Carrageenan: The Addendum, actually a mega rant
Do you ever have those moments when you get so fired up about something that you forget to mention a key issue that’s so important you give yourself a palm to the forehead for forgetting it?
How could I ever have forgotten the illness of our oceans? (Prepare yourselves for a first class rant, folks) I’ve always said that the ocean is the lifeblood of our Earth. If the continents are the skeleton, then the oceans are the Earth’s vital organs-and each existing body of water is an artery that connects ultimately to a larger living, breathing being pulsing with beautiful life. The oceans are our Earth’s lungs and ever beating heart and they teem with life of the most majestic and beautiful sorts.
Art by contemporary artist A.G. Sano who was so inspired by the Oscar winning film The Cove that he painted 23,000 portraits of individual dolphins to commemorate the 23,000 sea mammals who are murdered each year. (Photo and info courtesy of Our Hen House. Click the photo for the link!)
But these beautiful organs of our planet have become sick and weakened by the toxins we literally dump into them. Everything that comes from these bodies is not what it used to be 50, even 20 years ago. The plant life is especially susceptible to the environmental pollutants we throw at our Earth’s organs. Just like plants on land, plants of the sea absorb all of the elements both good and bad, of the world around them. (So that carrageenan I just posted about? It’s not safe because of the pollutants we’re throwing at it. Even “farm raised” sea products are often just grown in floating containment nets in the open sea.) So our little seaweedies are just as sick as we humans are making ourselves and our Earth. In fact, they receive the brunt of it. Remember that huge BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that no one ever talks about any more because it’s election time in the U.S. and that’s so much more important? Well I sure do. I think about those tiny little sea creatures and how many of them were subjected to painful and horrible deaths because of the negligence of a large company just hungry for monetary gain.
Couldn’t find the artist or title for this image, but do I ever love it!
What we are doing to our planet is slowly killing all that lives upon it, and I fear for our oceans most of all. If the oceans go, so do we, for how can a body live and thrive without its organs or its lifeblood?
So how does this relate to veganism? Not only are we indirectly harming our oceans, but we are also very directly and literally killing the beautiful beings that live within it. For years, I have collected images of whaling. Many people think that this is the stuff of legend, dying with the time and culture of Moby Dick, but in fact we kill not only whales but also dolphins, sea turtles, sharks, and countless fish everyday. We humans for some reason think that just because we’re (mostly) hairless and walk on two legs that we get to make all other beings bow to us and our whims.
For more information about the rights of sea mammals in today’s world, check out this recent episode of Our Hen House.
Bisous!
Rachel
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Oh Rachel, this post makes me want to cry! Isn’t it criminal how we are polluting our oceans and our earth! I usually think of it in terms of how polluted the fish must be so they aren’t fit for human consumption, but thinking about how ill the fish must feel to be so full of contaminants is more than a little overwhelming.
I read Eat to Live earlier this year, here are a couple of paragraphs he writes about fish:
“Fish is one of the most polluted foods we eat, and it may place consumers at high risk for various cancers. Scientists have linked tumors in fish directly to the pollutants ingested along the aquatic food chain, a finding confirmed by the National Marine Fisheries Service Laboratory. In some instances, such as with the PCBs in Great Lakes trout and Salmon, it can be shown that a person would have to drink the lake water for one hundred years to accumulate the same quantity of PCBs present in a single half-pound portion of these fish, reported John J. Black, Ph.D., senior cancer research scientist for the Roswell Park Memorial Institute to the American Cancer Society. From the flounder in Boston Harbor to the English Sole in Puget Sound, scientists report that hydrocarbon pollution from habitat concentrate in fish.
There are high cancer rates around New Orleans, where fresh fish and shellfish are a staple of the local cuisine. Higher levels of mercury found in mothers who eat more fish have been associated with birth defects, seizures, mental retardation, developmental disabilities and cerebral palsy. This is mostly the result of women having eaten fish when they were pregnant. Scientists believe that fetuses are much more sensitive to mercury exposure than are adults, although adults do suffer from varying degrees of brain damage from fish consumption.”