In April, Wired published a column on disappearing fish reporting that 96% of all wild fish considered edible, are endangered. The amount of marine fish captured has remained virtually the same since 1995 despite increasingly aggressive tactics. To make up for the difference, and equal amount of fish is being raised on farms. The biggest change for the consumer is the kind of fish we're eating. Fish that are easier to grow like carp and tilapia (which can literally be raised in a bucket of water) are more prevalent. (Mmmm, me like bucket fish.)
That same month, National Geographic published a special report on the vanishing ocean dwellers. Sixty-six pages of photos and articles detailing the state of our oceans in an explosive mix of cruelty, hope and despair. 40 million sharks per year are killed, definned alive and then left to die to support the taste for sharkfin soup in Asia. Recently banned in some countries, heavy iron doors scrape the sea bed for trawling nets where 50-80% of the haul is discarded as "bycatch." Urchins, fish, rays, suffocate aboard the vessel before being thrown overboard. Longline fishing unintentionally traps loggerhead turtles, marine mammals and albatross which make up a 30% bycatch. Shrimp, cod and sole, the intended targets, are becoming harder and harder to find sending fishing boats further offshore for longer periods of time.
The majestic giant bluefin tuna, a fish that can live for 30 years, grow up to 12 feet in length and weigh 1,500 pounds, can dive a half mile to swim at a speed of 25 miles per hour. This large swimmer is easily tracked by sonar and helicopter. Spotters in the air call to boats to tell them where the tuna is traveling, they are captured and kept in offshore cages to be fattened for sushi markets before being shot and slaughtered. Five-million dollar boats are equipped with nets that can encircle 3,000 adult tuna. Caught while they are spawning, or before they can, the species is on the brink of collapse. International laws are weak and easily flouted, more than twice the legal limit of fish is being extracted from the sea.
While nearly two-thirds of the earth is ocean, only .01 percent is protected to 12% of the world's land and despite protection, recovery is slow if not impossible. A hundred years after a ban on hunting bowhead whales, among the largest and longest lived animals on earth, they are still endangered. Entire communities have been devastated by the sudden depletion of fish and in Africa fisherman sell what they catch to Europeans leaving locals to starve or purchase the remaining carcasses for food. Ironically, it was this article, rather than Wired's that illustrated how technology has almost single-handedly led to the ocean's exhaustion.
The next month, I read in National Geographic about factory cities in China that sprout up in a matter of months drawing thousands of workers from rural areas looking for work. Traveling performers come through town to entertain the amassing population and the government shows free outdoor movies in the streets. Within a year, middle-income families have moved into high-rise housing in the area built by razing hundreds of hilltops.
Yet it was Wired that reported on the world's first "green city" being built in China as an experimental response to the environmental devastation sustained by the country for the last sixty years. In a 1940 speech, Mao Tse-tung urged China to conquer nature in order to reach its industrial future. Since then 90% of the trees in some provinces have been razed. For decades, Chinese families smelted steel in their backyards until the untreated waste turned their rivers black. It wasn't until last year that the government calculated what the environmental damage was costing the country: 10% of their GDP or $200 billion a year. Unsafe drinking water, air pollution and vast deserts that have caused flooding and other damage, are the result.
The thrilling challenge of building the world's first eco-city belongs to the international engineering firm, Arup, and their newly recruited star designer who believes the proposed metropolis, Dongtan, "was a rare chance to demonstrate that growth could happen a different way." Elaborate calculations determine how high to build, how dense to populate and ultimately, how much land is green.
A rough outline of the city, a real eco-city, began to take shape: a reasonably dense urban middle, with smart breaks for green space, all surrounded by farms, parks, and unspoiled wetland. Instead of sprawling out, the city would grow in a line along a public transit corridor.
Next, the city needed green power. But the planning process grew complicated. A city is a huge mess of dependent variables. The right recycling facility can turn trash into kilowatts. The right power plant can convert waste energy into heat. The right city map will encourage people to walk to the store instead of drive. "These are things people don't normally plan together," Gutierrez says.
This month, both magazines feature articles on the Noah's Ark of seeds, the Svalbard seed vault. National Geographic reports that The Global Crop Diversity Trust is spearheading a project with funding from Norway to preserve up to three million different seeds from key plants. The mostly food seeds are being kept in an arctic vault for the day when humanity has wiped out the majority of life on this planet - a day fast approaching. While seed vaults already exist, they are incomplete, vulnerable to damage or mismanaged.
Wired details the technology used in this massive undertaking by laying them out like something from Ocean's 11. The vault is guarded by bight lights, motion sensors, cameras and guards in a control tower. At the end of a tunnel that bores 400 feet into a mountain, are two airlocked chambers and protected against fragmenting rock by a steel sheath. The shelves inside the vault are a third of a mile long and hold envelopes with unique serial numbers each containing 500 seeds protected by a five-layer composite material, housed in plastic boxes and chilled to 0 degrees Farenheit, preserving them for centuries. The "living institution" is meant to preserve the means to grow food. One study showed that of 8,000 crop varieties grown in the US in 1903 had dwindled to only 600 in 1983.
The collective consciousness has become so saturated in environmental issues that you can't do, think or say anything without wondering about its impact on the world. I was recently working on a little video timeline of the century for a friend and it occurred to me that things change very quickly. We can change them for the better but the concern is that without conscious effort to do so, we can also very quickly change them for the worse. In the words of Ferris Bueller: "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it."
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