“World’s oceans in ‘shocking’ decline” proclaims the BBC website, based upon the outcome of this workshop by the IPSO.  Well, yes. Given the steadily rising human population on the planet, particularly the numbers that live in coastal zones and depend upon the sea for their subsistence or income, significant pollution and biodiversity loss is pretty much inevitable.

The obvious question to follow this astounding insight is: “What are we going to do about it?” To which no-one has any more satisfactory answer than “fiddle at the margins” (obviously I am paraphrasing). Whilst individual countries can contribute significantly to sustaining the diversity and health of their own coastal waters, in the face of the kind of global apathy and coordinated sociopathy that currently predominates in international forums, they are all but powerless. The plethora of human activities which contribute to the observed decline are near-impossible to influence on a national basis due to the global nature of the legislation governing many of those activities. That and the geopolitical infighting afflicting those same international organisations as dominant powers struggle to capture as many natural resources as possible to fuel their own supremacist struggles.

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