Our Ocean Crisis -- Solutions Are the Easy Part

Over the last 64 years, the geologic nanosecond in which I've lived my life, 90 percent of the largest pelagic (open ocean) fish -- including hammerhead sharks, bluefin tuna and black marlin -- have been wiped out, along with close to half the world's tropical reefs. Our global ocean faces a cascading disaster from industrial overfishing, oil, chemical, plastic and nutrient pollution, loss of coastal and marine habitat and fossil-fuel-fired climate impacts. A report earlier this year in the journal Science suggests we may soon face a mass extinction in the ocean. It's enough to make you lose hope. To which I respond, get over yourself. There's no time for that. Personally, I'm more frustrated than despairing, because we know what the solutions are. If you stop killing fish, they tend to grow back; if you stop producing 100 million metric tons of disposable plastic every year, you won't have that much of it choking sea turtles or acting as a toxic sponge pushing poison up the food-web. And if we make a rapid transition from oil to renewable energy, we can be assured no wind spill will destroy another beach or bayou. What we lack is not solutions but the political will to enact them. And even here there is hope we may have started scaling up the solutions as fast as the problems. Greening ports, fighting pirates, and establishing vast ocean wilderness areas are just three examples of how this is getting done. In my book, "The Golden Shore," I talk about how Californ...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news