In just half a century of intensive fishing, we have seriously altered and endangered many of the world's wild fish stocks. Aquaculture has more than doubled its output in the past decade, an increase of about 10 million metric tonnes. But this increase has not removed the pressure on wild fish stocks. Irrespective of the benefits or otherwise of farmed fish, we have been, and continue to be, enormously careless of the perilous balance of marine wildlife populations. That is, because of our impact on other species populations, we are tampering with various natural systems which are vastly helpful in sustaining life.
Extinction is, therefore, absolutely the norm.
The sort of wild devastation we are wreaking on animal populations surrounding our own can hardly help the chances for survival of either the species coexisting with us for this brief blink of time, or our own. We have assumed that just because the human need for something is seemingly limitless, supplies would follow. Encounters Along the World's Coasts and Beneath the Seas. Michael Parfit won the Overseas Press Club award for best reporting in any media for international environmental issues for the issue quoted above. Global Environmental Change and the Health of the Human Species by A J McMichael is published by Cambridge University Press, 1993.