Overview
The earth is a Blue Planet, with oceans covering over two-thirds of the surface, providing more than 90 percent of the available space for plants and animals to live, helping to control the planet’s weather, and containing the richest variety of life forms.
Yet destructive overfishing; coastal pollution from fertilizers, toxic materials, and plastic pollution; habitat destruction from bottom trawling and coastal dredging and filling; and man-made climate change all affect the ocean’s health and ability to bounce back from changes.
Many populations of whales are depleted or threatened with extinction like northern right whales of which 350 remain. All seven species of sea turtles are either threatened or endangered. Marine scientists predict that at the current rate of fishing, most commercially valuable fish species will collapse in the next 40 years all over the world. In U.S. waters nearly one quarter of all fish stocks are depleted and many are not being rebuilt to healthy levels.
Furthermore, off the Washington Coast is an island of trash twice the size of Texas. This toxic soup of plastic debris kills more than 1 million seabirds, 100,000 sea turtles and marine mammals, and countless fish each year. In all, more than 267 species die every year due to plastic in our oceans.
To restore the oceans to health, Environment Washington supports a moratorium on new offshore drilling for oil and gas, a halt to destructive overfishing which is depleting our oceans of fish, establishment of marine protected areas where some limitations are placed on fishing, actions to reduce the flow of nutrients and toxics into coastal waters, a ban on plastic bags and Styrofoam, and aggressive action on global warming.
