Are oil spills another big contributing cause to marine ecosystem pollution and biodiversity decline?
JEREMY: The issue of pollution is really interesting. Oil spills and human sewage tend to be very localized problems. When they happen on the beach of Santa Barbara with all those wealthy people there and all those wonderful seals and sea lions and birds, it’s a terrible local problem but it’s a local problem. Even the Exxon Valdez, which polluted a huge part of the Alaskan coast, was a local problem. If we wanted to worry about oil pollution, for example, oil spills are not the problem. The problem is all the oil that’s leaked from ships and runs off from the land on a routine basis, which is probably ninety or ninety-five percent of the oil pollution in the ocean: low level chronic stuff that nobody sees except a chemist. But even that is a small problem compared to, say, mercury pollution in the atmosphere, which comes from burning coal to make electricity. It goes up North in the food chains and the Arctic Ocean is polluted with incredible levels of mercury. Pollution is a huge pro
