You kill the womb, you kill life

SPECIAL REPORT: "Troubled waters: A special report on the sea," by John Grimond, The Economist, 3 January 2009.

Very scary analysis.

The first think I noticed when I started spending a lot of time in the Atlantic Ocean in RI in the late 1990s: ocean water smells a lot like the sack of water a fetus lives in (you only get a chance to realize this around a woman in labor who's water has broken or during the actual delivery, when a lot tends to gush out along with baby). So when you mess with the world's version of the water bag, you're messing with the origins of life.

The sad part here: we have figured out plenty of ways to help national waters recover (or at least not get too much worse), so the tragedy is the commons beyond the national waters.

You read this excellent survey and you can't help but come away with the sense of the inevitability of some global rule set that's a whole lot more aggressive that Law of the Sea was, including much more vigorous collective enforcement by great powers.

Comments

[Javaid Akhtar]

Thats amazing.I remember reading somewhere that the electrolytic balance in the 'water' is much the same as seawater.From the single cell to a foetus , we almost repeat evolution in full with every birth.

The amazing thought that we never left the sea really...we took it with us.