An Invisible Chain of our Time

by Iam Willgreen

agreed. Still more? Well, we would think what is regulated about the pouring of waste on the sea, be nuclear residues or not. There is nothing about, nothing in the common space and invisible scenario. All this before your eyes, in your eyes, everything with laws on hand everywhere, with many conferences, with several studies and much intelligence: all because you cannot see anything.

  Honesty, I must tell you “still more”. Still more, the latest years we have been able to listen and “learn” about new techniques for the improvement of oceanic nutrients conditions. It sounds like a scientific and amazing discovering, a big effort, and a fantastic intellectual achievement. These are techniques and technologies for fix a problem, but what is the more amazing problem?

  (5) Tuna and tuna-like species (albacore, bluefin, bigeye tuna, skipjack, yellowfin, blackfin, little tunny, southern bluefin and bullet), pomfret, marlin, sailfish, swordfish, saury and ocean going sharks, dolphins and other cetaceans.

  The fishing companies have not more profitable zones as those where they have been fishing, and at the present they are trying to feed fish into their free sea farms.

  Could you never have figured out there are easiest ways to recover the levels of fish populations? This has been there, always has been there. Nature is that, a complex assembly of beings that struggle for fill one place, one volume, one position, and one role.

  And if we left them to grow, they grow. They do not need help to do this. They have been doing it not along years, but along million years. Nevertheless, they have not outlived to razing from the faster asteroid that has been known never on the Earth, the fishing businessman.

  Say goodbye to them.

  The strongly decreasing of fisheries (it was not a sinking, rather a disappearing) affected to many common specie, some of them in the picture above: the mackerel, the swordfish, the sole fish, sardines, the delightful sea bass, the salmon, and specially the cod (so collapsed the eastern Canadian companies), the expensive bream and the tunas. But others are also being watched closely and continuously: sharks, seals, whales, crab, spider crabs, and so on. Please, keep it clear; there are no one species on the sea whose population has not been devastated. You can be sure about. It is as simple as the numbers are: it remains roughly among an 8% to 12% of fish populations in the seas.

  Of course, when you open the Explorer and go there looking for a nice picture, you will find a lot of them: all were taken in parks, in wildlife refuges, paying the tax for entry and stay for some days. Only in my first five years as diver, I saw decreasing the floors of shores, slowly, as if I see it with a low-speed camera. But the reality is another different in fact. You could lean out over the boardwalk railing of Bombay, and taste the smell of Indian Ocean: it smells ... strongly wrong. Down from Bombay, you even could see an army of debris and waste, sailing to south. Looking to rivers and wetlands, some photographers have more pictures on backup, which show fishes many more than those real fishes that already have been lost. This is the way what you finish thinking all is right, seeing the beautiful pictures from natural parks, and imagining the places you have not seen as a continuation of same pictures, a naive idea of folk with goodwill, probably as you. All this is visible in the net of nets, very comfortably.

  The lack of marine species, mainly the industrially profitable, has leaded the emergence of sea farms offshore and inshore. It is becoming since ten years on the source of food for people, implying some changes and challenges. This entire growing beings (millions o tons of fish) will need be fed, and you can imagine now that this food will not come from the sea. It is another intelligent process, another more. We could say another intelligent business.

  You can know, as very much approximately, the actual status of animals and forests in the lands over the zero height, above the water level. Under waves, the hunting we call "fishing" is not controlled. Do you want another joke more? Even today, the European Commission, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Trade Organization and other institutions, they continue discussing when, how many, where, who, what stage they can fish, the about 8-12% of fish remaining in the oceans! It is an international joke, an official joke, a TV show, a lack of intelligence… or maybe another issue? Smile! Do not laugh you? And we name barbarians to ancient cultures! This is exactly like say that we are stupid, do not matter us to lose our seas, do not matter us if we eat fish with flavor that comes from bones and residues, do not matter us if some firm with a ridiculous flag (license for all as 007), clears, razes, and destroys shores and depths.

  Do you remember the sixth paragraph, an imaginary story? It is not imaginary, is it? We notice easily when someone steal our farm because we can see it. However, we cannot believe that some firms have stolen our seas, because somehow we know us are guilty, we have paid all we wanted, we have celebrated Christmas with gargantuan amounts of shellfish, and paid nice jewels with shark tooth, we have lived in the heaven.

  Neither the Martians nor the climate change are responsible. We are the responsible. And now, what can we do? Well, if you have a farm flat, and you do not see one leaf over the ground, you will go to seek the food in other place: both the African farms, as also are the African shores, for example. As we are so organized, you will leave everything in the politician's hands, the policy and rules of trading with Africans; you will rest blind and deaf; and you do not will ask anybody any information by years; and will pay charmed these delightful fish. And some years later, you will shout astonished; “where are the fish; where is our fish; what happened on the sea; who did steal it?”

  Solutions? The same solutions as those that mathematically were applied by Nature as ecological law along the natural history: to sum how many goods are allowable to eat, and share it (distribute is a word that remembers suspiciously to pirates and loot, and so we have seen, it does not works for all). The looting of faraway resources is finally our global and common looting. I hope, one day, making the effort by five minutes, people will notice that some passionate scientists have been telling in many languages, in many places, to various attendants that: "we must slow down, we must eat but no devour anxiously, leaving the fish at least it can reproduce".

  We have had the cheaper solution for get away the waste since the eighteenth, a "clever technic" that becomes one of best showing of how humans do things: our warehouse for waste has been for more than 200 years the entire whole of seas. It was assumed that the seas could transport all this away, for free, all floating or dissolved, disappearing, thinking that the seas already know what to do with this. Clearly, this has not been a great inspiration. There is no genius: where was the technology, where was applied science?

  Today, we know quite about behavior of those compounds disseminated or propagated time ago, and about the behavior of currents, sediments, species, and relocation of compounds in this giant pond. It is another joke more hearing to say this: “the next decades, our children will see new opportunities to work and develop their careers, the research, and finding out solutions for all this problems". This is the peak of foolishness, idiocy, and insolence: and this is an insult to the intelligence of anyone. And this thought comes from some research centers, supported by the alimentary, fishing, financial, consulting, engineering and chemical companies.

  Is this science or technology? Try to digest this, if you do it.

  9. An arrow on the sky: the development.

  A statement with which I disagree: we dominate. Really we dominate?

  Ok, it is right, some revolutions drove us towards a more "free position", as is usual hear to say: we have achieved a very impressive production of food, an important advance in health, a huge performance in manufactures, an extensive engineering development, and a list of goods of all sorts as may be energy, potable water, cars, schools, shops, TVs, clothes, travels, protected all this with an insurance. I think cannot be forgotten this, in addition to freedom reached there is the liability and the limitations that Nature has.

  I would say this many times, again and again, never sto
pping: the same mathematics applies for your home and for the whole world: only change the player’s balance.

  I have heard that the environmental problems do not respect frontiers: we should say better "the frontiers cannot stop the environmental problems, neither mountains, nor laws, nor agreements". One of the guidelines in the classic agriculture, the green revolution, or the agrarian biotechnology, has been since ever the aim of “eradicate every being live which could attack, weaken, interfere or compete" with our crops. Then we could ask what believe those who took up their work to understand the relationships among organisms, or even better, what they know and what they do not know openly: science ecologists, soil specialists, engineers, agronomists, botanists, and so on.

  I would wish you could understand that in a few words, that almost totally the amount of actions and changes realized along the last 200 years that run between the Industrial Revolution and the now day, making a business use of science and technology, have had two main results: (1) an improving of the life quality in some places, and a big productivity linked forcefully to (2) extended problems as well locally as globally, and very costly for