Earthsky Interviews
Jeremy Jackson recalls some ocean success stories
02-15-2009 - Water
Jeremy Jackson: The importance of these success stories is that they provide kind of a model, an inspiration for people.
Jackson – who is with Scripps Institute of Oceanography – spoke about endangered fisheries off the northeastern U.S. that recovered after fishing was limited. He mentioned the Northern Line Islands, an isolated strand of island reefs in the central Pacific Ocean.
Jeremy Jackson: You dive on those and you feel you really are in utter wilderness. As soon as you go down you see lots of sharks. You see lots of fish. And you see lush growth of corals that is three-dimensional, like an underwater forest.
Jackson said the Northern Line Islands prove healthy corals can and do exist. He’s also encouraged by the creation of three large protected marine monuments in the Pacific in early 2009. Jackson said scientists know how to save ocean reefs and fisheries. But doing it is a matter of political will.
Jeremy Jackson: If we get our act together, and if we’re forceful, and if we just really push for protection we can achieve an enormous amount.
Our thanks to:
Jeremy Jackson
William and Mary B. Ritter Professor of Oceanography
Scripps Institute of Oceanography
University of California
San Diego, CA
Yes, definitely yes, we need for political will and capital to be directed toward saving the planet.
It appears that hundreds of billions of dollars, now amounting to trillions of dollars, as well as every available tool of governance and human enterprise, are being put into service for the sake of rescuing the global economy, but precious little money and scant tools are used to address the larger and much more forbidding, human-driven global challenges posed to the family of humanity by unbridled per-capita resource overconsumption and runaway climate change.
Are the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe who organize and manage the global economy refusing to recognize that there can be no such thing as a viable global economy on Earth if the planet’s limited resources continue to be recklessly dissipated and its frangible environment relentlessly degraded?
Who knows, perhaps necessary change from a soon to become patently unsustainable leviathan construction to a sustainable global human economy, one that benefits a democratic majority of the human community, is in the offing.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
Yes, human population numbers can be reasonably, sensibly and humanely decreased, but reducing those numbers would likely require a level of cooperation and sharing among members of the human family that is hard to even imagine in times like these in which political convenience, economic expediency, moral bankruptcy, human greed and elective mutism are predominant, motivating characteristics of many too many leaders.
Ecology not economy; sustainability not unbridled economic growth; and balance with Nature rather the institutionalization of unmitigated arrogance and unconscionable greed.
this is a good story of sea sharks and i will read it all day if i have to………………………………. IT is really good can i write one one day thank you