JOHN VC

Santa went about 3 miles down the chimney to fetch me a fabulous book on abyssal critters. It’s called “The Deep” by Claire Nouvian and if it doesn’t make your eyes bug out like some weird never-seen crustacean then you are beyond being amazed by anything. There may never have been a book published before with so much to look at.

The book may also have the greatest impact on public awareness since “The Silent Spring.” It repeats a message which is gut wrenching in the context of all this surreal beauty: the oceans, where we are only now finding so many new things, are simultaneously in the process of being destroyed by human pillaging. It’s clear-cutting and exterminating on a scale that makes what happened to rain forests and prairies look trivial. For example, we have just discovered vast deep-water coral reefs off of Norway, with individual “trees” the size of sequoias. They are already half gone, destroyed after only 20 years of deep-sea trawling.

Tuna, swordfish, toothfish (or “Chilean seabass”), cod, herring, anchovies, and dozens of other species are at the brink or past it, and the looters are moving on to other kinds of fish that were “trash” in the past, most of which are deep water types that reproduce far more slowly than the robust top-of-the-chain species that used to swim in vast schools near the surface - no more.

Richard Leakey put it very well: “Homo sapiens is becoming the greatest catastrophic agent since a giant asteroid collided with the earth 65 million years ago, wiping out half the world’s species in a geological instant.” A million years from now, the Martian explorers will look at the strata and see a single black layer, full of soot and bits of metal and masonry, at which the fossil record of thousands of species, from tigers and tuna and ivory billed woodpeckers and seacows down to a vast array of plants, molluscs, insects and microbes, will all end simultaneously. Including, perhaps, that of the most numerous large mammal of all.

Can we feed ourselves sustainably, without going to the base of the food chain for tasty varieties of algae and plankton? Can we clean up fish farms, even as we need to clean up chicken and pig farms, so that we can eat meat without living with filth and super parasites? Most of all, can we can shut down the hordes of human scavengers who are busily wrecking the last natural resource we have?