What are we doing to our planet?
Published on: 14 September 2007 By: David Walker
Can you remember Fifties and Sixties eating piping hot battered skate and chips with lashings of salt and vinegar, it was once the perfect way to end a day by the seaside or indeed with a lot of people the perfect way to end any day.
Each year we witness millions of holidaymakers head for the coasts around the world few will ever realise or perhaps never noticed why they can no longer enjoy their favourite cuisine.
Today however the common skate, whose Latin name is Raja batis is in such great danger of extinction that it ranks with the tiger or the mountain gorilla.
The skate has been labelled by the World Conservation Union as critically endangered and only one step from extinction but why is this happening?
Not so very long ago huge fish which can weigh in at more than 200 pounds were regularly found in large numbers swimming care free over the sandy sea bed of the North and Irish Seas but in a recent expedition alarmingly they failed to find a single skate around the shores of the UK.
The skate extinction is a chilling illustration of how the world’s oceans and Seas are in catastrophic turmoil. Virtually all creatures from the humble plankton to the mighty Wales are all suffering as they fall foul of the 21st century’s cocktail of environmental disasters.
The Seas have been over fished, seriously polluted, needlessly invaded, not to mention the effects of climate change. The impact of the gradual warming of all coastal waters has been witnessed by the sighting of a flotilla of Sunfish, strange huge visitors from far-off tropical waters that can way over two tonnes and measure the size of a car.
It's not entirely surprising that so little has been done much too late, that now worldwide governments intends to set up a marine bill, which they hope will preserve the threatened creatures and their habitats.
However as worldwide fish stocks, coral reefs, seabirds, dolphins and Wales still all face possible extinction and there can be little doubt as to who has caused this inevitable position. If ever the human race needed an image of what can happen if it fails to preserve the planets it is the story of the great Auk. The auk is the only British warm blooded creature to have become extinct in relatively recent times. The flightless birds a close relative of the puffin and guillemot was predictably hunted to extinction in the 19 century, the last birds being shot on the Orkney island of Papa Westray in the 1813. Now 200 years later the skate, the angel shark and the Balearic shear-water are all critically endangered and inevitably about to suffer the same fate.
I doubt whether anyone has even stopped to think that the skate is facing extinction. In fact, the list of threatened species grows each year all critical to the survival of the planet and all those people who just don’t care.
Everyone hopes that the marine bill will afford greater protection for the world sea’s which includes guidance of how the nation's around the world should best use the environment which is essentially the geographical heritage of every person on this earth.
But sadly there are few bills determined by human greed that will ever solve this problem the cold hard fact is that money will always come out on top.
Over fishing has devastated seas for years and no one has really done anything practical to solve the problem. Now new and greater threats are appearing, climate change is already thought to be having a devastating impact on the populations of some seabirds around the world but who cares?
The human being has relentlessly poisoned the environment for years toxic chemicals, sewage, crude oil, radioactive waste, agricultural fertilisers, animal wastes, storm run off from streets, and millions of tons of litter all threatened the seas we require to sustain our survival.
Pollution can contaminate the fish re heat the water in which they and we swim, damage the beaches we visit, and the world's marine life that is the balancing agent of the ecology.
There are also component products which are essentially breakdown products from larger plastic items that absorb toxic chemicals predictably being found in creatures that feed in the seas around the world, which is then consumed by predators leading to a biological accumulation of the food chain and still no one cares.
Why do we still persist in closing our eyes seemingly nonchalant to the gifts we were given when the earth was created.
All fishing industries are declining around the world virtually every species have suffered serious decline in numbers, yet still the human being selfishly over fish effects of which are even more serious than you would think.
Fishing is carried out at a scale that impacts heavily not only on the abundance of fish in the sea, but also on targets species such as dolphin’s, sharks and invertebrates.
If the human race continues to be hideously selfish the consideration of them selves will destroy the very element they seek to protect which is themselves.
But what about climate change a truly disastrous spectacle requiring the unadulterated talents of evil.
The spectre of global warming is not only creating the long hot summer's the world is now experiencing because climate change is causing an imbalance in the distribution of plankton, the first and most important link in the oceans food chain and we are all destroying that balance.
Without these building blocks of life many if not all species will suffer already we have witnessed serious fluctuations in specific species which have ultimately caused knock-on consequences for other breeds throughout the world's oceans.
To make matters worse, greed has also devised yet another destructive weapon to the oceans caused by dredging for gravel for building not to mention bottom trawling a new threat and extreamly devious device that will kill dolphins around the world.
The wail and the dolphins are almost always items of our delusions of grandeur whilst pretending to care, save the wail, save the dolphins yet we do nothing greed prevails.
But why does all this happen? Why is the human race so oblivious to everything around it? Who are we? What is our basic makeup? What are the elements that make a human being? Have you never stopped to think about these questions? Well, you should then understand that it was defined at the beginning of time that in a word all human beings suffer from desire, and that can quickly turn to greed, and that can quickly turn to selfishness, and that’s why we are destroying our planet.
At the heart of our human desire is our quest for separate identities.
Some people desire sexual fulfilment. Others desire intellectual fulfilment, some though sadly very few want religious fulfilment, most seek material acquisitions, some desire frame and just a few look for enlightenment.
Too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they don't need, to impress people they don't like.
View All Articles (Articles Archive)