The End of the World As We Know It?

Happy Canada Day to my Canadian visitors.

My wife and I and our wild banshees are just getting ready to embark on a three week road trip to Newfoundland. My posts will be more infrequent during this time but I will keep dropping in whether you like or not.

The issue I would like to feature today was inspired by my love for the Canadian east coast and Dan Carlin's most recent Common Sense podcast entitled A Conflict of Interest. Carlin drew my attention to an article by Johann Hari in The Independent which asks the startling question: Could we be the generation that runs out of fish? The article begins with the arresting line: "In the babbling Babel of 24/7 news – where elections, bailouts and beheadings blur into one long shriek – the slow-motion stories that will define our age are often lost." Hari then goes on to explain how the world needs to immediately ban fishing in 30% of the world's ocean area (instead of the current 0.6%) and impose strict fishing quotas on the remainder if we hope to avoid the imminent extinction of the world's wild fish stocks. Sounds straightforward, doesn't it? That's where Carlin comes back in to explain how the governments and interest groups that currently profit from the ongoing rape of our oceans are essentially biting off their noses to spite their faces by resisting the only measures that will allow the world's fishing industries to continue.

Hari's article can be found at: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-could-we-be-the-generation-that-runs-out-of-fish-1697247.html

There is a compelling argument to be made that what is currently happening with our oceans is a real-time example of how mankind is driving itself headlong into extinction. This dilemma was probably explained best by Richard Dawkins in an open letter to Prince Charles almost a decade ago:

" ...... we must beware of a very common misunderstanding of Darwinism. Tennyson was writing before Darwin but he got it right. Nature really is red in tooth and claw. Much as we might like to believe otherwise, natural selection, working within each species, does not favour long-term stewardship. It favours short-term gain. Loggers, whalers, and other profiteers who squander the future for present greed, are only doing what all wild creatures have done for three billion years.

No wonder T.H. Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, founded his ethics on a repudiation of Darwinism. Not a repudiation of Darwinism as science, of course, for you cannot repudiate truth. But the very fact that Darwinism is true makes it even more important for us to fight against the naturally selfish and exploitative tendencies of nature. We can do it. Probably no other species of animal or plant can. We can do it because our brains (admittedly given to us by natural selection for reasons of short-term Darwinian gain) are big enough to see into the future and plot long-term consequences. Natural selection is like a robot that can only climb uphill, even if this leaves it stuck on top of a measly hillock. There is no mechanism for going downhill, for crossing the valley to the lower slopes of the high mountain on the other side. There is no natural foresight, no mechanism for warning that present selfish gains are leading to species extinction – and indeed, 99 per cent of all species that have ever lived are extinct.

The human brain, probably uniquely in the whole of evolutionary history, can see across the valley and can plot a course away from extinction and towards distant uplands. Long-term planning - and hence the very possibility of stewardship - is something utterly new on the planet, even alien. It exists only in human brains. The future is a new invention in evolution. It is precious. And fragile. We must use all our scientific artifice to protect it.

It may sound paradoxical, but if we want to sustain the planet into the future, the first thing we must do is stop taking advice from nature. Nature is a short-term Darwinian profiteer. Darwin himself said it: 'What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horridly cruel works of nature.'

Of course that's bleak, but there's no law saying the truth has to be cheerful; no point shooting the messenger - science - and no sense in preferring an alternative world view just because it feels more comfortable. In any case, science isn't all bleak. Nor, by the way, is science an arrogant know-all. Any scientist worthy of the name will warm to your quotation from Socrates: 'Wisdom is knowing that you don't know.' What else drives us to find out? [my emphasis] source - http://www.agbioworld.org/biotech-info/religion/dawkins.html

We have the chance right now to ensure that what we see happening to our world's fish stocks is not just another step towards the end of the world as we know it. Unlike the battle against global warming, the solution is ridiculously simple. The question is whether our governments will close the barn door before the horses escape.

My hope is that my and your kids won't be reading this in 30 years time asking why we didn't do more to preserve the oceans. If you share this fear, I encourage you to email this URL to your Member of Parliament, Minister of the Environment or other like government representative. The message is clear and simple: the solution to saving our world fish stocks is easy - we just have to do it.