The Marine Holocaust

"Indonesia's rainforests are being destroyed faster than any on Earth. A forest area the size of six football fields disappears every minute."

"In total, Indonesia has already lost more than 72 percent of its large intact ancient forest areas and 40 percent of its forests have been completely destroyed."

~Greenpeace

Sickening statistics by any measure.

But it ain’t only on land where the destruction is taking place

Because incredibly rich marine ecosystems across the world are also in grave danger of being wiped out.

In fact cross that out. Co they are being wiped out. Right now.

In what some researchers are calling a “marine holocaust”, coral reefs are now dying across the globe due to high water temperatures caused by global warming:


"It's an unprecedented die-off," said National Park Service fisheries biologist Jeff Miller, who last week checked 40 stations in the Virgin Islands.

"The mortality that we're seeing now is of the extremely slow-growing reef-building corals. These are corals that are the foundation of the reef ... We're talking colonies that were here when Columbus came by have died in the past three to four months."

And for the first time, scientists are seeing entire colonies die off, including an 800-year-old, 13-foot-high star coral colony found dead in the waters off Puerto Rico recently.

Complete madness. And what is the response from the politicians? Let’s cut down more trees!!

How … can you get?

Politicians? More like a bunch of…

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Stop press: Bunaken faces destruction

This is getting really really sick:

The Bunaken National Marine Park, winner of a prestigious Tourism For Tomorrow Award in 2003, is threatened by plans to dispose of waste from a new gold-mining operation.

According to the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, ocean currents will drag any pollution from the proposed mine at Toka Tindung towards the reefs of nearby small islands. These include the marine park, which contains 400 species of coral - more than the Great Barrier Reef - and thousands of fish species, as well as several rare varieties of pygmy seahorses. She added that the park is now being considered for listing as a World Heritage Site.

The gold mine will be operated by Meares Soputan Mining (MSN), which Indonesian newspapers report is mostly owned by Archipelago Resources, a British company. Toka Tindung is thought to hold substantial gold reserves, and Indonesian environmentalists believe that they will be extracted using cyanide, which will form part of an estimated 4,000 tons of waste to be disposed of at sea.

Will we never learn?