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SHARED EARTH
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Fridays 15.00 - 15.30 |
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Shared Earth is a series from the 91Èȱ¬ Natural History Unit which celebrates the natural world and explores what we can all do to help conserve wildlife and habitats and reduce our footprint on the planet
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FridayÌý29ÌýFebruary 2008 |
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Impact on the Oceans
This month the journal Science published a very worrying map. It was the result of collaboration of a group of internationally renowned scientists who looked at the various threats facing the oceans and laid them onto a map of the world. The result is a map which shows the most heavily impacted seas, coloured red, and the North Sea comes out as one of the worst in the whole world.
The North Sea is a small, shallow, semi enclosed body of water that is heavily used by industry, shipping, fishing, sea-bottom trawling and receives a lot of treated sewerage from the densely populated countries that surround it. Add onto that the effects of climate change that have already been observed and we have a very disturbing picture of our precious resource.
Related link:
Plastic Pollution
Many of the threats are not so obvious to the average person walking along a beach. We can’t see the bottom of the sea that has been ploughed up by trawlers, we can’t see the diminished fish stocks – but we can see the large amounts of plastics that festoon our shores. Is this large debris harmful? Plastics don’t dissolve and so, apart from being an eye sore, they could be pretty harmless? Plastics do disintegrate into millions of tine fragments, some with a diameter no greater than a human hair. Dylan looks at how this is impacting on wildlife.
Related Links:
Trump’s Tees
In the last series of Shared earth we covered the developing story of the millionaire business man Donald Trump and his bid to buy a large chunk of the spectacular dunes along the Aberdeenshire coastline to develop his new golf links. The plans include 2 hotels, 500 houses and a huge golf club, along with the infrastructure needed to support such a large development.
The environmental impact to the landscape opens a much bigger issue of foreign land ownership, especially absentee landlords (such as Mohamed Al Fayed who owns the Balnagown Estatein the Scottish Highlands) who use their money to buy up land.
Trying to find a balance between economic investment, environmental concerns and local needs has proven to be tricky.
Related link:
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