Oh, boy. We are just using and abusing this planet to death, and I don’t know what is going to be left for my nieces and nephews and their kids. First, we’re going to be out of oil in 40 years. But that’s okay, as we’ll also be starving because global warming will have caused a famine. And now this:
The world will run out of seafood by 2048 if steep declines in marine species continue at current rates, according to a study released today by an international group of ecologists and economists.
The paper, published in the journal Science, concludes that overfishing, pollution, and other environmental factors are wiping out important species across the globe, hampering the ocean’s ability to produce seafood, filter nutrients and resist the spread of disease.
“We really see the end of the line now,” said lead author Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Canada’s Dalhousie University. “It’s within our lifetime. Our children will see a world without seafood if we don’t change things.”
The 14 researchers from Canada, Panama, Sweden and the United States spent four years analyzing all the available data on fish populations and ocean ecosystems to reach their conclusion. They found that by 2003 — the last year for which data on global commercial fish catches is available — 29 percent of all fished species had collapsed, and that the rate of population collapses has accelerated in recent years.
This gets scarier and scarier, this complete frenzy we have created for the limited resources of this planet. And we don’t have any other planets in reserve. You know all those sci-fi movies where the Earth is invaded by some aliens who have come to plunder our resources because their own planet is used up? Well, I’d say that we are those plundering aliens — except that we are so lazy that we haven’t even come close to creating the technology we’d need to go elsewhere to plunder.
