Sylvia Earle: This is the time, as never before, that the systems that do safeguard and give us life are in trouble. And that means we’re in trouble.
Sylvia Earle is a renowned deep sea diver, National Geographic explorer-in-residence, and former Chief Scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. When Earle spoke with EarthSky, she spoke on behalf of grasslands, streams, rivers – and especially for the sea.
Sylvia Earle: We’re talking about our life-support system here. The natural world is really showing signs of wear and tear, desperate signs in many cases. In the ocean, we’re seeing a decline in 50 years of 90 percent of many of the big fish species, the sharks, the tunas, the swordfish, the grouper, the snapper — creatures that when I was a kid were thought to be essentially limitless in their capacity to recover, no matter how many we took.
Earle calls human beings Earth’s most relentless predator for the ocean’s large fish. And yet – while time is running out for many fish species – she’s still hopeful.
Sylvia Earle: The good news is that we now know this, and we have a chance. And we should take heart in that. We should be excited that of all the people who have ever lived on the planet, we have an unprecedented chance to make a difference, to turn things around._
Thanks today to NOAA, and to Sylvia Earle.
Our thanks to:
Sylvia Earle
Explorer-in-Residence, National Geographic
Chair, Council of Advisors
Harte Research Institute
Corpus Christi, TX
Many thanks to Sylvia Earle….
The time is coming when many people will follow the exemplary behavior of Dr. Sylvia Earle by speaking out loudly and clearly for something, for anything at all to do with the preservation of life as know it and Earth, even though it is not politically convenient and economically expedient to do so, even though thousands of greedy kings and self-proclaimed masters of the universe eschew such open expressions as well as maintain that “silence is golden.”
Soon people will be heard speaking out often in many places for something, for anything at all that does not have to do with the unbridled and soon to become unsustainable growth of the global political economy.
The silence regarding the threat of rampant economic globalization is deafening. How much longer will it continue?
While the article on the work of Sylvia Earle is interesting, its brevity and ‘up-beat’ message seems to promote a false hope that perhaps this situation is reversible. On the contrary, it is a fact that there is NO HOPE of sharks recovering from overfishing and ‘finning’ and not even combined human intervention at this late date can save them from extinction. The message that 90% of our large fish species have declined in less than half a century fails to point out even basic warning signs. While ‘modern’ sharks appeared 290 million years ago and adapted to almost every situation to guarantee their survival, the many years required for most of them to reach sexual maturity and the fact they produce few offsprings means their reproductive rate is very low and centuries would be needed to increase their population even slightly. Sharks will most assuredly be completely extinct within the next few years and the effect will be disastrous to marine ecosystems as well as to the entire planet. Removal of a top predator like sharks causes a chain-reaction which may well reduce the necessary phytoplankton which produces 75% of the oxygen we breath.
It is important that researchers such as Sylvia Earle not only conduct their vital academic work, but that the ‘bad news’ that is both unpleasant and unpopular to voice is heard nonetheless. Very few people other than those involved in the fishing industry and the scientific community are aware of such horrifying facts as those stated above, yet they are true (visit Sharkproject.org).
RJ FLeming
Geneva Switzerland