We've Seen the Enemy and the Enemy Is UsPowered by CYBER DIVER News Network
by FREEMAN WASHINGTONRush hour traffic at Stingray City in the Cayman Islands Earth is a beautiful planet. It is also small, fragile, crowded and ravaged by overpopulation and overdevelopment, primarily in coastal areas. Even if birth rates in developing countries rapidly decline, which seems unlikely, there will be twice as many of us by 2050. At the same time, rapid economic development around the world will further diminish our planetīs biodiversity. In this century 20-50% of earth's species will be wiped out by earth's most powerful exterminator--us. Scientists, self-taught eco experts and environmental groups around the world are working frantically to save what's left. Ecological scientists have isolated fragments of pristine natural habitat and are literally building walls around these areas to prevent further damage and destruction. The strategy is a last ditch effort to "push the species of the world through a bottleneck" as Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson describes it. The bottleneck is us, six billion today, another 250,000 tomorrow and every day after that, and 12 billion or so by 2050. A fifty year interval, a nanosecond on the evolutionary timeline. The neck of the bottle is becoming smaller every day. Yet on the street, in the board rooms of multinational corporations, in the corridors of government bureaucracies, the prevailing view of nature remains one of exploitation and development that excuses environmental destruction for the sake of economic benefit. It is a view based on the absurd and self-destructive notion that we are dominant and possess the power to defy the limits of natural systems and resources. For every dollar contributed to projects aimed at preserving our environment, millions go to mutual funds which promise to make us wealthy. At the end of the day, most of us are quite content to kill off a few more species and natural habitats for the good life down on easy street. No matter that easy street is also crowded and polluted. For a price equal to the total annual income of many third world communities, we can jet off to some idyllic coastal resort and spend a week or two communing with nature and partying around the pool. We can dive in habitats where marine species are more predictable and better trained than we are. We can buy T-shirts in shops owned by the same companies that sell similar stuff at our local shopping mall. We can eat the same food we eat at home, watch the sun go down and enjoy a generic nightlife experience at the franchise bar. We can dive, eat, drink and be happy with all the comfort and cultural accoutrements upon which we have become so dependent. Who could imagine there wasn't anything here except mangroves just a few years ago? Diving is now a mainstream tourist activity and tour diving infrastructure has rapidly expanded in coastal areas around the world. This rapid expansion has contributed to marine habitat degradation in many areas where resort developments designed to accommodate divers have taken the place of once pristine coastal ecosystems. Mangroves, earth's nursery for marine biodiversity, have been cut down. Sewer pipes have been built into the sea and raw sewage is discharged into fragile marine habitats. Water runoff from developed areas carries pollutants that create algal blooms which in turn damages coral, the foundation of earth's most diverse marine ecosystems. Despite the environmental spin on diving, the high-profile beach cleanups and contributions to marine conservation efforts, the diving industry, in its race to expand the market, is pushing diving infrastructure into every pristine coastal habitat on the planet. In so doing, the diving industry and the global diving community have inadvertently become part of the problem. The Galapagos is just one example. In all the rhetoric that followed the sudden influx in population there during the 90's, our responsibility for igniting the gold rush was conveniently overlooked. No one ever mentioned that in our absence, the sudden surge in population, and all the problems that came with it, never would have happened. In other areas, dolphins and whales are no longer threatened by the fishing industry, their new enemies are the hordes of tourists who have become an unwelcome monkey on the back of marine mammals. We need to seriously confront these problems and make a more genuine and sincere commitment to marine conservation. Limits need to be placed on development and some areas should remain inviolate. The rate of population growth is alarming, yet, the global diving community is expanding even faster. To ensure the health of fragile marine habitats and protect marine biodiversity, we need to understand and accept that some areas in the world should be designated as marine santuaries which are off limits to everyone including us, the world diving community. © CDNN - CYBER DIVER NEWS NETWORK | 
