Welcome to Common Dreams Sylvia!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have your most excellent book at home "The World is Blue", and I am very glad to see you on this site. I discovered Common Dreams while looking into Fukushima.

Are you marching on Washington DC with James Hansen, Wendell Berry, Maude Barlow, David Suzuki, Bill McKibben etc - or, what do you think of this idea?

Manysummits
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Read up on the history of Cholera, you'll lose the idea that humans will do anything about the problem until it's nearly too late in nearly every case; especially if it costs the rich more money. I'm becoming more pessimistic as time passes, I think our only hope lies in a massive economic collapse that precedes, and hopefully prevents, the environmental one. But I'm not going to bank on that after the last set of bailouts the economy saw...

Eat, Drink and be filled with merry thoughts, we're fucked.

I am reading "Moby Duck" by Donovan Hohn. It is a must read.

The biggest question that continually arises in my mind is how do we make the connection between ourselves and those others who are unaware or complacent? What words or actions will make those who could care and act get up and finally take a stand? Our world is filled with many problems, and many who are so encumbered with other issues cannot necessarily drop whatever else they are committed to and join this cause.
But what about those who can act but just don't care and don't want to? They could make the difference in how our planet looks in 30,40, 50 years. So what do we do? I often wish there was a pill to cure apathy. But then, would the apathetic make the effort to take it?! Dear Lord...
I guess I'll just keep doing whatever I can.
And thank you Sylvia for a passionate and timely piece. Hope you will contribute often.

Sylvia Earle is the greatest! I love this woman!!
Check out her Wish at the TED Awards:
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang/eng//id/467
Amazing stuff; we need more like her!

On a more somber, less gushing note: it is imperative, as Dr. Earle points out, that we establish baseline datasets - or at least what is going to have to pass for baseline datasets. We simply cannot know to where we are heading if we do not know from where we came.
Secondly, and perhaps equally as important: why is it that we pay more attention to the background of the individual vis-a-vis employment; college educations; and, government assistance, for example, but do not apply the same principle of precaution to the impacts of capitalism on our collective environment?

Bless and Protect the Oceans. Bless their crystalline structures.

I stopped hunting and spearfishing a long time ago, feeling that I was contributing to the extinction of many species whose downfall I witnessed firsthand, starting when the world was still whole. Now I even feel guilty about ordering many kinds of seafood that I occasionally eat. I hate to think of the world my children are likely inherit, thanks to our stupid science denying, superstitious, overpopulating, greedy, bestial conservative side.

I understand and agree with the evidence that shows the oceans are in trouble. But please help me understand something that doesn't make sense to me.

Sylvia says... "Some 90 per cent of many fish, large and small, have been extracted. Some face extinction owing to the ocean's most voracious predator – us."

I agree that the current mass fishing practices to get the food to the markets is predatory and unsustainable.

But then she says this... "First, only 5 per cent of the ocean has been seen, let alone mapped or explored. We know how to exploit the sea."

Isn't it contradictory to say that 90% of the fish have been extracted, but then say that we have only seen 5% of the ocean. If we haven't explored 95% of the ocean how do we know that 90% of the fish have been extracted from the ocean?

I am being earnest here when asking this question. I am not a marine biologist or any type of expert in regards to the oceans, and just want to clear up what seems to be a contradiction, in my mind. I'm assuming the reason I see this as a contradiction is because I am lacking the correct information to understand the claim Sylvia is making.

Can anybody help clear this up for me?

Thanks in advance.

I like Sylvia Earle and National Geographic. Years ago, it is there that I first got a vivid picture of the people's situation in Congo in an article about the river transport. More recently there was a good article about the auguries of sea level rise. You can learn a lot.

Two things:

1. Where there is no insight, the people perish!

2. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad!

Yesss... the oceans are dying because there is much madness in the land. But the planet is now fighting back. Indeed! The host organism (Earth) has decided to kill us! Old Coyote Knose! Old Coyote Knose!

Ironically... Earth sends water to create radio active fire and plutonium clouds to poison the baboonies and give them cancer. Fukushima tells the tale. The flooding of the Souris river this week also tells a story of Earth pissed off! Mother Earth, now awakened to her fury, esparks massive fires and droughts... and she sends great storms to wipe out nests that the parasites have built. Massive earthquakes are also coming.

Praying to Jeeesass! and/or saluting the U.$. flag will not make things better. Quite the opposite in fact! The United $tates of Perpetual War Profiteering (and blind profligate consumption) will NOT! exist by 2050. The Amerikan dream is too toxic for life. And most other humans on this angry planet will be dead before 2100. Enough is enough! You dead! You dead! It is the legacy of creative and imaginative baboonies (humans) infected with faulty DNA... meaning they lack prescience and common sense!

Yesss... YOU DEAD!

What does anyone expect when the human race replicates as much as it does and all humans take priority; all other life's priority is rescinded.

And I bet there are those who still think the human population can go right on up to 12,000,000,000 people with no serious consequences.

The human animal's footprint and lifestyles are the problem and I don't doubt at all that earth is striking back. Now if we can only get the Long Caldera in California and the Yellowstone Caldera in Wyoming to erupt at the same time, I think Nemesis' work will do just fine for all these arrogant foolish and greedy humans.

I can't tell why my heart feels like this is fate, kismet, Karma, the empire disease, whatever. Nero fiddled, the folks went to the "games" while the empire was falling apart, their freedoms curtailed for safety and greed by the few at the expense of the many because they knew the end was near; since they had a great deal to do with the collapse. I pick on the Romans but there have been empires all over the world and all of them have fallen.It is like greed and power is the most important function of an existance here on this planet. How many empires get to destroy the world from one end to the other? That will probobly be the sum-total of the the shitty and depressing legacy of this country. Tony

The powers that be, the billionaire class, will never listen to Sylvia Earle. Shitheads never listen to intelligent people, on any subject. Does Obama care that we're killing the oceans, and thus ourselves? Does Fox News report the truth?

AMONGST my many sins, I consider myself something of an historian. As such, my reading has shown me empire after empire, ruler after ruler, who has set out upon a course of world domination, at least of the world as they have known it. Listening to the posturings of Bush and his minions, I see the same thing being repeated by the United States.
No empire has lasted forever, especially those bathed in blood. We have the ability to utterly destroy the world, but no matter how repressive Bush is against his own people, how aggressive he is against other countries, eventually he and his empire will fail. But at what cost?
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Hubris Uber Alles

Astride the known world,
Filled with hubris
They marched in their turn:
Darius, Xerxes, Agamemnon, Alexander,
Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler and more

All their empires rising, conquering,
Their passing marked by mounds of skulls
And vainglorious boasts.
Their places taken in turn by others
as their empires rotted from within.

Now yet another warlord stands,
His nation’s proud banner, once a beacon
Of freedom and hope to all mankind,
Now a symbol to be feared
By friend and foe alike.

This, too, shall pass away
After adding its quota of skulls to the mountain,
While the common man around the world
Holds tight the dream of Brotherhood and Peace
Close to his breaking heart.

Steve Osborn
9 August 2003
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The above was written while we were still being Bushwhacked. Now, in the Obamanation, the situation has continued to worsen, more wars, more giveaways, more rape of the land, more death, more poverty, more hunger, and more money to the megawealthy.

Should we not first go see what is there? No. If you see what is there the capitalist-pig-fisherman will go and destroy it all. I saw this phenomenon growing up in Africa. If you opened an area with a road the exploiters used that access to destroy everything. If you want some area or ecosystem to survive in this world leave it alone. Scientists are often the first leg of the destruction of nature because they are too stupid to see that their research will be used to exploit resources--not protect them. They need to wake up before it is too late.

Sunday Perspective:

Since Sylvia Earle has given us this article on the sea, and on life - a few thoughts on life:

At Stephen Jay Gould's "left wall of complexity" stand the domains Bacteria and Archaea. To summarize Stephen's classic "The Evolution of Life on Earth" (Scientific American October 1994),

'first there was the modal bacter, and ever after'

The rest, the Eukarya, are symbionts - the icing on the cake.

All plants and animals are powered by ATP (adenosine tri-phosphate) from, respectively, chloroplasts and mitochondria, once free-living members of the "modal bacter," all of whom once made their living in the world ocean - the 'Blue World' of which Sylvia writes.

The 'modal bacter' has always been the dominant lifeform on Earth, and has done nothing over the last four billion years but increase their dominion on this planet. The Eukarya can profitably be thought of as elaborate symbiotic forms for the ubiquitous 'modal bacter', which fill new niches made available by the molecule Oxygen, whose presence in our present atmosphere was initiated and is even now largely maintained by oceanic phyto-plankton.

To put it another way, humans talking about being in charge is similar to the old saw of the fleas on the elephant arguing over whose elephant is whose!

Scientists study the natural world, as did all of us in times past. But scientists today spend lots of time obtaining funding, or getting articles published, or in peer-review, or at conferences all over the world, or furthering their careers, raising their families, and on and on.

Perhaps, in considering why we continue on the road to Armageddon, despite all this talent and knowledge and technology - perhaps we might stop, for even a millisecond, if that is possible in this self-absorbed world, and listen to the words of a man who, like Sylvia Earle, was both a formidable physical explorer and a superb scientist - Fridtjof Nansen:

"Deliverance will not come from the rushing, noisy centers of civilization, it will come from the lonely places."

Sylvia Earle has been to these lonely places innumerable times, and I think this is partly why her voice is so fine -

Manysummits
Calgary, Alberta
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How about 'peak' life? Because this is where we are headed.

Ya Know, There really doesn't have to be suffering from a collaspe, or at least not that terrible.... Because, if the rich, or anyone who could share, be it money, or food, or tools or housing.... and I just don't mean here in the US... Every one would help each other, sharing what they have and spreading their wealth. That way, we could really "bail ourselves out" and the human race could start over..... stop burning fossil fuels, etc.... communal sharing, which is what really has kept the human race alive.... up until the last few hundred years or so....
Wait, don't say it, I know I'm dreaming.....