we wrecked the oceans

Apologies for reverting to the preaching I would occasionally do on Pinch Me. But... I just watched a very powerful talk and really, really encourage everyone I know to watch it too.

Below are some extracts I typed up. But if you eat fish, have ever wondered what all this "ocean acidification" talk was about, and/or just have a soul, you'll want to hear everything this coral reef ecology expert has to say (and it's all very straight-forward and easy to understand). Spare the 18 minutes.




... And we trawl, which means to take something the size of a tractor-trailer that weighs thousands and thousands of pounds, put it on a big chain and drag it across the sea floor to stir up the bottom and catch the fish.

Think of it as being the bulldozing of a city or of a forest, because it clears it away. And the habitat destruction is unbelievable. This is a typical photograph of what the continental shelves of the world look like. You can see the rows in the bottom, the way you can see the rows in a field that has just been ploughed to plant corn.

What that was was a forest of sponge and coral which is a critical habitat for the development of fish. What it is now is mud.

And the area of the ocean floor that has been transformed from forest to level mud, to parking lot, is equivalent to the entire area of all the forests that have ever been cut down, on all of the earth, in the history of humanity. And we've managed to do that in the last 100 to 150 years.

...So what are the oceans going to be like in 20-50 years? Well there won't be any fish, except for minnows and the water will be pretty dirty, and all those kinds of things, and full of mercury, etc., etc. And deadzones will get bigger and bigger and start to merge. And we can imagine something like the dead-zonification of the global coastal ocean.

The really scary things though are the physical, chemical, chemical, oceanographic things that are happening.

As the surface of the ocean gets warmer, the water is lighter when it's warmer, it becomes hard and harder to turn the ocean over. We say it becomes more strongly stratified. The consequence of that is that all those nutrients that fuel the great anchoveta fisheries, the sardines of California, or in Peru or whatever, those slow down, and those fisheries collapse. And at the same time, water from the surface, which is rich in oxygen, doesn't make it down and the ocean turns into a desert.

So the question is, how are we all going to respond to this? And we can do all sorts of things to fix it but in the final analysis, what we really need to fix is ourselves. It's not about the fish; it's not about the pollution; it's not about the climate change. It's about us and our greed and our need for growth and our inability to imagine a world that is different that the selfish world we live in today.

So the question is, do we respond to this or not?

I would say the future of life, and the dignity of human beings depends on our doing that.