The Human Impact
For many coastal peoples, the sea is rich in meaning and spirituality,
religiously significant and central to their very being. The legends and
traditions of the Maori of New Zealand feature fishing heavily, with
one tale positing that the country was discovered by the great explorer
Kupe while hunting a giant octopus. Traditional coastal whalers in
Japan maintained Shinto whale shrines and whale temples, where detailed
descriptions of the whales and their deaths were maintained. For the
Inupiat of Alaska, the hunting of the bowhead whale remains to this day
more than a form of acquiring food, but is instead the fundamental act
around which every aspect of their society, and indeed the very purpose
of their existence, revolves.
However, the human presence on and near the ocean has not always been to
the ocean’s benefit. Because of over-hunting, gray whales are no longer
found in the Atlantic and are close to disappearing from the western
Pacific; in the Atlantic Arctic, bowhead whales number in the hundreds
at most. In the Southern Hemisphere, where once there were perhaps
200,000 blue whales, there are now maybe 1,000. The great auk, sea mink,
Steller’s sea cow and Caribbean monk seal are all extinct.
Today, the vaquita, a porpoise found only in the Gulf of California, may
number as few as 100 individuals. The southern bluefin tuna and elkhorn
coral are critically endangered, as are several species of sea turtles.
Hammerhead, thresher and white sharks have declined in the Northwest
Atlantic by more than 75 percent in 15 years; in the Mediterranean Sea,
sharks have declined 99.99 percent from historical abundances in the
early nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.
Since 1980, an area of seagrass meadow the size of a soccer pitch has
been lost every 30 minutes, and almost 30 percent of all seagrass beds
are estimated to have been lost. Similarly, about 35 percent of both
mangroves and coral reefs worldwide are believed to have been damaged or
destroyed as a result of human activities - a figure that does not take
into account the growing impacts of climate change.
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