Moya Lázaro, Fernando.
This study is one more among many about the ocean life. In the study we can read about many problems which affect the ocean’s life but the solutions are really difficult and some of them should mean a huge change in our behavior. I am going to focus on Spain since I have closer knowledge about the issue.
In Spain we have a huge experience about overfishing and other problems of the sea life. Spanish coast was an area where fishing had had an important role in the society, but not anymore. We would be generous if we said that the fishing in the Spanish coast is scarce, it is almost extinguish. There are some factors that made the destruction of the Spanish coast faster and deeper. Like, the construction fever, the use of the Mediterranean Sea as if it were a water park, the bad politics about industrial dumping or the bad usage of fertilizers and bad farming.
The construction fever brought many huge problems for the economy but also for the ecosystem. When a construction site is started the area has to be flattened and that means to get rid of all the trees or bushes of the area, this way the soil lose strength and provoke erosion. When it rains all the forest’s debris and part of the soil end up in the sea and build up at the bottom suffocating all the sea life there.
The Mediterranean Sea has yet a great problem with pollution but we do not realize when we go there. The Mediterranean Sea is a closed sea; it means that it only has access to clear its water through the Strait of Gibraltar in which there is an unlevel because the Mediterranean Sea is in a higher position than the Atlantic Ocean; that plus the narrow space between Spain and the north coast of Africa only allows a small amount of water to be clear up. Despite of that, the Mediterranean coast is where the construction sector has grown faster and bigger than anywhere else, ships do whatever they want there and people use it as their personal rubbish bin. We can also mention the rivers which feed the Mediterranean Sea on which we pour sewage and industrial dumping on them.
Bad farming methods are a problem too, although the agriculture sector in Spain is in decline the use of fertilizers or the way the soil is plowed are really harmful for the ecosystem. The agriculture sector has become a rough sector where farmers fight against each other’s and against middlemen through prices. The cheaper is the winner, so they try to get as much yield as they can, buying worse fertilizers for the environment and transforming the soil quickly through the aeration of the soil what is very useful to oxygenate the soil and to help the land to absorb water and fertilizers faster. Eventually chemical substances, such as fertilizers or pesticides, are drained into rivers and, finally they end up in the sea.
Because of all of those examples and the overfishing, the fishing industry has been forced to move away from the Spanish coast. The government and the fishing companies have been obliged to arrange contracts with foreign countries, usually in Africa, to be able to provide enough fish to the European market. We can say that we have destroyed our coast and now we are devastating other coasts through money on behalf of some corrupt governments.