Comments on: Remember The Blue Planet

By: GM

GM — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 05:33:13 +0000

As far as I am aware, St. Francis never mentioned anything about carrying capacity or the need to restrain human activities so that we don’t overshoot.

Of course, while I do have a keen interest in the history of intellectual thought, when faced with the choice of learning something about the natural world and learning something about people’s misconceptions 800 years, I typically chose the former, so I may be wrong. Correct me if this is the case

By: Ian

Ian — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 14:51:20 +0000

@4 “The attitude illustrated by the above sentence is the reason why we should be fighting against religion and for its complete eradication in any way possible.”

Yeah, yeah – tell that to St Francis.

By: Sean McCorkle

Sean McCorkle — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 23:34:03 +0000

Quite a powerful presentation. It continually escalates to the climax @16:00:

So, um, what are the oceans gonna be like in 20 or 50 years? Um, well there won’t be any fish, except for minnows and, um, the water will be pretty dirty, and and all those kinds of things and full of mercury and etc. etc. and dead zones will get bigger and bigger and they’ll start to merge and we can imagine something like the dead-zonification of the global coastal ocean…

God, all I could think of after that was:

… so remember – Tuesday is Soylent Green day! (cue Beethoven’s 6th symphony, 1st movement.)

By: GM

GM — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 08:16:17 +0000

After a disaster like the BP spill, images like this brown pelican drenched in oil remind us that we ought to be better stewards of oceans

The attitude illustrated by the above sentence is the reason why we should be fighting against religion and for its complete eradication in any way possible. The anthropocentrism that has been drilled into our collective consciousness over the centuries is so pervasive and so self-destructive that there is no other way to make us understand what our actual place in the universe is and still have religion around

We have no obligation to be stewards of anything; to think we do so is arrogance of the grandest scale. Humanity is not outside and above the environment, it is a subsystem of it. The environment is not there for us to forage on it and we’re not here to be “stewards” of the environment. The only obligation we have is towards our evolutionary imperative to survive, and this is the real reason why we should not be destroying environment.

It would be useful if it is put in the proper “frame” more often

By: Doug Watts

Doug Watts — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 04:45:53 +0000

This is ignorant. The oceans are already destroyed. Calling them a “frontier” is an insult to any marine scientist. They are the most thoroughly raped places on the planet.

By: Roberta

Roberta — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 21:15:58 +0000

I agree.

By: interested bystander

interested bystander — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 20:51:14 +0000

As a layperson who lives far from the ocean, listening to Jackson’s talk about the reality that the oceans (or at least the ones he studies) are in such bad shape, makes me so sad. My husband and I so enjoyed snorkeling for the first time on a recent vacation to Hawaii. A fish-less coral reef would be such a tragedy. I really had no idea that over fishing, pollution and climate change were adding up so much. People need to hear this.