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July 23, 2015

10 Facts that will make you turn to your Friend & say “Well Gaddamn!”

“Human logic: Lets dump a bunch of trash and harmful chemicals into the thing that makes up 70% of our planet and is our most vital resourse!” ~ Redditor

1: Dolphins are struggling to reproduce because of industrial chemical pollution in European waters that can linger in the animals’ bodies for a lifetime (france24.com)

If you would like to read the paper that is referenced in the article, here is a direct PDF link.

Also, the source page at PLoS ONE.

Here are some hard numbers on dolphin contamination levels from waters in Asia.

Mercury levels 330,000 times the level in the sea-water.

PCBs in dolphin meat 1.62 million times higher (in blubber 120 million times higher) than in sea water.

Like all predators, dolphins bio-accumulate toxins. Apparently the levels of toxicity can reach extreme levels if there is any sort of food scarcity that imposes additional stress on the dolphins.

Unfortunately, this is a global problem, not just one limited to European (or Asian) waters.

2: Global trends show seabird populations dropped 70 percent since 1950s

“This one ^ especially scares me. The global seabird population declined 70% since 1950. Carnivores at the top of a food web are very good indicators of the overall health of an ecosystem. If the ocean ecosystem itself is in this bad of a state, we are in big trouble.”

3: Salt-Water Fish Extinction Seen By 2048.

4. A quarter of the world’s marine species in danger of extinction

5. Oceans on brink of catastrophe < read this, it’s like the plot of a disaster movie

6. CO2 emissions threaten ocean crisis: 90% of the extra heat we’ve produced since 1970 has been absorbed by the ocean. Now it’s giving back.

7. Ocean acidification may cause dramatic changes to phytoplankton 

8. MASS EXTINCTION UNDERWAY: The World Wide Web’s Most Comprehensive Source of Information on the Current Mass Extinction 

9. The FDA raised the allowable amount of radiation in our food because of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster which nobody is doing anything to fix.
10. These 10 species are near Extinction. What would John Donne Say?

 

Solutions: Care, don’t ignore. Bike, don’t drive. Eat lower on the food chain. Apply pressures to the 100 big corporations effing up our oceans. You can stop eating so much fish—the Japanese people recently started eating less tuna, which can be felt straight away on the fish market. You can use this app if you still want to eat fish sustainably.

 

Or, we are just killing ourselves in the end.

“There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.” ~ Marshall McLuhan

Can We Survive Ourselves? Yes. But Will We?

As Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia puts it, it’s selfish to be an environmentalist. Meaning, if we care about ourselves, we need to wake up to the effects of our actions.It’s time to learn from our mistakes and correct them, before we become one of our mistakes:

Here’s an easy start:

Years ago, I interviewed leading environmental hero Lester Brown. He said we were doomed—unless we decided as a society, as we did before WWII, to rapidly mobilize. Seven years later, little has changed for the better. The key, he said then, is media. Communication. Education.

Where will we find the will to fight our own laziness, greed and selfishness?

 

Relephant bonus: 

We have 5 Months to Save the World!

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