Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Oceans become deserts


Study the above for a moment. Consider that net's width, consider its height. Know that the ground rollers destroy most everything -- yes, everything -- in their path. Together, the ensemble is an underwater behemoth, a pitiless Shiva of the deep. That's terrorism. That's extremism. OK?
For what it is worth, if you are interested or not, Mister Bijou remains moderately positive most of the time. How else is one supposed to keep going? But casting about -- considering the world his teenage nephew and niece are iPoding their way into -- gloom can quickly set in:
The oceans are emptying. In a single generation, once thriving populations of deep sea fish have been driven to the brink of extinction by expanding fisheries, researchers say today. Records of catches logged by trawlers operating in the North Atlantic from 1978 to 1994 show that at least five species of deep sea fish are at such low levels that they qualify for the World Conservation Union's critically endangered list. The research, published in the journal Nature, adds weight to demands by conservationists for the creation of internationally protected reserves to place vast areas of the deep seas out of bounds to fisheries.
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"These are species no one really cares about, but they play a key role in the ecosystem," Ms Devine said.
The scientists reviewed trawler logs for records of five deep sea by-catch species - the roundnose grenadier, onion-eye grenadier, blue hake, spiny eel and spinytail skate. All are slow growing, reaching more than a metre long and living to 60 years. They found that levels of all the fish plummeted by 87%-98% over the 17 years, a rate that will see a decline over the next three generations of 99%-100%. Records for roundnose grenadier and onion-eye grenadier from 1995 to 2003 show those species have collapsed by 99.6% and 93.3% in 26 years.
We are turning our oceans into deserts: Guardian

Elsewhere? We are a world bent on the methodical destruction of itself:
That the demand for life itself has now become a revolutionary programme is demonstrated, at least negatively, by the following fact: carried farther and farther into madness by the necessities of their dominance, those social forces that would once have been described as conservative are no longer concerned even with the conservation of the biological bases for the survival of the species. Quite the opposite, because they are in fact bent on the methodical destruction of those bases. The dimensions of the gulf that they are digging for us are forever being calculated and recalculated, right down to the likely speed of our descent into it, right down to the bottom line -- which is, in the event, the lifespan of cesium or plutonium. For this society is mad in Chesterton's sense: it has lost everything except its reason -- everything except that abstract rationality of the commodity that is its ultimate raison d'etre, and the one that has outlasted all the others. No doubt one could find other ruling classes in history which, having lost all historical perspective beyond that of their own survival, sank into a suicidal irresponsibility; but never in the past has a ruling class been able to press such vast means into service of such a total contempt for life.
Abyss: L'Encylopodie des Nuisances

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