Eat Your Jellyfish! Human Impact on Nature Publication date : April 5, 2013
Philippe Cury is a specialist in marine biology. His Ecosystem Approach to marine resources has had a major influence on environmental science. He is a research director at the French Research and Development Institute (IRD) and the director of the Mediterranean and Tropical Halieutic Research Centre, in Sète, France.
A marine biologist and a professor at the Fisheries Centre in Vancouver, Daniel Pauly is one of the world’s top specialists in marine resources.
This book tells a simple tale whose final act is perhaps being played before our very eyes: the story of how nature was transformed. Left to its own devices, nature undergoes change — but very slowly, too slowly for us to notice. The changes we experience (cyclical seasonal changes, for example) repeat themselves over centuries and millennia. Animal and plant life thus appear to be stable. Human beings have managed to overcome certain natural constraints by eliminating large predators, for example, or by controlling plant resources or fighting disease. The results: an unprecedented population explosion; the complete colonisation of the planet by humans; the total exploitation of all arable land and marine resources. Nature may be cyclical but humans are rushing headlong in a mad suicidal race.
This contrast between Nature and humans lies at the heart of the major problems of our time — and could lead to the destruction of Nature, unless we begin acting in ways that respect natural cycles and that put a halt to blind expansion. If we do this, we will have invented sustainability. If not, there will be nothing but jellyfish left on the Earth’s surface!
• Two of the world’s top specialists in marine resources deconstruct the infernal mechanism of human pressure on Nature.
• An uncompromising picture of overexploitation, especially of marine resources. Examples of certain actions that have been successfully undertaken show (perhaps) that all has not yet been lost.