At dinner the other night some friends and I got to talking about the health of the world's oceans. It was painful to think of the dead spots, the pollution, the mass harvesting of sea life with its collateral damage to so many species. Long lines do not discriminate. Fishermen go after sharks and kill sea turtles and dolphins and sea birds and much, much more.
I began looking at shark fishing and ran across a wonderful series of videos Sharkwater by Rob Stewart. His film moved my heart and shifted my thinking. I learned that 90% of the world's sharks are gone. When the top predator that shapes ocean life is gone, it is very hard to imagine the potential impacts. One possibility is that the animals that eat phytoplankton will proliferate and decimate phytoplankton supplies. Phytoplankton absorbs CO2 and produces O2 (if I understand this right). Without phytoplankton, what will happen to the oxygen levels that we depend on to live?
From a systems perspective and from a Buddhist understanding of interconnectedness, we need to act from a high enough perspective to hold and protect the whole. No one protects the oceans; and sharks are considered by so many as harmful and dangerous. And shark fin soup is so prestigious.
With the shark's demise and the crashing populations of sharks all over the world, the web of life is damaged.
With a great hole in the web of life, all life suffers. It may not seem like our lives depend on the sharks, but in the interconnectedness of all things, we don't have a separate existence. Without the sharks, I am less, we are diminished, and life has an absence--something missing in the web.
What will we say to our grandchildren about how we lost the life of the oceans?
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