To the eyes of an oceanographer, the image is pure catastrophe.

In reality, the rogue bag would float into a sewer, follow the storm drain to the ocean, then make its way to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch – a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that’s twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists.

The enormous stew of trash – which consists of 80% plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers – floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii.

Marcus Eriksen, director of research and education at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, said his group has been monitoring the Garbage Patch for 10 years. (By Justin Berton) more

Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/19/SS6JS8RH0.DTL

-Rachel Carson

We all know our oceans are in trouble, but that trouble is coming on faster than some feared. Last week, two dozen coral reef specialists and climate change experts addressed a meeting in London to discuss the fate of our coral reef systems. They announced their prediction that carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere will reach 450 parts per million by the year 2050. Since the oceans absorb these gases and become more acidic as a result, this predicted pace will soon wipe out all coral reefs in existence. The reefs don’t just attract under sea inhabitants and human visitors, they’re also one of the ocean’s biggest life forces and a potential storehouse of human medicines. Losing them could have unimaginable repercussions.

“The kitchen is on fire and it’s spreading around the house,” said Alex Rogers of the Zoological Society of London and the International Program on the State of the Ocean. “If we act quickly and decisively we may be able to put it out before the damage becomes irreversible.” (By Michael Kahn)

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE5654JY20090706

Seagrass provides habitat for coastal life and helps reduce the impact of sediment and nutrient pollution.

“The combination of growing urban centers, artificially hardened shorelines and declining natural resources has pushed coastal ecosystems out of balance. Globally, we lose a seagrass meadow the size of a soccer field every thirty minutes,” co-author William Dennison of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science said in a statement.

“With the loss of each meadow, we also lose the ecosystem services they provide to the fish and shellfish relying on these areas for nursery habitat. The consequences of continuing losses also extend far beyond the areas where seagrasses grow, as they export energy in the form of biomass and animals to other ecosystems including marshes and coral reefs,” Robert Orth of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science of the College of William and Mary added.

The researchers said that since 1990 there has been about a 7% loss of seagrass per year, with the major impacts coming from coastal development, dredging and reductions in water quality.

The research was supported by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in Santa Barbara, California, through the National Science Foundation.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/01/58-percent-of-seagrass-me_n_223737.html

The core activities and campaigns that the Surfrider Foundation uses to protect our oceans, waves and beaches fall into the categories of Clean Water, Beach Access, Beach Preservation and Protecting Special Places.

Clean Water

Our initiative to protect and restore coastal water quality from the ridges, through our watersheds and out to the nearshore ocean where we surf, swim and recreate.

Beach Access

Our initiative to promote the right of low-impact, free and open access to the world’s waves and beaches for all people.

Beach Preservation

Our initiative to protect and preserve healthy beaches that are important coastal ecosystems and recreational areas.

Protecting Special Places

Our initiative to proactively conserve, protect and restore special coastal and ocean places.

Surfrider Foundation’s unique membership includes ocean enthusiasts of all sorts: Surfers, bodysurfers, bodyboarders, windsurfers, swimmers, divers, beachcombers and ocean-loving families from all walks of life. If you’re interested in becoming a member, go to www.surfrider.org/join.

PeacePaint compiles important information about the Peace and Green movements and publishes eye-catching articles, slideshows and videos.

PeacePaint people are aggressive at guerrilla marketing non-violence and ecological logic through newsletters, viral videos and merchandising. We are generous, investing all of our resources in pro-social marketing.

PeacePaint is funded by Intelligent Design (ID) apparel, who makes fashionable, cause-driven t-shirts. PeacePaint affiliates make money by placing ID banners on their websites. When anyone from an affiliate website purchases anything from the ID store, ID pays 10% of the total sale directly to their affiliate.

About Time

Imagine a global economy offering fair opportunities to everyone and hope of a better future for all of our children. Efforts to attain that dream will do more to stop terrorism and avoid war than would any homeland security system or deadly weapon.

Click here to find out more.

The activist is the man who cleans up the river.”  -Ross Perot

Worldwide seafood production skyrocketed then plummeted.

1950 – 19 million tons – 15.4 pounds per person

1990 – 37 million tons – 37.4 pounds per person

Now seafood production is less than 14 pounds per person and dropping.

See, Lester Brown, Plan B 3.0

75% of the world’s great ocean fisheries are being fished beyond their capacity to reproduce.

Many fisheries have already collapsed, e.g.

Cod Fisheries in Canada and New England failed completely.

Atlantic bluefin tuna fisheries lost 94%.

Chesapeake Bay oyster production dropped from 35 million to one million pounds.

Fishing fleets now concentrate on the few viable fisheries and are rapidly destroying the few survivors.

Now, 90% of the world’s big fish are gone and 29% of fish species have collapsed.

See, Myers and Worm, “Rapid Worldwide Depletion of Predatory Fish Communities”

and “No More Fish to Eat in 40 Years.”

The free market forced fishermen to empty the oceans of fish.

In a fully free market, fish belong to the fisherman who catches them.

This means fish businesses race to catch everything catch able – to build floating fish factories and empty the sea from top to bottom.

Responsible individuals who leave enough fish for the long term, will be beaten out of business by fish factories trolling the seas from surf to bottom.

Economic Democracy is the Answer.

Responsible fishers are joining a global movement to organize catch limits at sustainable

levels.

European Union fleets are agreeing to reduce fishing capacity for endangered species.

See, Lester Brown, Plan B 3.0 and “Ocean Life on the Brink of No Return.”

People Are Destroying the Ocean’s Ability to Renew Life.

Wetlands, mangrove forests and rivers serve as spawning areas for 90% of ocean fish, but these areas are being destroyed by pollution and development:

Half of the world’s tropical mangrove forests are lost.

More than half of coastal wetlands are in decline.

Almost all urban rivers run brown with silt and toxins.

Coral reefs incubate the food supply for most major ocean fisheries, but coral reefs are being destroyed by pollution and global warming.

20% of the world’s reefs have already died.

24% are facing of imminent collapse.

26% are rapidly deteriorating.

200 huge Dead Zones are spreading throughout coastal waters.  Sewage discharge and run-off from farm fertilizers create massive algiie blooms.  When the algae die, they decompose, leach the oxygen out of the water and kill all of the fish.

See, United Nations Environment Programme,

“Further Rise in Number of Marine Dead Zones.”

A vast continent of plastic garbage – weighing 35 tons – will swirl for centuries in the center of the Pacific ocean – destroying fish life in an area twice the size of Texas.

The free market forces everyone to pollute.

Responsible waste disposal is costly and labor-intense, but flushing waste into rivers is

easy and cheap.

Businesses who invest money and time in responsible waste disposal lose out to their

freeloading competitors.

Corporations find it easier and cheaper to lobby for relaxed pollution laws than to take care

of pollution problems. Politicians who push for responsible waste disposal miss out on the

easy money and get criticized for driving away local businesses.

Moreover, politicians who push for responsible community waste disposal must find tax

money to pay for the cost.

Economic Democracy is the Answer.

Responsible people and political leaders from every nation are joining in a global effort to

curtain ocean pollution.

Bill Jemas, Peacepaint

A study of more than 100 fishing regions, published in the Journal of Science, suggests that, if current trends are maintained, every seafood species will have collapsed below commercially viable levels by 2048.

Its authors also found, however, that fish stocks and diversity recover quickly when marine ecosystems are managed to prevent overfishing.

Concerns have been raised for several decades over stocks of such fish as cod in the North Sea — but the extent to which species have declined worldwide and mankind’s effects on the Earth’s ecosystem shocked scientists.

“Whether we looked at tide pools or studies over the entire world’s ocean, we saw the same picture emerging,” said Professor Boris Worm, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada.

“In losing species we lose the productivity and stability of entire ecosystems. I was shocked and disturbed by how consistent these trends are . . . [It is] beyond anything we suspected.”

Researchers found that 29%  of fish species have collapsed to, or below, 10% of their original levels over the past 1,000 years. There has been a steep decline since the Industrial Revolution. (By Lewis Smith)

Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2435290,00.html

“By the time my nine-year-old son is my age, there would be no wild seafood left,” said Emmett Duffy, a scientist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences in the United States.

In this grim, not-too-far-off future, not only will there be no fish to eat, humans will also lose the vital services oceans provide, including processing wastes, cleaning beaches, controlling flooding and absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The world’s oceans are already in a precarious state, hammered by extensive coastal pollution, climate change, over-fishing and the enormously wasteful practice of deep-sea trawling, in which heavily weighted nets dragged along the sea floor scoop up everything in their 100-metre-wide paths, including vast amounts of unwanted sea creatures, the so-called bycatch.

The only way to reverse this slide into an abysmal future is to stop fishing out one species after another to ensure there is an abundance of biodiversity in the seas, researchers have found.

It turns out that every species matters. Each species of fish plays an important role in the health and capacity of the oceans to respond to disease or disaster. That is the gist of the most comprehensive analysis of life in the oceans ever carried out, published Thursday in the Journal Science. (By Stephen Leahy)

Source:  http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=35349