A terrifying article from Alternet.
Meanwhile, overfishing has created some 150 “dead zones” — oxygen-free patches of ocean that can sustain no life — around the world: Some of these patches, Grescoe tells us forebodingly, “are now as large as Ireland.” In search of seafloor-dwelling species such as the trendy monkfish — long ignored, then popularized singlehandedly by Julia Child in 1979 — bottom-trawls weighing more than 26,000 pounds each rake and flatten wildlife-rich undersea peaks, leaving a paved-looking flatness in their wake. Oh, and a large percentage of coral reefs worldwide are dying or already dead. Oh, and those bluefin tuna and halibut steaks you like? Say it with me: Mercury. Those jumbo fried shrimp battened on pesticides and antibiotics in bacteria-riddled Chinese farms, their decomposing flesh treated with borax? How’s your health insurance?
It is happening right this minute but not quite right before our eyes. This is exactly the sort of thing our species prefers not to think about. What kind of catastrophe is it? Take your pick. Ecological. Medical.
If we wanted to, we could bombard our readers with stories such as this. Corporate industrial civilisation is bad news for the planet. In this culture environments and habitats are destroyed for short term economic gain.
“This kind of attitude lies at the heart of the problems facing the oceans,” he seethes. “It is the ongoing plunder of the seas, done in the name of keeping a boat afloat for another season, and multiplied a hundred thousand times in all the ports of the world …. If this were still the age of inexhaustible cod mountains and endless salmon rivers, such a display of spirit might be admirable. It is the essence of the indomitable, short-sighted, buck-passing Atlantic fisherman: an independent, almost lordly working-class hero, romanticized to death in our culture. As long as there is a single jellyfish left in the ocean, he will be ready to go out and catch it.” And jellyfish, down at the foot of the food chain, will be the last edible species out there in a not-too-distant future when our great-grandchildren, Grescoe half-jokes, will eat “peanut butter and jellyfish sandwiches” and “jellyfish and chips.”
Peanut butter, only if they are able to grow peanuts where they live. And jellyfish? Only if they live near the coast (as the seas rise more of us will be near the coast!).
