A tin full of people
Image courtesy of 'Wikimedia Commons'
A baby sardine
Saw her first submarine:
She was scared and watched through a peephole.
‘Oh, come, come, come,’
Said the sardine’s mum,
‘It’s only a tin full of people.’
Spike Milligan (1918-2002)
I was reminded of this verse while watching a cruise ship departing Southampton. Very few liners have elegant lines these days and look more like container ships, which I suppose is what they are. The very largest look like floating blocks of flats.
In the small hours of the night they are sparsely lit, the passengers mostly asleep, and the crew members the only folk awake. When darkness falls and before the cabin calls, the liners blaze like a department store at Christmas and there is endless associated noise, much like a passing car on the road with its music playing at full volume.
The thrumming of the engines and the cacophony of the passengers do nothing to enhance the peace of the sea. Noise pollution can affect the hearing of marine animals, causing stress and changes in behaviour. Such changes may lead to population decline because of decreased reproduction rates.
Cruise ships are one of the major sources of air pollution worldwide, affecting the air quality of coastal cities and ports. A luxury cruise ship emits as much particulate as 1 billion cars.
You can read more about the effects of cruise liners here, here and here.
I know people enjoy their cruises - some go on two or three a year - but perhaps the cruise liner companies could find some way of assisting the unseen world they are so carelessly destroying. There must be a way to moderate unnecessary travel, leisure travel, if you will - make them more expensive to undertake, set a limit on how many cruises one person can make in a year? (That would open up a Black Market in ticket sales, I'm sure.)
Something must be done before we destroy life in the oceans as efficiently as we are annihilating life on terra firma. Sadly, many of the measures to save our environment are ill thought-out and amount to virtue-signalling and back tracking on promises. The only remedy is for humanity to change its ways. There's little hope of that until probably far too late.
Our beautiful blue planet is fast becoming a dirty brown dead planet, spinning endlessly in space. Space is the next great frontier and the next we will undoubtedly fight over and despoil, if we survive that long.
Humans are essentially self-centred. In the past we had to be, to survive. Now, we take and take without thought for the consequences and of how our descendants - our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren and their children - will manage to live in a depleted world.
