According to Alan Sielen, pollution, overfishing, and climate change are now emptying oceans, enabling the lowest forms of life - microbes, jellyfish, and disease - to make a comeback, returning us to the "barren primeval waters of hundreds of millions of years ago."
Destructive fishing practices in "the commons" are rife. Among them, Sielen says about a third of what fisherman pull out of the water was never meant to be harvested. And "fishing vessels drag huge nets outfitted with steel plates and heavy rollers across the sea floor and over underwater mountains, more than a mile deep, destroying everything in their path."
As a resident near the murky waters of the US East Coast (and former resident of islands in the South Pacific) what really brought this "reverse evolution" to life for me were these images:
“...we are far removed from the days...when 15 foot sturgeon bursting with caviar leaped from the waters of Chesapeake Bay, when George Washington’s Continental army could avoid starvation by feasting on swarms of shad swimming upriver to spawn, when dense oyster beds nearly blocked the mouth of the Hudson River, and when...adventure writer Zane Grey marveled at the enormous swordfish, tuna, wahoo, and grouper he found in the Gulf of California.”
I remembered an extraordinary, oceans-fight-back, page-turning thriller I read a few years back called The Swarm, by Frank Schatzing. There was a plan to turn this book into a movie - it would be very timely.
