ScubaTribe

We were on a Dive site off the coast of Taba (I can’t remember the name of the site, Henry’s Hill or something) enjoying the scenery. On this particular site, it was common to see large Napolean Wrasse, several different types of Moray Eels and occasionally a few Rays swimming about.

We had been to 25 meters around the northern side of the hill, we were a group of 8, and had seen a bit of everything the site had to offer. Viz was pretty good, about 15 meters, which isn’t too bad for the Mud Flats of the Northern Gulf of Aquaba. We had returned to the Plataeu which lay in about ten meters and were preparing to ascend to our safety stop depth on the mooring line when one of the group spotted a strange shape at the edge of Viz and duly rang the alarm.

We all had a good look, it was difficult to see exactly what it was but my first impression was a wayward ray cruising near the surface. After a few minutes of squinting and gesticulating the arguement moved us toward the thought that it was a rather large Jelly fish. The current was nearly non-existent but it was heading our way so we waited. Eight people, hanging on a mooring line, all attention towards the mystery animal making its way slowly toward us.

As it came nearer I became absolutely sure it was a jellyfish as the amount of activity around it was evidence of a large population of small fish feeding away. It seemed to be in a half eaten state as one side was curiously shaped and the bunch beneath that should be its tentacles were not trailing anything of length.

When it came within 10 meters I was shocked, and a bit surprised to see that it was actually a rather large plastic bag drifting aimlessly through the water. Fish were all around it, picking at it and eating the algae off its well crusted edges. As a nursery for small fish, it was quite bountiful but I could imagine what it would do to a Turtle or other such creature who was in the habit of eating Jellyfish.

I did grab the bag and took it topside with me, possibly robbing several families of small fish of a food supply, but I felt justified in doing so.

In the Red Sea, I have seen so many plastic bags and so few Jellyfish that whenever I dive there now, I automatically sign “Plastic Bag” to my group and wait in the hopes that I will be proven wrong. Sadly, I am almost never proven wrong.

I was just reading an Article by Janice Neitzel at triplepundit.com about plastic bags. She estimates that around one million plastic bags are used every minute….. hmmm, as she says, that’s alot of plastic bags.

She goes on to state that the Marine Connection estimates that over a million birds and 100,000 marine animals, including whales and turtles, die each year from plastic debris mistaken for food. Really scary statistics.

Personally I bring a cloth bag to the grocers when I go shopping but that is kind of the European tradition. I remember when I used to live in the US, the baggers at the grocery store would place two bags around a bottle of wine, another one for the ice cream, then a fourth to put them both in so I didn’t have to carry seperate bags. (okay, ice cream and wine are not the best combination, it was just an example). If it was a particularly large shopping trip, you could sometimes leave the shop with an excess of 20 seperate plastic bags. That is potentially 20 dead marine birds or animals.

Unfortunately my understanding of this problem was superficial until I started diving and mistaking floating bags for jelly fish myself. The North of the Red Sea around Eilat and Taba was where I first saw a big problem with plastic bags. On every dive, especially closer to shore, we had at least five to ten bags float by. We gathered as many as we could but the next dive was full of them again. Of course putting them in a bin on land was certainly no garuntee that we wouldn’t be collecting them on the next dive or the one after that.

In the last years, many first world nations have heard the plea of the conservation and protection groups and action has been, and continues to be taken. In Janice Neitzels article “Ooops, thats a plastic bag, not a jellyfish” she cites that IKEA has opted to motivate buyers away from Plastic bags and totally eliminate their use in the future. Of course most of the bags that actually make it into our waterways originate from second and third world nations in areas like South East Asia, Africa and South America and not the places where IKEA operates.

A worldwide ban on the use of plastic bags seems a little unrealistic at the moment but that would be the best solution. However, as plastic is a petroleum based product, and world oil reserves are estimated to last only another thirty or fourty years, there is an end in sight.

A couple years ago, we were diving at St. Johns in the south of the Red Sea near the Sudanese border with Egypt and I found this cigarette pack laying on a coral ledge at about 24 meters. It was a bit of a shock in such a rarely visited area, and then only by divers and fishermen, that such an item would be so carelessly discarded into the sea. Since that time I have taken many pictures of garbage floating around in the sea and lying on the bottom.

It is true that this cigarette package will deteriorate rather quickly, it probably has already, and return to its baser elements, possibly even adding to the environment in which it sits, but that is not true with most of the things we dump into the sea. Take for instance the plastic bags floating everywhere in all nearly our oceans, rivers and lakes. They will spend hundreds of years choking corals, killing sea turtles and generally just hanging around before they deteriorate enough to where they can’t cause problems anymore. Or the barrel after barrel of Nuclear waste dumped in places like the Farralon Islands off of San Fransisco or the deep sea trenches. These will be there, even after all visible evidence of the barrels is gone, emitting dangerous radiation for eons.

Look at the plastic bag, balloon, candy wrapper or whatever it is that you are currently holding or have nearby. Chances are this will either end up in a landfill, excreting chemicals into the ground water, sitting at the bottom of the sea in a designated waste dump, or floating about in the oceans for a lucky turtle to mistake for a jellyfish. No matter what we dump, it finds its way into the water eventually. In first world nations such as the US and European countries, waste is treated and handled in ways where the impact is reduced in many cases. Recycling has reduced the amounts that find its way into our natural world but most countries make no such efforts.

We need to produce less, recycle more and generally take all our actions, no matter how small or insignificant they seem, into account. Nearly every product you purchase, or daily routine you engage in has some effect on the natural world. Think before you act or any actions may be too little, too late.

I guess if one thinks too much then life can be a bit depressing. I was just looking around me at the different things that we take for granted in this modern world. The building materials we use, the cars, our food, clothes, personal effects and etc. Nearly all has been made from our natural environment using methods that harm that same environment.

Take cement for example, one of the most widely used building materials in the world. First, raw minerals are gathered from the landscape in the form of Limestone, sand, different aggragates, ash and others. They are combined and heated in a process that uses incredible amounts of energy normally derived from burning Coal and now commonly from burning waste. The amount of CO2 emmitted from this process is phenomenal. The cement must then be processed and transported, again using incredible amounts of energy from unsustainable sources. When it finally reaches the building site, it is mixed and pumped to the desired position and the chemical process of drying and setting has its own hazards.

Even products that claim to be made by natural processes or using eco friendly materials etc. are highly dependant on non-environmentally friendly forms of energy. When you plug in the blender to make a protien shake or turn on the toaster oven to heat up a all natural breadroll, you are depending on the burning of coal, smashing of atoms or some other equally unsustainable form of power generation to satisfy your hunger.

So what can we do as consumers to limit or stop the destruction of non-renewable resources? The answer is alot, but almost nothing we do is going to stop it completely. Even a windmill, although running pretty clean and efficiently, requires huge amounts of energy to produce and consistent repair and maintenance using these resources that don’t come back.

Best case scenario would be to return to our hunter gatherer roots, take only what we need, cook over open fires and basically reduce the population to a manageable number… Maybe Nuclear war wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

Okay, so now I have built the site (still working on it so don’t be too critical) I guess I should write a post or two in the realm of its subject line. The Environment, specifically the Marine one, is that subject.

Everywhere we hear about new challenges facing the Marine environment. From Overfishing and Pollution to Threatened Species and Extinctions, the list of stresses we have placed upon our oceans is long and dirty. Just last week I read an article (can’t remember where) about the Farralon Islands off of San Fransisco where the US military dumped several thousand ordinary steel drums of Nuclear waste between the 50’s and the 80’s. The waters surrounding these Island have since been designated a Protected Area but the ramifications of all that highly toxic waste sitting on the bottom can never be truly measured.

According to the NOAA “Current estimates note that 10 percent of all coral reefs are degraded beyond recovery. Thirty percent are in critical condition and may die within 10 to 20 years. Experts predict that if current pressures are allowed to continue unabated, 60 percent of the world’s coral reefs may die completely by 2050 (CRTF, 2000). ”

These are sobering statistics considering that coral reefs are responsible for around 80% of the biodiversity found in our oceans.

Thankfully, more attention is being brought to these issues and work is being done on local, and to a lesser degree, global scale. With the work of organizations such as Greenpeace and the WWF as well as countless others, progress is being made. Too little too late??? It depends on us.

Have a look at the NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation site for up to date info on the plight of the worlds reefs.

Well, It is coming along a bit slower than I had hoped but learning a bit as well. I have teamed up with Simply Scuba for equipment purchases:

And with Amazon.com for books and other slag.

Here is a practical guide for all us Dummies

This one is a great book by Tim Ecott with a lot of Diving History and a few interesting stories. He interviews some of the greats of diving and really delves into the history of the sport. A great read!

Well, it is up and running anyway. I have been working the last three or four months on building a site that was based on Microsofts ASP.NET technology and am not making much headway so I have reverted back to what I know… and that is what you see before you. This site has gone through many stages of development and this is just one more. I hope to move to the big boy technology within the next year but was so sick of the old site (haven’t even updated it in a year or more) that I had to make a change. So here we are. I promise my next post will be of merit.

Moving back instead of forward seems to me absurd.

James Hettfield