This is not just a parable about the warming of the seas. By the global peak of whaling, in the 1960s, roughly 80,000 whales were still being harvested for their meat each year, more than a half-century after the bowhead, right and gray whales were brought close to extinction for their blubber and oil. Ninety percent of global marine fish stocks have now been fully exploited or overfished; 81 percent of monitored migratory freshwater populations have declined since 1970. And although the total mass of humans on earth is only about 0.4 metric gigatons, the physicist and oceanographer Helen Czerski writes in her hypnotic tribute “The Blue Machine,” we are collectively responsible for about 2.7 metric gigatons of life going missing from the seas — which are, after all, the only known oceans of water anywhere in the universe and the primal source of all known biology.
David Wallace-Wells
Read full article in The New York Times by David Wallace-Wells