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If sharks could write they would have complained long ago to the Press Council about having their reputation maligned by sensational, unbalanced, media over-coverage of a tiny number of human deaths caused by sharks each year compared to the mass slaughter of sharks by humans worldwide.

Photo Credit: WWF

According to the Taronga Zoo Shark Attack File: “in the last 50 years, there have been only 53 human fatalities (1.06 per year) in Australian waters from shark attacks”

Every year sharks kill about 4 humans worldwide but humans kill an estimated 70 million sharks – which group should be more afraid of the other?

Agence France Press (AFP) reported recently that “the insatiable Asian appetite for shark fins, which make their way onto ostentatious dinner tables in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan [could have] dire results for a marine ecosystem regulated by the predator for some 400 million years”.

According to the National Museum of Natural History the risk of being killed by a shark attack is a tiny fraction of the risk that a defective toaster will kill you.

According to US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) despite their scary reputation, sharks rarely ever attack humans and would much rather feed on fish and marine mammals.

Only about a dozen of the more than 300 species of sharks have been involved in attacks on humans. Sharks evolved millions of years before humans existed and therefore humans are not part of their normal diets. Sharks primarily feed on smaller fish but some species prey upon seals, sea lions, and other marine mammals.

Sharks have been known to attack humans when they are confused or curious. If a shark sees a human splashing in the water, it may try to investigate, leading to an accidental attack. Still, sharks have more to fear from humans than we do of them. Humans hunt sharks for their meat, internal organs, and skin in order to make products such as shark fin soup, lubricants, and leather.
- NOAA

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I watched the documentary “Force Of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie” yesterday at the Possible Worlds Canadian Film Festival held in Sydney (using a press pass from sponsors RIM, a Canadian company which created the Blackberry smartphone).

My first few years of primary school eduction were experienced in Toronto, Canada and I remember watching David Suzuki’s show on TV as one of the reasons I became interested in the environment.

David Suzuki was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1936. He has had a long and prolific career as a scientist, environmentalist, broadcaster and author. His scientific field is genetics, but he is best known for his television and radio programs that examine and explain the natural sciences, including “The Secret of Life” and “A Planet for the Taking.” He is the co-founder and chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, which was established in 1989 to advocate and educate people about environmental conservation, sustainable ecology and climate change.

Force Of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie was filmed before a live audience. In front of a memory box of moving, distilled images, he articulates a core, urgent message: we have exhausted the limits of the biosphere and it is imperative that we re-think our relationship with the natural world.

Suzuki looks unflinchingly at the strains on our interconnected web of life and out of our dire present circumstances, he offers up a blueprint for sustainability and survival. The film interweaves the lecture with scenes from the places and events in Suzuki’s life. As such, the film is a biography of ideas – forged by the major social, scientific, cultural and political events of the past 70 years.

During his travels David has met Aboriginal people from all around the world including Australia. He noticed that they all believe we are part if the environment and everything we do to it comes back to effect us. There’s no line that divides the air from us, the water from us etc. The “economy” which is treated with great reverence by politicians, business and the media is a part of the environment, yet the environment gets treated shabbily in comparison.

David Suzuki has spent a lifetime of thinking about how we are all connected. In the video below David Suzuki explains how we interact with the air around us:

At 74, and coming the end of his scientific and broadcasting career, Suzuki mused on the notion: “If I had one last lecture to give, what would I say?” The result is a very special “Legacy Lecture” full of humour, warmth, insight and passion.

At a packed house at the Perth Convention Centre in late 2010, Suzuki voiced his long-time frustration at the obsession for economic growth at the sacrifice of nature, while urging us all to strive for a sustainable future.

Lecture Highlight – 4 minutes

Full Lecture – 83 minutes

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Republishing in full not allowed without permission.. Source: bhatt.id.au/blog/

I was planning a quiet meal at home yesterday when I got a call from BBC World Service Radio. The producer of World Have Your Say had just read my article Olympics and World Cup Big Events Waste of Tax Payers Money and wanted me to contribute to the program..

I rushed to ABC Ultimo radio master control (who connected me to the BBC) and an hour later I was a guest on BBC World Service Radio for a discussion about the legacy of Olympics past and present. Are the Games ultimately a waste of money – especially at a time of recession in the UK – or do they leave something worthwhile behind?.

I noted that while the people of the host nation feel very proud and happy during the Games, I think in the cold hard light of day the billions in public funds spent on big events like the FIFA World Cup and Olympic games rarely result in a net long term benefit for the host nation, while delaying or canceling spending on more pressing public health, education and transport projects.

The BBC World Service host was Robyn Bresnahan and the 5 guests on this World Have Your Say program included: American dual Olympic Gold medalist Ed Moses, British Paralympic sprinter Jonnie Peacock, Kimberley a teenage journalist who lives in the Olympic region of East London, Myself and Marie a citizen of Athens.

You can listen to the show as an MP3 audio file. Either the 23minute show as broadcast or just the edited excerpt of the show with the host introduction and all the segments where I speak. Since the BBC delete their podcasts after 7 days I have hosted copies on my site.

• BBC World Service Radio – 23min program as broadcast
• BBC World Service Radio – 6 minute edited excerpt of the program with the host introduction and all the segments where I speak.

Unless they invite me back sometime I doubt I’ll ever share my thoughts with a bigger audience again as the BBC World Service has an audience reach well over 150 million people!

PS For Doctor Who fans: ABC Ultimo radio master control is called the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space). These are photos of me from a previous visit to the TARDIS for a discussion on ABC Radio National.

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Republishing in full not allowed without permission.. Source: bhatt.id.au/blog/

The 1973 Film Soylent Green predicts a future world in the year 2022 where the stark landscape has been cleared of vegetation, temperatures are sweltering, mass extinction of flora and fauna means there’s no fresh food and the masses inhabiting overpopulated cities are fed energy concentrate wafers by the Soylent Corporation.

The new Soylent Green variety made from plankton is said to be tastier and more nutritious but accidentally found oceanographic surveys reveal the horrible truth at the conclusion to the film. All life in the oceans has long since died and “Soylent Green is People” reclaimed from carcasses fed into waste processing plants.

Today’s IQ2 Debate “If we keep populating we will perish” will most likely focus on issues like an aging population and immigration.

What it’s almost guaranteed to not cover is negative externalities of a constantly growing human population on Earth. A negative externality is a technical sounding term in economics that basically means let somebody else deal with the problems that are created.

The world’s oceans, lakes and seas are classic negative externality victims. Water covers 70% of the Earth’s surface and the oceans hold about 96.5% of all Earth’s water and yet few people think about the ocean besides swimming at the beach or flying over it to a holiday destination.

We need a healthy marine environment if the population of Australia and the world is to continue growing and be fed. According to the World Health Organisation “worldwide about a billion people rely on fish as their main source of animal proteins”. While the health of the oceans affects us all because of their rich bio-diversity, they are out of sight and so also out of mind.

A recent news release by the United Nations Environment Programme points out that 45% of the planet’s surface is high seas that are outside the limits of any nation’s jurisdiction:

“This area, which contains perhaps the largest reservoir of biodiversity left on earth, is exploited by many countries, but managed by no one … three-quarters of marine fisheries are exploited up to, or beyond, their maximum capacity. According to the UN’s most recent “State of the World’s Fisheries and Aquaculture” report, 85% of fish stocks are fully exploited or worse – the highest levels ever recorded”.

Amongst the many issues needing to be addressed are:

• Overfishing causing species such as the Southern Bluefin Tuna to be critically endangered
• Phosphorous fertiliser discharge into the oceans
• Small broken down pieces of plastic covering vast areas of the ocean, killing sea life
• The worrying trend of growing numbers of “dead zone” areas so low in oxygen that sea life cannot survive.

If we want to avoid a Tragedy of the Commons Soylent Green future we should pay more attention to organisations like the International Program on the State of the Oceans report whose scientists warn of a “potential marine massacre with a mass extinction of sea life akin to the death of the dinosaurs”.

The University of Queensland’s Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg was one of the report’s co-authors and told ABC Radio’s The World Today that: “a growing human population is to blame for many of the changes and … the pressure will only increase, with the world’s population set to grow by another 3 billion people in the next 30 to 50 years.”

Entrepreneur Richard Branson recently announced a new non-profit scientific research organisation called Virgin Oceanic that would study 5 of the deepest ocean trenches in the world. When doing so he made the point that:

“What if I were to tell you about a planet, inhabited by intelligent beings that had, in the 21st century, physically explored 0% of it’s deepest points & mapped only 3% of it’s oceans by unmanned craft, when 70% of that planet’s surface was made up of water”.

“Then I tried to convince you that only 10% of the life forms inhabiting that unknown world are known to those on the surface. You’d think I’d fallen asleep watching the latest sci-fi blockbuster. Then you discover that planet is Earth.”

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