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Plastic was first created in 1907. But, today, it’s virtually everywhere — including in our oceans. Marine animals (including whales, birds, turtles, dolphins and fishes) are paying the price for our throw-away lifestyle of convenience. Countless sea animals are ingesting and getting tangled-up in plastic debris, often with fatal results. There is no end in sight with the millions of tons of plastic dumped into our oceans every year, which does not biodegrade, but rather breaks into ever smaller (and still destructive) pieces of toxic plastic. Please seriously minimize your plastic use (especially single-use plastic), recycle what you can (keeping in mind that a lot of plastics actually cannot be recycled), and try to use biodegradable and reusable bags and packaging as much as possible. Of course, in addition to this plastic crisis, we are also overfishing the oceans at an alarming, unprecedented and increasing rate. According to the 2016 United Nations’ SOFIA report, a staggering 89.1% of fisheries are now fully or overfished. With a human population of 7.5 billion and growing, if everyone has seafood in their diets, then overfishing seems to be the inevitable result. But, the assault on our oceans from overfishing is actually something we can stop quite rapidly, if we collectively decide to stop eating fish. Humans have no nutritional need to eat any fish (or any other animal foods), and fish is far from a health-food (for a number of reasons, one of which is the pervasive mercury and plastic contamination). So, in addition to seriously reducing your plastic use, please take the simple and much needed step for our oceans, the rest of the planet, the animals, and yourself — and keep fish (and other animal foods) off your plate. |