The Devolution of the Seas

[n2doc]

By Alan B. Sielen

Of all the threats looming over the planet today, one of the most alarming is the seemingly inexorable descent of the world’s oceans into ecological perdition. Over the last several decades, human activities have so altered the basic chemistry of the seas that they are now experiencing evolution in reverse: a return to the barren primeval waters of hundreds of millions of years ago.

A visitor to the oceans at the dawn of time would have found an underwater world that was mostly lifeless. Eventually, around 3.5 billion years ago, basic organisms began to emerge from the primordial ooze. This microbial soup of algae and bacteria needed little oxygen to survive. Worms, jellyfish, and toxic fireweed ruled the deep. In time, these simple organisms began to evolve into higher life forms, resulting in the wondrously rich diversity of fish, corals, whales, and other sea life one associates with the oceans today.

Yet that sea life is now in peril. Over the last 50 years -- a mere blink in geologic time -- humanity has come perilously close to reversing the almost miraculous biological abundance of the deep. Pollution, overfishing, the destruction of habitats, and climate change are emptying the oceans and enabling the lowest forms of life to regain their dominance. The oceanographer Jeremy Jackson calls it “the rise of slime”: the transformation of once complex oceanic ecosystems featuring intricate food webs with large animals into simplistic systems dominated by microbes, jellyfish, and disease. In effect, humans are eliminating the lions and tigers of the seas to make room for the cockroaches and rats.

The prospect of vanishing whales, polar bears, bluefin tuna, sea turtles, and wild coasts should be worrying enough on its own. But the disruption of entire ecosystems threatens our very survival, since it is the healthy functioning of these diverse systems that sustains life on earth. Destruction on this level will cost humans dearly in terms of food, jobs, health, and quality of life. It also violates the unspoken promise passed from one generation to the next of a better future.

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http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140164/alan-b-sielen/the-devolution-of-the-seas

[The Wielding Truth]

1. Here's another place we need more regulation. We so need to get smart and save our Mother Earth.

[pscot]

2. We won't act until we start dying

ourselves.

[Moostache]

3. I hate to be pesimistic, but I disagree...

We won't do anything until ALL of the brown people die first....THEN, the 1% will kill off the remaining white people and eventually they will all be killed by their private security forces or we will see civilization collapse into a second Dark Ages from which humanity will never emerge.

I will have long shuffled off this mortal coil before then, but best wishes to those who are under 20 now...you're gonna see a shitstorm that makes the 20th century wars and brutality seem like an idyllic paradise by comparison.

[Uncle Joe]

4. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, n2doc.

[blkmusclmachine]

5. We're killing our Seas. And somewhere, a CEO rejoices.

[MBS]

6. really good (and timely)-thanks

I have been SO frustrated for SO long about the lack of political and community will to solve this and other urgent environmental problems.. . not to mention the lack of journalistic interest in covering such issues.
I remember Al Gore, in a radio interview, mentioning how , in his 2000 presidential campaign, he would give a 45-minute speech on the environment,and the press would only mention something that came up, on an utterly different topic, in the Q and A.

These are SOLUBLE problems (recycling plastic bags, anyone?), but time is very short.