An excerpt taken from The Meaning of the Twenty-first Century by James Martin , Eden Project Books, 2007, ISBN 978-1-903-91986-6, pages 45-47.
The story of the Black Sea is a parable of our time with serious lessons...
The Black Sea is deep, more than 7,000 feet in places. For thousands of years, it was a prime fishing area that over the centuries sustained ancient Greece, Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire and Imperial Russia.
The Danube flows from the Black Forest to the Black Sea, but it is hardly the blue Danube of Johann Strauss. It crosses several European countries, all of which dump into it unprocessed sewage, oil, pesticides and toxic industrial waste.
The Danube has a delta of two million acres that filters its water before it reaches the Black Sea. This delta used to sift out the river's toxins and algae. Unfortunately, Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania's murderous dictator, ordered the delta drained and developed because he thought it was a waste of Romania's real estate. At a time when many countries were increasing the pollutants being dumped into the Danube, Ceausescu destroyed the filter that protected life in the Black Sea.
The Danube and lesser rivers carried excess fertilizer from large numbers of farms into the Black Sea. This made algae bloom specatacularly and caused an explosive growth of the zooplankton that feed on the algae. These creatures began to consume most of the oxygen in the sea, which led to a condition called "eutrophication".
The large underwater meadows of seagrass and enormous forests of kelp in the Black Sea were a major source of oxygen, and they fed and sheltered 170 animal species - sponges, anemones, crabs and other creatures that were essential parts of the food chain. The pollution killed the seagrass and kelp forests, along with the creatures that lived there. Eutrophication and industrial pollutants wiped out most of the fish, and the sea became as green and bad smelling as a stagnant pond. The stench of dead fish descended on the streets of the once-fashionable resorts of Odessa and Yalta.
When an ecosystem is weakened, an agressive predator can take over. In 1982, Soviet scientists noticed a creature in the Black Sea that they hadn't seen before, and it took time to identify it. It was a bell-shaped comb jelly, Mnemiopsis leidyi, which was native to brackish water estuaries on the East Coast of the United States. It must have travelled across the ocean in the ballast water of a ship. This jellyfish has voracious eating habits, and it found a profusion of food that it liked in in the Black Sea. The creature opened wide its jelly jaws and vacuumed up the dense concentrations of microorganisms. It sucked up fish larvae, baby shrimps, crabs and molluscs, grazing until the sea was almost devoid of fish life.
As they had seemingly endless food and no predators, the comb jellies multiplied with almost unbelievable fecundity. By 1990 there were more than a billion tons of them - more than the weight of all the creatures that all the fishermen in the world land in a year. The Black Sea beach resorts then had no usable beaches. The fishing towns had no fish. In a few years, the Black Sea had gone from good health to a state of collapse. The elite dachas of top-level officials of communist Russia were abandoned because of foul American jellyfish.
An important part of this and other such stories of our time is that marine scientists had computer models that showed them that the Black Sea was being destroyed. They knew how to stop the destruction (although they would have argued about the finer details), but governments took almost no notice of the scientists' findings. What happened with the Black Sea was an entirely preventable catastrophe, but it played itself out to a devastating conclusion.
-oOo-
posted by David Pennant