We aren’t thinking selfishly enough.
No, I did not say that we aren’t being selfish, because we are. In the social media mainframe that we live in, our pictures surround us. We fight to hear our voices above crowds. We excuse a lot of unhealthy behavior by calling it “self-care.” Humanity is selfish, but not in the right way.
If we thought selfishly enough, we would recognize our complicated and fragile state. Our skin burns from the sun and freezes in darkness. Viruses crumble us from the inside out. Disasters strike us down, again and again, every time we turn on the news. We need protection. We need to preserve who we are but also where we are. So, we aren’t thinking selfishly enough. Because if we were, our planet and, more specifically our oceans that help keep us alive, wouldn’t be dying.
Every day, 8 million pieces of plastic pollution find their way into our ocean. According to Ocean Crusaders, that is equal to one garbage truck discarding plastic every minute. If nothing changes, there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish by 2050.
Ninety percent of the large fish present in the 1950s have completely disappeared due to overfishing. While every year six humans are killed by sharks, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History’s International Shark Attack File, every hour, fishing kills 30,000 sharks. Every year, fishing kills over 300,000 dolphins, porpoises, and whales. Yet another problem is how the ocean is continuing to heat up at a dangerous rate.
One percent of the pumped heat-trapping carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere. The ocean, National Geographic stated, absorbs the rest. The uppermost section takes the majority of the extra heat. The bottom few thousand feet snatch another third. This made the average global sea surface temperature rise .13 degrees per decade. The last 30 years, though, have reached the highest temperatures on the record. The skin of the sea is heating up by an average of about 0.11 degrees.
“Even small changes in that system can have large impacts on things like the size and intensity of storms, rainfall patterns, and sea-level rise,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, a scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany. Marine organisms like plankton are very sensitive to these slight changes in temperature. They’re dying, which then kills the remaining fish that managed to escape fishing nets. When one species suffers, entire food chains get disrupted — including our own.
The Rolling Stone reported that many regional economies in the U.S. depend on the ocean. Alaska earns around $2 billion in total annual income, with the seafood industry employing more than 50,000 workers. Over three million jobs and about $300 billion of the U.S.’s annual gross domestic product comes from fishing, shipping, ocean farming, ocean tourism and recreation. So, if the state of the ocean does not improve, millions of jobs disappear, our economy will crumble more so than it already has, and hundreds upon thousands of species fall extinct.
Luckily, there has been a small progressive step. The U.S. reentered the Paris Climate Agreement. In 2015, nearly every nation adopted the Agreement to address climate change. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) deducted the Agreement could add protection for millions of tons of “top revenue-generating fish species” and “billions of dollars annually of fishers’ revenues, seafood workers’ income, and household seafood expenditure.” The Agreement could also bring benefits to 75% of maritime countries. This is due to around 90% of the protected fish getting caught “within the territorial waters of developing countries.”
“Thus,” AAAS said, “implementing the Paris Agreement could prove to be crucial for the future of the world’s ocean ecosystems and economies.”
Additionally, there needs to be a stronger reinforcement of no-catch marine reserves. This will raise the percentage of protected oceans from 2% to 30% by 2030 (which is only nine years away). Then, according to the ocean conservationists behind the new documentary, “Seaspiracy,” $35 billion in subsidies is given to the fishing industry every year. Cutting this number even in half would bring drastic but positive change for the seas.
The National Ocean Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), also listed ways we, as individuals, can help our ocean. At home, we can conserve water and reduce pollutants. Using fewer chemicals and lowering wastewater help keep the oceans clean. In the community, we need to use reusable materials when we shop. Avoiding seafood and switching to plant-based diets are also proven to be beneficial.
Yet, the most important thing we can do is simply respect the ocean. We need to leave it alone.
God put human beings, us, in charge of His creation, meaning it is our responsibility to listen. The ocean generates over half the oxygen we breathe, and God uses it to sustain who we are and where we are. We must think more selfishly, because if we want to continue living, the ocean needs to live, too.
