( A TEN MINUTE READ)

Dear Landlubbers:

Before you will drown you will starve even though you have 4.4 billion hectares of land suitable for cropping.

Don’t get we wrong I have nothing against the land.  It has suffered abuses for far longer than us.

I also fully understand that fisheries and the aquaculture sector are an important source of employment and income, supporting the livelihoods of 12 percent of the
world’s population. That both give employment to almost 60 million people with a further 140 million employed along the value chain from harvesting to distribution.

However is there any chance of you taking any notice whatsoever that your neighbors the oceans are under stress and at risk of collapse and of you losing a valuable food source not to mention our ability to control climate.

You have between 2010 and 2014 more than 370,000 manuscripts in ocean
sciences published and more than 2 million articles were cited in my defense, unfortunately, it seems to me to be worthless and of no avail.

You have allowed overfishing for decades> Your mismanagement has depleted my most valuable fish so now you are moving on to the second most valuable ect ect.

This both involves physically fishing on different locations (from sea mount to sea mount) as well as changing to different, usually smaller, species.

Between 1950 and now you have systematically worked down along the food chain by fishing out all the top predators one after the other and now I am losing species as well as entire ecosystems, as a result.

Indeed it would at this stage be not alarmist when I say that I am losing the overall ecological unity of oceans.

It is also true to say that your use of fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) in terms of global warming has not escaped anyone’s attention but you don’t seem to understand that we currently absorb about a third of human-created CO2 emissions, roughly 22 million tons a day.

Do you not think it would be a good idea to protect me your largest ecosystem on our planet the one that gives the name Blue, that regulates change and variability in the climate system and supports the global economy, nutrition, health, and wellbeing, water supply, and energy.

Of course, I appreciate that no single country is able to measure the myriad changes taking place but surely it would be in your interest to proactively address the major challenges based on what is known.

The impacts of the acidification on marine organisms and their ecosystems are much less predictable. Not only calcifying organisms are potentially affected by ocean acidification. Other main physiological processes such as reproduction, growth, and photosynthesis are susceptible to be impacted, possibly resulting in an important loss in marine biodiversity.

I have never protested. To be fair I have been unable to do so but how about giving me a break by placing a moratorium on consuming and killing millions of tons of fish every year. Rather than dragging destructive nets which are now killing every living organisms in my depth, dynamiting, poisoning my coral reefs.

You might consider at one of your many god wobbling meetings, G20, The World Economic Forum, The UN, asking the big fishing eating nations like China-Japan, to pay the poorer nations fishermen a protection wage to stop fishing.

Based on projected population growth and on the maintenance of the present world level of consumption, by 2010 will reach 120 million tonnes a year, a substantial increase over the 75 million to 85 million tonnes of the mid-1990s.

South Asia, South-East Asia, China, and Japan — is projected to make up 70% of global fish consumption by 2030.

If you don’t cop on your are risking a valuable food source that so many depend upon for social, economical or dietary reasons.

I see that you are with all your technology developing clean meat but by the time you are eating Laboratory produced meat your neighbor, the Ocean will be dead.

If you don’t believe me here thanks to the BBC is video evidence.

 

All human comments appreciated All like clicks chucked in the bin.