Vocal Voices

... is man.

This is what our home, Earth, looks like from space. A beautiful blue green and whie orb. It is the only home we have got.


And this is what it looks like when we zoom in.





Have a read of this but play special attention to the video.

We are rightly worried about CO² and overpopulation and air quality, but this worries me even more. We are effectively feeding plastic, when it breaks down, to marine life at the bottom of the food chain and in the process killing it. There is then a knock-on effect all the way up the food chain. But we are not satisified with that, the larger stuff is killing animals, such as doplphins, whales, sharks tuna and turles, to name a few, before it breaks down.

We are killing the seas ... and ourselves.

I agree with you 100% I have in a small way here on the IOM been trying for years telling and asking anyone who will listen the seas need good management to little avail.
In the 70's I was on a committee with members of the IOM government and back then we were trying to convince civil servants the importance of fish control/ breeding and over fishing locally.
I myself with a rod and line in a day could take home maybe 200 lbs of prime cod throwing back young and breeding stock alive to sustain the species this was in the 70s .........today this year and for maybe a few years now I have not heard of ANY cod being caught here in the local waters ie withing 3 miles of the shore, on a good day in summer with one rod I might catch up to 40 good sized plaice(bigger than I see in the supermarkets ) keep enough for myself and family and maybe a few friends all smaller fish and unwanted larger ones returned alive.
Between the Isle of Man and Cumbria /England/ Wales the sea is only about 60 feet deep on average I used to scuba dive up till the late 80s in many places in the irish sea and because of over fishing and shellfish dredging I would estimate about 75% of the seabed is like a desert no boulders no seaweed and consequentially very few fish certainly not shoals of flatfish Plaice/brill/sole/ like there used to be.
To the best of my knowledge there is not a single bottom trawler fishing for flat or roundfish with a net left operating , Why? because there are too few fish for the owner to cover costs never mind make a profit.
We tried in the 70s to create artificial reefs and breeding grounds for immature fish and were rebuffed finally last year the fisheries department closed off a few areas of the inshore seabed and marked them as sea nature reserves with no fishing allowed other than rod and line fishing by anglersthey even went as far as to close some beaches off to stop the digging of bait and to allow the area to MAYBE recover I am unlikely to live long enough to see even a 20% return of the lost species.
I hold 2 manx records for two species of fish caught in the mid 70s to 1980 still unbroken and unlikely to be broken now as the few fish left around the beaches/rocks of the manx shores are all smallish immature fish most not old enough to breed even yet.
I am brought to tears seeing the results of the EU fisheries policies where a skipper has to dump overboard in the main dead fish that would be wanted and very saleable because the EU says he can only catch this fish or that fish anything else is dumped dead or alive regardless.............UTTER MADNESS AND SHORTSIGHTED.

Manxie getting off the soapbox xx

here is a link to a group here doing a bit to help

https://www.facebook.com/beachbuddiesisleofman/

Manxie xx

Workingman wrote:... is man.

We are killing the seas ... and ourselves.

Yes, that's what most scientists are saying, and most predict that the human race
will cease to exist, before very long, if we continue with our present practices.
For some reason, however, very few people either don't believe this, or couldn't
care less. I feel sorry for youngsters now being born when I think of just what the
world will be like when they grow up.

Perhaps we are being balanced after all.

If we kill 5bn people with CO2 impact, the remaining world and seas we have not polluted will, maybe, be sufficient to sustain them...

It is, as has been said, utter madness. Manxie I'm with you 100% on the EU fisheries policies. They used the CFP to restrict UK fishing then gave the waters to the rest of the EU who then fished them to destruction ignoring the same restrictions they had put on us. Very little policing was done and complete mayhem has resulted.

As for the polluting of the waters. One of the problems we have is that those nations who are rising on the back of the 1st world discoveries, without having to go through their own industrial revolution, are polluting 10 times (or more), as much as the 1st world countries.

It is bad enough that we do it. The rising economies are far worse but it is only, really, the 1st world countries that care.

Remember all the films in the 70's about how the polluted future of the world would force humanity into domes for survival and how the world outside would be a desert?? They always said 2000. If they had said 2050 it might have been more believable.

The biggest change in the world today is in information sharing. We are no longer tied to the paper or the TV the way people were in the 70's. So we can be more environmentally responsible. In fact we are. MUCH.

However we live on a 5-10 year roller coaster never looking further than that. The environment needs a 50-1000 year view and we just don't have it and won't pay for it.

So we will, in the end, pay the price.

Sorry put that in the wrong place..

Those pictures of plastic debris floating in the sea are depressing.

The big picture (which the tv NEVER mentions) is population growth.

The third world is pumping out people at an unsustainable rate, producing far more people than it can provide a living for. There are four times more Nigerians now than there was when the country achieved independence. The birth rate in Niger in almost eight babies per woman.
In 1976 there were 134 million people in Indonesia; in 2016 it was 261 million.
In Pakistan in 1976 the population was 69 million. In 2016 their population was 193 million!

We can't keep on like this.

cromwell wrote:We can't keep on like this.

Of course we can.

I am forever reading that the planet can easily sustain 10 - 12 billion of us due to advances in farming technologies and the fact that only a fraction of the land is urbanised. "Onwards and upwards" they cry, we are humans, no problem is insurmountable.

Manxie, the turtle video in the link is so poignant. I was watching one ot the minor channels on Freeview and there was a turtle with its back flipper caught in the handles of a supermarket bag. The bag acted like a sea anchor and the poor thing could only swim in circles while being at the whim of the ocean tides. In Blue Planet II there are scenes of an albatross feeding its young a strip of plastic, this is a known problem for many sea birds. There was also a scene of a pilot whale with its left flipper wrapped in a plastic tarpaulin. The North Sea is pretty much like the seas around the IOM being shallow, about 300 feet, much less on the Dogger Bank. Where once there were clams, molluscs, coral and sea grasses .. and fish, it is now a virtual dessert. It only took us 150 years to destroy it.

Many of us will have heard of such things as the Pacific Garbage patch. This throws up an image of a plastic raft of bottles, bags and takeaway trays as in my original post: it is not the case. The large plastics are more often found in coastal waters where they wash up on beaches causing their own problems. It is a particular problem in the Indian ocean, the South Atlantic, South Pacific - East and West, and SE Asia.

The garbage "patches" are actually ocean gyres where the waters spin in roughly the same place all the time, think Dyson vacs. They are where the larger items which have broken down accumulate and are further broken down as these columns of water rise and fall. It is the smaller (microplatics) from these that get into the food chain and are transported around the globe.

When Suff says we need long-term actions in the region of 50-1000 years he is not wrong. If we stopped polluting the seas today it would take that long, and then some, to return them to their pre plastic state. Twenty years ago the gyre "patches" were unheard of. In that time it is estimated that we have thrown 160 million tonnes of plastic waste into the sea. If we go back to the time when plastics really took off the estimate jumps to 350 million tonnes. Today we are dumping 8 million tonnes every year and that is increasing year on year.

Some of these plastics will only ever leave the food chain when they have been consumed, the animal or bird has died and fallen to the bottom of the sea, the sea has covered it in silt and the pressure turns it back into oil....

Millions of years. We are fools for thinking we can dig up these resources and then throw them all over the world in a huge pile of rubbish.

Sadly that is life. We have focussed on progress so long and so much that we have blinded ourselves to the consequences of that progress.

Workingman wrote:I am forever reading that the planet can easily sustain 10 - 12 billion of us due to advances in farming technologies and the fact that only a fraction of the land is urbanised.

Yes, I've seen stuff like that too, and i think it's rubbish. BBC news the other night had a very chirpy and upbeat piece about how wrong we all were to think that our country is overcrowded. Why, they said, only one per cent of land is occupied by houses! What silly billies we all are to be worrying about this, was their tone.

A while ago a similar study came up with similar conclusions until it was pointed out that it counted front and back lawns as "countryside". It was only the footprint of the actual house that counted. Gardens? No. Drives? No. Industrial estates, roads, railways, airports, hospitals, prisons, shops, car parks - none were included. We are entering an age of very dodgy statistics imo, where a conclusion is reached and then research conducted to "prove" that the conclusion already arrived at is correct.

Manxie, as a very young boy I was taken out into Filey bay on the east coast of Yorkshire, in a rowing boat. Using one of those square wooden framed hand lines I caught four fish. I don't think that could be done these days.