World
Marine wild life about to collapse in 100 years: Study
Washington: The collapse of wildlife on land due human activity is about to recur in the sea in the next 100 years, a consortium of scientists has found.
According to the researchers, wildlife in the oceans is still as healthy as it was on the land hundreds of thousands of years ago.
However, that may be about to change as the next 100 years promise to present major challenges to marine life.
“A lot has changed in the last 200 years. Our tackle box has industrialised,” said lead author Douglas McCauley, professor at University of California – Santa Barbara.
There are factory farms in the sea and cattle-ranch-style feed lots for tuna.
Shrimp farms are eating up mangroves with an appetite akin to that of terrestrial farming which consumed native prairies and forests.
“Stakes for seafloor mining claims are being pursued with gold-rush-like fervour and 300-ton ocean mining machines and 750-foot fishing boats are now rolling off the assembly line to do this work,” explained co-author Steve Palumbi from Stanford University.
According to the authors, increasing industrial use of the oceans and the globalisation of ocean exploitation threaten to damage the health of marine wildlife, making the situation in the oceans as grim as that on land.
As McCauley pointed out, “We now fish with helicopters, satellite-guided super trawlers and long lines that can stretch from New York to Philadelphia.”
“All signs indicate that we may be initiating a marine industrial revolution. We are setting ourselves up in the oceans to replay the process of wildlife Armageddon that we engineered on land,” he warned.
Among the most serious threats to ocean wildlife is climate change, which, according to the scientists, is degrading marine wildlife habitats and has a greater impact on these animals than it does on terrestrial fauna.
The findings were published in the journal Science.
Shanghai’s rich middle class is leading a wave of online dissent over the strict and prolonged lockdowns imposed in various parts of the country. Chinese internet censorship is struggling as patience is wearing thin in many urban centers, coming up with creative forms of online protests.
Social Media Posts Revealing Lockdown Tension in Shanghai
Drawn-out lockdowns are nothing new in China as authorities insist with the nation’s zero-Covid policy since the start of the pandemic. Currently over This time around, however, metropolitan areas like Shanghai are increasingly difficult to keep quiet, given that its more than 25 million residents have seen weeks of total isolation along with food shortages and many other service interruptions.
Dozens of towns and reportedly over 300 million Chinese citizens have been affected by lockdowns of different severity. As expected, urban netizens have been most outspoken over their difficulties by finding creative ways to get around state censorship and bans placed on topics, news comments and spontaneous campaigns.
Shanghai residents have been using mobile proxies and hijacking seemingly unrelated hashtags to talk about healthcare issues, delivery failures and the overall severity of their situation. The “positive energy” that the Chinese government wants to transmit during the recent prolonged series of lockdowns does not come naturally to those counting food supplies and online censors are working hard to filter words, trending topics and undesired social media sharing.
WeChat groups and message threads are under constant monitoring. Posts questioning the zero-Covid approach have been quickly deleted, including by leading Chinese health experts like Dr. Zhong Nanshan. Video footage is soon censored and protests and investigations are quickly made to disappear.
Where this has not worked, officials have exposed banners with warnings and outright threats like “watch your own mouth or face punishment”, while drones have been patrolling the city skies. Yet, if anything, this has led to further tensions and unspoken confrontation with Shanghai’s educated and affluent middle class.
Creative Online Solutions Harnessing Civic Energy
Announcements by Chinese social media that they would be publishing the IP addresses of users who “spread rumors” have not helped either. Tech industry research has shown that much of Asia’s tech-savvy population has a habit of using mobile proxies and other privacy tools, quickly finding workarounds to browse the internet freely and talk to the world about the hottest topics.
The sheer volume of forbidden posts is already a challenge for the very censorship system, experts explain. Unable to track all trending hashtags, state workers overlook topics that speak about the US, Ukraine or other popular news. Linking human rights elsewhere to their situation, Chinese online dissidents establish their informal channels and “hijack” the conversation to share personal or publicly relevant information about the Covid suppression in their town.
Sarcastic and satirical posts still dominate. Others hope to evade the censors by replacing words from famous poems or the national anthem. One thing is certain – social media, when harnessed with the right creativity, has proven its ability to mount pressure on the government in even some of the most strictly controlled tech environments like China.
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