The Sea in Danger [antikvár]

Introduction: The Planet is on FireFlying in a private plane over any continent today is a terrifying experience. In summer, Africa is burning solid. At night, from an altitude of 10,000 feet, you may count as many as 25 simultaneous fires, some of them enormous. The myth of the "beneficent" brush fire has spread worldwide and has brought about the disastrous proliferation of arid areas and such catastrophic droughts as the recent one in Nigeria. During daytime, the plane has to climb above 12,000 feet to find clear air. Below is a thick, dark, ochre coating of smoke that screens the sun's raysand that humans have to breathe. Corsica, the Riviera, Florida, Canada, Australia, with individual variances, are also on fire, shrouded almost permanently in a thick, visible layer of choking, smoking air. Forests shrink, fertile soil is washed away. Recent research has demonstrated that the Sahara was covered with trees as recently as 6000 years ago, and that it was turned into a desert by nomadic tribes that burned the trees to provide grazing areas for their herds. From our little airplane, the thought is obvious: we are today in the process of turning the entire planet into a global Sahara.Another alarming experience is flying by night above oil fieldsin the Middle East, in Louisiana, Texas, or offshore in the Persian or Mexican gulfs. Everywhere burning torches light up the dark sky. Gas is burned just to get rid of it, because it would be uneconomical to store it. Flames dance sarcastically above every single refinery planta symbol of waste, of carelessness, and of man's contempt for nature.When a ship arrives at night in the vicinity of a great harbor, be it Rotterdam or Miami, from dozens of miles away its sailors can see a huge glowing area: the nighttime cities lavishly lit up, burning with no consideration or restraint the treasured fossil fuels accumulated over millions of years. From the quiet sea, these auras suggest severe hemorrhages that sooner or later may bleed mankind to agony.In the sea, the reckless waste is even more shameless. Ninety-four percent of our whales have already been slaughtered. The quantity of fish in all the oceans has decreased by more than 30 percent. Half the shorelines of the world are dying. The bottom life on the continental shelves is destroyed systematically by heavy trawlnets. The coral reefs are sick everywhere, most probably from pollution. Seabirds are less than 50 percent their numbers at the turn of the century. The last true penguin in the arctic was killed in 1948. Generally speaking, more than 1000 species have been eradicated by man since 1900.It is only recently that we are becoming aware of how severely we are plundering our planet. This can be explained by the suddenness with which our growth has entered the explosive mode. For at least 1 million years the human species has struggled for survival with a very weak set of defensive and offensive weapons: no shield, no carapace, no thick skin, no fur, no blubber, no fangs, no claws. The naked man had a brain, was standing erect, had agile hands and an articulated voice. He had to use all the tricks he could devise to compensate for his weakness, and survival became equivalent to fighting nature permanently. But with access to the sun's power, concentrated in coal, oil, and natural gas, man suddenly became, in the short time span of four generations, the undisputed ruler of the earth. This8