"The ocean is broken"

[nd5056]

Depressing... can't even describe how it feels to me.


http://news.yahoo.com/the-ocean-is-broken-133327474.html

 

[3smithboys]

Horrible....just so sad...

 

[wiigirl]

So depressing actually.

 

[WDWBarb]

And it seems so hopeless - trying to change what people do and what they care about.

 

[dislaney]

Sad!

 

[mombrontrent]

Yes it is incredibly sad and scary. We as humans in our insatiable greed have raped the oceans and polluted them beyond belief. I wouldn't want to eat anything that came from that toxic cesspool . We have destroyed the oceans for future generations and all the innocent sea life. This will have far reaching and ever lasting consequences that we cannot even begin to imagine.

 

[Soldier's*Sweeties]

Yes it is incredibly sad and scary. We as humans in our insatiable greed have raped the oceans and polluted them beyond belief. I wouldn't want to eat anything that came from that toxic cesspool . We have destroyed the oceans for future generations and all the innocent sea life. This will have far reaching and ever lasting consequences that we cannot even begin to imagine.

Not only that, but some people don't realize the impact the ocean has on the land! If the oceans die ... We die.

 

[John VN]

Sad but oh so old......http://www.biography.com/people/jacques-cousteau-9259496?page=2

Jacques Cousteau informed us many years ago.

 

[Cannot_Wait_4Disney]

What's really sad is the thread complaining about getting points is going to end up longer than this one. Most people don't see it. So they don't care. But the real danger is what you don't see. Plastic doesn't biodegrade. It just breaks down into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces of plastic. These are entering the food chain and are nearly impossible to clean up. There is way too much of it. Back to the stuff you can see. You should see all the stuff that washes up on a couple of beaches in Hawaii. What a mess.

 

[Fortuosity]

The ocean is broken.

Wonder what the Disney Wonder et al. will do?

(Think I'll avoid any and all DIS cruise threads. Gonna be some mighty unhappy Happy-Ever-After folks when they find their trips have been cancelled.)

 

[Soldier's*Sweeties]

What's really sad is the thread complaining about getting points is going to end up longer than this one. Most people don't see it. So they don't care. But the real danger is what you don't see. Plastic doesn't biodegrade. It just breaks down into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces of plastic. These are entering the food chain and are nearly impossible to clean up. There is way too much of it. Back to the stuff you can see. You should see all the stuff that washes up on a couple of beaches in Hawaii. What a mess.

I know... I grew up on the Gulf Coast of FL. It's disgusting and annoying.

 

[LuLuO]

It is heartbreaking. My family and I were in Pensacola Beach last week. I went out at sunrise to have some time to myself. I came back a couple of hours later with a bag full of trash. Bottles, cans, artificial flower petals, caps, bags, straws, cups, plastic of all kinds and a steak knife.

 

[Angelrose]

Just remember the movie Soylent Green. It sure looks like we're heading that way.

 

[mnrose]

What's really sad is the thread complaining about getting points is going to end up longer than this one. Most people don't see it. So they don't care. But the real danger is what you don't see. Plastic doesn't biodegrade. It just breaks down into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces of plastic. These are entering the food chain and are nearly impossible to clean up. There is way too much of it. Back to the stuff you can see. You should see all the stuff that washes up on a couple of beaches in Hawaii. What a mess.

Yup. We prefer to stick our heads in the sand and not think about destroying our ocean, warming out planet, and the fact that antibiotics are ceasing to work (started a thread on this yesterday and drew a SINGLE response). These are big, and real, problems. Instead, we talk about Kimye's engagement and getting points.

I think, however, this is human nature. Not necessarily the sign of not caring, but simply that we are overwhelmed.

I wish our politicians would focus on the big picture instead of miring themselves in the muck of petty partisan politics. We have the might to solve these problems, we lack the will.

 

[nd5056]

At this point I'm not sure what's worse, the garbage or the way they harvest the fish...

...
North of the equator, up above New Guinea, the ocean-racers saw a big fishing boat working a reef in the distance.

"All day it was there, trawling back and forth. It was a big ship, like a mother-ship," he said.

And all night it worked too, under bright floodlights. And in the morning Macfadyen was awoken by his crewman calling out, urgently, that the ship had launched a speedboat.

"Obviously I was worried. We were unarmed and pirates are a real worry in those waters. I thought, if these guys had weapons then we were in deep trouble."

But they weren't pirates, not in the conventional sense, at least. The speedboat came alongside and the Melanesian men aboard offered gifts of fruit and jars of jam and preserves.

"And they gave us five big sugar-bags full of fish," he said.

"They were good, big fish, of all kinds. Some were fresh, but others had obviously been in the sun for a while.

"We told them there was no way we could possibly use all those fish. There were just two of us, with no real place to store or keep them. They just shrugged and told us to tip them overboard. That's what they would have done with them anyway, they said.

"They told us that his was just a small fraction of one day's by-catch. That they were only interested in tuna and to them, everything else was rubbish. It was all killed, all dumped. They just trawled that reef day and night and stripped it of every living thing."

Macfadyen felt sick to his heart. That was one fishing boat among countless more working unseen beyond the horizon, many of them doing exactly the same thing.

No wonder the sea was dead. No wonder his baited lines caught nothing. There was nothing to catch.
...