Listening to Cassandra

What follows is a really important article - I can't recomend strongly enought that we should all read it, and take notice:

The Cassandra Principle and the Demise of the Cod by Paul Watson

The problem with being a conservationist is that we have all become like Cassandra, the doom and gloom prophetess princess of Troy. It is our burden to make predictions based on the observed ecological stupidity of humanity and to cast these predictions out as warnings. And like Cassandra, we appear doomed to have our predictions ignored or dismissed...I warned the Canadian government that the Atlantic cod fishery would collapse within a decade. It collapsed in 1992.....The government announced a two-year moratorium. I told the media in Newfoundland and Canada that a two-year moratorium was ridiculous. I said at the time that the cod would not recover in ten years or fifty years and may not recover at all....The Canadian government and its small army of scientific posers that I call biostitutes dismissed me as a doom and gloom environmentalist. I was called naïve, ignorant, stupid, and overly dramatic.

Thirteen years later, my prediction is becoming reality.

This month, researchers who have studied data over a 40-year period have discovered that the food chain in the North Atlantic has been drastically altered with the disappearance of the cod.

What this means, is that the entire Northwest Atlantic marine ecosystem is being restructured because of the collapse of East Coast cod populations. These same scientists are now saying that the data indicates that recovery of the cod may be impossible.....The three basic laws of ecology have been violated for too many years:

- The Law of Diversity that rules that the strength of an ecosystem is dependent upon the diversity of species within it.

- The Law of Interdependence that rules that all these species must be interdependent.

- And the Law of Finite Resources that dictates that there are limits to growth.

You don’t need expensive complex, long-winded, drawn-out studies to predict that an ecosystem is in trouble. You just need to observe if the three ecological laws are being respected.

We soooo don't learn. It guess nature will teach us.