The Great Barrier Reef is
2,300km long and 9,000 years old, and it annually pumps some $6 billion into
the Australian economy. Each year 2 million people from around the world are
drawn to experience it, stoking up the coffers of Queensland's boating,
swimming, snorkelling, diving and hospitality businesses that employ in excess
of 50,000 people.
Several other nations once
boasted similar wonderful reefs, but through waste, ignorance, overfishing and
other dire exploitations almost all are collapsing, dying, or already gone.
The delicate algae that
supply corals with nutrition are being killed by over-warm waters. With temperatures regularly reaching record heights, reefs
around the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean and the tourism-driven Asian Pacific
islands are on the brink of no return.
Corals are not just another
renewable form of vegetation, as governments appear to think. They are the
fragile, chemically-derived creations of numerous microscopic animals. As such
our reef is already jeopardised. Storms are increasingly violent. Floods wash
massive amounts of agricultural chemicals and unnatural debris into the sea.
The breakdown of tonnes of agricultural and domestic waste is altering the
ocean's natural chemical make-up. And now the quick and irreparable impact by
wealth-driven corporations, encouraged by our present
government, is threatening to deliver yet another blow.
While
the sea is capable of absorbing 50 times more carbon dioxide than the atmosphere
can do, the constant over supply we are pouring into it is reacting with the
corals, rendering them weak and easily broken by rough conditions that they
would normally withstand. Marine biologists predict
total disintegration of the harder corals once CO2 parts per million
(ppm) levels in the atmosphere reach 400 to 500 ppm. Currently those levels
stand at around 385 ppm.
Our reef is
facing extinction. But to our current government this sensational asset is
apparently dispensable. Instead of
fiercely protecting this particular goose that
lays the extraordinary egg that reliably feeds so many people, our
governments are a patsy to industry that will in time destroy it. The loud
warnings are aggressively ignored, setting our fragile reef well on track to
follow the others into obliteration.
-
Patricia Edwards
This article was published in the "Voices for the Earth" column of the The Daily Examiner on Monday 20 January 2014.
