We must restore the oceans

I was reading about a group of Chilean students who found a treasure trove of whale fossils while on an expedition. Chile might make the entire area a national monument.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070629/sc_nm/chile_whales_dc_1;_ylt=ApX7xVQ.ydkeY3aosBN_qAPmWMcF
Also on Yahoo, I'd been reading about the oldest known right whale fossil, 5-6 million years old, on exhibit in Japan.

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I often am "homesick" for the way the earth's oceans used to be, not all that long ago. One only has to go back several hundred years, not millions of years, to find a time when the oceans were clean and healthy and teeming with life. Can anyone beside me really imagine the time when MILLIONS of whales thrived in the oceans? And there was a richness of every kind of fish? There were healthy coral reefs and oceanic animals, from dolphins to octopuses, who were numerous and not under unnatural stress.

When you compare that image, one that wasn't all that long ago, to what we have today, everyone should feel angry, sad, starved, and robbed. Except we cannot blame "climate change" for this, and we can't fix it with "carbon credits" or "concerts to save the oceans." There has to be an international, collective will to steward the oceans to thrive again. This can only be done by cleaning up the pollution (both effluent and physical garbage, ranging from plastics to fish netting) and by paying those who earned their living at fishing to now work as global "restockers" and shepherds of the sea. Rather than fighting over diminishing quotas and robbing people of their fishing heritage, I'd like to see money go to fishermen to work for national oceanographic institutes of countries to work at cleaning the oceans of garbage, improving habitats for natural breeding of ocean wildlife, and restocking. It can (and must) be done. If the earth's landscape is our farm and our body, the oceans are our souls and our blood, just as our clean air is our lungs. We must start a radical renewal of the oceans to their cleanest and most thriving state, and stop quarreling while engaging in the long defeat.