Green Future in our Oceans

By: N. Thomas

When you hear the term ‘green futures’, what comes to mind? Perhaps global warming, pollution, logging. What about the ocean? When you link both topics what do you think about? Is it turtles and straws? Maybe overfishing? Currently, oceans are largely responsible for the Earth's biodiversity, home to over 242,000 known marine species. It also produces 50 – 80% of the earth’s oxygen and regulates the planet’s climate! We depend on oceans yet seem to forget this as we continuously harm it. In this article you’ll see there is much more to human impact than plastic straws and the sad truth might surprise you. 

Marine populations have decreased significantly in the last years, with blue whale populations dropping 90% in the last century, shark populations plummeting 71% since 1970, and bluefin tuna populations becoming practically extinct. Institutions such as the UN have tried to battle these numbers, with the illegality of whaling, although some countries like Japan and Iceland refuse to comply, and continue practicing this inhumane, merciless sport. 

These marine populations are decreasing from being targeted and due to bycatch and the disposal of fishing gear in the oceans. Bycatch is when other animals are accidentally caught during the fishing of one specific species, 40% of fish in fishing nets are bycatch, and these fish are returned to the ocean either dead or dying. Now, not only do fishing boats use their gear to kill animals, but they dispose their gear in the ocean. These gears were designed to kill, so it is no surprise to see that 650,000 animals are killed per year due to these disposed gears. Every day, enough fishing nets are disposed in the ocean, to wrap around the Earth 500X! 

When we look into things we can do to help, we might think that buying fish with tags like ‘Dolphin Safe’, might be making a difference. Wrong! Most of these companies have no supervision at all on the ships they get their fish from, so they have no idea if their fish is really ‘dolphin safe’. If you take a deeper look into this system, you will see that fishing businesses (that do bycatch and pollute the oceans) are paying these ‘tag companies’ to deceive people into thinking they are doing a good deed in order to sell more! 
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Everyone must take part in trying to combat all these ruthless actions, doing the best they can to minimize their impact on the ocean, since if it dies, so do humans.    ​