How many humans are killed each year by sharks? I've seen several answers to that question, but 10-20 seems a good guess. According to Wikipedia the most shark attacks ever recorded were in 2000, and there were 16 fatalities that year.
How many sharks are killed by humans? Again, the answers vary, and I've seen numbers from 73 million to 200 million. Elizabeth Kolbert, in her August 2 New Yorker review of The Scales Fall, says the number is 100 million, quoting David Helvarg in his book Saved by the Sea: A Love Story with Fish.
20 humans. 100 million sharks. And WE are afraid of THEM?
Humans are, without a doubt, the most destructive force this planet has ever known. I used to think we would not survive as a species because we would nuke ourselves to death. I now think it is much more likely that we will die off after making the planet inhospitable to human life.
Will things change? I don't know, but I have a theory that it will take something truly massive to wake people up to the reality of dwindling resources. I mean truly massive. A famine that kills 500 million people, an earthquake that levels New York, a tsunami that wipes London off the planet. I know this sounds like the plot of a bad sci-fi movie -- wait, it WAS the plot of a bad sci-fi movie: 2012 -- but I honestly think it's what might have to happen before we wake up. Before we stop eating meat, stop overfishing the oceans, stop polluting the seas with oil, stop changing the climate with carbon dioxide.
I'm not an optimist; you all know that. I'm glad I won't be around to be proven right. You better hope your kids will be around to prove me wrong.
In one of the "Matrix" movies, Agent Smith posits humanity as a disease, akin to a virus. It reproduces, destroys all it touches and moves on, without any benefit to its host. Makes more and more sense to me all the time.
ReplyDelete