This Is The Way The World Ends

On November 3, 2015, Scripps Oceanography put out a press release about fish populations off the California coast.

The California Current is home to many marine animals, including marine fishes, which are the most diverse vertebrates on Earth and critical to marine ecology.

Two independent long-term time series now reveal strikingly similar trends of wide-ranging declines in fish populations in the California Current.

Tony Koslow and John McGowan, researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, and Eric Miller of MBC Applied Environmental Sciences of Costa Mesa, compared two independently collected data sets from the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) and power plant cooling water intakes (PPI) from five sites along the California coastline.

The data show that fish abundance from both studies has declined sharply since 1970, with a 72 percent decline in overall larval fish  abundance in the CalCOFI data set and a 78 percent decline in fishes from the PPI sampling.

Although there was limited overlap in species between the nearshore PPI samples and the more offshore CalCOFI sampling, the correlation between the two time series was about 0.85. The study was published in Marine Ecology Progress Series.

“It is notable that these two very distinct data sets tell us that the larval fish populations collected by CalCOFI and near shore fish species observed by PPI data are both declining at nearly the same rates,” said Scripps researcher John McGowan.

It is indeed notable that two distinct data sets show a greater than 70% decline in fish populations in the California Current ecosystem since 1970 (the last 45 years).

But saying that something is notable doesn't mean anyone will actually notice it. I found four stories reporting on fish declines in Google News. All these reports were local. Only phys.org picked up the story nationally (they reprinted the press release). The Orange County Register reported that warming of the California current was most likely the cause of the fish declines. That is almost certainly correct.

"This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper," said T.S. Elliot, and he was right. These California fish declines are yet another whimper in an ailing world. It is death by a thousand cuts.

I remember the mid-1990s. I was living in Boulder, Colorado and I was watching my local world turn to shit. Very suddenly, it seemed, everybody was driving SUVs, my girlfriend too. All of a sudden the world seemed crowded. All that traffic. The historic landmarks which had given Boulder its hippie charm were disappearing, replaced by bland new "development" of the usual kind. I sensed then that something was deeply wrong with that picture.

And of course things just went downhill from there. In the fifties when I was growing up people would miss the old things but were perfectly content to say "that's progress" and you can't stand in its way. But in the 1990s I knew that what I was looking at wasn't progress. It was a very slow-moving catastrophe.

Most humans don't notice the damage they do. I've discussed the reasons for this, but don't want to get into it here. Suffice it to say that damage happens gradually on the human time scale, and we would need a new Rip Van Winkle to tell us what just happened. If poor Rip went to sleep in 1970 and woke up now, he would probably die of shock.

A few others wait for a "collapse" because humans are wired to fear and respond to sudden threatening events, even optimists. You know, real attention grabbers, like a panther leaping out of the bush. Without some big calamity, humans hardly notice anything at all. At least modern humans don't, if it's not happening in their immediate physical environment. I mean, in your face. Otherwise, it's all so abstract, it's all so far away. Like it doesn't exist.

Like those now-visible fish declines and those SUVs in the 1990s—suddenly those monster trucks were everywhere, but nobody actually seemed to notice.

Big calamities are rare. That's not the way the world ends. And if you have a catastrophe, it's already way too late to fix things because The Bang was preceded by lots and lots of Whimpers.

All of this sucks of course, especially if you are cursed to be able to see it. In the 1990s, I would go to dinner parties and talk about what was going on. I would say stuff like "hey, all these SUVs, this is really fucked up!" That didn't make me popular. I was complaining about overpopulation at a party one time, and a woman told me "that's just not how we [humans] work."

I knew right away she was right. And so here we are. Death by a thousand cuts, none of which is fatal in itself, but, taken altogether ... well, you know what I mean. It's so sad.

Comments

[Brian]

It is that.

My kids ask me why things happen all the time, and I find myself knowing that it's because that's "just the way we are", but not wanting to burden them with that reality yet. So, I try to explain in more Flatlandish terms why these or those people are doing this or that ridiculous thing. There will come a time when my explanations will have to be more realistic and, hence, more depressing. But that time is not just yet. And, of course, we'll be that much further down the rabbit hole by then.

Yes, sad it is.