What is Our Environmental Legacy?

Image via Wikipedia

I am haunted by a picture I saw some time ago, of a man standing atop a dead blue whale, hacking it up for processing. I can't understand how this awe inspiring creature of the deep could be treated with anything less than incredulous wonder and how they could have been hunted to near extinction - between 1900 & the mid-1960's some 360,000 of them were killed (national geographic). What were people thinking back then?

While most of the world has stopped whaling, we are all still threatening the existence of these magnificent creatures - acidification of the seas, use of sonar, increased sea-going traffic, overfishing, cluttering the oceans with our rubbish . . .

What pictures will haunt my children and grandchildren and leave them shaking their heads at our thoughtless stupidity?