The sea is dead apart from exclusive corners of the oceans

The Sea, The Sea was the unforgettable title of a novel by Iris Murdoch which she might have taken from of an old ballad by one Barry Cornwall (1787–1874) that went “The sea, the sea, the open sea,/ The blue, the fresh, the ever free;/ Without a mark, without a bound,/ It runneth the earth’s wide region round.”

It still does that, but it’s not the same sea. After millions of years growing and nurturing our planet, we’ve killed off 50% in the last half century. Last week, a sperm whale was found dead on an Indonesian beach with 13 pounds of trash in its stomach.