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 world fisherieshere is an exerpt from the ny times about the report: If fishing around the world continues at its present pace, more and more species will vanish, marine ecosystems will unravel and there will be “global collapse” of all species currently fished, possibly as soon as midcentury, fisheries experts and ecologists are predicting. The scientists, who report their findings today in the journal Science, say it is not too late to turn the situation around. As long as marine ecosystems are still biologically diverse, they can recover quickly once overfishing and other threats are reduced, the researchers say. But improvements must come quickly, said Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, who led the work. Otherwise, he said, “we are seeing the bottom of the barrel.” “When humans get into trouble they are quick to change their ways,” he continued. “We still have rhinos and tigers and elephants because we saw a clear trend that was going down and we changed it. We have to do the same in the oceans.” The report is one of many in recent years to identify severe environmental degradation in the world’s oceans and to predict catastrophic loss of fish species. But experts said it was unusual in its vision of widespread fishery collapse so close at hand. The researchers drew their conclusion after analyzing dozens of studies, along with fishing data collected by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization and other sources. They acknowledge that much of what they are reporting amounts to correlation, rather than proven cause and effect. And the F.A.O. data have come under criticism from researchers who doubt the reliability of some nations’ reporting practices, Dr. Worm said. Still, he said in an interview, “there is not a piece of evidence” that contradicts the dire conclusions. www.nytimes.com" target="_blank">-> www.nytimes.com |
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This is an area where The problem I see is that the United Nations will not be able to garner the required support. This is an economic problem for most nations and they simply will not lose an economic industry. You can apply this same problem, generically, to many of our environmental issues too. Since these are global issues, the United Nations should be able to provide the leadership, goals & directions to resolve the issues. But, how do you get the United Nations to be able to mandate and then enforce something? It seems that there will always be some "disenting Nation" that will block the actions. |
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shipbreakers of bangladesh here is an exerpt and the link...check it out...eye opening! You can’t really believe how bad it is here, until you see it. It could be as close as you’ll get to hell on earth, with the smoke, the fumes, and the heat. The men who labor here are the wretched of the earth, doing dirty, dangerous work, for little more than $1 a day. It’s not much of a final resting place, this desolate beach near the city of Chittagong on the Bay of Bengal. Ships are lined up here as at any port, but they’ll never leave. Instead, they will be dissected, bolt by bolt, rivet by rivet, every piece of metal destined for the furnaces to be melted down and fashioned into steel rods. The ships don’t die easily - they are built to float, not to be ripped apart, spilling toxins, oil and sludge into the surrounding seas. The men who work here are dwarfed by the ships they are destroying. And they dissect the ships by hand. The most sophisticated technology on the beach is a blowtorch. The men carry metal plates, each weighing more than a ton from the shoreline to waiting trucks, walking in step like pallbearers, or like members of a chain gang. They paint images of where they would like to be on the trucks - pictures of paradise far from this wasteland. www.cbsnews.com" target="_blank">-> www.cbsnews.com |
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