You know, if you care about other animals, or even if you just care about yourself, you should still care about the ocean. Your life depends on it; more oxygen is produced and cleaned by the ocean than all the forests of the world. (This doesn't mean you shouldn't care about forests, of course, the ocean is just gargantuan compared to what we consider land)
But despite how vast the ocean is, despite the fact that we as a species may never know all that lies beneath the waves, we are stealing life from every inch of it.
There are plastic bags at the bottom of the Mariana's Trench, the deepest known place in the ocean.
Every day, hundreds of species are going extinct before we can even know they exist.
This is a crisis. This isn't something you can just ignore. And yes, it is all our fault.
While we play Animal Jam, a fantasy game about nature, we all need to understand that if we have no thought for the real creatures we hurt every day, there may soon come a time when the only place you can see other animals is through a screen.
Messed up, right?
Ocean pollution is a complex issue. It goes beyond plastic straws, bags, or styrofoam cups.
It has to do with the dangerously widespread idea that the ocean is a boundless puddle that we can take from and pollute because it's somehow our "right".
It has to do with the idea that fishes and the billions of diverse creatures who make the sea their homes are somehow inferior to us because they just look so different.
It has to do with the fact that the most temporary of products are packaged in the most eternal and unbreakable plastic, simply because it's cheap and convenient for us.
But we aren't feeling the true cost. Yet.
Even though it is vitally important that we all do our best to reduce our use of plastic, and that the corporations we buy from should move away from plastic, the worst plastic polluter is fishing nets. Even if they aren't plastic, they can literally trap and kill animals for hundreds of years, just discarded at the bottom of the ocean.
Nobody really likes having to use plastic straws, but a lot of people like the taste of fish meat. Have you heard the statistic that soon, there will be more plastic in the ocean than actual fishes?
The reasoning for that is two-fold. One, a horribly large amount of plastic is dumped in the ocean every day. Two, a horribly large amount of undersea creatures are killed every day by the fishing industry.
These animals include turtles, dolphins, seals, sharks, squids, octopi, and untold thousands of other rare and endangered species.
But it isn't just because people are eating them. Fishing is done by throwing a big net over a large area of water and fishing up whoever gets trapped in it. Fishermen pick around the dead and painfully dying creatures for the one species they were told to bring back and sell.
Only a microscopic fraction of the fish killed by fishing boats are actually eaten. The others suffocate and are tossed back long after they've died.
One small fish at the supermarket costs the lives of a hundred other animals, many of them endangered. But you only have to pay $8.00 a pound.
Because we only seem to care about ourselves, we don't pay the real cost of a lifeless plastic ocean until it's too late. And soon it will be too late if everyone continues business as usual.
It's good to reduce your own use of plastic, but wanna know the best thing you can do?
Just stop eating fish.
Every time you eat a fish, you give a little more money and power to an industry that's destroying the world.
I'm not even going to say that "sustainable" fish eating is any better– at this point, with so few animals left in the ocean, there is no real way to kill them "sustainably". All effort should go to bringing animal populations back from the brink of extinction.
What's better: a temporary flavor, or a beautiful world?
Ask yourself that.
– DoomyPanda
Yep, it sucks that all the plastic is killing the animals in the ocean. They do nothing to deserve this... the clear water marine aquarium had a donation for worlds ocean day, where if you donated $20 or more you could get a free bracelet in support. All the money is going towards ocean conservation. I donated $20:) Also I read on Instagram from oceana or another company similar, that every minute a garbage truck load of trash gets dumped into the ocean.
ReplyDeleteWhile some of this may be true, the 'fact' that hundreds of species of fish go exstinct before we can discover them is completely unprovable.
ReplyDeleteYes, it is provable by scientific data and common sense.
DeleteThe majority of life on Earth is located in the oceans, and the majority of that life is unknown. Humans know more about space than the oceans, yet despite humans ourselves only being able to reach the deepest depths of the oceans in expensive equipment, the impact of ocean acidification due to climate change, plastic pollution, and the fragmentation of ecosystems at all levels of the oceans reaches every single species.
Here's some interesting reading on this:
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(14)01618-2.pdf
https://geog.ucsb.edu/earths-species-become-extinct-before-theyre-discovered/
"As the California Academy of Sciences puts it, 'Despite intensive efforts to document life on Earth, scientists estimate that more than 90 percent of the species on this planet have yet to be discovered. In the face of large-scale habitat loss and degradation, many of these species are disappearing before we even know they exist.'"
A few more things are:
ReplyDeleteUse paper straws
Don't use a straw
Don't use a plastic lid on a drink
Try to reuse something
Wash out straws
Also, I NEVER eat fish or crab or sushi and I try to get my family to not eat it either.
-julieblap and a very happy betta fish
Awesome! My family uses bamboo straws. :D
DeleteIf you think about it though, why do we even need straws? They're fun, but they're just so unnecessary lol
I have that book! I love the illustrations.
ReplyDeleteThough I'm not sure I'm understanding what you're meaning to say. So, millions of diverse fish are killed every day, which somehow makes their populations go up...? That's what I'm getting from this comment. I don't see the logic in that idea, would you want to elaborate?
Also, it may be important to note that the fishing industry not only kills the large predators (sharks, squid, etc.) that would naturally control the populations of major fish populations, but it's gotten to the point where those big fishing corporations are removing an important source of food for those big predators. Theoretically, if all fishing were to stop, I'd imagine that the populations of predators like sharks would rebound because they are no longer being killed AND their main sources of food are more available.
Of course, when I say that it's best to not eat fish, I say that from the perspective of someone from North America where fish is a luxury rather than a necessity. There are island nations that depend more heavily on fish to feed themselves.
However, in places like North America, people generally do not depend on fish and only eat it as a luxury, which is why it's probably best to just not eat fish. It requires so much death and destruction, and it isn't even necessary.