Well, this is another huge bummer in a series of unending planetary bummers. It seems huge areas of ‘dead’ water, in which no life can grow (meaning, no life-sustaining life) are cropping up in all parts of the world’s oceans due to fertilizer runoff.

According to a new study in Science, the rest of the world fares no better—there are now 405 identified dead zones worldwide, up from 49 in the 1960s—and the world’s largest dead zone remains the Baltic Sea, whose bottom waters now lack oxygen year-round.

What’s really sad is that people/governments are talking about bioengineering their way out of the problem. Yes, they’ll use GMO crops that fix more nitrogen (but, thanks to Monsanto and Dupont who develop them, will self-terminate each year) as well as huge engineering projects to pump air into dead zones. Umm, how about we change the way we harvest food? How about eliminating many of the novelty crops that are not required for human consumption but are grown for their value as gourmet foodstuffs? I can think of a lot of things to do that don’t require any sort of sci-fi engineering.

The rest of the depressing story…

Tags: dead zone, dupont, french fries, monsanto

This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 8:45 am and is filed under environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.