Udhay
I work with a wildlife conservation non-profit in Mysore, and this is exactly how all my mornings start off. Each day research throws up ever more horrible facts, each day the government tramples over environmental and human concerns, each day my own footprint on the planet grows larger.
From a few years experience I can offer but two ways of dealing with the frustration. An evolutionary biologust will tell label 'noxious' filled the atmosphere, and today's benign (?) oceans were rather like the vats of oil awaiting us in Hell. It is possible that the muck we pump into the oceans will simply enable a better adapted, or as in the case of the cyanobacteria, a simpler form of life to take over. Nothing terribly tragic in that.
In fact, human mediated change, like overfishing, as the article says, have been going on for millenia. Scientists modelling herbivore assemblages in the Trans Himalaya recently stumbled upon an astonishing fact - that sheep and goat reared by traditional communities in the Tibetan plateau since man learned to walk upright, have, over hundreds of years, replaced wild herbivores like ibex and gazelles in some areas, simply by beating them at cornering forage, just as any other competing species could have done. That such changes took place over hundreds of year seems to makes it more palatable, somehow more acceptable, although in evolutionary terms, that is hardly a blink.
The other option is to hear the whole story. The article you mailed out if of course filled with verifiable and worrying fact, but really it is the typical doomsday propheteering that everyone is now familiar with, and, I suspect, tired of. Instead let me tell you about what a colleague calls "epiphenomenal conservation".
Some years ago, the vast and stunning coral atolls of Lakshadweep died out in a matter of weeks, due to an El Nino event that occured sooner than it should have in the natural course of things. Reefs across the tropical world were affected by the "bleaching"--which is what a sudden heating event in coral habitat is called. Coral die within hours and algae start to grow on the exposed hard surfaces beneath, and prevent coral from regenerating. But the reefs of L'dweep recovered, in way that no one expected, and in a way that no other reef anywhere else in the world did. Why? Simply because traditional fisher communities in the islands had been lured away, by sustained governmental efforts, to the more lucrative, 'export-oriented' deep-sea tuna fishing back in the 80s-- this meant that they did not fish in the reefs as they had done
for generations, which in turn meant that herbivorous reef fish had a feast feeding on the growing algae and served to mow it down to levels where coral could make a comeback.
Perhaps for the first time ever, the State had contributed to conservation, entirely without being aware of it! But of course, it really isn't as simple as that -- the article you sent laments that tuna have been overfished in the open seas and are now in decline. True, but had they been been fishing in the reefs, L'dweep's fishermen would have contributed to the extinction of endangered coral reefs. How do we pick between tuna and coral? Should we?
I have perhaps raised even more questions in my attempt to answer yours--my apologies. I only wanted to make the point that it often isn't as simple as "ending pollution" or "finding alternate fuels". Life perhaps functions with a much larger pattern than we are able to discern with our limited senses, our crude tools of understanding, and our very, very limited experience in living on earth.
Pavithra
----- Original Message ----
From: Udhay Shankar N [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Udhay Shankar N [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Very depressing, and fills me with an inchoate anger. What is to be done?
Udhay
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-me-ocean30jul30,0,6670018,full.story
Udhay
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-me-ocean30jul30,0,6670018,full.story
