Joanna Griffiths, Guardian, August 11, 2000

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 385.

In just 50 years, humankind has managed to deplete a seemingly limitless supply of fish, culminating[104] in a global fish crisis today. As fish numbers drop, we are being forced to confront a previously held notion, that the seas would endlessly replenish[105] themselves with fish, and that man's feeding would not have any long-term effects on populations.

19th Century naturalist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck demonstrated this optimistic perception of the limitlessness of the seas when he argued that "animals living in the sea waters are protected from the destruction of their species by man. Their multiplication[106] is so rapid and their means of evading pursuit or traps are so great, that there is no likelihood of his being able to destroy the entire species of any of these animals."

It was in 1995 that signs of the depletion of global fish stocks became impossible to ignore. In an article published in the New Scientist that year, the author argued that the crisis in fish stocks had been caused by a "fundamental folly": a failure to perceive that fish are wildlife, "the only wildlife still hunted on a major scale." Wild fish, he continued, "regenerate[107] at rates determined by nature", so fishing under market dictates must "eventually run into limits".

At the same time, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) concluded that the current level of functioning of the world's fisheries could not be sustained; and the National Academy of Sciences in the US reported that human actions had caused discernible changes in the composition and abundance of edible marine life, changes sufficiently significant to endanger marine ecosystems.

An article in the November 1995 issue of National Geographic, highlighted the fact that fishing was failing despite all technological advances, because the fish were no longer there. The "wealth of the oceans, once deemed inexhaustible, has proven finite. Fish, once dubbed 'the poor man's protein', has become a resource in demand - and fought over - by nations."

This situation is the result of the modern fishing boom, which lasted about 50 years. Improvements in radar technology allowed boats to fish in fog. Long-range navigation equipment meant that vessels could locate specific areas of the ocean to within 50 feet, and sonar opened up the deepest recesses[108] of the sea darkness. By the 1970s half a million fishing vessels were moving through the seas around the world, tracking and catching fish. Now the figure is over a million. Nearly half the world's oceans are now "claimed" by fishing nations and organisations. Pressure on fishing populations has increased dramatically year after year; now 80 to 90% of some populations of fish are removed each year.

In just half a century of intensive fishing, we have seriously altered and endangered many of the world's wild fish stocks. At the point where wild fish stocks have dwindled[109], technology has come up with the solution again: aquaculture, or the cultivation of fish in controlled environments. Irrespective of the benefits or otherwise of farmed fish, we have been, and continue to be, enormously careless of the perilous[110] balance of marine wildlife populations.

Homo sapiens has existed for less than one-thousandth of the time since animal life ventured from the oceans onto the dry land. Humans are newcomers, with no special immunity against the usual fate of biological species on earth: extinction.

Our extinction threat, or our "endangerment", as a species derives not necessarily from the contamination of local environments with toxic chemicals, or from the outstripping[111] of the Earth's material resources - oil, metals, timber and so forth. Rather, the risk derives from the disruption of natural systems because we are exceeding the planet's capacity to absorb, replenish and restore. That is, because of our impact on other species populations, we are tampering[112] with various natural systems which are vastly helpful in sustaining life.

An estimated 99% of all species that have ever existed on Earth are now extinct. Extinction is, therefore, absolutely the norm. The sort of wild devastation we are wreaking[113] on animal populations surrounding our own can hardly help the chances for survival of either the species coexisting with us for this brief blink of time, or our own. We humans cannot live apart from nature, remote from the great web of life."

We have assumed that just because the human need for something is seemingly limitless, supplies would follow. It is this sort of belief in the mysterious regenerative faculties of nature, which cannot continue.

10. Match the following parts of word combinations from the text. When in place, render the context where they are used in the text.

Additional Language Exercises

11. Study the idiom listed below and then fill in the gaps in the sentences with the right idioms.