This is it, this is our place, the only one like it.
As far as we can see into space, there is no other planet capable of supporting complex life, our lives. And our atmosphere is so thin, its like a miracle that it stays there.

Scattered through the unimaginable reaches of icy darkness between us and the big bang, are stars and galaxies of all ages and types, black holes, quasars, pulsars, giant galaxies, warped spaces, and plenty of other inconceivabilities that do not conform to the way physics is understood here on earth. Its hard not to respect nature, considering that.

All of the inhabitants of this blue heaven are the children of an eternity so long that altering it is courageous indeed, given that we aren't going to be taking off for fairer fields if we go wrong. Nevertheless, humanity's crimes against life have thrown Earth's life support systems into crisis, and the number of extinctions is about a thousand times the normal rate.

Shark finning is one of the prominent crimes against life practiced today. All across the vast blue reaches of our sapphire planet, the magnificent apex predators are systematically hunted down for their valuable fins and tails, which are easily slashed off with a knife. The animal is tossed away as trash. Back in the ocean, finned sharks, like little planes stripped of their wings, slowly sink, dying, into the crushing densities of the abyssal depths. Only five percent of the shark is used. In a protein starved world, such waste is a crime against life.

China's growing middle class provides the biggest market for shark fin soup, with millions more newly rich Chinese being able to afford the luxury dish with each passing year. China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand are the biggest consumers of the tasteless dish, which sells for about ninety dollars a bowl. (Shark fins are worth about 300 dollars per pound).
But this methodical massacre is not the only way that sharks are being killed. The enormous scale of commercial long-line fishing and by-catch, habitat loss and destruction, particularly of their nursery areas in shallow waters near shores, pollution, and a variety of smaller operations which have great impact taken together, are drastically compounding the problem.

Sharks, around whom oceanic life has evolved for several hundreds of millions of years, are nearly gone, like the buffalo of the American west, but on a planetary scale. Life came from the oceans, and flowers on the earth because the oceans continue to moderate the planetary life support systems. But the destruction of the ocean's complex life will kill them. And how will we live, then?

Ila France Porcher © 2008

A True Nightmare

Who could have said that today,
our life would change this way,
and no matter what we can try,
we are surely about to die.

It started a few moments ago,
and why it happened we do not know,
as we were peacefully patrolling the sea,
my hundred friends and me.

Our swimming path was blocked,
and in a trap we were all caught,
as from the ship fell a huge net,
which we knew would mean our death.

We had seen these nets before,
and we all knew what was in store,
for friends of ours had died this way,
and now this was our final day.

As the nets closed compressing us tight,
we all tried uselessly to put up a fight,
and as we were lifted out of our sea,
panic engulfed my friends and me.

On the ship's deck we were released,
and we saw humans grinning with greed,
as one by one they took us away,
for on this ship we would not stay.

And as they pinned us to the floor,
we each felt pain like never before,
as our fins and tails were cut off with a knife,
and our mutilated body thrown back to sea alive.

As now we cannot swim anymore,
and slowly drop to the ocean floor,
our imminent death is so very near,
and for our species extinction we fear.

Alex 'The Sharkman' Buttigieg©

January15th, 1999