After watching documentaries such as Blackfish and Seaspiracy it's hard not to question the morality of what humanity has done and continues to do to the worlds oceans. We routinely overfish to the point of causing extinction. We capture and sell young dolphins, orca's and other sea creatures for use in aquariums where their standard of life is so low that they almost never live to their natural lifespans. We dump over 14 billion (that's billion with a B) pounds of plastic into the ocean every year and plenty more. With so much pressure on sea life it's not hard to imagine that by 2100 the oceans will be dead, potentially leading to massive and irreversible consequences for humanity.
I want to reiterate a previous point and build on it. We dump roughly 14,000,000,000 pounds of plastic into the ocean every single year. From this reliable source i would like to quote "Work from the Algalita Foundation indicates there is six times more plastic than phytoplankton per weight and fifty times more plastic than zooplankton. Over half this plastic is less than 60 mm- or a quarter inch." Now you might think to yourself what such small plastic pieces could possibly do to creatures living in the oceans. As pointed out by the Seaspiracy documentary, these tiny pieces of plastic travel up the food chain to whales through small creatures such as phytoplankton. Plastic waste in our oceans kill about 1,000,000 sea creatures every year and those that it doesn't kill, it weakens and poisons.
This demonstrates somewhat the horror that we are inflicting on our wildlife. Even our wild birds are being decimated by our plastic usage. It's not just Albatross and fish that are affected but so are sea turtles, as demonstrated here. We've produced enough plastic waste that you can even find in the deepest parts of the ocean, namely the Mariana's Trench as mentioned here. It takes plastics between 500 to 1000 years to disintegrate. That means the earliest these plastics being made today and dumped into the ocean will decompose is in 2521, but could stay around till 3021. Oh and did i mention that if we don't change things NOW that the amount of garbage in the ocean will triple by 2040. That's in little less than twenty years.
But these are indirect things. Sure we're dumping enough trash into the ocean to kill it ten times over, but that's mainly born of ignorance. What can't be excused by any measure are the inhumane, cruel and unacceptable practices of shark finning and whaling . As evidenced here the shark populations have crashed by 71 percent in the past couple of decades. Whats more despicable is that much of the time these deaths can be attributed to the horrid act of shark finning. For those who don't know what shark finning is, it's where captured sharks have their fins cut off before the shark is thrown back into the water, where it is unable to move and drowns. Fishermen willingly take sharks, slice off their limbs and let them drown, all for soup that has NO medicinal or nutritional value, nor a taste and which costs only 100 dollars.
in 2019 Japan resumed commercial whaling despite international outcry as evidenced here. Acknowledged globally however, demand for whale meat has dropped for a myriad of reasons and thankfully the practice may hopefully die out permanently, but for now Japan still clings to ancient customs despite the reality of it's actions.
So where am I going with all this? Our oceans are becoming unsustainable and may die in our lifetimes. Since most of our oxygen is produced by creatures in the oceans this is concerning for me and i would hope concerning for others as well. Do you agree that our oceans are in imminent danger? What methods can our governments take to reverse this looming disaster?
