These numbers will only continue to grow.
It is in these places that we find the extreme concentration of development, industry, manufacturing, toxic waste, untreated chemicals, plastics, air pollutants, sewage and all the rest that, mixed with groundwater run-off and extreme weather events, turns the quality of air, local rivers, adjacent wetlands, and alongshore areas into zones where sickness incubates, or worse, little or nothing can survive. Smog brings sickness; mangrove swamps are filled; reefs are killed; fresh water is undrinkable; beaches are un-swimmable; fisheries are gone; and the ocean is corrupted at such a mammoth scale that it can never be mitigated by marine protected areas located far away. It is an enormous, ever escalating, mutually degrading process of destruction, much of which is invisible or otherwise lost in a fog of indifference, inaction, deliberate avoidance, cynicism and disillusion. It is not that we don’t know what’s happening; it is that we don’t have the determination to save ourselves from it.
Am I being melodramatic? Alarmist? Perhaps. But what will it take for the reality to sink in? And what happens to those millions within megacities if they become unlivable? Where do the unfathomable numbers of climate refugees go? What do they do? What happens next?
Environmental groups must stop fiddling around the edges where victories are easily won. I believe in these organizations, yet I feel they should find the energy and imagination to modify or change their strategies to turn their focus to the megacities, not the empty spaces. With energy, effort, imagination, and invention we have the power to transform urban spaces into visionary laboratories for change, to transcend the global perspective and look to home, where even the smallest improvements will touch millions of people for the better. I believe they should apply their conservation values and financial resources to a new, integrated strategy that attacks multiple problems at multiple levels within the local community, re-allocating existing capital from within to design and implement technologies and systems, many of which are within our grasp, that will advance a different, coherent, community-based response that challenges conventional situations, processes, and social behaviors now and sets them on end. Let’s take those megacities by the sea and turn them into exemplary marine protected areas.
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Peter Neill is founder and director of the World Ocean Observatory, a web-based place of exchange for information and educational services about the health of the world ocean. Online at worldoceanobservatory.org.
December 2016 - Conservation Comments
SEVENSEAS - 91