" In the 100 years space, the expansion of our population and our economic power have escaped with any measurement and threaten to become explosive. Wars and catastrophes multiply. With or without metaphor, we live on a planet on fire "

Jean-Yves Cousteau

The greatest danger of the marine environment is the Man. It proved it on several occasions. many oil slicks polluted our coasts l’Homme went jusqu’à to make disappear from the seas for its economy (draining of the sea of Araal to divert water towards cotton fields).

The ocean, cradle of the life, and which is for much the ultimate refuge, are today only one virtual desert, intersected by oases threatened. The principal danger which watches for it comes from the multiplied attacks whose its critical zones, in particular its coasts, its surface and its funds, are the object. To great slaughters of the marine animal-life, ascribable to the poison chemical of our industry, is added the destruction of the shelters, the feeder surfaces and the zones of reproduction of many species. Our activities (construction of ports, sea traffic, fishing, etc) are the essential cause.

The sea is an immense chemical tank, where practically all the elements and all the natural compounds of the Earth accumulated. However, the chemical pollutants are spirit, today, definitively to compromise the ecological balance of the seas. The progressive bio-concentrations and the stability of the toxic substances rejected with the ocean, make that its natural capacity of self-purification is impotent to eliminate all that one gives up to him.

Anxiety took possession of the spirits, ecology applied starts to bear its fruits in the field of the protection of the oceans. But what was made to prevent up to now or to cure pollution is negligible, sometimes even dangerous. Too much rare was indeed those which had truly included/understood the nature and the extent of the danger. Thanks to modern oceanography, the problem is nevertheless maintaining clearly posed.

The few rare attempts undertaken to put an end to the assassination oceans were hardly compartment naked, neither by the industrialists, neither by the politicians, nor even by general public. It should be recognized that the cleanliness of the seas costs expensive, that the blackmails with employment go to wonder, and that the protection of water require an international collaboration evil granted with the intrigues of the traditional policy. Is it necessary to be resolutely pessimistic? Is necessary it to be moderately optimistic. If it is quite true that it is not necessary to succeed in order to persevere, it is not bad d’espérer to undertake.