Industrial and Military Operations vs. Marine Life: Turns Out They Can't Co-exist

I spoke with Kim Elmslie, a campaign coordinator for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, who spoke about a recently-published report by IFAW, about the threat to marine life from noise pollution. It made me recall reports I had read about whales washing up dead on shores, with blood coming from their ears and hemmorhaged brains, just after the US military conducted underwater sonar testing nearby. It turns out that not only is military testing killing marine life and ruining the lives of surviving populations, but all the noise from oil rigs, shipping, and other industrial activity is also to blame. Another sad example of how the basic operations of this military-industrial society are destroying animal populations.

And not only animal populations, but essentially all of life. The basic infrastructure of this system - networks of roads, highways, train tracks, electrical lines, shipping routes, mining, electromagnetic communications, dams, and so on - kills a collosal amount of creatures every single second, not to mention the fact that the operations they enable lead to an ever increasing destruction of habitat. Whether it is pollinators who are crucial to our food supply, migratory bird species, frogs, or turtles who can't survive the fragmentation of their habitat, or large 'keystone species' like sharks, whales, grizzly bears, caribou, polar bears, and on and on and on... they are all rapidly dying off. It's grim.

The trick with this one is that the survival of these creatures - indeed, pretty much all life on earth - requires more than writing letters in hopes politicians will create change, and more than lifestyle choices and changes in what we buy. The very industrial system is the culprit. The industrial system and the rest of life have been proven in study after accumulating study to be unable to coexist. And the leaders on this continent are showing no signs of stopping, not even signs of slowing down. So where does that leave you and I? You might find some suggestions in some other interviews on my site. Godspeed....

To check out IFAW's report, see, Ocean Noise: Turn it Down. To read a shorter article from the BBC, check out Oceans are 'too noisy' for whales.

Download 21:47  Recorded September 17, 2008

This interview is hosted on rabble.ca, so there is an intro ad for rabble. Hope you don't mind, the server at the radio station is inaccessible to me these days.