IF fish and other marine life could speak their minds, they would condemn humans as the dirtiest life forms on earth and a threat to all life — notwithstanding claims to ‘civilisation’.

They wouldn’t be far wrong. Unknown to most, 80 per cent of the sewage produced by the world’s six billion humans, plus as much industrial and agro-chemical waste, pour into the oceans in unbroken, continuous streams. This process has been going on ever since modern engineering began to provide cities with drainage systems sans treatment to remove harmful pathogens before releasing wastes into the environment.

What the continued practice of ocean dumping does is to simply carry the effluent produced on land out to sea, and then expect it to somehow miraculously clean itself up! It is an expensive way of making our living space even more unhygienic.

The vastness of the ocean misled people into believing they could take liberties with it. After all, 72 per cent of the earth’s surface — some 140 million square miles — is covered by ocean. But then, humans invented large-scale production which in turn created mass-scale waste all of which cannot be recycled safely or at the same pace.

Despite the world becoming more health-conscious during the twentieth century, and preventive and healthcare systems being installed by most governments, it is astounding that many continue to turn a blind eye to the befouling of coastal waters.

Distasteful though it may be, to understand the magnitude of the problem, one has to envisage — even if for just a moment — the outpouring of sewage of 16 million people of Karachi city alone into coastal waters via drains and rivers on a daily basis. That’s not all. There is also highly toxic waste that cannot be neutralised by nature. It comes from several hundred thousand factories and service industries, big and small, as well as from upriver, containing hundreds and thousands of gallons of oils, heavy metals, organic pollutants, radioactive substances and chemicals.

The shallow waters where all this pours out is the habitat of mangrove forests which constitute breeding grounds and nursery for most fish and shellfish species. For marine life, it means having their habitat continuously flooded with refuse around the clock. It is the same water in which coastal dwellers are forced to wash and which causes various chronic, waterborne infections and diseases. It is also the same water from which fish and shrimp are caught for local consumption as well as the export market.

It is for this reason that the European Union, Pakistan’s main seafood destination, laid down conditions for accepting our marine exports: Pakistan has experienced earlier bans. Most people have failed to conceive that fish need clean water as much as humans do. But nothing is being done for cleaning up the coastal water itself — a responsibility of both state and local governments and industry.

Half our seafood exports are caught on the Sindh coast. Most seafood exported from Pakistan is shrimp. For shrimp and 90 per cent of all marine life, mangroves are indispensable. Pakistan’s mangrove forests were once the sixth largest in the world, covering 650,000 acres of the Indus delta. Today, because of overwhelming pollution and mismanagement, there are only 80,000 acres of mangroves left.

It is not that fisherfolk and coastal residents don’t know what’s happening or that they are not suffering. But nobody ever seriously listens to them. What is inexplicable is that even planners and local bodies are either inured to dirt or are able to ignore it as long as it doesn’t appear in their own backyard. Accumulations of slime reach a point when they poison the waters so that oxygen can no longer penetrate and all marine life dies out. The consequence is ‘dead zones’ where no fish can live, and they vary from a few square miles to hundreds of square miles, murky and evil-looking.

While the breaking down and recycling of organic waste into benign form is part of nature’s cyclical processes, the ocean was never designed for absorbing unlimited human waste, chemicals and heavy metals. The volumes that are dumped constitute an overload of nutrients that accumulate and lead to excessive growth of algae, ultimately destroying the sensitive mangrove environment and marine nurseries.

A lesson needs to be learned from the 200-odd dead zones that have mushroomed around the globe. The largest covers a shocking 9,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico which has been receiving decades of waste carried down by the Mississippi River from across much of the US. Unless Pakistan takes its untreated waste problem seriously, it will in time join its ranks. The oceans can take only so much abuse. Karachi needs at least 20 treatment plants to deal with its liquefied wastes. It has only one — which went into operation only last year. The effects of 60 years of coastal pollution can only be imagined.

Today, Pakistan’s fisheries, and the health and lives and livelihoods of over 300,000 fisherfolk and over a million indirectly-dependent coastal dwellers, are threatened. In terms of numbers, this appears to be a negligible fraction of our population of 160 million. But few realise that the negative impacts on the coastal ecosystem are far-reaching enough to severely dent the economy and lives of people residing far inland.

A study of the World Health Organisation and the UN Joint Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection, found that bathing in polluted seas caused around a quarter of a million cases of gastroenteritis and upper respiratory disease every year. Uncooked shellfish is a gourmet dish in the West and Far East, but another 250,000 or more come down with infectious hepatitis annually as a result of consuming sewage-contaminated shellfish. Locals may not eat it here, but prospective importers can reject it. Infectious hepatitis, cholera, typhoid have frequently caused serious epidemics in many coastal areas around the world.

While civil society struggles to elect the right leaders, it is surprising that the coastal system was never made an electoral issue. It is a fundamental issue whether or not people eat fish or want to swim in the ocean. Instead of being a sanctuary for new marine life, coastal waters have become a breeding ground for gastrointestinal diseases that create a chronically diseased population.

Dangerously uninformed about basic biological and oceanic processes, municipalities don’t realise that taking the ocean for granted and self-poisoning through waste can bring a disastrous end to an entire social and economic sector.

Since oceans regulate climate and temperature, and provide water for rain, they could alter our climate drastically, affect the air we breathe, and spread communicable diseases as they work their way inland through human contact and activities.

The process has already begun. Karachi’s great ambitions for coastal tourism and exports won’t go far as the noxious putridity keeps spreading hundreds of miles. Which tourist is going to bathe in visibly polluted waters?