It is hard for me to see the sea and not get angry.
In other lines and in other places I have written about friends and acquaintances that experience the destruction that we have brought upon our land and our water and our air. I realize that I have not so much written about myself, about my own anger at what I see. It started with my family flying from the argentinian genocide and landing in Venezuela. My parents embraced the lush nature of the tropics and early enough I went to the mountains and to the sea and to the big plains. And so I ended up studying biology and ecology, perhaps to extend the great pleasure of being outdoors. Yet I wonder. Would I have been happier if I would have learn some sort of ingeniering? I did do a lot of outdoors as a biologist. But I also learned about extinction. I really wonder. Would I have been less aware of this never ending suicide that we practice, had I studied anything else?
Anyway, I studied biology. Having studied physics before I hankered for some sort of general theory that could make sense of what I was learning, and that’s why I got into evolution. Evolution is a historical science, so sooner or later you get to learn what has been before what we see today. And then is when you begin to hear about the unbelievable massive and irreversible wound that we have already scratched on our planet. Then is when you learn about the ultimate absurdity. My generation is concerned with what we have extinguish, or with what we are about to extinguish. But we only know about the things that we know about. Obvious? perhaps. But think about it. It also means that we can not know what was the diversity of a forest in The Netherlands, for example, before we started counting diversity, right? Yet we started counting diversity hundred years ago, tops. So we are concern about the decline of the larch, of the sea eagle, of the beaver. But what about the wolves? and what about the bears? It was but couple of hundred years ago that these animals roamed under the dutch trees. We kill them all. But we don’t mourn them, because we never saw them.
So with the sea. The North Sea. Dive in the north sea and you will see sand. Now and then the goal of my own diving, a wreck. Because the north sea, exception made by the mediterraneum, is easily the most fared sea in history, so also the one with more wrecks. And is not that deep, so pretty much any wreck is at the reach of a recreational diver like I am, maximally around 50-60 meters under. Also, we dive in wrecks because the rest is sand, and where there is sand, there is no life. Sea life needs what we biologists call hard substrate to lay eggs. If anything lay eggs on the sand, they are covered right away, and they die. So eggs needs something hard and above the sand. So then, nowadays, the wrecks.
The thing here, the thing that I know as a biologist and very few of my fellow divers know, is that the North Sea wasn’t always like this. The north sea was a source of fisheries, yielding tones and tones of whatever men used to fish. So somewhere the fish were laying their eggs, and we were fishing them. Take oysters. If an oyster happen to survive in the sand, right away a few other will grow on top of it. Leave a decade pass, and you will have a oyster bank that is hardly distinguishable from a reef, with anemones, and corals, and plants and fishes of all kinds. So, only few decades back, the north sea had all sort of hard substrate in it, and lots of fishes to be fished. And then we went and invented trawl nets. For many hundred of years we were fishing with nets that hovered above the sea bottom. But then we realized that the fish were escaping under our nets, so we invented nets that dragged themselves along the bottom of the sea. And fished it all. All. Also any clump of anything that could sustain fish eggs, anything that could sustain life.
And so, in few decades we made one of the most productive seas of the world into the desert that I see today when I dive. And so my diver friends are never excited to dive in here, because in other seas you see more... and none of them knows that we ourselves made this dessert.
And I think about it, and I get angry.