Word: sea
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...decline to accept the end of the oceans, for to do so would be to accept the end of humanity. I see signs that we are starting to alter our course--laboriously, yes, barely perceptibly, like a supertanker beginning a slow turn in a heavy sea, but changing direction nevertheless...
Consider too the sharks: apex predators, lords of the food chain, inspiration for scary stories. A few years ago, I dived off the coast of Costa Rica in a marine preserve where, supposedly, all life was protected. Every day, looking down, I saw the sea bottom carpeted with the corpses of whitetip reef sharks, grotesquely stripped of their fins by poachers who had slashed them off to sell to the soup markets of Asia and had cast the living animals back into the sea to die. Around the world, the numbers of some shark species have declined as much...
...know we have already wiped out--and by that I mean driven nearly to commercial extinction or, in a few cases, the brink of biological extinction--more than 100 popular species of food fish, including Nassau groupers, Chilean sea bass, orange roughy and cod. What we don't know, what we'll never know, is how many undiscovered species have been eradicated along the way. What creatures, great and small, might have contained genetic or chemical secrets that could have saved lives or improved them, conquered diseases or averted them...
More and more nations are establishing marine reserves, where sea creatures of all sorts and sizes can mate and bear their young free from the menace of man. Just as important, funds are being found for enforcement of limits, restrictions and bans. Personnel are being hired and trained; boats and planes are being deployed to monitor compliance...
Aquaculture--fish farming--has established beachheads from Maine to the tropics, from the South Pacific to the North Sea. Raising fish in enclosed pens is a complex and controversial process that can pose enormous environmental problems, but if done right, it holds great promise for feeding millions of people and providing vast numbers of jobs...