Lyrics Gone Fishing - Consolidated

Gone Fishing

Many people have stopped eating cows, pigs, chickens, sheep, eggs, and milk
For health reasons, environmental reasons, and ethical reasons, yet the
existence and fate of fishes and animals from the ocean are still excluded from
this discussion
It is not because the numbers slaughtered are too few to be noticed.
Perhaps it is because they dwell in a realm out of view to us in the seeming
silence and darkness of the sea.
Yet, we remain oblivious to the ruin we
inflict
In 1988, commercial fishing landed 98 million metric tons of fish
Deep sea sport fishing in the US took nearly 500 million pounds in 1990.
Hundreds of species fall victim.
The numbers and ecological destruction grow
each year
For thousands of years, the seas has provided food for humans, but they cannot
withstand human overpopulation, selfishness, and technological power.
The US demand for fish has grown by one-fourth in the last eight years.
At its present rate, fishing will soon bleed the oceans to death
Few people who sit down to a plate of salmon, swordfish or tuna ever consider
how these animals were caught, their suffering, or the ecological devastation
caused by commercial fishing techniques.
The harvesting machines suck fish from
the sea in huge gulps.
It sucks up anything in its path.
It rips and shreds
bigger fish into little pieces.
Silently under the waves it roars insatiably
insanely.
Nets inflict the worst destruction.
Nets entangle everything they
encounter, enveloping and killings billions of sea creatures.
Drift nets,
forty miles wide, furl out across the flowing, silent world and kill all they
touch.
Half to two-thirds of the dead and dying animals are tossed back into
the sea.
Lost nets, called 'ghost nets,' wander on, killing without purpose
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society estimates that drift netting kills 30,
000 Dall’s porpoise, 50,00 0northern fur seals, over a million seabirds,
and an unknown number of dolphins and sea turtles every year
Driven by profit, the fishing industry wages war on all animals it sees as
competitors.
Albatross and pelicans are shot on sight.
Orcas are killed by the
hundreds with guns and explosives.
Thousands of sea lions are clubbed and shot
off the pacific coast each year.
Hundreds of thousands of seal are slaughtered
all over the world.
Over three million sharks are clubbed and hooked.
The slow-moving gentle Beluga whale has been harpooned nearly to extinction
All for the commercial fishing industry
Over the last decade, scientists have warned that fish stocks have been
decimated by overfishing throughout the world.
If the killing continues,
our lifetime will witness the desolation of the great world ocean,
the last illusion of an inexhaustible world, of infinite commodities to be
taken and consumed
We see the surface of the sea, and ignore the devastation of the hidden world
that upholds life on earth.
We must look into the depths of the waters and
understand the delicate ecosystem, the intricate web of life of the ocean
Human beings must safeguard the seen and unseen together.
If we follow our same
blind path, we fail to see oceans and all their inhabitants as our origin,
our element, and part of ourselves, we will also soon disappear silently into
the ocean of space