Deep Politics Forum

Full Version: The ocean is broken
You're currently viewing a stripped down version of our content. View the full version with proper formatting.
Sometimes when I go to this website, I think that subjects like the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 are really quite pointless now. Maybe I only keep investigating them to distract my mind from thinking about more serious things.

http://www.desdemonadespair.net/

http://www.theherald.com.au/story/184843...is-broken/

IT was the silence that made this voyage different from all of those before it.

Not the absence of sound, exactly.

The wind still whipped the sails and whistled in the rigging. The waves still sloshed against the fibreglass hull.

And there were plenty of other noises: muffled thuds and bumps and scrapes as the boat knocked against pieces of debris.

What was missing was the cries of the seabirds which, on all previous similar voyages, had surrounded the boat.

The birds were missing because the fish were missing.

Exactly 10 years before, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen had sailed exactly the same course from Melbourne to Osaka, all he'd had to do to catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw out a baited line.

"There was not one of the 28 days on that portion of the trip when we didn't catch a good-sized fish to cook up and eat with some rice," Macfadyen recalled.

But this time, on that whole long leg of sea journey, the total catch was two.

No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all.

"In years gone by I'd gotten used to all the birds and their noises," he said.

"They'd be following the boat, sometimes resting on the mast before taking off again. You'd see flocks of them wheeling over the surface of the sea in the distance, feeding on pilchards."

But in March and April this year, only silence and desolation surrounded his boat, Funnel Web, as it sped across the surface of a haunted ocean.

North of the equator, up above New Guinea, the ocean-racers saw a big fishing boat working a reef in the distance.
"All day it was there, trawling back and forth. It was a big ship, like a mother-ship," he said.

And all night it worked too, under bright floodlights. And in the morning Macfadyen was awoken by his crewman calling out, urgently, that the ship had launched a speedboat.

"Obviously I was worried. We were unarmed and pirates are a real worry in those waters. I thought, if these guys had weapons then we were in deep trouble."

But they weren't pirates, not in the conventional sense, at least. The speedboat came alongside and the Melanesian men aboard offered gifts of fruit and jars of jam and preserves.
"And they gave us five big sugar-bags full of fish," he said.

"They were good, big fish, of all kinds. Some were fresh, but others had obviously been in the sun for a while.
"We told them there was no way we could possibly use all those fish. There were just two of us, with no real place to store or keep them. They just shrugged and told us to tip them overboard. That's what they would have done with them anyway, they said.

"They told us that his was just a small fraction of one day's by-catch. That they were only interested in tuna and to them, everything else was rubbish. It was all killed, all dumped. They just trawled that reef day and night and stripped it of every living thing."

Macfadyen felt sick to his heart. That was one fishing boat among countless more working unseen beyond the horizon, many of them doing exactly the same thing.

No wonder the sea was dead. No wonder his baited lines caught nothing. There was nothing to catch.

If that sounds depressing, it only got worse.

The next leg of the long voyage was from Osaka to San Francisco and for most of that trip the desolation was tinged with nauseous horror and a degree of fear.

"After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead," Macfadyen said.

"We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head. It was pretty sickening.

"I've done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I'm used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen."

In place of the missing life was garbage in astounding volumes.

"Part of it was the aftermath of the tsunami that hit Japan a couple of years ago. The wave came in over the land, picked up an unbelievable load of stuff and carried it out to sea. And it's still out there, everywhere you look."

Ivan's brother, Glenn, who boarded at Hawaii for the run into the United States, marvelled at the "thousands on thousands" of yellow plastic buoys. The huge tangles of synthetic rope, fishing lines and nets. Pieces of polystyrene foam by the million. And slicks of oil and petrol, everywhere.

Countless hundreds of wooden power poles are out there, snapped off by the killer wave and still trailing their wires in the middle of the sea.
"In years gone by, when you were becalmed by lack of wind, you'd just start your engine and motor on," Ivan said.
Not this time.

"In a lot of places we couldn't start our motor for fear of entangling the propeller in the mass of pieces of rope and cable. That's an unheard of situation, out in the ocean.
"If we did decide to motor we couldn't do it at night, only in the daytime with a lookout on the bow, watching for rubbish.
"On the bow, in the waters above Hawaii, you could see right down into the depths. I could see that the debris isn't just on the surface, it's all the way down. And it's all sizes, from a soft-drink bottle to pieces the size of a big car or truck.
"We saw a factory chimney sticking out of the water, with some kind of boiler thing still attached below the surface. We saw a big container-type thing, just rolling over and over on the waves.
"We were weaving around these pieces of debris. It was like sailing through a garbage tip.
"Below decks you were constantly hearing things hitting against the hull, and you were constantly afraid of hitting something really big. As it was, the hull was scratched and dented all over the place from bits and pieces we never saw."
Plastic was ubiquitous. Bottles, bags and every kind of throwaway domestic item you can imagine, from broken chairs to dustpans, toys and utensils.
And something else. The boat's vivid yellow paint job, never faded by sun or sea in years gone past, reacted with something in the water off Japan, losing its sheen in a strange and unprecedented way.

BACK in Newcastle, Ivan Macfadyen is still coming to terms with the shock and horror of the voyage.
"The ocean is broken," he said, shaking his head in stunned disbelief.
Recognising the problem is vast, and that no organisations or governments appear to have a particular interest in doing anything about it, Macfadyen is looking for ideas.
He plans to lobby government ministers, hoping they might help.
More immediately, he will approach the organisers of Australia's major ocean races, trying to enlist yachties into an international scheme that uses volunteer yachtsmen to monitor debris and marine life.
Macfadyen signed up to this scheme while he was in the US, responding to an approach by US academics who asked yachties to fill in daily survey forms and collect samples for radiation testing - a significant concern in the wake of the tsunami and consequent nuclear power station failure in Japan.
"I asked them why don't we push for a fleet to go and clean up the mess," he said.
"But they said they'd calculated that the environmental damage from burning the fuel to do that job would be worse than just leaving the debris there."
Our current glorious leader does not believe in climate change. Ivan will not get any help there as their only concern is to support corporate business model interests not humans nor the environment. There is fire burning all around Sydney as I write and it is too unhealthy to go outdoors because of all the smoke and ashes and particles. Over 90 fires burning in the whole state We have bushfires here but not just out of winter which is what it is in the southern hemisphere. This sort of weather we have in February. We've been having temperatures close to 40 deg celsius. This has been going on for a week now and expected to last another and is not the first time this year. The first bush fires actually did start while it was still officially winter.

We already know what to do. But no one is doing it.
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD="width: 84%"]

Climate Change: First They Came For ...

By Louallen Miller[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD="width: 60%"]
[/TD]
[TD="width: 40%"]10/20/13[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[TD="width: 16%"]
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]


"Climate Change: FirstThey Came For "
First they came forthe Arctic sea ice, and I did not speak out--even though its volume is two thirds what it was thirty years ago.
Then they came forour mountainglaciers-- Kilimanjaro, Glacier National Park, the Andes, and Himalayas--and still I didn't speak out. My water supplies were not threatened.
They thawed the permafrost and continental shelves even though these areas could release planet alteringgreenhouse gases. Still Iremained silent.
Then they came after the coral reefs, crustaceans and other ocean life with rates of warming and acidification we have not seen for millions of years. Eventhough our oceans are being devastated, I did not speak out.
Then they came after our winters, but I enjoyed the earlier springs, so I did not speak out.


Then they came forthe boreal forests of North America with bark beetles and wildfires. They ravaged our tropical forests, the lungs of our planet and home to most of its species. I love and need trees, still I did notspeak out.
Then they came for our coastlines, slowly, inch by inch. It adds up over the years, but like the fool on the hill I kept perfectly still.
Then they came afterour wheat, corn and livestock in the record 2012 US drought and 2011 floods. Even when heat waves decimated grain harvests in Russia and China, my supermarket shelves remained full. I had no reason to speak out.
I did not speak outwhen thousands of species I'd never heard of began moving and vanishing each year, even though the rate of extinction could surpass anything we'd experienced infifty million years.
Then they despoiledour gulf, farmlands andcommunities with drilling rigs and pipeline spills, fracking and mountain top removals, and dangerous storage ponds of toxic wastewater. It wasn't happening in my neighborhood so Ikept quiet.
They hijacked ourwater supplies to operate their nuclear and coal plants--for fracking and tarsand production. Even though a warmer planet will mean severe water shortages for hundreds of millionsof people, I did not speakout.
When they came afterthe tribal lands of our Native Americans with their uranium and coal mining, I was speechless.
They've been comingafter our governments for decades, manipulating politicians across the US and in othercountries with money, lobbying firms and "grassroots" movements so our leaders won't speak out.
Now they're coming after our minds, distorting and reducing the amount of science in the news, even in our children's schools and continue to attack climate scientists and their credibility to keep them from speaking out.
They've rebranded and treated those who did speak out as "terrorists" and I had good reason to be afraid of speakingout.
They continue to stall and undermine international negotiations and agreements, hoping that even if we speak out it won't make a difference.
Now what they'vedone is threatening the habitability of the planet for our children and grandchildren. We must speak out for their sake while there is still time.
Quote:"And they gave us five big sugar-bags full of fish," he said.

"They were good, big fish, of all kinds. Some were fresh, but others had obviously been in the sun for a while.
"We told them there was no way we could possibly use all those fish. There were just two of us, with no real place to store or keep them. They just shrugged and told us to tip them overboard. That's what they would have done with them anyway, they said.

"They told us that his was just a small fraction of one day's by-catch. That they were only interested in tuna and to them, everything else was rubbish. It was all killed, all dumped. They just trawled that reef day and night and stripped it of every living thing."

Macfadyen felt sick to his heart. That was one fishing boat among countless more working unseen beyond the horizon, many of them doing exactly the same thing.

No wonder the sea was dead. No wonder his baited lines caught nothing. There was nothing to catch.

Sheer, utter and depraved madness.