Our Oceans Are Dying

They say the ocean is a place with no memory and no future. Its natural beauty is unfathomable, and its currents can take you anywhere in the world. They say there is more life in the ocean than all life on dry land. Yet we continue to destroy it, thinking we can live without it. We can’t and the great oceans will fight back.

The bounty of the depths can give life, but unknown to most of us the ocean’s bottom hides our destruction. For locked within its layers is a ticking time bomb of sulfur and smog that if unlocked will turn our beautiful blue marble into the gassy wasteland that is Venus. We can already see the signs. Permafrost degradation in the north. Siberia having 100 degree Fahrenheit days. Massive out of season monsoons and hurricanes. Habitat collapse on a massive scale unseen since the Permian Era, also known as “the Great Dying”.

During that era in our planet’s history, 90% to 95% of marine species became extinct, as well as 70% of all land organisms. It is also the only known mass extinction of insects. It’s happening again and not only in the sea, but on land as well with the massive collapse of pollinating insects. Let me state that again incase you don’t understand. The Permian Era, the greatest mass die off of species on this planet, had the mass extinction of its insect populations.

We’re doing to ourselves. We are on the brink of a global extinction level event that has only one cause, Humanity. Not the sun. Not the volcanos. And absolutely not a natural cycle of warming and cooling.

It’s already happening with our blatant use of greenhouse gas emitting cars, our endless use of jet fuel aircraft, and our agricultural domestication of cattle. If we continue down this path our oceans will become a murky muck and our blue skies will turn a sickly green. Our land will be filled with toxic sludge from the torrential down pour of acid rain from the oceans that have now become a massive hydrogen sulfide pit of despair. An inky dark abyss that is devoid of all life except the few extremophiles that live there.

What we need to do is put our world back on track. What we need is a strong leader that will pull us back from the brink. What we need is to embrace the science and not object to hard truths that don’t necessarily fit with our own world view. We need to dissent from the cognitive dissidence that lets us believe that we can’t possibly be the cause of worldwide disaster because we are such tiny creatures.

We are the only creatures in this planet’s history (that we know of) that have developed enough to be aware of our own existence and our place in it. It is our right, our privilege, nay our duty to fix the mistakes of our past. Put aside the politics and get to the real work of detoxifying our planet.

Because people until Elon Musk or NASA puts people on Mars or beyond, this is our only home. It’s the only home we’ve ever known and we’ve trashed it. We’ve kicked down our own doors, punched holes in the walls and ceilings, and lit the carpet on fire. It’s time we got down to the business of growing beyond our adolescent past and mature as a society. It’s time to repair those walls and wash ourselves of this dirty past, because as anyone who has lived in a extremely dirty house will tell you. Eventually your gonna get sick, and then it only gets worse from there.

We need to save ourselves; no one is going to do it for us. It all starts with saving our oceans, because once they go, we won’t be far behind.