Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Treasures of the deep?

The Informed Reader (B12) scoops Dec. 20's New York Review of Books.

Writes professor Tim Flannery:

Scientists know more about the surface of the moon than about life on the ocean floor...much of [ocean life] is threatened by the persistent notion that such distant zones are largely empty and have little connection to human activity.

Humans have bombarded the depths for years with chemical weapons, industrial waste, sewage and sunken ships . Meanwhile, trawling has brought some deep-sea creatures to the dinner table. "Like the sump of an engine, the deep is where much of the muck accumulates...But unlike a sump, the pollutants of the deep don't stay there."

What goes down, comes up, I guess. Why don't people just eat normal fish? Shallow-water ones?

1 comment:

Aurora said...

Hannah, this is the same Tim Flannery who was 'Australian of the year' either last year or the year before. Here he makes a fairly decent point, but he can be a real moonbat on other issues. Good point about the fish though.