The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [110]
While overfishing puts serious pressure on oceanic health, probably the worst problem of the lot right now, there are other problems as well, ranging from destruction of estuaries, loss of coral reefs, oceanic “dead zones” caused by pollution runoff, and the build-up of toxic metals and other industrial pollutants in the top species.
Sperm whales feeding even in the most remote reaches of Earth’s oceans have built up stunningly high levels of toxic and heavy metals. [R]esearchers found mercury as high as 16 parts per million in the whales. Fish high in mercury such as shark and swordfish—the types health experts warn children and pregnant women to avoid—typically have levels of about 1 part per million.3
What sort of signal should we receive from the fact that whales—mammals just like us—now carry toxic loads of mercury so far beyond what the EPA would allow in humans that they would probably require a person so infused with mercury to be buried in a special leakproof casket to prevent the release of hazardous materials?
The Air You Breathe
I was taught in middle school that the oxygen I breathe comes from trees. That’s not entirely wrong; it’s just not entirely accurate either. The source of half the world’s oxygen is not majestic trees in the Amazon rising hundreds of feet into the mist, but microscopically invisible one-celled creatures that live at the ocean surface, tossed hither and yon by majestic waves and currents.4 Called “phytoplankton,” which is a fancy way of saying “photosynthetic organisms that are really small and live in the ocean,” these little “trees of the ocean” are responsible for far more than half the oxygen you breathe; they are the very base of the food pyramid in the ocean.
On land, plants form the base of the pyramid, and these plants are eaten (for example) by the rabbits that are eaten by the foxes. In the ocean, phytoplankton are the plants, which are eaten by slightly larger plankton and larvae, which are eaten by . . . well, you get the picture. There’s an entire ecosystem and food chain in the ocean which exactly mirrors the one on land in its basic pyramid shape, but it is eons older in terms of its layers, complexity, and structure. Life started in the sea and has a billion or more years of a head start on terrestrial life when it comes to complexity (e.g., interrelationships, dependencies, feedback loops, and the like).
This is all well and good and perfectly ignorable until we read things like this:
The microscopic plants that support all life in the oceans are dying off at a dramatic rate, according to a study that has documented for the first time a disturbing and unprecedented change at the base of the marine food web.
Scientists have discovered that the phytoplankton of the oceans has declined by about 40 per cent over the past century, with much of the loss occurring since the 1950s.5
While we don’t know if this finding will hold up, or what might be causing it if it is real, it’s a trend that has been tracked by scientists for quite a long time.6,7 If such findings are true, we should be just as focused on why half of the world’s supply of oxygen is disappearing as why our GDP is not growing as rapidly as we might like.
The very air you breathe is dependent on a form of life that you almost certainly have never seen with your own eyes, and something seems to be amiss with it. Whether the cause is global warming, nutrient imbalances, or an upset in the normal predator-prey relationships is utterly unknown at this point. Wouldn’t it be good to know what the cause is? Without (hopefully) belaboring the obvious, human pressures on the oceans, in whatever form, are a ripe candidate for speculation and inquiry.
The Bottom Line
All of the data coming from the oceans says that even at a population of 6.5 billion, humans are exerting unsustainable pressures and demands upon the world’s