The world's oceans are in bad shape, and our neglect will have powerful effects.

According to a study release this week, by 2050, Earth's oceans will have more garbage in them than they have fish.

That is a frightening proposition.

Humans have already dumped so much refuse into our waterways that it is showing up in the stomachs of more than half of all sea turtles and almost all its marine birds.

And with our population ever increasing and with few limits on what can be dumped, the situation is expected to get steadily worse.

By far the biggest villain is our consumption of plastics.

We use plastic bottles and other containers at a troubling rate, and many of them end up in the ocean.

According to the report, the world's use of plastics now is 20 times what it was 50 years ago, and it is expected to double in the next decade and triple in the next 35 years.

As we have produced more plastic, though, we haven't been effective at reusing what we make or in disposing of it once we've used it.

That means it is a menace that winds up in the ocean and takes years to degrade, all the while posing a danger to fish and boaters.

To make matters worse, as man has made the marine environment increasingly hostile to the wildlife living there, we have also overfished the oceans, creating an incredible burden on the sealife populations around the globe.

Another study released this week says the world has drastically undercounted the fish that are caught and killed.

The numbers nations submit on how much fish they catch are lower than the actual numbers, the study says.

They often leave out recreational fishing, the killing of bycatch and illegal fishing. Together, those categories can account for vast numbers of fish that weren't previously counted. And when countries submitted answers such as "no information," those were frequently counted as zero, which resulted in more undercounting.

The bad news is that our practices have been short-sighted and neglectful. The good news, though, is that the oceans are incredibly resilient and can return to their former health.

They will not recover, though, without a change in the way we treat our garbage and our oceans.

We have to start encouraging the recycling or proper disposal of plastics, particularly as we begin to create even more of them. And we have to take the ocean's health into account when we formulate policies that will have far-reaching effects.

We are close to the ocean. Many of us see it when we go to work or when we go out on the water fishing. We have to be mindful stewards of the world's greatest resource.

Or, we will see firsthand the devastating effects of our further neglect.

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Photo credit: Paolo Gamba