Different Pollutant, Similar Result
The world’s oceans are every bit as important to the inhabitability of the planet as forests and prairies are because they produce immense quantities of oxygen and, until we short circuited the atmosphere, absorbed billions of BTUs of solar radiation.
The oceans are their own unique biosphere, excreting and metabolizing in manners quite different from most terrestrial life. Like the rest of the planet, though, the atmosphere within the oceans is self-regulating, providing food and shelter in harmonious balance, until greedy Homo sapiens came along and treated the oceans like a garbage dump.
Put another way, it is a well known fact that dumping waste, both liquid and solid, into the oceans is a good way of causing harm. Done often enough and with sufficient volume, such dumping can kill an ocean, just as is the case today with the Gulf of Mexico and North Pacific Gyre. What is less widely known is that acidifying the oceans can be even more damaging.
Since the oceans cover about three-quarters of the face of the planet, logic would dictate that we cannot acidify all of our oceans at once, right?
For the answer, return next time when I will lay it out for you. The answer lies in an historic series of conversations which took place about 30 years ago in various government bodies in the Northeastern United States and Canadian Maritime Provinces. The difference between now and then is that the question regarded fresh water lakes and boreal forests.
Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line
Corbett Kroehler
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