Nobody seems to be sick or dying from nuclear pollution in the ocean but many are diseased and dying due to inadequate nutrition resulting from nutrient pollution. Nutrient pollution is feeding algae that in turn is smothering estuary and bay seagrass food web nursery and baitfish on which migratory animals including tuna depend. Many indigenous coastal and island people have now fundamentally lost their traditional staple food and associated subsistence trade.

Nuclear pollution is certainly a problem but it is not the immediate or sole critically urgent problem that needs to be addressed. Evidence indicates it is not nuclear pollution devastating the ocean ecosystem and natural remaining supply of food on this planet. Nuclear pollution can not be blamed for fish shortfall in supply causing higher prices and feed-meal producers turning to cheaper meat-offal from abattoirs to make meat-meal in place of fish-meal, cattle then eating brain from their own species, resulting in mad cow disease and CJD in humans. Who knows whether cheap low-nutrition feedmeal is or is not sustaining the immune system of industrial or home caged pigs, and whether pig/swine/hog lung disease might mutate as a consequence and enter humans.

Many poverty stricken people suffer disease and death because they can not afford to nourish themselves due to cost of food, so would their animals get adequate nutrition? Lets be honest about all the issues, all the pollutants, all the risk all consequences and all benefit from solutions.

“Evidence indicates it is not nuclear pollution devastating the ocean ecosystem”

Hi JF Aus

There has been little research released to the public on the impacts of nuclear pollution on marine life. However the little I have on file indicates that marine life is in fact contaminated.

Marine mammals from many locations were found to be contaminated with anthropogenic radionuclides. Since marine mammals are mainly at the top of the food chain, the contamination is a good indication that the smaller fish they feed on are also contaminated.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es030362h

The environmental catastrophe of Chernobyl, 23 years ago, continues to contaminate sheep in Scotland, 1,400 miles away.

http://www.robedwards.com/2009/04/chernobyl-still-contaminating-scottish-sheep.html

I agree with you that the livestock industry has become an abomination – both for the animal and the consumer. With the advent of intensive farming, new and re-emerging diseases striking humans are now some 67% zoonotic in origin and the super bugs are regularly blamed for the massive use of antibiotics in food animals.

These industries lack the will to return to more sustainable and humane farming practices. Profits are paramount.

Posters may be interested in learning that motor vehicles are one of the highest emitters of pollution in the nation. They are predominantly responsible for emitting several of the greenhouse gases of concern and other carbon based chemicals which all oxidize to CO2 when burnt.

Motor vehicles; (1) = the highest nationwide

Benzene (1)
Toluene (1)
Dioxins (5)
Carbon Monoxide (2)
Oxides of Nitrogen (2)
Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (2)
Total Volatile Organic Compounds (2)

Keeping the car in the garage, share arrangements and public transport would see a staggering mitigation in Australia’s carbon emissions and a carbon reduction of emissions of which the nation could be proud. A sacrifice as such would be far less uncomfortable than those we face in the near future if we maintain our current dependency on fossil fuels.

Unfortunately, we too lack the will; the libertarians object to regulation or enforcement and so the cliff draws ever nearer.

Hi Protagoras,

I do not understand radioactive pollution especially because I can not understand how people are living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

As for devastation of world ocean food supply it has been accidental finding of malnutrition amongst people living on a Pacific island surrounded by sea without enough fish to catch and eat, that stunned me in 1982. Years of investigative general research later it is now apparent from researched evidence of substance that whole world ocean fish stocks are devastated and that there are critically serious social, environment and economic consequences.

Australian science needs to come out of the dark age and take a whole of ecosystem approach because obeying a 'boundary' and ignoring southern city nutrient pollution that is devastating GBR and islander food supply where malnutrition and disease and death is occurring, is a total disgrace.

Evidence indicates what is happening in the SW Pacific has already happened elsewhere. In other words there is evidence the whole world ocean environment now is in an advanced state of collapse.

It is amazing to me there is a boundary-jurisdiction existing between the southern Great Barrier Reef and Fraser Island that is stopping Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority 'science' from understanding eastern Australia alongshore current that transports food into GBR waters to feed coral growth, or alternately, that is transporting nutrient pollution killing coral and seagrass. I am also totally amazed how the GBR has not been included in the Asia/Pacific islands Coral Triangle research project. It is incredible the Coral Sea is not included either.

To take matters toward solutions, on what justifiable grounds is the southern GBRMPA boundary situated between Fraser Island and the Swains Reef? What does James Cook University science say about the boundary stopping longshore current research? Can anybody answer these questions?

What an amazing response, I was half-expecting to be howled down, thanks to all the posters, it's been fascinating!
It would seem more a question now of "when", not "if", so, I'll run a Sweep, I'm putting my money on 20 years,MAX, that's all I'll give us before Total Melt-down, environmental and "civilisation as we know it" etc.
Any other guesses?

Maximillion: "I was half-expecting to be howled down"

You were?

There aren't too many topics we have general agreement about here at OLO. Euthanasia, population, resource depletion and censorship would be about it. You picked one of those.

I don't think we are too far out of step with the rest of the population, but in each one of those issues our popularly elected pollies are leading us in the opposite direction. I often wondered how that could be so in a democracy, but have never figured it out.

That's because our "democracy" is an illusion, after all, we can only vote for those put up by the "Party System", and the odd, powerless Independent. This system lends itself to corruption, and influence-peddling, hence the results we all live with. Money speaks louder than voters, full-stop!