America is currently suffering from several self-inflicted wounds including disrespecting and defunding our police, ignoring mass looting and random violence, several million undocumented people pouring across our border, and a collapsing economy. Taken individually these are problems we could solve in our spare time, but taken collectively and ignored they have the potential of dooming us. Therefore, I apologize for adding another threat to that list, but I do so because of the latent wisdom of an old Fram oil filter ad:
YOU CAN PAY ME NOW, OR YOU CAN PAY ME LATER! In other words, this problem, just like the others, is not going to go away, in and of itself.
Because Earth’s surface is approximately 71% water and 29% land, we probably should have named it Planet Ocean rather than Planet Earth.
Water is the one non-negotiable thing that life requires. Nowhere on Earth is there life without water, and 97% of Earth’s water is in our seven salty small oceans. The other three percent of water is fresh, found only on or below land, and less than 2% of it is suitable for human consumption.
Life as we know it is totally dependent on our ocean. Seventy percent of the oxygen in our atmosphere is generated by ocean-dwelling organisms. In just the past thirty years thousands of new kinds of carbon-based life-forms have been discovered thriving in every spoonful of seawater. Some are miniscule blue-green bacteria that generate the oxygen in one of every five breaths we take.
There are limits to what we can both take out of and put into the ocean without dire consequences for us and for our world. We are the only creature on Earth with the power to alter the way Earth works and the only one able to solve our own problems. Just recently we have become aware of how inordinately dependent we are on our world.
Every sea creature is threatened by plastic and numerous other human-made contaminants. It has been predicted that human activity will be the cause of all of the fish species we depend on for food to be gone by 2050.
We have extracted hundreds of millions of tons of ocean wildlife from the sea, including 90% of most large fish. Half of all coastal mangrove and kelp forests, marshes, and sea grass meadows that bordered islands and continents in the 1950s have been destroyed by us.
We have deliberately dumped billions of tons of garbage, sewage and toxic chemicals into the ocean. We have created dead zones in our seas and smaller oceans almost to the point of no return by using them as garbage dumps for plastic waste, fertilizer run-off, and industrial pollutants.
Between Hawaii and northern California there is an odd stretch of ocean called the Doldrums by sailors and the Eastern Garden Patch by scientists. It is a slowly swirling vortex of our trash that contains plastics, tires, toys, bottles, paper, clothes, nets, ropes, jugs, tarps--anything that will float---and it stretches for hundreds of miles. From the water’s surface to the sea floor far below there is every conceivable type of junk that we have abandoned. Sailors and most forms of sea life do their best to avoid this human-made, waste-land of pollution.
All over the globe our disintegrating pollution is making its way into the food chain. Fish and sea birds are obvious victims, their bodies packed with partially deteriorated metals and colored plastic scraps that they mistake for food. One animal dissected by Dutch researchers contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.
The coral reefs that circle our globe are dying. Ecologists estimate that reefs more than 65 million years old that ring the undersea world will begin to crumble in the next 50 to 75 years. The primary reason, other than dredging, is the increasing acidity in our oceans caused by our burning fossil fuels. The damage is exacerbated by using dynamite in the reefs to obtain fish. We have drained marshes, diverted streams, damned rivers and developed attractive coastlands in low areas without any restraint or concern for the future.
As ocean acidity increases, the availability of carbonate for shell building decreases causing a decline in the food webs on which we and other animals depend. First to go are plankton, which comprise the basis of the ocean’s food chain, followed by lobsters, crabs and mussels. The destruction up the food chain continues.
Sturgeon are large, ugly-looking fish called living dinosaurs because their lineage goes back 200 million years. There are 26 species world-wide, but we are imperiling their survival by catching and killing them because they are our primary source of caviar.
As our Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico it creates a dead zone, one of 400 other similarly poisonous dead zones around the World. Fertilizers running into the Mississippi River from 31 states create a zone of nitrogen and phosphorus that kills everything in it. That dead zone extends for more than 8,000 square miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River to the southeastern coast of Texas. More than 235,000 tons of seafood in the Gulf of Mexico are lost to that dead zone every year and entire species are being obliterated. Even fish in the open sea are threatened. In the past 30 years we have decimated fish stocks such as the Atlantic swordfish, bluefin tuna and cod.
Our rains are turning into acid. So many chemicals are flowing into rivers and lakes that the composition of the water in many of them has been fundamentally changed. Human overpopulation is emptying our aquifers and diverting the natural flow of rivers. Billions of people around the globe lack access to clean water. A huge number of children die every year from preventable waterborne diseases.
There were 2.5 billion people on Earth in 1944, and today there are seven billion. Since our Earth has an approximate carrying capacity of perhaps nine billion, no informed person doubts that our resources are finite and that we will be the cause of our own impending doom.
On a personal note, a life-long friend I grew up with opened his fishing marina in Florida in the 1960s. In 1970 I fished with him for the first time, and the experience was incredible. Accustomed as I was to sitting on a pond dam and waiting for my cork to bobble up and down, I was amazed at the ease with which we caught redfish, trout, grouper, flounder, mackerel, sting rays and sharks, not to mention the generous limits. I last fished with him in 2021, and those incredible fishing days and bountiful limits are now gone, certainly not to return in my lifetime and perhaps never.
One of the most important actions we can take toward our survival is to restore and protect the living ocean. Albert Einstein once said, “Our basic task is to widen our circle of compassion so that we embrace all living creatures and the beauty of nature.”
The greatest threat of all? Human indifference!
Our ocean is the life-support system of our planet. As the ocean and its creatures go, so go we. Save the ocean and them, and we save ourselves!
Clyde H. Morgan lives in Brandon. He has a bachelor’s degree in geology.
