Fish

The Decider annoyed a lot of people with his dog-whistle claim that Iraq's current descent into chaos will in the fullness of time look like a historical "comma". I've concluded he's right: human atrocities at nearly any level of badness look exceedingly trivial in comparison to the end of fish -- apparently on schedule to occur some time in my seventies. The benign and familiar, relaxing and graceful, beautiful and tasty fish, metaphor for revolutionary organizing, occupant of our planet for half a billion years, incubator of the bone, is -- if present trends continue -- on the way out, as a result of a mere 100 years of superexploitation, or so sez a team of fancy scientists. (I got the impression their focus was merely on fishing, and didn't account for, e.g., the acidification of the seas due to increases in atmospheric CO2, which imperils shellfish and their plankton; so my armchair estimate is that the collapse could occur even faster. But what do I know.)

Half a billion years is about 10% of the age of the earth -- hard to miss on a really big historical scale; by comparison humans have been around for what, .01% of the age of the earth, and the industrial assault on fish doesn't show up until the seventh decimal place.

The good news: protecting fisheries can bring their populations back, and at present "only" about 30% of species are in a "state of collapse" (at 10% or less of natural populations). One hopes that around Jan 2009 there will be a US govt with priorities that are not utterly insane, and thinking people of the world will start to organize to prevent this calamity.