How have human activities threatened marine ecosystems through history?
How have things changed over time? JEREMY: We weren’t so good at polluting in the beginning. There weren’t so many of us. But a few people can kill off an awful lot of wildlife. I don’t think it’s controversial. There are a few people who do still. But, people came to the New World, let’s say around fifteen to twenty thousand years ago, and by ten thousand years ago there were no more mammoths and horses and giant ground sloth- about thirty different kinds of major big animals had disappeared. A lot of the people don’t believe in it and say, oh, it must have been climate. But, you know, we’d had ten big ice ages for a million years beforehand that somehow didn’t do it. And then people showed up, and there weren’t a lot of them to begin with, and all those animals disappeared. In the beginning of our impact on the oceans, it was mostly fishing- that’s sort of a no brainer. And in the Mediterranean, where civilization began in a big scale of three thousand, four thousand years ago, we wi
