[Coral-List] 7 Billion Question RE: What agency should list corals

Fri Apr 5 17:46:26 EDT 2013

Sarah and Coral Nation:

The  mother of all Facebook Coral pages you propose will, no doubt, have a series of galleries to show the good and the ugly, and I would like to contribute my coral disease series (and algal overgrowth images) which will show what sewage (septic leachate) does to a reef in Micronesia.  Once it gets rolling, we need a charismatic rep to appear on Colbert Nation!

Great idea!

Cheers,
Dean

----- Original Message -----
From: Sarah Frias-Torres <sfrias_torres at hotmail.com>
To: Alina Szmant <szmanta at uncw.edu>; Steve Ord <johnbell32 at outlook.com>; coral list <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
Cc: 
Sent: Friday, April 5, 2013 5:33 AM
Subject: [Coral-List] 7 Billion Question RE: What agency should list corals

I've been following some of the interesting exchanges in Coral-List and I can't hold my horses (or seahorses) any longer.
Here are three quick comments and the 7 billion question:
1) We think "people" and the "environment" as two separate entities. The paradigm shift will arrive when we identify ourselves with the environment. When we accept we are all one and the same, and if we kill the oceans, we kill ourselves. Such awakening has not yet arrived. 
2) Oppression is taking away women's rights to control their own reproductive output. Roughly 70 % of women in the world are denied full education and forced in some way or another to become baby-making machines. That's a result of religion, society, poverty or a combination of all. When women have access to education beyond elementary school and can control their own reproductive rights, their choice is quality over quantity, delaying over a decade or more the age of having their first child, choosing to have replacement rate numbers or no children at all.
3) Since beyond Paleolithic times, we've obtained energy burning something. That's almost our entire evolutionary history, assuming Australopithecus afarensis didn't know how to make fire.  Using non-burning green sources of energy is very new, but a behavior we must instantly acquire to avoid total disaster.
Finally, James Lovelock recently said that the maximum carrying capacity of our planet was reached before the Industrial Revolution. Any increase in human population beyond that point was due to burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas) or using fossil fuel derivatives that increased food production (artificial fertilizers, etc). The world population before the Industrial Revolution was 1 billion. We are now 7 billion and growing.
Too many people, using too many resources, and apparently not caring enough.
So here's the 7 billion question: Can we mobilize enough people to make a paradigm shift within the next 3 years?
Well, Facebook has roughly 1 billion users. If it was a country, it will be the third most populated country in the world, just behind China and India. It will be interesting that the 1 billion Facebookers, the same population size before the Industrial Revolution, got their ducks in a row and mobilized the rest of the world into action. 
Just a thought. Any takers? ... and if someone knows Mark Zuckerberg, please forward my message to him.

Sarah Frias-Torres, Ph.D. 
Twitter: @GrouperDocBlog: http://grouperluna.wordpress.comhttp://independent.academia.edu/SarahFriasTorres

> From: szmanta at uncw.edu
> To: johnbell32 at outlook.com; coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
> Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2013 09:13:07 -0400
> Subject: Re: [Coral-List] What agency should list corals
> 
> I totally get your point, and agree that 'charity starts at home'.  FYI, I had my daughter when I was 42 so at least I lengthened the generation time.  And I am encouraging her to adopt instead of having a child when she comes to that time in her life (she isn't sure she wants to have kids in any case; she teaches middle schoolers).  And I have solar panels on my home, and drive a Pruis, and have become a vegetarian.  But I do sin:  I fly in airplanes, I drink Diet Coke that comes in plastic bottles (but I will walk a mile to recycle that bottle).  We do what we can, and we could all do more.  But too many people don't do anything, and don't even recognize the problem.  That IS the problem.  If the problem were seen for what it is, the collective 'we' would be doing more to resolve it, including dis-incentivizing larger families,  greatly reducing our excess consumption of trivial goods, and stop developing fossil fuel resources (and looking
 for new ones).
> 
> *************************************************************************
> Dr. Alina M. Szmant
> Professor of Marine Biology
> Center for Marine Science and Dept of Biology and Marine Biology
> University of North Carolina Wilmington
> 5600 Marvin Moss Ln
> Wilmington NC 28409 USA
> tel:  910-962-2362  fax: 910-962-2410  cell: 910-200-3913
> http://people.uncw.edu/szmanta
> *******************************************************
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov [mailto:coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov] On Behalf Of Steve Ord
> Sent: Wednesday, April 03, 2013 9:31 PM
> To: coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
> Subject: Re: [Coral-List] What agency should list corals
> 
> 
> 
> 
> And how would you feel Dr. Szmant if an outside government said that you couldn't have your 24 year old daughter because the world was too overcrowded? Here's the problem: Yes the world is too crowded, and yes food and resources are becoming scarcer because there are more people in the world. Ecosystems are degrading because of human consumption and behaviors at a mass level. But these problems aren't problems unless they start to affect us. And we point the finger and say that this is somebody else's fault as long as it doesn't interfere with our own standard of living. The minute it affects us it's a different story. Would you be willing to give up the ability to procreate because somebody else said the world was too overcrowded? The ability to have children is the most powerful biological driving force in society. To deny one group procreation rights while maintaining your own is the very essence of oppression.
> 
>                            
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