I am beginning to wonder if there is anything human beings haven't messed up in the last three or four decades. Whether it's financial deficits, the faltering environment or the destruction of our own "American dream," it appears that massive consumption, over-population and a sense of unrestrained entitlement are directly responsible for an array of societal and environmental problems.Today I learned of this bit of sobering news: Scientists have concluded that more than 54 percent of the decline of large predator fish has taken place in the last 40 years. Forty-years! That's not even a blink of the eye in the timeline of mankind.
So what is it about human beings in the last half century that make them so destructive? Are there just too many of us now? Or have we lost our sense of stewardship? Maybe it's a combination of many things, including the never-ending quest for expanding profits. We can blame it on technology that tends to proclaim more is better, or bad parenting, or some sort of cosmic shift. But there is no denying that there is something wrong with a generation of humans that has left so many scars on the planet so rapidly that in one or two more generations we may have to visit an aquarium to see anything bigger than a guppy or a zoo to see a large cat. And if those were the only problems related to mass extinctions, it would be sad but survivable for us. However, extinctions have a domino effect that impacts virtually everyone and everything. Of course, as we get dumber (yes, our rankings in education in the U.S. have also plummeted in the last few decades), it seems less likely that we're going to fix what ails us.
The real predators in this world aren't the sharks. They only take what they need. It's human beings who will cut off a shark's fin (for soup) and callously discard the rest of the fish. It's human beings who destroy oxygen-producing rain forests and kill the Chesapeake Bay with factory farm-produced toxins so that some corporation can produce chickens at a rate that keeps stock prices high. It's developers who knock down trees and fill in wetlands so that it's easier and more cost efficient to build shopping centers and residential subdivisions, even as current retail stores and homes remain vacant. And we're all guilty of wanting everything we consume for the lowest possible price, which leads to all sorts of abuses, including child labor and defective products. So in a way, we create the predators who are cleaning out the oceans and depleting other natural resources.
Click here to read more about the assault on our oceans and why you eventually will be eating sardines instead of cod or salmon.
