An SOS on World Oceans Day
Today, June 8, is United Nation’s World Oceans Day. On CNN.com Sylvia Earle expresses her thoughts on the urgent need to protect the ocean and how the Gulf Oil Spill has brought this need into sharp relief.
It once seemed that, as with the ocean as a whole, the Gulf was so big and so resilient that nothing we could do could harm it. The benefits we believed would always be there, no matter how large the trawls, how long the nets, how numerous the hooks for catching ocean wildlife, or how many, how long or how deep the pipelines, drilling operations, seismic surveys or production rigs.
But destructive fishing pressure has sharply depleted ocean wildlife…Half of the coral reefs are gone or are in a state of sharp decline. Dead zones in the sea, unknown until recent decades, are rapidly proliferating. Excess carbon dioxide is accelerating global warming, sea level rise, ocean acidification and overall climate change.
[...] now the mega-spill in the Gulf of Mexico is adding a jolting insult to decades of injury. Despite the enormous advance in knowledge about the many threats to the ocean, the greatest problem facing us now with respect to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is ignorance, and with it, complacency.
Life in the sea, after all, supports the basic processes that we all take for granted: the water cycle, the oxygen cycle, the carbon cycle, and much more. With every breath we take, every drop of water we drink, we are dependent on the existence of Earth’s living ocean.
Learn more about protecting the Earth’s blue heart at mission-blue.org.
