OCEAN'S END

A state-of-the-marine-environment message from journalist Woodard (Christian Science Monitor), in which the mood is dark

and the tidings grim. Every large body of water is another chapter in a global "cautionary tale of what can happen when marine environments are treated with reckless abandon," writes Woodard. He presents us with a catalog of the ills visited upon great waters by human agents: there is, for example, the matter of overfishing and the habitat degradation that has winnowed fish stocks to bare bones, leaving almost no cod at all where once you could practically walk across their backs from the Faeroes to Newfoundland. There is the "toxic deluge from a thousand factories, power plants, and paper mills" that gags the mighty Mississippi; there are the grotesque consequences of nuclear testing and the subsequent cultural aftershocks that plague the Pacific archipelagoes. For sheer ham-fisted abuse, however, it would be hard to find better poster children than the Danube and the Black Sea (a rank sewer that would be better called the Dead Sea, if there weren't already one—or a hundred—of those). Woodard wisely airs the positions of the naysayers—who claim that fish stocks are naturally in flux and that the same goes for climatic change—and this gives both a balance to his closely argued case and a sense of humility before all that is genuinely not understood about oceanic processes. He also tenders a score of sensible prescriptive measures (which others might call pipe dreams): reducing government subsidies for fishing vessels, changing our fundamental appreciation of the oceans and seas (and their fragility), and encouraging a global problem-solving approach (since shorelines, whether they know it or not, serve as political boundaries). Woodard's quietly passionate and focused presentation leaves little doubt about the gravity of the water world’s ecological

crisis. (Illustrations, not seen)