Word: fishelis
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...face up to the fact that "we cannot make a living on a sustained basis from terrestrial wildlife. Not to say that we didn't try. We have become frighteningly effective at altering nature." Her worry now is that people are altering the ocean. If you want to eat fish, grow them, she argues, offering support for the burgeoning aquaculture industry--in which such delicacies as salmon and trout are raised in aquatic pens--as long as the pens themselves do not despoil the coastline...
...recognized marine fisheries were overexploited or already depleted, and 44% more were at their limits of exploitation. Nontarget fish are swept up in the process. Dredges and trawls destroy habitats--Earle calls the invaders "bulldozer equivalents"--as they drag the ocean floor...
Another threat comes from man-made fertilizers, which wash off fields into streams and eventually into the ocean. This spurs the harmful overgrowth of algae and the spread of toxic microbes that can kill fish and cause human health problems, such as liver and kidney ills and amnesia. Billions of fish died along the Middle and Southern Atlantic coast in recent years because of suspected pollution from upstream sources. On a tour of the land area around Big Sur, my guide from the California Coastal Commission, Lee Otter (yes), noted as a caution and as a fact that "something always...
Earle notes that the world's decision makers are as culpable as the smaller fish. "How about the people in the Soviet Union who authorized the dumping of nuclear subs and other radioactive waste, the use of rivers as open sewers, the taking of endangered whales when other nations agreed to abstain?" she says. "Or decision makers in the U.S. who gave the go-ahead years ago to reroute waterways in South Florida at great expense--a decision that has now been reversed, at great expense...
...settles and stares out. What does she see? What does anybody see who gazes longingly, devotedly on that great wet wilderness? Melville said that people find their souls in the ocean. That may have been his way of paying tribute to our microbial past. Out there does some poor fish imagine its evolutionary future? If people work to preserve the sea, will we also save our souls...