Press Watch — CNN, June 8, 2009
The world’s oceans are full of trash, causing “tremendous” negative impacts on coastal life and ecology, according to a U.N. report released Monday.
The oceans will continue to fill up with junk discarded from cities and boats without urgent action to address this buildup of marine debris, the United Nations Environment Programme says in a report titled “Marine Litter: A Global Challenge.”
Current efforts to address the problem are not working, and the issue is “far from being solved,” the report says. […]
The ocean litter is a problem for coastal communities, which rely on clean beaches for tourism dollars and to boost quality of life for their residents, the report says. Ocean trash also affects marine life and degrades human health.
Sea turtles, for example, think plastic grocery bags are jellyfish when the bags are floating in the ocean. An untold number of the turtles and other creatures, such as Hawaii’s endangered monk seal, swallow the bags and suffocate, drown or starve, said Holly Bamford, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s marine debris program.
The Surfrider Foundation’s Kauai chapter is offering a reward — as yet unspecified — for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for the shooting death of two Hawaiian monk seals on Kauai.
Federal authorities are investigating the death of an endangered Hawaiian monk seal that witnesses said they believed was shot as it lounged on a beach on the North Shore of Kaua’i yesterday.
Easily exploited by hunters, whalers and fishermen in the 19th century, Hawaiian monk seals essentially never recovered. As early as 1976, the Hawaiian monk seal was listed as endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. The species is also on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN’s) Red List of Threatened Species, and trade in the species or its parts is banned under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).