Professional oceanic yacht racer Ivan MacFadyen recreates a voyage from a decade ago and discovers a major difference in this new oceanic experience compared to the previous one -- and it's a difference that ought to make thoughtful, rational and caring people lose a lot of sleep at night.
Observe:
"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.
If that sounds depressing, it only got worse.
The next leg of the long voyage was from Osaka to San Francisco and for most of that trip the desolation was tinged with nauseous horror and a degree of fear.
"After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead," Macfadyen said.
"We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head. It was pretty sickening.
"I've done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I'm used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen."http://www.theherald.com.au/story/1848433/the-ocean-is-broken/
Anyone with even the slightest amount of cognitive thinking ability knows that mankind is slow motion strangling the precious life out of this beautiful planet that we all live on.
From the childishly obtuse climate change deniers, to the fishermen who refuse to believe that the sources of their targeted catch are finite, to politicians who, whether they believe in environmental preservation or not, gladly accept money from the world's worst polluters and environmental pillagers, to heads of state, whose myopia and fecklessness ensures remedial action at curbing the damage to humanity's life-giving habitat is perpetually encumbered -- well . . . all The Gadfly has to say to those who are apathetic about these issues, and even hostile in some cases to the view that mankind is to blame, or dimly deny that there is even a crisis at all, is don't come crying to those of us who fucking told you so when the consequences of your foolhardy intransigence engenders a calamitous world that leaves you and/or your descendants staring in to the dark chasm of your own species' mortality.
And that pretty much sums up everything that The Gadfly has to say about this lamentable matter.
----TFG
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