In the article,The high seas are too precious to be left to plunderers and polluters", from February 9, 2013, Callum Roberts addresses many of the issues of our ocean pollution and is hopeful that the launch of the Global Ocean Commission will finally address these problems. The commission will be, “dedicated to ending the neglect, in international affairs, of the high seas.” The seas the commission will address lie 200 nautical miles off the coast from where England’s sovereign national waters meet the global commons. These international waters are a place in which no nation has ownership, but needs to be taken care of by all nations around the globe.
These international waters of the global commons have a long
history of being exploited by people looking for wealth. The mariners of the 19th
and 20th centuries slaughtered whales to the brink of extinction. The 1950’s saw the emergence of fisheries in these waters that used long-line and drift-net fleets. In the search for the profitable tuna, swordfish, marlin and shark, the fisheries were killing turtles, whales and dolphins in the wake of their pursuit. These nets were banned by the UN in 1992, but they now set long lines with thousands of hooks and so the massacre continues. Further, the roundnose grenadier and orange roughy are facing extinction from the exploitation from the deep sea fishery industry. They are destroying unseen habitats by trowling, stripping the ocean floor, killing off animals that may be hundreds or even thousands of years old. The cost to our coral forests and sponge groves are high.
Fishing is not the only crisis in our oceans. The oceans are
suffering from the dramatic effects of climate change. The change is heating
the surface layer of the ocean and starving the deeper waters of oxygen. Floating
refuse thrown away by modern society is being caught in the circulating waters
of our seas. Found in thousands of miles of ocean, the floating pollution has
been dubbed the “great ocean garbage patch”. The drifting plastic fragments
into smaller and smaller pieces that pick up and concentrate chemical pollutants
of mercury and DDT from the industrial emissions from power plants.
Our earth cannot sustain the devastation we are creating
with our growing population and denying, misguided thinking. The world does not
have an endless supply of natural resources. We may not actually see the ills
of modern throw- away society in our oceans but it is there and has become a
crisis that cannot be ignored. This new organization must urgently act to
revive our unhealthy international, global commons that we all share.
"Only now, with the launch of the Global Ocean Commission are we finally addressing the ravages of the oceans."
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