[adapted from Michael H. Brown's Tower of Light]

Dozens of biologists with no political axe to grind say the seas have reached a tipping point, a "slow-motion disaster" with which, we might add, God can not be happy.

For He created those seas before even He created land and the fate of humans is attached to them. Thus, we pay attention.

The very blood that courses through our veins bears similarities to seawater.

We are all connected in ways that are not commonly fathomed and such links are being breached, according to overwhelming evidence.

That fact alone edges mankind toward a correction, or "purification."

While we often think of abortion, sexual immorality, and irreligion as reasons for chastisement, the degradation of His Creation also factors into the equation.

In fact, the sea is like a prophecy itself and I was alarmed at what was transpiring across those great, gargantuan waters that until recent times -- until ships, until satellites and transatlantic flights, until drift nets -- seemed endless.

We are learning that the oceans are huge but far from infinite.

There are those who see signs in the oceans (as Revelation itself saw such a sign) and it is tremendous to read that only ten percent of fish species aren’t under threat of monumental decline. Already, 29 percent of edible fish and seafood species have declined by ninety percent. If the current rate continues, the oceans will be devoid of most stocks, according to one study, by the mid-point of this century.

In major parts of the world, salmon have all but disappeared, and there are the whales, the countless whales and sharks that have been killed by Japanese or Norwegians or others who thought it more important to have a delicacy than to preserve forms of life that are not only a huge creation of God but also of great intelligence. It is to the point where they can count (at less than a hundred) all the right whales that migrate each year up the East Coast of the United States (they even have names for them).

Every day, fishermen are killing at least a thousand sea mammals unintentionally – by use of equipment that scrapes and scours the ocean floor, raking everything without concern about long-term effects: this because Satan wants to destroy the earth and all that God created. He does. He is always enraged.

We have come surprisingly close to depleting the oceans (already blue-fin tuna are almost extinct, and only five to thirty percent of cod remain, as just two examples, which is hardly what God meant when He said to subdue the earth), and yet we continue to destroy them as sport or toss them out of swank restaurants if there is any imperfection (just throw it in the bin).

Up to forty percent of all our food is thrown out.

Can you imagine if you were the Creator?

As far as the waste of any natural resource, the papal preacher, Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, once said (please heed): "When all were satiated, Jesus ordered: 'Gather up the fragments left over, that nothing may be lost,' 1 Corinthians (11:20-22). We live in a society where waste is habitual. In fifty years, we have gone from a situation in which one went to school or Sunday Mass carrying one’s shoes to the threshold, so as not to wear them out -- to a situation in which virtually new shoes are discarded so as to adapt to the changing fashion."

When will we come to our senses?

Whatever our politics, do we really believe we can continue our wanton wastefulness -- that resources are without limit?

It is wrong to kill any living creature without a reason, and it is wrong to destroy their habitats – to plow down wetlands for high-rises that blocked the ocean’s view for the sake of those with money that was often made in businesses that also had transgressed against the environment. Let's face it: even those leaders who count themselves among the faithful have paid more attention to the whims of industry and realtors and developers than they have to the teachings of Jesus.

Along the Atlantic where I live brown pelicans come by in small flocks but are about all that is aloft over waters that were once teeming, that still have a catch, but that are over-fished by both the commercial trawlers who spread themselves across the horizon – grabbing the delicacy of shrimp – and overzealous sportsmen who are not cautious enough, who senselessly kill fish they can’t eat, or who laugh with great mirth if a pelican gets caught in one of their lines and they have to yank it by its leg up to the pier.

Large bait fish are hooked through the eyes and if unused, tossed like trash.

When small sharks are caught, they often already have two or three hooks embedded in their mouths (from previous "sport" catches).

Tons of unwanted baby fish caught in nets as "by-caught" by shrimpers are tossed dead into the ocean near Daytona Beach (again, like garbage).

The Japanese catch sharks, chop off their fins for a soup delicacy, and toss them back.

Plastic lines litter the bottom of waterways – plastic that will be there for decades.

One scuba diver off Spain reported strands of plastic that waved like seaweed (and also spotted a Mickey Mouse doll). Recent storms in California threw trash back onto shore -- including many discarded supermarket shopping carts: see here).

This isn't tree-hugging stuff. This is what the Vatican constantly worries about -- rightly and biblically. This is God's Creation we are destroying.

And it is a sin.

“The smallest of what lives is precious in My sight,” said an addendum to the 1990 prophecy, which seems to bear more meaning every time we read it [see 1990 prophecy and addendum].

Around the time as the 1990 prophecy researchers calculated that the world began to consume more than nature could regenerate, that there was a mounting "debt" and that if the entire world shared the wasteful lifestyle by 2050 – a sort of deadline for many prophecies, and again that mid-point of this century – it would need to be three times larger than it is.

The limits of the earth's endurance, in some cases, have been reached. The Pope himself spoke on the desperate need to preserve the Amazon forests. Consumerism has been in a frenzy.

The current economic downturn is a slight warning.

Yet, many continue to scoff.

They have not been out there in nature.

In Aruba, fishermen have turned their boats into tourist boats because there are no more fish to catch.

This doesn't mean we limit population. It doesn't mean we worship the earth as a goddess. It means that we simplify and do everything in prayer as naturally as we can -- pray, pray, pray, and be close to what He made for us, without wasting or abusing it.

Nature, said Thomas Aquinas, was God's first Bible. We fail to read it..

In five centuries, since the Renaissance – since the Industrial Revolution – 844 animals and plants have disappeared from the planet.

Nearly two dozen species of shark are almost finished.

Did God create them for us to extinguish?

The polar bear and hippopotamus are now endangered. The Asian river porpoise was just a week ago declared extinct. Apes were all but gone – these animals that can learn, that can communicate with us, that can look deeply into our eyes, and ours into theirs. Frogs are considered a bellwether because they so quickly absorb what is in the ecology through their skin and at least two of the five amphibian types in the Americas are threatened.

How would St. Francis view it -- he with the doves? What would Jesus think? In the Pacific, biologists are seeing "mysterious and disturbing things," according to the Associated Press -- which reported not only plummeting catches of fish but "lots of dead birds on the beaches, and perhaps most worrisome, very little plankton" -- the tiny organisms that are a vital link in the ocean food chain and that take us right back to the prophecy when it talked about the undermining not only of what was smallest but of the very foundations.

“The smallest of what lives is precious in My sight,” the Lord had said in an addendum to what we call the 1990 prophecy, and it all is swiftly falling into place.

There is this idea that anything which makes life more convenient is good and that nature is only okay to the extent that it serves our extravagance. Bulldoze it. Never mind the manatees, the dolphins, the fish; scour a new channel for condos.

We forget that God created creatures as just that: creatures, not things. John Paul II said they have the "spark of God." Benedict XVI has extended that message of preservation.

Let us not become crazed and think animals are our equal; but let us respect them as what the Lord made.

In the beginning of Genesis was God’s express command for the multiplication of fish – not the ravaging of them.

It makes sense that we are to preserve what should be preserved as we provide for ourselves in the Plan of God’s love. With prayer we appreciate what God made.

Closeness to nature is closeness to Him.

It is not wrong to eat fish, or meat -- Christ did – and certainly it is not wrong to work with nature in providing for us.

But let us remember that we were told to subdue nature -- not pulverize it into submission.

[see the 1990 prophecy and the addendum]

[resources: Tower of Light] 

[see also: Dangers of nanotech and Crocodiles can be taught to recognize names]

[Further note from book: There are animals that are cognizant. There are animals that sing to each other. There was an abused lion that had hugged (at least for the moment) the woman who saved it. There are birds -- African Grays -- that know the concept of zero and identify people by name. There are animals that have saved humans from disasters. There are animals – in the case of dolphins -- that have "names" for each other. "Dolphins may be closer to humans than previously realized, with new research showing they communicate by whistling out their 'names,'" said a report in The Times of London.

"The evidence suggests dolphins share the human ability to recognize themselves and other members of the same species as individuals with separate identities. The research, on wild bottlenose dolphins, will lead to reassessment of their intelligence and social complexity, raising moral questions over how they should be treated."]