Blog break....

I took a break to attend to other concerns. But I'm back! And, sadly, I find no shortage of troubling news to pique my righteous wrath.

Like this from today's L.A. Times:

PLAYA GRANDE, Costa Rica -- The leatherback sea turtle, the massive and mysterious reptile of the Pacific Ocean, has outlived the dinosaurs by 65 million years. It has survived fiery asteroid strikes and ice ages that chilled the globe.

But it doesn't look as if this prehistoric innocent will survive us.

Imagine...! And here's why:

Scientists, once focused on protecting turtle nests on shore, are shifting their attention to what they see as a greater menace: the drowning of turtles in fishing nets and on strings of baited hooks unfurled for 50 miles off the sterns of commercial long-line vessels.

Crowder [an oceanographer] calculates that long-line fishermen set 4.5 million hooks every night, stringing the ocean with the marine equivalent of 100,000 miles of barbed-wire fencing. [Emphasis mine.]

Are we crazy?!

These lines sound like the modern equivalent of driftnets, banned by the United Nations, the E.C., and, happily, the U.S.

Unfortunately, even driftnets continue to be deployed in the high seas and along the shores of the countries yet to ban them. Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the Republic of China are cited as repeat offenders. Driftnets, like the long-lines mentioned here, drown turtles, seabirds, dolphins, sharks, marlin and many other types of fish, many of which are then discarded.

I know I shouldn't be surprised at this, after all, look at the carnage we wrought against our own kind in Iraq. Still, the short-sightedness of these practices is utterly appalling.

The L.A. Times article ends by saying that we're pushing not only the turtles to extinction, we're depleting the entire Pacific Ocean, the world's largest ocean, something scientists once thought would be impossible.