11. Ecosystems and Listening

This chapter highlights the conflict between human activity and marine ecosystems. The decline of various marine species due to human impact goes back more than a millennium but accelerated markedly in the 1950s. Hemingway wrote about the shift from sustainable to unsustainable attitudes towards fishing in his 1952 novel The Old Man and the Sea. Beautiful living marine resources are now mismanaged as if humanity and the ocean no longer had any relationship with each other. The ocean responds with disappointment at human lifestyles and attitudes, and invites us to listen better and realize that marine resources could give much more back if managed properly.