Birdfish's Earth Day 2010 Environmental Editorial
We are living in some very tough times, and it is
even worse for the environment. Lots of things that
would be of benefit to the planet were planned and
ready to do, but now have been put on hold.
Money that was allocated for countless projects for
conservation, habitat restoration, preservation,
and improvement, is simply not there now. For people
personally, and for the environment, the world has
been hit very hard by the economic downturn.
Many various assaults on the environment, however, continue
unabated. Here in our backyard in some states, fracking for
natural gas has caused people's wells, their water, to
become flammable ... dogs have stopped drinking it.
chemicals pumped into the ground to frack for natural gas
extraction got magically exempted from the Clean Water
Act several years ago. Had it not been "loop-holed" exempt,
it would not be legal. Yet we are putting this chemical,
and thousands of others, into our water tables. Big
business is making the rules now in case you haven't noticed.
Natural resources is what the world is made of and if we
just think we can extract anything no matter how we poison the
water table to get it, the ecosystems will collapse. Imagine
a world without clean air, water, soil, and forests. There is
no future in this mentality, only easy money for a few that think
a pile of money will buy them out of any trouble that comes.
"Money doesn't talk, it swears" - Bob Dylan. He was right.
We burn coal and oil like it's a good thing; many litter
like mad in lots of places, in some places literally filling
the sea with plastic and trash. We treat our waterways
like industrial sewers, while our energy prices are ridiculously
off the charts, and the utility companies fight solar power,
as in Hawai'i where they burn fossil fuels for electricity!
Record profits for any and all energy profiteers (ought to
all be non-profit or nearly so like it used to be) from oil
to gas, water, electricity. The tail is wagging the dog as I'm
sure many of you folks have noticed, on way too many levels.
That is not the direction that will help us live healthy tomorrow.
Much like how the big financial institutions yelled "no regulation"
until they yelled "bailout." Hopefully intelligence will prevail
before it is too late.
The March 2010 CITES meeting just decided to do nothing
about Atlantic Bluefin Tuna overfishing which has lowered
the population by 90% in 60 years or less. And they didn't
do anything about shark finning - killing sharks just to
cut their fins off and throw them back. Most of the shark
fin is eaten in China as soup, the Bluefin mostly is eaten
in Japan as sashami or sushi.
We must stop over-fishing by commercial and foreign pirates
(rampant worldwide and estimated at double the known legal
take) interests. Bottom dragging dredges probably kill more
corals annually than the hobby takes. There has to be a
point before extinction when we say there are not enough to
ensure continued existence of a fishery.
We've removed Cod, soon Bluefin Tuna, and several others
from the ecosystem. We are still doing the same stupid thing
going from fish to fish, not learning, not changing our take,
with better efficiency and technology. All over the world,
the assault is continuous, around the clock.
In the 1800's, boats were fast enough (with sails) to eliminate
most of the world's whales. Most have recovered with protection,
except the Right Whale, the right one to kill. It is still
barely hanging on in the North Atlantic. Now we use battleships
and cruisers to fish from, miles of long nets you wouldn't believe,
and sonar to know where to put them, catches plumetting everywhere,
sizes down, no more big fish, exploitation rampant, as we
overfish the sea to death.
All the fishing boats off California shot every shark they
saw from the 1940 and 50's at least, I saw it in the 60's and
70's, until finally sharks collapsed, and now you see the sea lion
explosion on the news, taking over docks by the hundreds,
and wiping out salmon when they return to rivers to spawn.
The sharks weren't really competing with the fisherman,
just stealing the wounded fish on their line sometimes.
Turns out the sea lion was the real competitor, and now
without sharks to keep them in control, they are out of
control doing more damage than sharks ever did.
That is home spun biology in action. The people doing
what looked to them like "solving the problem" which
invariably results in a bigger problem.
Who thinks all this abuse won't have results and ramifications?
Every sea has it species that are commercially extinct,
or racing towards it due to lack of will, care, and enforcement.
Or wiped out due to foreign exotic invaders brought with
ship ballast water. Preventable, yet wiped out fisheries
examples abound. Now we have Cerambycid Long-horned beetles
from Asia that came in crates, wiping out our trees!
Everything is connected, when one tugs on the web of life
on one side, the other side moves. (to paraphrase John Muir).
What we do here affects others elsewhere, and vice versa.
The Aral Sea, once the fourth biggest inland body of water
in the world is 90% dry in less than 20 years due to diversion
of river inflows to grow cotton in a desert. Another fishery
dead. Any and all development is not progress. This is
a great misconception and sales success of the developers.
We do nothing about dozens of known rampantly overfished
fisheries, while we pick on corals, live rock, and aquarium
fish. They can't run or swim away. The soft easy target.
All our money in the tanks, from hobby to industry too poor
and disorganized to fight back properly in many cases and ways,
against slick high-priced marketing and bought and
paid for "junk science."
We must take the work of the real, true, honest biologists
seriously ... those who really know the ecosystems.
In high stakes developer or mining and energy games,
high-paid corporate biologists will write anything in a
report for that sweet annual salary with benefits in an
otherwise tough job market.
And when the real environmental disasters we're creating
reach fruition, and the coral reefs die due to Co2
acidification, they will go to the hobbyists they tried to
keep out of it for genetic material to keep the species
alive. As has been the case so many times before from
Arabian Oryx to Bali Starling.
We have entered a major extinction event by all known rates.
There have been 5 so far as we have found. This is known as the
6th. Of course we all know of the dinosaur event, accepted now as
the result of an asteroid impact that altered the climate
worldwide. We're doing the same thing insidiously with chemical
pollution, over-development, and over-usage of the resources.
Cutting down too many forests, taking too many fish, building
more than we need or can use, and now all the anti-biotics
we take are in our water tables. One bacteria, virus, disease
after the next immune to all of our "cures" mutating from our
chemical attacks. They can change a lot faster than humans
will be able to.
I don't mean to sound gloom and doom, but I'd hoped to
have seen more signs of more things getting better by
now and I'm not seeing what I should be. I've watched
and studied the environment for 50 years now, very closely.
From the birds, to the butterflies, and even fish, everyone
and anyone studying it can't believe the changes, and most
of all, the speed with which they are occurring.
Look ... you can run a ship full of coal at full speed onto
the Barrier Reef, but we couldn't take those corals and
grow them. The coal highway there is Australia mining
exports, and the various governments let anybody willynilly
blindly haul arse through the alleged priceless and
protected coral reef, so they can burn coal power plants
in China. Is that something we should be doing at this
point anyway? Is this the best way to do it, no pilot
boats to direct traffic OFF the reef? It's OK to kill
the reef directly and indirectly with coal, but don't
take a piece and study, love, or farm it.
It is too easy to go after a soft target like a hobby,
instead of fixing the problems that really will kill the
corals off like deforestation, burning fossil fuels,
ag chemical and pesticide pollution, acidification via
Co2 or rain, mountain top coal mining, thawing of the
permafrost, etc., ad. infinitum, someone please stop me.
And they want to pick on the few corals the hobby takes.
If we just stop those coral hobbyists, everything
will be saved. There is a petition (the first step)
from a "conservation organization" to U.S. Fish & Wildlife
to list a bunch of corals as Endangered. Some (seemed
like few) were actually rare species that should be
protected, those of extremely limited range, generally
"one island" species.
On land here in the U.S., when something like the
Bald Eagle, Peregrine Falcon, Gray Whale, etc. hits 10,000
animals they are considered for delisting. Such is what
usually occurs. Applying this acceptable minimum reservoir
population to corals, 80% or more of the corals on the list
should not be listed.
There are surely hundreds of thousands of, if not many
millions, of many of these species proposed in the petition.
There are many tens of thousands of islands in the Indo-Pacific,
most of which have never seen a coral collector. I suspect
more corals are killed annually by cyclones, runoff, pollution,
tsunamis, etc., than the hobby takes by factors, yet there
are several layers of bureaucracy and regulation to take
one for culturing purposes, if you can at all.
I really don't think anywhere close to half the places corals
live have been seen by modern man. How can you call something
like that endangered? For truly rare ones, with known limited
ranges, fine, but not wholesale genus painting with the widest
brush to see how much you can get.
The only reason they can get away with suggesting some of
them are endangered is because we can't see them, and truly haven't
begun to be able to survey most of the places most of them live.
Mark my word, long before the hobby gets them, the by-products
of dirty industry, and not using what we know, technology we have,
to live with less impact on the environment, will get them.
Then there are animal "rights" groups that know little to
nothing about animals, only recently discovering fish, that
gets lots of media attention saying we should not keep or
eat fish either one. Which is to say a third of the people
on the planet should start starving right now. Yet their
Madison Ave. marketing tactics get lots of money and
followers, even posting on reef message boards, they have
nothing positive to do apparently. They pretend a pro-vegan
stance has no ill affects on the environment. A lot of
forests were removed for soy bean farming.
Corporate mega-farming with its fertilizers and pesticides
is not good for the environment either. We've ploughed
under ancient river bottom forest for corn that we don't
even consume here, but export.
We proved with locally extinct indigenous foods like Giant
Clams (Tridacna) we could farm a supply for the people and
hobby, and restocking, easily. If the people at the farms
just remember to breed them every year, a more difficult
task than anyone had imagined. We can supply ourselves in
many ways, supplying jobs where there are often none.
It will be an ugly world for future generations if we don't take
care of our environment and ecosystems. The trees, soil, air, and
water are the very breaths of the life we live, taking care of and
protecting them for the future generations should be one of our
most important tasks and duties.
To conserve is good. It is to save for another day. From Thoreau
to Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir to Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and
many more like them, America has a long, proud history of great
conservationists. With what they knew in their time, they saw the
unquestionable value in protecting our natural resources above all.
Nowadays money decides what is saved or protected. Big biz wins.
Meanwhile do your part, do what you can to try to educate others
about the importance of healty ecosystems and the balance of nature,
with your reef or fish tanks. And how what we do here, may decide the
fate of that stuff in your tank from the other side of the world.
Remember, reduce, reuse, and recycle. Combine trips, don't drive
gas hogs or idle more than a minute, don't use AC if it's below 75
in house or car, don't leave lights on, and do be consciencious
about your carbon footprint. It's coal they don't have to burn for
somewhere else. Glacier Nat. Pk. just lost two more glaciers,
less than 25 left, and most may not last another decade.
All the little things we do individually add up, and they do count,
they do matter, and they do make a difference. Once you train
yourself to recycle, you'll never go back. :)
Anyway, if you got this far, thank you, and congratulations,
you must really care, and that is great, to me. :)
Think globally, act locally.
Have a great EARTH DAY !!
For this year's Earth Day page, we have
decided to take a closer look at ...
Marine Debris -
Understanding the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
An example of some of the damaging effects ...
Plastic Beach
(Also of interest on this page ...
Midway: Message from the Gyre)
The following video takes you up close
to the situation onboard the Algalita ...
Plastic Alphabet Soup
(Re: The video above, www.algalita.org)
Learn more about the Laysan Albatross
This problem of too much plastic pollution also
exists in the Atlantic, as this recent news
article describes ...
News Article - Atlantic Garbage Patch
Coloring pages for young children ...
Albatross
Manta Ray
Chambered Nautilus
Environmental News Pages -
envirolink.org
Environmental News Network
Environmental News Service