You mean, cite beacuse you’re wowed by the figure? Cite because you’re interested in conservation? Or is this one of those adversarial “Cite, please” requests done only to harass someone and impugn the point being made? Please expand on your request.
Oops, looks like I owe you an apology – I understated it. It’s an area TWICE the continental United States. Annually.
This was big news when it was first discussed, ten years ago. How big? Well, the oceans are the foundation of life on earth, and twice the area of the contiental US being raked over and largely destroyed annually makes this one of the most important news stories, well, imaginable, doesn’t it? I mean this is a real-life doomsday plot like something a Bond villain would attempt. Clearly it’s orders of magnitude more important than, say, 9-11, for God’s sake, and a greater threat to the United States. You’ve heard of 9-11, have you? But you needed a cite for this? Wonder why you don’t already know it?
Because people (in general, news services included) don’t know how to deal with this kind of news. Everyone takes a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” attitude, and goes back to Googling Lindsay Lohan.
I don’t have any axe to grind in this area of the discussion, but that sounds like suspicious math to me. I’d be willing to bet that this total area is arrived at by claiming that, say, one square mile that gets dragged 6 times a year counts as six square miles.
Touchy, much? It was an entirely legitimate request for justification for an unsubstantiated claim.
Also, I wouldn’t cite “The Environmental News Service” as an objective or technical authority on the topic as they obviously have an axe to grind. (One doubts that they’d publish a headline like “Earth Just Fine! Everything In Balance!” even if it were true.) I’d tend toward at least something like the United Nations Environmental Programme which cites some authoritative published sources.
No, you took an accusatory, passive-aggressive, hyperbolic stance.
Your citation, such as it is, lacks any substantiation, quantified data, or source bibliography; in other words, it provided nothing that could be debated or contended, just (at best) journalistic advocacy and apparently specious factoids. The citation I provided gave firm numbers to debate and at least four bibliographic references from widely respected peer-reviewed journals as well as several published surveys and reports which have been by scrutinized by subject matter experts.
If you sincerely believed that the request for a cite was “done only to harass someone and impugn the point being made,” responding with an authoritative and well-supported citation (which took me all of 45 seconds to find with a simple Internet search with a widely used search engine) is a far more effective and civil position than snarky bombast and feigned offense, not only to the inquisitor (who may or may not have a genuine interest in the answer) but to other readers who are sincerely interested in supporting evidence for the claim.
I don’t think showing how much space human beings physically occupy really says anything about the human impact on the Earth. I’d say a better factor would be what percentage of the Earth’s surface shows evidence of human impact. My guess is that it’s over fifty percent by even a pretty narrow definition.
I found this one ironic. The obvious rebuttal is that human beings have already been taking resources out of the ocean for a lot longer than a millennium. It’s like saying “I don’t have to make financial plans. I’m so rich I would take me a decade to spend all my money.”
I stated in my post that I “overheard” this statements, I did not say that I found them correct or that I agree with them, what I was asking is how much area our "Activities"would cover on the 8’Foot Globe, “Little Nemos” reply was the only one that attempted to answer that question!
I know very well myself that the whole argument can not be discussed so simply but I was expecting a bit more imagination and not so much “infighting”
Okay, I came on a little strong. My views may be colored by my frustration at the “head in the sand” approach people take to environmental issues.
I’ve been particularly cranky about the urgency people seem to feel to stop Somalian pirates while ignoring the deep-sea bottom trawlers, which seem to be doing orders of magnitude more damage.
Even if you count just the different areas trawling affects it’s a vast area:
Citation: Kaiser et al. 2002. Modification of marine habitats by trawling activities: prognosis and solutions. Fish and Fisheries3, 1-24. Link
20 million square km - by comparison, the area of the US is 9.8 million square km.
2. More importantly, it makes it worse that the same areas are frequently trawled. Trawling is dragging large fishing gear across the bottom to catch benthic or demersal organisms, and dragging huge nets across habitat does lots of damage to that habitat (with the exception of some resilient shallow sandy bottoms,) sufficient to damage areas for months to years. Fishermen/women don’t want to trawl there again immediately since the catch will be reduced, but they do want to come back in a matter of months (or years, depending on the target species) when the habitat has had some time to recover (although they have no incentive to allow the habitat to fully recover.) Then the habitat gets damaged over and over again to the point where it doesn’t ever get a chance to completely recover.