August 16, 2008 by mike.

When we are disappointed in some way we may hasten to remind ourselves that there are a lot of fish in the sea. We don’t have to have the object of our heart’s desire, the manyness of the small blue planet oneness may have its own designs for us.

That is a soothing mantra for adjusting our world view and moving from an ego-centered frame of reference where the world exists primarily in its capacity to meet our desires to possibly recognizing our own place as one of the many fish in the sea.

But in fact, there are not nearly as many fish in the sea as once existed. One of our specie’s early recognitions of our capacity to decimate an aquatic population came when whale populations plummeted in response to their wholesale harvest. These beautiful, strange and clearly sentient beings are mammals like most of us reading and writing on the small blue planet. If we try just a little bit we can feel a kinship with these beautiful beings. It’s easier to bond with a sea-going mammal, a dolphin, a gray whale, and the others than it is to feel a bond with a mackeral.

The “fishing” of the whales continues here on the small blue planet but it is reduced and the economics-driven killing of these beings is out of vogue with many of the terra-peds operating nautical devices. But the reduced killing of whales and the economics of fishery harvest has decimated many of the large fisheries of the planet. Drift nets, gill nets, industrial “fishing” have created havoc with many species trying to slosh around below the watery horizon.

Courtesy of the National Center for Policy Analysis:

• In the past 50 years, populations of large fish species - including tuna, swordfish, marlin, sharks, cod, halibut and flounder - have decreased 90 percent worldwide.
• A total of 98 species are overfished, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service; as a result, half of all U.S. fisheries and a quarter of the major fish stocks worldwide are in jeopardy of an abrupt, severe decline from which they may never recover.
• Fish stocks have collapsed in nearly one-third of all ocean fisheries, and all commercially valuable world fish stocks could completely collapse by 2048. [See the figure.]

Maybe we need to think more about just how many constitutes plenty?

Posted in Connect the Dots, Small Foot Print, Global Warming | Print | 1 Comment »

August 16, 2008 by mike.

Earth is primarily an ocean planet. That may be hard for non-aquatic life-forms to wrap our fins around, but it’s true.

The oceans are the reason the planet looks blue. The planet surface is about 2/3 ocean and 1/3 land mass.

When we terra-peds make a pilgrimage to the beach we look out at a horizon of ocean, the motion of ocean, we become the slaves of waves (having a Dr. Seuss moment). There is something wonderfully soothing about standing at the edge of the two different biosphere systems - land and sea.

It may be that looking at the eternal, unchanging nature of wave and water, contemplating the zen demonstration of the oneness of the manyness of this experience stops our minds in a fundamental way. However you experience it, I hope it is as meaningful and soothing to you as it is to me and I encourage you to find time to sit at the edge of land and sea, doing nothing but breathing and being a part of the biosphere instead of the econosphere.

But, there are problems with the blueness, the oceanity of the small blue planet. These problems are not readily apparent as we gaze at the wave horizon. We may experience a sense of the unchanging nature of the planet as we contemplate wave, but in the aquatic world beneath the ocean horizon there are problems of over-fishing, of ocean acidification, and of pollution that is creating large dead zones in the oceans.

Posted in Mysticism, Connect the Dots, Small Foot Print, Global Warming | Print | 1 Comment »