The vast ecosystem of our seas and oceans is being altered fundamentally by overfishing, industrial pollution and the waste of the human race run amuck.
While many a species of sea creatures head towards extinction one thrives - the jellyfish. The jellyfish species thrives because it feeds on the pollutants and waste we dump into the sea. Compounding this is the fact that jellyfish also feed on the eggs and the young of the predator species that feed on them. And so as the population of jellyfish multiplies the population of species that could have kept a check on it dwindles. Setting up a vicious cycle that ocean scientists have termed as 'the rise of slime'.
Think of jellyfish as the corrupt. Think of the pollutants and the waste as acute materialism. Think of the species that hunt jellyfish as the honest and the upright in society. And think of the attack of the jellyfish on the young of these species as the insidious corruption-fuelled attack on the values of our children and our young.
To use another metaphor, humanity's race to extinction is not just being fueled through the inexorable running down of the hardware - global warming et al- but an insidious attack on the software- the corruption of the human spirit.
Bad as the diagnosis is, the eternal optimist in me believes that the prognosis is not all doom and gloom. Because even slime wants to evolve. All of life arose from a primordial slime. Unfathomable are the ways of this universe- an endless cycle of destruction and creation.
