Make Refuges, Not Refuse: The Fate of the Seas

A very upsetting story about oceanic pollution in The New York Times today, "Swimming through Garbage" by Lewis Pugh.  He spent a good part of his summer swimming in the seven seas, literally: the Mediterranean, Adriatic, Aegean, Black, Red, Arabian and North Seas. The longest swim was 37 miles and took him two days.

What Pugh saw was desolation almost every place but where an area had been made a designated refuge.

He writes: "I saw no sharks, no whales, no dolphins. I saw no fish longer than 11 inches. The larger ones had all been fished out.

When I swam in the Aegean, the sea floor was covered with litter; I saw tires and plastic bags, bottles, cans, shoes and clothing."

And: "In the Red Sea, I saw no coral and no fish. It looked like an underwater desert. But then, a little more than a mile later, I swam into a protected area, where fishing had been restricted. It was a sea as it was meant to be: rich and colorful and teeming with abundant life."

So there you go.  There's where it goes--all the garbage that's tossed into water courses and off the sides of boats, all that stuff we'd rather not think about but which we discard. We'd better think about what we're fishing too.   

Pugh addes:  "As I was about to jump into the Red Sea, I asked the boat’s skipper whether I should keep a lookout for sharks. He told me not to worry — they’re long gone. Well, that’s exactly what does worry me. An estimated 100 million sharks are fished out of the world’s oceans every year. That’s like removing the lions from the Serengeti. It wouldn’t be long before the gazelles, zebras and wildebeests had multiplied and eaten all the grass. And when the land was laid bare the grazers would starve."

Is anybody listening?