So sad: "The Ocean is Broken" theherald.com.au reports on dwindling signs of life in the oceans.

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From the article:

What was missing was the cries of the seabirds which, on all previous similar voyages, had surrounded the boat.

The birds were missing because the fish were missing.

Exactly 10 years before, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen had sailed exactly the same course from Melbourne to Osaka, all he'd had to do to catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw out a baited line.

"There was not one of the 28 days on that portion of the trip when we didn't catch a good-sized fish to cook up and eat with some rice," Macfadyen recalled.

But this time, on that whole long leg of sea journey, the total catch was two.

No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all.

"In years gone by I'd gotten used to all the birds and their noises," he said.

"They'd be following the boat, sometimes resting on the mast before taking off again. You'd see flocks of them wheeling over the surface of the sea in the distance, feeding on pilchards."

But in March and April this year, only silence and desolation surrounded his boat, Funnel Web, as it sped across the surface of a haunted ocean.

Read the rest of "The Ocean is Broken" here: http://www.theherald.com.au/story/1848433/the-ocean-is-broken/.

This is a very sad read. It actually should be more sad, since they pin the debris in the Pacific to the Japanese tsunami when the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (which was made worse by the Tsunami) has existed in the Pacific since the 90s while evidence of it goes back as far as far as 1988. We've been doing this to our planet for a long time. We're just now catching on, as a people, that it's causing serious damage to sea life.

The saddest part of this article is when they mention the part about how cleaning up the mess would cause more damage to the environment than just leaving all the garbage in the water. This fact alone should be enough to spur the boat industry to develop clean energy powered boats. Instead everyone just sulks about how bad things are. I think we've forgotten how to be inspired.

I think there is still hope, however. We just have to realize that we caused all this change in the world and that means we can change it back--but we have to choose to change it back.

Special thanks to my old friend Zoe for posting about his on Google Plus.