchecked, would lead to the "collapse of all taxa currently being fished by the mid-21st century."
Stripped of scientese, what the report described was the real possibility of the ocean as a vast, fetid grey zone, not quite dead but no longer able to provide a significant amount of food to humanity. And not in some unimaginably distant future, but rather in just four short decades, around the time when your aughts-era infant will reach middle age.
When the report dropped, it grabbed attention in the eco-foodie world like a great white shark sunning its dorsal fin in the shallows of a crowded beach. I was just beginning to write about food politics at the time, and the Science study jolted me from my land-locked fixations and opened the ocean as a rich and urgent topic.
Not only do the oceans cover more than two-thirds of the planet, but they're also home to 90 percent of the planet's living biomass. [2] Snuffing out their astonishing biodiversity would have unpredictable consequences for we creatures who dwell on the earth's relatively rare swaths of dry land. Surely, I thought at the time, the Science paper would spark a global push to heal what ails that murky, saline region that surrounds us.
Read More:
http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/06/oceans-still-headed-disaster
