Marine Pollution Bulletin 126 (2018) 436–437
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Editorial
Life on Earth is better than ever!
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On the 25 August 2017, The Times of London, in an article headlined ‘Life on Earth is Better than Ever!’ quoted Sir David Attenborough FRS (91) in an address to the delegates of the Edinburgh International Television Festival on the preceding day as saying that he had detected a “worldwide shift” in attitudes towards conservation and that (politicians) “realise that people worldwide … wish to protect their natural world”. Much as I respect and admire the television presenter, I am afraid that, and though junior to Sir David's eminence, his opinions, if accurately reflected in the article's headline, do not find accord with my own observations about the state of the planet. As a marine biologist, one of the reasons I retired early from the University of Hong Kong thirteen years ago was the increasingly parlous state of the habitats and species inhabiting this city state's badly and increasingly polluted coastal waters. A graphic example of this decline is provided by the fact that in the 1970s and 1980s, the lower intertidal of Hong Kong's exposed rocky shores were awash for a few months over winter with a broad band of Sargassum fronds up to three metres long, and with a concomitantly associated fauna (Morton and Morton, 1983, figs 5.1 & 5.2), but not now. And nobody has investigated or knows why. Since my return to a small town on the Sussex coast in 2004 and where I live opposite a remnant marsh of the River Arun, I have not heard a cuckoo calling for ten years now suggesting that either it or its egg host species, reed and sedge warblers, no longer return here. In reply to a letter from me this year to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and past president of WWF International, H.R.H. stated and I quote: “My impression is that most of the migratory birds coming to this country are rapidly disappearing. Windsor Castle used to be a favourite nesting place for swallows, swifts and house martins. I have not seen any this year at all!” Such an observation matches my own here in West Sussex. I freely admit, however, that I am only an ‘amateur’ bird watcher, but countrywide, ‘professionals’ say the same thing. Moreover, in an article in the Sunday Times Magazine dated 26 September 2016, the naturalist and bird watcher Simon Barnes revealed that over the past 46 years, 56% of Britain's terrestrial wildlife species have declined. In a meticulously detailed State of Nature report compiled by 53 wildlife and research organisations, of the 8000 species assessed, 15% were considered to be threatened with extirpation nation-wide. I very, very, rarely see honey bees in the garden now and, increasingly fewer and fewer bumblebees, which the Sunday Times of the 27 August this year identified as being wiped out in Britain by the neonicotinoid agricultural pesticides thiamethoxam and thiacloprid, as are leaf beetles and stone flies. One must not have access to newspapers, a radio or a television to not know that in southern Africa, elephants and rhinoceroses are being slaughtered by poachers in numbers almost to the point of extinction - especially in the latter case. Briefly returning to Britain's seas, a Sunday Times article on 18 June 2017 entitled ‘Fishing gear kills up to 4,000 Cornish dolphins’ reported that scientists investigating the 1000 dead individuals identified on British and French beaches in the spring of 2016 concluded Cornwall's inshore dolphin population is being wiped out by fishing boats. A marine biologist at La Rochelle University who examined 700 stranded common dolphins, Delphinus delphis, on French beaches showed that most had suffered trauma “generally attributed to (fisheries) by catch”. Britain's Marine Conservation Society organises an annual beach cleanup and during the one-day event in September 2016, 6000 volunteers picked up 268,384 pieces of litter from 364 of their local beaches. But, in more general terms, and returning to the newspaper's report of Sir David's speech and interview, I and 2080 other scientists worldwide completed an annual questionnaire in 2016 on ‘Global Environmental Problems and the Survival of Humankind’ organised by the Asahi Glass Foundation in Japan. The foundation relates our responses in the annual questionnaire on the state of the global environment in terms of a visual (12 hour) Doomsday Clock. Since 1992 when the clock read 7:49, it has risen steadily to 9:31 in 2016. That is, overall, scientists were Fairly Concerned about the state of the global environment in 1992. Today, they are Extremely Concerned. The latest results of the questionnaire were announced at the IUCN World Conservation Congress held in Hawaii in September 2016 and, regrettably again, these do not find accord with Sir David's reported views. In the marine environment, aside from the issues of over-fishing, pollution, sea level rise and climate change, there is the problem of plastics in all its varied modern usages. On 30 October 2015, The Times of London reported that billions of tiny plastic beads (microbeads), less than 1 mm in diameter and used in bubble baths, facial scrubs, shampoos, shower gels and toothpastes, for no reason other than either glitter or an extra fine abrasive, are flushed down our sinks, showers and baths, pass straight through sewage treatment systems and end up in the sea. Here, they are ingested by zooplankters, bivalves, polychaetes, sponges and other suspension feeders and sea bed scavengers and then pass up the food chain back to us in our seafood. Subsequent to these revelations, other newspapers in Britain have joined the campaign to ban the microbeads from what are essentially ‘fad’ cleansing lotions, upon which an estimated ₤4.5 million is spent each year. Further, wet wipes and fleeces popular with some as outdoor winter clothing have been shown to release thousands of tiny polyester fibres each time they are flushed away and washed, respectively, and end up in the marine food chain too. On 28 January 2017, the Daily Mail newspaper launched a campaign, following on from an earlier one to halt the widespread use of plastic carrier https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2017.11.043 Received 20 November 2017; Received in revised form 21 November 2017 0025-326X/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Marine Pollution Bulletin 126 (2018) 436–437
Editorial
bags, to recycle plastic bottles by putting a refundable deposit on each one. The campaign was launched with graphic images of, mostly plastic, litter strewn along British beaches. In one of the most shocking examples of littered beaches, however, The Times reported on 16 May 2017 that one of the most isolated islands on Earth, Henderson Island, part of the Pitcairn Islands British Overseas Territory, 3000 miles from the nearest significant human population, and which was designated as a World Heritage Site in 1988, is contaminated with plastic beach litter. Scientists investigating this mess estimated there to be, overall, 37 million pieces of such litter weighing 17.6 tonnes on the island's beaches. And, further, investigations revealed there to be an average of 239 pieces per square metre (672 on the most polluted beach) and that this was being added to at a rate of 27 pieces each day. The Zoological Society of London in the summer 2016 edition of its magazine ‘Wild About’, estimated that there are 46,000 pieces of plastic in every square mile of ocean, 13 billion single use plastic bottles are purchased in Britain each year (but with only three billion being recycled), 100 g of greenhouse gases are produced in the manufacture of each bottle (about 8% of all oil production) and that 90% of all seabirds have pieces of plastic in their guts. In one study, 95% of northern fulmars, Fulmarus glacialis, washed up dead on North Sea beaches had an average of forty-four pieces of plastic in their stomachs. Worldwide, it is estimated that every year eight billion tonnes of plastic wastes end up as floating debris in our global oceans. And, little of this is collected such that most simply degrades and accumulates in near surface gyres and eventually and slowly, sinks onto the seabed. In an interesting article in the Daily Mail of 5 August 2017, scientists at the University of Exeter in Britain were quoted as suggesting that so much plastic is now ending up on the sea bed, only really within the last fifty years, that it will form an ‘anthropocenic’ layer in the geological record. Now, that is worth thinking about seriously as our generation's legacy for the future. But there is some hope, at least in Britain, because the five pence charge levied on plastic carrier bags by supermarkets, following on from the successful campaign to end the free availability of such products, has led to nine billion fewer bags being handed out and an 83% decline in their use by the public. And some of the money from the present sale of bags will be used to promote beach clean ups organised by the Marine Conservation Society. And, the British government has also committed to introduce legislation this year to ban the sale and manufacture of microbeads. But this is only in Britain with a population of some 65 million, but what about Europe with some 750 million and, ultimately, the world with over nine billion people and still growing? Now, I am sure that David Attenborough is as aware of the above, very few, facts about the parlous state of our Earth's environment and it is thus difficult to understand why he, or more likely, The Times, feels that Life on Earth is better than ever or, at least, as this newspaper headlined his lecture. I think it is to do with his career as a television naturalist presenter. There is no doubt that the programmes, such as Life on Earth and the Blue Planet, to be followed up by Blue Planet II this year (2017), which he presents and sends him to some of the most wonderful wildlife locations on the globe, are immensely popular worldwide and has made him a celebrity who is watched and listened to with almost saint-like affection. Today, however, in our personal inactivity and growing obesity, at least in the west (And did you know that, since 2012, more people on Earth are dying of health risks associated with obesity than they are from starvation?), watching such documentary programmes, from our all too comfortable sofas and armchairs, we have actually divorced ourselves from the awful reality of the state of our Earth's environment. And in Sir David's programmes we only see what highly sophisticated cameras and their operators seeking the most unique and startlingly amazing images, want us to see. When all around us, but this time in actual reality and largely un-noticed by a majority of the world's population, the living species we share this planet with are declining at, some would say, an alarming rate. Sometimes, I personally fear for the survival of humankind unless there are dramatic, and I do mean dramatic, changes in personal and public attitudes towards the environmental problems bedevilling our world and us. And re-assurances of and an all too readily accepted contrary view of a wonderful world of television wildlife only serves to foster complacency and a wholly unrealistic understanding of the present parlous state of Life on Earth. References Morton, B., Morton, J., 1983. The Sea Shore Ecology of Hong Kong. Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong (pp. i-xiv + 350).
Brian Morton School of Biological Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China E-mail address:
[email protected]
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