What's happening to the oceans is truly awful: overfishing, bycatch, bottom trawling (like strip mining or clear-cutting of the ocean floor), ocean acidification, ocean warming, agricultural runoff leading to algal blooms, noise pollution, and plastic pollution. It would never be tolerated if it was more visible.
It's so big, even 100 years ago it probably seemed impossible for human activity to affect it. But human activity scales while ocean size remains constant.
I get where you're going, but I think you need to go back more like 200 years at least. 100 years ago our impact on whales at least was very clearly evident to anyone remotely paying attention.
> It would never be tolerated if it was more visible.
Idk man, we put up with a lot of horrible stuff up here, too. Not so much because we like it but because nobody who isn't a billionaire (or perhaps heads a powerful but privately owned company) has much say in any of it. Heck, even my city council does whatever the heck the businesses want, no matter how big a crowd shows up at their meetings and says "please no."
(We don't have any ocean, here, but we do have lakes that have been getting more and more polluted for decades because nobody has the backbone to tell folks upstream to keep their fertilizer out of the water, or whatever.)
