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=Defending our Oceans= ===Seen from space the Earth is covered in a blue mantle. It is a planet on which the continents are dwarfed by the oceans surrounding them and the immensity of the marine realm. []===

A staggering 80 percent of all the life on Earth is to be found hidden beneath the waves and this vast global ocean pulses around our world driving the natural forces which maintain life on our planet. The oceans provide vital sources of protein, energy, minerals and other products of use the world over and the rolling of the sea across the planet creates over half our oxygen, drives weather systems and natural flows of energy and nutrients around the world, transports water masses many times greater than all the rivers on land combined and keeps the Earth habitable. Without the global ocean there would be no life on Earth. It is gravely worrying, then, that we are damaging the oceans on a scale that is unimaginable to most people. We now know that human activity can have serious impacts on the vital forces governing our planet. We have fundamentally changed our global climate and are just beginning to understand the consequences of that. As yet largely unseen, but just as serious, are the impacts we are having on the oceans. A healthy ocean has diverse ecosystems and robust habitats. The actual state of our oceans is a far cry from this natural norm. A myriad of human pressures are being exerted both directly and indirectly on ocean ecosystems the world over. Consequently ecosystems are collapsing as marine species are driven towards extinction and ocean habitats are destroyed. Degraded and stripped of their diversity, ocean ecosystems are losing their inherent resilience. We need to defend our oceans because without them, life on Earth cannot exist.

Dead oceans, dead planet
We need to defend them now more than ever, because the oceans need all the resilience they can muster in the face of climate change and the potentially disasterous impacts this is already beginning to produce in the marine world. The Greenpeace Defending our Oceans campaign sets out to protect and preserve our oceans now and for the future by setting aside swathes of the global oceans from exploitation and controllable human pressure, allowing these areas the respite they so desperately need for recovery and renewal. Building on a protection and recovery system established to manage land based over-exploitation, Marine Reserves are the ocean equivalent of national parks. Marine Reserves are a scientifically developed and endorsed approach to redressing the crisis in our oceans which work alongside a range of other measures designed to ensure that the demands we make of our oceans are managed sustainably. Beyond Marine Reserves we need to tackle a great many threats to the oceans' viability and find better ways of managing their resources. To this end, while Greenpeace campaigns for Marine Reserves, we also campaign against the acts which have brought the oceans to this point - we expose the countless pressures, reveal the threats, confront the villains and point to the solutions and measures necessary to create sustainable oceans.

Industrial fishing
Giant ships, using state-of-the-art equipment, can pinpoint schools offish quickly and accurately. These industrial fishing fleets have exceeded the ocean's ecological limits. As larger fish are wiped out, the next smaller fish species are targeted and so on. (Canadian Fisheries expert Dr Daniel Pauly warns that if this continues ourchildren will be eating jellyfish.) Simply put, more and more people are competing for less and less fish and worsening the existing oceans crisis. [|More]

Bycatch
Modern fishing practices are incredibly wasteful. Every year, fishing nets kill up to 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises globally. Entanglement is the greatest threat to the survival of many species. Moreover, some fishing practices destroy habitat as well as inhabitants. Bottom trawling, for example, destroys entire ancient deep-sea coral forests and other delicate ecosystems. In some areas it is the equivalent of ploughing a field several times a year. [|More]

Unfair fisheries
As traditional fishing grounds in the north have collapsed, fishing capacity has increasingly turned to Africa and the Pacific. Piratesthat ignore regulations and effectively steal fish are denying some o fthe poorest regions of the world much needed food security and income,and those fleets fishing legally are only giving a small percentage of the profit to African or Pacific States. [|More]

Global warming
The ocean and its inhabitants will be irreversibly affected by the impacts of global warming and climate change. Scientists say that global warming, by increasing sea water temperatures, will raise sea levels and change ocean currents. The effects are already beginning to be felt. Whole species of marine animals and fish are at risk due to the temperature rise - they simply cannot survive in the changed conditions. For example, increased water temperatures are thought to be responsible for large areas of corals turning white and dying (bleaching). [|More]

Pollution
Another significant impact of human activity on the marine environment is pollution. The most visible and familiar is oil pollution caused by tanker accidents. Yet despite the scale and visibility of such impacts,the total quantities of pollutants entering the sea from oil spills are dwarfed by those of pollutants introduced from other sources. Theseinclude domestic sewage, industrial discharges, urban and industrial run-off, accidents, spillage, explosions, sea dumping operations, mining, agricultural nutrients and pesticides, waste heat sources, and radioactive discharges. [|More]

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The largest dump in the world isn’t outside New York or London or Shanghai but in a desolate stretch of the Pacific Ocean nearly a thousand miles from the nearest island. Held together by a slowly rotating system of currents northeast of Hawaii, the Eastern Garbage Patch is more than just a few floating plastic bottles washed out to sea; the Patch is a giant mass of trash-laden water nearly double the size of Texas. The Eastern Garbage Patch is just the most obvious manifestation of the amount of pollution filling the seas. Even though seventy percent of plastic items will eventually sink, the UNEP estimates there are 46,000 pieces of marine debris for every square mile of all the world’s oceans. Nearly four fifths of this garbage has been carried from litter on land, washed into storm drains, or floated down rivers. The problem, of course, is plastic and its nearly complete resistance to the elements. Able to last indefinitely in seawater, plastics will continue to plague the Eastern Pacific long after new solutions have been adopted on land. To the average Hongkonger, the concerns about the safety of our beach water flow from many fronts. And perhaps the most relentless reminder is aesthetic. Garbage and detritus has long been a problem, mainly because of the nearby location of factories in the region – as well as Hongkongers’ lax attitude to littering. Hong Kong’s Marine Department reports collecting 12,000 tonnes of floating refuse annually, and last year the South China Morning Post reported that the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department picked up an additional 15,500 tonnes. That’s not even mentioning the work of NGOs, like the Green Council, whose International Coastal Cleanup last year collected more than 7,000kg worth of junk – mostly food wrappers and plastic bottles – from the territory’s shorelines. And as Seba Sheavly, an environmental consultant, points out: “Debris respects no state or national boundaries. It will float anywhere.” It’s a sobering thought. More alarmingly still is that according to Doug Woodring, director of Project Kaisei, an organisation studying both the scale and impact of marine debris, “80 per cent of the garbage floating in the water comes from the land.” A recipient of the Hong Kong Earth Champion Award in 2008, Woodring says that everything from trash left behind in the mountains to wastes from Guangdong can end up in our coastal waters. Thankfully, the levels of these industrially sourced compounds have seen a sharp decline in recent years. In the past, heavy metals had been recorded in sediments and there’s a history of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which show up in the tissue of local marine life. However, both the government and industry have acted together to make these levels more acceptable, at least according to Zurcher. “There used to be a lot of photographic chemical industry here,” says Zurcher. “Silver, a surprisingly toxic heavy metal, was a substantial component.” The digital age dried up film processing demands, and with the decay of that business model, the threat has diminished significantly. Toxins and plastic, though, are both big, fat red herrings. “Your greatest concern is sewage discharge,” says Zurcher. Ultimately this means that the real test of water quality lies with bacterium. It’s essentially a fecal problem, and one that can cause flu, diarrhoea, skin rash, hepatitis, respiratory disease or eye, ear and nose infections, as well as all the other nasty symptoms people usually associate with dirty water.

So how does the government go about sorting this problem out? The Hong Kong Environmental Protection Department (EPD) gauges beach cleanliness by checking the level of E. Coli bacteria on a regular basis. The EPD collects water samples from gazetted (managed) beaches on a weekly basis (as well as cleans them three times a month) and rates them accordingly on a scale that range from ‘good’ (less than 24 E. coli colonies per 100ml of water) to ‘very poor’ (over 610 E.coli colonies per 100ml of water) – which leads to closure. A ‘good’ rating essentially reduces the chances of falling ill to an undetectable level, while a ‘very poor’ rating pushes that figure up to somewhere nearer to 1.5/100 cases and higher. One of the more alarming figures released by the government shows that in 1997 Ting Kau beach in Tsuen Wan (which has been closed ever since) had an E.coli count of around 1583 to every 100mL of water. Even though that has now been reduced significantly in 2009 to around 145 that is still within the realms of being technically unsafe. Therefore, going by international standards, Hong Kong’s system is more in-depth than those of most other countries. And the assessments over the past decade or so have shown quite remarkable results. Things are definitely improving. Pure, unpolluted water is an essential resource to the environmental balance of the world. Water has life-giving properties which are crucial to the world's global ecosystem. Water has also been used as a source and a means of trade for hundreds of years. In some areas water transport is the only viable means available. In some areas of the world, rivers and seas have become so polluted that ecosystems and the health of plants, animals, and humans are threatened. Water pollution also inhibits trade by killing off fish (an economic resource in some regions) and damaging the trade waters. In recent years, many nations have realized the problem of sea and other water pollution. Some of these nations are taking steps to control or clean up the polluted waters. Specifically, sea water pollution can cause many different problems. The origination and spread of serious disease to humans and animals can result from sea or river pollution. In some areas, the population only has one source of water. If this water is polluted, the population has no choice but to use that water. Sea water pollution also detroys the habitats of many species of fish and other animals. In some nations, fishing or harvesting of other animals is the main source of income. If sea water pollution continues at the current rate, fishing industries in many nations will be severely damaged. Sea water pollution can also create industries. People have a great need for clean, pure water. In the industrialized nations, bottled mineral waters are in high demand. This is because of the threat that drinking water in these nations is polluted. In nations all over the world, companies bottle "pure" water and sell it for a significant profit

Should Hong Kong’s waterways be better protected? Hong Kong has lots of world-renowned architectural wonders that exemplify the creativeness of Hong Kong people. But when speaking of flood control, it seems that the only way that the international city can think of is to turn every natural stream into a concrete channel. The destruction of the Ngong Ping Stream is just one of the many recent cases that shows the unimaginativeness of the Drainage Services Department. Artificial channeling natural rivers may be the easiest and cheapest way to control flooding, but it is also the most damaging to the rivers. I hope the engineers in the Drainage Services Department can prove me wrong by coming up with greener ways to solve the problem. But being too imaginative may not be commendable either. The reason that the Ngong Ping Stream has been diverted is that the Government planned to build a huge Public Transport Interchange there. And I really mean HUGE: 1.2 ha, more than half the size of the adjoining theme park and is probably the largest PTI in Hong Kong. It is this PTI that forces the anti-flood channel into the country park, destroying 101 mature trees. Why the Government wants to build such a gigantic PTI in the middle of Lantau Island is really beyond my imagination. Well, maybe they want to make it another architectural wonder. The Ngong Ping Stream could have been saved if the Government had heeded our call to halve the size of the PTI, relocating some of the theme park there, providing more buffer for the stream, and integrating the natural stream area into the theme park. Unfortunately, as with many other cases, transport facilities just have to take priority. Thus another natural resource lost to the tyranny of transport. LISTER CHEUNG, Chief Executive, The Conservancy Association. www.conservancy.org.hk/articles/docs/20040501e.pdf It was on our way home, after finishing the Los Angeles-to-Hawaii sail race known as the Transpac, that my crew and I first caught sight of the trash, floating in one of the most remote regions of all the oceans. I had entered my cutter-rigged research vessel, //Alguita,// an aluminum-hulled catamaran, in the race to test a new mast. Although //Alguita// was built for research trawling, she was also a smart sailor, and she fit into the "cruising class" of boats that regularly enter the race. We did well, hitting a top speed of twenty knots under sail and winning a trophy for finishing in third place. Throughout the race our strategy, like that of every other boat in the race, had been mainly to avoid the North Pacific subtropical gyre-the great high-pressure system in the central Pacific Ocean that, most of the time, is centered just north of the racecourse and halfway between Hawaii and the mainland. But after our success with the race we were feeling mellow and unhurried, and our vessel was equipped with auxiliary twin diesels and carried an extra supply of fuel. So on the way back to our home port in Long Beach, California, we decided to take a shortcut through the gyre, which few seafarers ever cross. Fishermen shun it because its waters lack the nutrients to support an abundant catch. Sailors dodge it because it lacks the wind to propel their sailboats. I often struggle to find words that will communicate the vastness of the Pacific Ocean to people who have never been to sea. Day after day, //Alguita// was the only vehicle on a highway without landmarks, stretching from horizon to horizon. Yet as I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic. It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments. Months later, after I discussed what I had seen with the oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, perhaps the world's leading expert on flotsam, he began referring to the area as the "eastern garbage patch." But "patch" doesn't begin to convey the reality. Ebbesmeyer has estimated that the area, nearly covered with floating plastic debris, is roughly the size of Texas.

My interest in marine debris did not begin with my crossing of the North Pacific subtropical gyre. Voyaging in the Pacific has been part of my life since earliest childhood. In fifty-odd years as a deckhand, stock tender, able seaman, and now captain, I became increasingly alarmed by the growth in plastic debris I was seeing. But the floating plastics in the gyre galvanized my interest. I did a quick calculation, estimating the debris at half a pound for every hundred square meters of sea surface. Multiplied by the circular area defined by our roughly thousand-mile course through the gyre, the weight of the debris was about 3 million tons, comparable to a year's deposition at Puente Hills, Los Angeles's largest landfill. I resolved to return someday to test my alarming estimate. Historically, the kind of drastic accumulation I encountered is a brand-new kind of despoilment. Trash has always been tossed into the seas, but it has been broken down in a fairly short time into carbon dioxide and water by marine microorganisms. Now, however, in the quest for lightweight but durable means of storing goods, we have created a class of products—plastics—that defeat even the most creative and voracious bacteria. Unlike many discarded materials, most plastics in common use do not biodegrade. Instead they "photodegrade," a process whereby sunlight breaks them into progressively smaller pieces, all of which are still plastic polymers. In fact, the degradation eventually yields individual molecules of plastic, but these are still too tough for most anything—even such indiscriminate consumers as bacteria—to digest. And for the past fifty years or so, plastics that have made their way into the Pacific Ocean have been fragmenting and accumulating as a kind of swirling sewer in the North Pacific subtropical gyre. It surprised me that the debris problem in the gyre had not already been looked at more closely by the scientific community. In fact, only recently starting in the early 1990s—has the scientific community begun to focus attention on the trash in the gyre. One of the first investigators to study the problem was W James Ingraham Jr., an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Seattle. Ingraham's Ocean Surface Current Simulator (OSCURS) predicts that objects reaching this area might revolve around in it for sixteen years or more [//below//]. Ocean Surface Current Simulator (OSCURS) model developed by W James Ingraham Jr., an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), predicts the trajectory of drift originating along the coasts of the North Pacific rim. Drift from Japan is shown in red; drift from the United States, in blue. The diagrams show the position of drift after 183 days (left), three years (center), and ten years (right). Because of the intertwined city and county areas of South Belt, there is confusion on whom to call for water service, trash pickup, etc. Texas Department of Human Resources The building at 10060 Fuqua houses the state Department of Human Services and the Commission for the Blind. The DHS uses more than 80 percent of the 22,000-square-foot building for its services, which include food stamps, Medicaid and AFDC. Both agencies needed larger facilities.

Water pollution refers to the anthropogenic, or human-related, contamination of water. Common water contaminants include chemicals, pathogens, minerals and elements, and waste water discharge. While many of these contaminants occur naturally in water sources, pollution of the water sources occurs when anthropogenic sources raise the level of contaminants to a level that is dangerous to plants, animals, or other organisms. Water pollution is generally classified as coming from one of two sources. Point source pollution comes from an identifiable single source, such as a factory or water treatment facility. Nonpoint source pollution is a pollution that does not come from a single source. Nonpoint source pollution usually occurs where small sources of contaminants build up over time before being released into the water supply via surface runoff or leaching into groundwater. Nonpoint sources include fertilizer or other nutrient runoff from fields or lawns and oil-contaminated runoff from a highway.