ARE WE EATING OUR WAY TO DESTRUCTION?

By DR VICKI BISMILLA

 As human beings we are destroying the Earth’s oceans at an alarming rate. According to Julia Barnes, the Canadian documentary maker who made the documentary Sea of Life: “50 per cent of the coral reefs are gone. 90 per cent of the fish have been taken from the ocean. 40 per cent of the plankton that produce the oxygen we breathe have been taken out.”

With our industrial CO2 emissions into the atmosphere and sea drilling, it is estimated that the coral reefs will completely disappear by the middle of this century. That is only 30 years away.

Why should we care about coral reefs? Coral reefs have survived for 250 million years, and they sustain one third of the ocean’s ecosystems and biodiversity. And now they are dying, and the effects will be devastating as sea life will be lost at an increasing speed. Her documentary was made during and immediately after the 2015 Paris Accord on climate change. The Paris Accord signed by world leaders agreed on a 1.6 per cent emissions ceiling, but coral reefs cannot survive on anything below a 2 per cent emissions ceiling.

The film also points out that all life on this planet depends on ocean plankton. These are tiny, microscopic organisms that “create two out of every three breaths that we take in” (see review at wildlensinc.org.)

Plankton is disappearing due to ocean acidification. Our survival depends on drastically cutting the carbon we are emitting into the atmosphere all over the world. The ocean absorbs the carbon at an increasing and alarming rate.

If we don’t curb carbon emissions the consequences for life on this planet are bleak and the immediacy is frightening.

In addition to industrial carbon emissions, the fishing industry is also destroying the oceans. Trawls and nets cast by fishing vessels in all our major oceans are meant to net particular kinds of sea life like shrimp high in demand by humans. 

But the shrimp in trawl nets are only 20 per cent of the catch. The remaining 80 per cent is thrown back into the ocean and dies. They have inside them tiny balloon like swim-bladders filled with oxygen that help them stay afloat in deep water. But these swim bladders cannot survive the pressure of being hauled up into our atmosphere and then being thrown back. The balloon-like organs burst and the fish dies. 

Blue fin tuna are nearly extinct due to overfishing. They take 15 years to mature and start reproducing but they are being hauled out before maturity and reproduction in huge unsustainable amounts by overfishing.

As they near extinction the price for them soars and the fishing for them becomes more frantic.

All large fish in the ocean have drastically depleted and more than 95 per cent of sea turtles are already extinct, gone from our planet.

People are so intent on eating everything that can be caught that there is no respect for nature. Humans only see nature as things we can consume.

Wildlife such as coyotes, foxes and wolves are being shot and killed at an alarming rate because they are seen as predators to the all-important cattle and livestock that people want to eat.

An alarming fact that emerged in this documentary is that a large percentage of fish hauled out of our oceans are fed to chickens and pigs, so that people can kill the chickens and pigs and eat them. The same for huge swaths of grass and plants being fed to cows so that cows can be eaten by people.

The world’s human population has increased about six-fold in the last two hundred years. But our consumption of food has gone up more than twice that amount.

The late Canadian environmentalist Rob Stewart described how we as people should be part of nature, but instead we look to dominate nature and are destroying nature at an alarming rate in these last two centuries.

This is true particularly in the developed, industrialized world. And the world’s consumption of meat is the leading cause of much of the death of our planet. Species are becoming extinct, rain forests are being denuded to make way for industry, the oceans are being overfished, polluted and dying and global warming is destroying icecaps and climate.

Full disclosure, I am a vegetarian, but these views are not mine alone. They are the views expressed by the environmentalists, ecologists and scientists in the documentary Sea of Life, in other environmental documentaries and dozens of peer-reviewed books and journal articles based on data and evidence.

Examples of some of these articles and book by most recent date are:

• Golb, A. (2020). Human Health and Ocean Pollution, PubMed Central, Bethesda, MD, U.S.A.

• Sumaila, U.R; Tai, T.C. (2020). End Overfishing and Increase the Resilience of the Ocean to Climate Change. Frontiers, Lausanne, Switzerland.

• De Vries, M; Van Middelaar, C.E; de Boer, I. J. M. (2015). Comparing environmental impacts of beef production systems: A review of life cycle assessments.  Livestock Science in Science Direct, Elsevier, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

• Gerber, P.J; Mottet, A; Oppio, C.I; Falcucci, A; Teillard, F.  (2015). Environmental impacts of beef production: Review of challenges and perspectives for durability. Meat Science in Science Direct, Elsevier, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

• Coll, M; Libralato, S; Tudela, S; Palomera, I;  Pranovi, F. (2008).  Ecosystem Overfishing in the Ocean. Plos One, San Francisco, U.S.A. and Cambridge U.K.Sindermann, C.J. (1996). Ocean Pollution: Effects on Living Resources and Humans. Boca Raton, Florida, U.S.A. CRC Press.

Articles published online by credited environmental organizations like Greenpeace echo the same concerns (see Seven reasons why meat is bad for the environment by N. Brown, Greenpeace U.K. July 2022).

None of the scientists, scholars, researchers, environmentalists and ecologists are demanding that all people on earth become vegetarians. What they are all calling for are more sustainable fishing and meat farming practices that will curb the harmful effects on our planet.

There appears to be in the last two decades an alarming avarice for more and more meat in bigger and bigger servings and one can rarely find a television food show now that is not touting recipe creations with large sizes of meat portions on plates, piles and piles of meat on top of meat in screaming food shows and competitions. And do we really have to invade the oceans to feed fish to chickens and pigs, both unnatural to their nature? We as people have to change what we eat, how much we eat, how much of the earth’s energy we consume, how we relate to the ecosystems and how we treat our oceans, the most important ecosystem on our planet. The abuse of the planet’s oceans is impacting the food we eat, the air we breathe and our climate. The oceans are dying because of human behaviour, overfishing, industrial climate change and out of control human pollution. Fish are not an endless flow of food to feed humans and animals. Oceans are exhausted and we humans are to blame.

Despite the bleak forecast, ocean conservationist Fabien Cousteau says that the story doesn’t have to end sadly. Cousteau suggests that if we give nature time to heal, new life can emerge. “Although the world of the oceans has changed quite drastically over the last few decades, it can change for the better over the next few decades,” says Cousteau. But he maintains that “the single greatest threat to our planet’s seas is humankind.” (BBC Future Now conference New York, 2017).

Tons of human garbage is thrown into the oceans killing hundreds of thousands of sea birds, mammals and sea life each year.

To help support solutions Cousteau has initiated Proteus, an international “space station” of the oceans, a globally collaborative observatory to generate data and solutions to build innovative technologies to rescue our oceans.

According to the World Resources Institute, what is also needed is a more sustainable approach to meat farming, especially beef farming, starting with animal welfare, reduce land usage, reduce massive land clearing for pastures, improve feeding practices using plant pastures, highly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and “cow-burp” methane emissions and manage manure more efficiently e.g., redirect manure to fertilize crops.  These require government policies, political will and voter demands to out-voice lobby groups. 

Our own individual part toward better ecology is to shift away from high beef diets, educate ourselves and young people about sustainable meat farming and food habits, eat wisely, shop less, cook less and avoid food waste, conserve land and water, use energy efficient light bulbs, plant trees and do not send chemicals into our waterways, instead choose non-toxic products in our homes.