"They are also hastened by global warming..."

Of course they are. Everything bad is, at least when you want some grant money to investigate it.

"What many people do not realise is that some of the worst extinctions in the history of life on Earth occurred because of a process very similar to this. In the biggest of the lot, the Great Death of the Permian around 252m years ago, an estimated 95 per cent of marine species were wiped out – rugose corals, nautiloids, armoured fish, trilobites – never to be seen again."

Sorry, in what sense is a transient reversible change to less than 1% of the marine environment comparable to a global extinction? You're reaching here...

"What triggered it is still a scientific mystery..."

Then you have absolutely no reason to link it to the current crop of dead zones.

Your mark: B for facts, F for scaremongering. You need to go back and take some more lessons from James Hansen and Al Gore.

Interesting article Julian.

< The solution to this unsettling problem is quite simple and even technically feasible: it is to recycle our nutrients. >

That’s a very large part of it, but not the whole story. We also need to stop the pressure being exerted on these places from continuously increasing or to strive to reduce it. ie; to deal with population growth.

In places like the Peel/Harvey Inlet in WA, right next to the rapidly growing city of Mandurah, the impact just continues to increase for obvious reasons.

Even if we were really quite successful at recycling nutrients in these places, we wouldn’t be able to do it to more than a certain degree, and the continuously increasing input from increasing population would work directly against it, and either dilute our efforts, cancel them out or completely overwhelm them.

So it’s not good enough to just work on recycling nutrients. We need to take a more holistic approach than that.

“Death and all his friends” (Coldplay)!

...“And in the end we lie awake and dream of making our escape”

That is all very well Julian, but of course mixed in with those
nutrients are also the 83'000 chemicals which you mention. How
adding those back into the food chain will affect it, nobody knows.

Of all the issues mentioned by Julian the one that actually matters is over-fishing, and that's had a major impact. Never mind nutrient run-offs, which have nothing like the effect which Julian fears. Over-fishing has knocked over gigantic fisheries.. as in closed them down completely because the fish aren't ther any more. The example that comes to every one's mind is the grand banks fishery in Canada. If you search the net you will also find serious suggestions that all fisheries will be closed by 2050 due to over-fshing.

It is typical of this sort of material that the author recommends a hugely expensive solution that addresses the wrong problem. In that respect the article may be even harmful.

What to do about over-fishing? One solution often proposed is to give fishermen (fisherpeople?) a commercial stake in their fishery, which seems to be the Australian solution but I'd have to look harder myself to work it out.

There is very little awareness of the problem let alone any proper communication to the public about required solutions, and this article does not help.

I don't think you can get more 'holistic' than recycling nutrients, Ludwig.
For years now, I have been advocating farmers should treat their land as if it were a vessel; for sustainability inputs must equal -or exceed- outputs.
This means all the 'chemicals' leaving farms -in the form of beef, lamb, chicken, pork, eggs, milk, vegetables, grain...- must be replaced by (hopefully cheaper) chemicals coming back to the farm.
What could be cheaper than that which is described as “waste”, which currently costs money to get rid of?
This attitude can and should be applied not only to farms, but also to individuals, communities, nations and continents.
Imagine starting from scratch in an enclosed arcology with strictly limited resources. It would be absolutely vital that those resources not be lost or wasted. Everything, including dead bodies, would need to be recycled. If any resource was lost, the carrying capacity of the arcology would be reduced.
The population of living organisms would need to be reduced.
Now all we have to do is get people to understand we are living in just such an enclosed arcology.
It seems a lot of people just can't get their head around the fact that, no matter how big the world is, it is still finite, and resources can still be utterly wasted and lost.
Rest assured, Ludwig, your preoccupation with population density will inevitably resolve itself.
The question is, how painful will the resolution be?
Changing the common mindset concerning recycling resources is part and parcel of population density, in a finite world.
BTW, excellent article, Julian Cribb