This article is about more die-offs, this time in Alaska. This is what comes to mind for me when i read it - all the articles before this one which just serve to magnify and clarify the scope of the crisis. US taxpayer dollars allocated to create positive PR campaigns about Fukushima, chemicals, GMOs, fracking, oil, plastics, travel, military submarines, unsustainable fishing and tourism from government officials amounts to billions and billions of bucks being spent to keep us stroking the system while the federal funding sent to the few labs allowed to study the crisis in the Pacific Ocean is in the thousands of dollars through grants that have to be applied for and won. Entire species are going missing, animals are spotted where they ought not to be, young are starving and succumbing to disease, fishing industries are going belly up, even land animals that frequent the West Coastline like elk and caribou are dying in the largest mass die-offs ever known, drift nets and debris from Japan float across the ocean with hundreds of thousands of entangled carcasses of all manner of creatures from seals and dolphins and whales and turtles to every fish that swims, radiation is often measured at 25,000 normal levels in Japan, and the official federal response is underwhelming. This is called a vacuum of leadership, not just current leadership, but, generations of government and business leadership. Each might address one aspect, and ignore the rest, yet, they are inextricably tied together as much as those dead creatures are caught up in the lines and nets following the current across the sea that was once their home but is now our natural resource. None of it can be separated out. The causes - well all of them are unpopular, thus the vacuum of leadership - warming oceans, acidification, desalinity, microbes that got irradiated, overfishing, toxins, agriculture, sonar, hundreds of mile long floating fields of debris mixing in with the usual plastic gyres. There is no worst crisis on the planet today than the death of the Pacific Ocean. Its life has weathered vaster climate changes than we have coming our way, yet it cannot survive human beings for a couple hundred years of unbridled and misused industrialization. The Pacific is ot just home to the largest marine life on the planet, it feeds over half the human population. Without it? It is unthinkable. Perhaps that is why we hear nothing about it from leadership.
Posted on: Fri, 01 Aug 2014 03:39:26 +0000
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