In the Chinese zodiac, 1998 is the year of the tiger. Those who put their faith in the zodiac believe children born this year will have certain tiger-like qualities. For those of us already born and raised, this may be a good year to act like a tiger – to hunt with stealth, to attack boldly.
Nineteen ninety-eight is the United Nations’ Year of the Oceans. This designation is also a kind of zodiac, a bureaucratic zodiac. Like other zodiacs, this bureaucratic zodiac is concerned with prophesying future events, but there are few good omens for the earth’s oceans. By naming 1998 the Year of the Oceans, the UN is playing the part of Marley’s ghost to warn Ebenezer Scrooge – in this case, us – that the only way to avoid unhappy consequences is to take action now.
The United Nations has cause to send out warnings. Seventy percent of edible fish species have been seriously depleted by overfishing. The ocean is a great global dumping ground. In the last 50 years, we have thrown millions of tons of trash, from nuclear reactors to toxic chemicals to plastic into the seas, where it poisons the deep water and strangles marine animals near the surface. All the earth’s water eventually flows to the ocean and much of the damage we do to the sea is indirect. Rivers carry concentrated doses of pollutants. At the mouth of the Mississippi River and in Europe’s Baltic Sea are huge, floating dead zones, the result of toxic chemicals and oxygen-poor nutrients being carried out to sea. Tons of acid, lead and mercury fall into the oceans, carried by the wind from our smokestacks and dropped by rain into the seas. Ultraviolet-B light, streaming in through the depleted ozone layer at the North and South poles, is sterilizing the base of the marine food chain.
The list goes on, it’s frustrating to name all the ills afflicting our oceans. The list seems as endless as the seas themselves. Each item on the list of hazards and injuries has a sublist and those have sub-sublists and all the lists and sublists overlap and interact until the list of all the damage we do to the ocean begins to look like a food web and take on a life of its own and we begin to see that our excesses in the Caribbean cause us pain and regret in the North Sea.
And for every grievance on the list of offenses we have committed against the oceans, somebody, somewhere is making a buck. That’s the other food web you don’t hear about. The ocean is the great unmortgaged real estate, the great unpaid employee. For decades it’s been easy to dump our problems in the ocean and report our quarterly profits. There are a number of international agreements and conventions outlawing oceanic abuse, but too often they share the fate of the United Nations and wind up being so many polite words on paper.
Even our national laws are going the way of all good intentions. In 1996, Congress renewed the Magnuson Fisheries Conservation Act and added important provisions to ease the burdens of overfishing. Most of those provisions have yet to be implemented because the regional councils which oversee American marine waters are dominated the same industrial fishing companies that are plundering our fish stocks to the point of extinction. And now I hear there is movement in the easily-purchased Senate to undo Magnuson’s strong provisions before they are ever implemented.
Nineteen ninety-eight is the Year of the Tiger and the Year of the Oceans. If the ocean is going to survive, it will need a few tigers on its side.
The Year of the Oceans
In the Chinese zodiac, 1998 is the year of the tiger. Those who put their faith in the zodiac believe children born this year will have certain tiger-like qualities. For those of us already born and raised, this may be a good year to act like a tiger – to hunt with stealth, to attack boldly.
Nineteen ninety-eight is the United Nations’ Year of the Oceans. This designation is also a kind of zodiac, a bureaucratic zodiac. Like other zodiacs, this bureaucratic zodiac is concerned with prophesying future events, but there are few good omens for the earth’s oceans. By naming 1998 the Year of the Oceans, the UN is playing the part of Marley’s ghost to warn Ebenezer Scrooge – in this case, us – that the only way to avoid unhappy consequences is to take action now.
The United Nations has cause to send out warnings. Seventy percent of edible fish species have been seriously depleted by overfishing. The ocean is a great global dumping ground. In the last 50 years, we have thrown millions of tons of trash, from nuclear reactors to toxic chemicals to plastic into the seas, where it poisons the deep water and strangles marine animals near the surface. All the earth’s water eventually flows to the ocean and much of the damage we do to the sea is indirect. Rivers carry concentrated doses of pollutants. At the mouth of the Mississippi River and in Europe’s Baltic Sea are huge, floating dead zones, the result of toxic chemicals and oxygen-poor nutrients being carried out to sea. Tons of acid, lead and mercury fall into the oceans, carried by the wind from our smokestacks and dropped by rain into the seas. Ultraviolet-B light, streaming in through the depleted ozone layer at the North and South poles, is sterilizing the base of the marine food chain.
The list goes on, it’s frustrating to name all the ills afflicting our oceans. The list seems as endless as the seas themselves. Each item on the list of hazards and injuries has a sublist and those have sub-sublists and all the lists and sublists overlap and interact until the list of all the damage we do to the ocean begins to look like a food web and take on a life of its own and we begin to see that our excesses in the Caribbean cause us pain and regret in the North Sea.
And for every grievance on the list of offenses we have committed against the oceans, somebody, somewhere is making a buck. That’s the other food web you don’t hear about. The ocean is the great unmortgaged real estate, the great unpaid employee. For decades it’s been easy to dump our problems in the ocean and report our quarterly profits. There are a number of international agreements and conventions outlawing oceanic abuse, but too often they share the fate of the United Nations and wind up being so many polite words on paper.
Even our national laws are going the way of all good intentions. In 1996, Congress renewed the Magnuson Fisheries Conservation Act and added important provisions to ease the burdens of overfishing. Most of those provisions have yet to be implemented because the regional councils which oversee American marine waters are dominated the same industrial fishing companies that are plundering our fish stocks to the point of extinction. And now I hear there is movement in the easily-purchased Senate to undo Magnuson’s strong provisions before they are ever implemented.
Nineteen ninety-eight is the Year of the Tiger and the Year of the Oceans. If the ocean is going to survive, it will need a few tigers on its side.