Diamonds among the Garbage

Fresh Kills Landfill on the shore of Staten Island was opened in 1947 as a temporary landfill, but for half a century was New York City's principal landfill, and became the largest landfill in the world, also, the largest man-made thing in the world. In 2001 the landfill was 25 meters taller than the Statue of Liberty. Rats and feral dog packs roaming the dump became a hazard to employees; attempts to poison them failed. The area was declared a wild bird sanctuary and a number of hawks, falcons, and owls were brought in, reducing rats during daytime, but air pollution consequences of the giant dump remained serious. Now, garbage is disposed of further away, and a new garbage dump has become an even bigger problem. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or Pacific Trash Vortex, covers from 700,000 square km to 15,000,000 square km, and is essentially the largest landfill in the world. At least the size of Texas, it could be twice the size of the continental United States. This vast drifting "soup" – in effect the world's largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents, and stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan. About 100 million tons of flotsam circulate in the region. Plastic constitutes about 90% of the rubbish floating in the oceans - in all our oceans are about 46,000 pieces of floating plastic for every square mile; in the North Pacific has an estimated six kilos of plastic for every kilo of natural plankton. The plastic are consumed by seabirds and other animals; their stomachs fill with bottle tops, lighters and balloons. A turtle found dead in Hawaii had over a thousand pieces of plastic in its stomach and intestines. Over a million sea-birds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles are killed each year by ingestion of plastics or entanglement in them. The plastics also act as a chemical sponge, concentrating many persistent organic pollutants, and attracting man-made chemicals like hydrocarbons and DDT, which eventually enter our food chain.
Not to raise hopes, offer absurd justifications or in any way indicate that irresponsibility pays (although sometimes it might), but it is interesting that domestication of plants and animals may have occurred through sloppy waste-dumping habits. Not only did scavengers prowl, and thus become more accustomed to proximity of humans, but the interaction of composting with discarded seed dispersed a bit more widely than might otherwise have been the case (but closely enough with other seed for interaction – especially subsequent sexual interaction – to occur) led to both greater accessibility and utility. Domestication may never have been planned out at all, and that it occurred almost as if by accident makes rather much more sense.
While irritation with declamations of various reinventions of Chicken Little or the Boy Who Cried Wolf have become somewhat of a norm, we still have pressing problems. Ozone depletion may not be as dire as it once was, but it’s still a problem, as is global warming, despite vociferous nay-sayers. Genetically-modified organisms may well present greater problems than the current US doctrine of a state of permanent war. Overpopulation, newly rampant diseases, and violent changes to our Earth’s crustal zone (how much influenced by humanity through temperature changes, drilling, pumping and mining, we simply don’t know) aren’t just threats. And the extension of large predators seems, at least to me, to inevitably present us with a variety of new complications. There’s also growing peril from radiations of various sorts, not only due to nuclear power and changes in the atmosphere, but also to wi-fi internet, hand-phones and power-lines. We can and will ignore all that, but I’m afraid the problems we face from waste-disposal may be quite a bit more in-your-face, coming quite soon.
The oceans create roughly 70% of the oxygen in our atmosphere, and their pH - the measure of alkalinity or acidity - is changing. This is primarily due to increased levels of CO2, caused by us humans. It results in a threat to most all forms of oceanic life, carbonic acid. Spent nuclear fuel raising ocean temperatures and disrupting biological processes certainly doesn’t help. Simply put, our self-indulgences could soon result in our death – as a species. We have upset nature’s balance, and it is unlikely that we can put it right again. Within 50 years, our oceans may have living in them only reddish-orange algae, jellyfish, and bacteria that don’t need oxygen to survive. For humans to contaminate the earth’s waters, its land, its air and its life with poisonous substances, to cause species extinction, and to destroy the integrity of our earth by causing changes in its climate, isn’t simply fouling our own nest, but to commit suicide.
A bit more scientifically: when plastics decompose in the ocean they release a range of chemicals not found naturally, including bisphenol A and polystyrene-based (PS) oligomers. Bisphenol A has been implicated in disrupting the hormonal system of animals. Styrofoam releases substantial quantities of a toxic styrene monomer, a known carcinogen, and also styrene dimers and trimer, suspected carcinogens. The trimer also breaks down into the toxic monomer form. Samples of seawater collected from the Pacific Ocean were contaminated with up to 150 parts per million of some of these components of plastic decomposition. In Japan alone, 150,000 tons of plastic is washed up on its shores each year; perhaps hundreds of millions of tons of plastic rubbish now float in the world’s oceans. Virtuous recycling will do no more than no longer littering to correct this situation. It’s this simple: if humanity cannot begin to work together, humanity will not survive.
We’re far too uneducated, let alone self-centered, to deal with all this. Of course, maybe God in some deus ex machina guise might deign to interfere, as many hope or even expect, but experience suggests this to be a bit less likely than that our current crop of “leaders” will do anything intelligent, or that folk in the USA will replace materialistic lusts with interest in social welfare.

An Associated Press release from late 2011 reports that Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard announced that his huge city will now turn garbage from millions of people into reusable materials and energy. Concrete giant Cemex SAB has agree to buy 3,000 tons daily to turn into energy, and some garbage will be recycled (60% of it!) or composted, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by a minimum of 2 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. The city will embark next year on a major project to harness methane gas produced at its old dump, now closed, into energy. It also plans to open a new plant to recycle construction waste into building material. The report concluded, “The city says it is also negotiating with 1,500 pepenadores, or scavengers, informal workers who traditionally have been a key part of Mexico's waste-management system. They living at dumps and scavenge and resell material. Pablo Tellez Falcon, who heads the scavengers guild, said 300 of them worked at the Bordo Poniente landfill and that he will negotiate for a written agreement with the city government so they don't lose their livelihoods. He said the city and the scavengers have only had a spoken agreement until now.”
Not only can garbage produce methane, it can teach us wisdom. From it we can get the best fertilizer, good construction material, land-fill and other valuable resources. Recycling may not be as good as re-using, but learning to act responsibly is one of the things we live to learn – no responsibility equals no satisfaction. No respect for that other than the self and its desires translates into no respect FOR the self and its desires. We can try to be more aware, or live awhile longer with our mistakes, but make no mistake about this: the mistakes we are making WILL eventually kill us, if not adequately addressed.




Pics from Strange Tales #181, August 1975 - a full generation, 37 years ago... This morning, 26 Feb, 2012, my kids watching Ben10, I noticed that cartoon also referring to the garbage problem, specifically the largest man-made thing referenced above.

and some good news: http://mashable.com/2012/03/07/plastic-eating-fungi/

Some of the garbage (“refuse” in news-speak) from the tsunami in Japan a year ago will reach Hawaii and the West coast of the United States in a year or so.

Truth and War

Less than a decade after Texas declared independence from Mexico (1836), provocative movements of U.S. troops led to further war. U.S. troops eventually attacked a Mexico City military school (at Chapultepec Castle) defended only by teenage cadets, and the National Palace (the root of the “Halls of Montezuma” line in the Marine Hymn). After the US annexed Texas (1845), Mexico soon severed relations… with no more provocation than that, President Polk sent troops - who rapidly took Baja, Monterrey, Buena Vista, Veracruz and Tampico (Mexico's leading ports) - in fact, most of mainland Mexico. There was no military need to attack the military school, nor to build a fort 150 km. inside the Mexican border; but purely for political (and expansionist) reasons, these insidiously menacing things were done. The war was expensive, though, and unpopular (seen by many as a land grab for the slave states); at the end, for a little over a dollar a square kilometer, the US was able to annex Texas, California, Nevada, Utah, western Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Arizona (about half of Mexico’s total territory). During the war, a group of Catholic Irish immigrants in the US Army rebelled, objecting to abusive treatment by Protestant officers (and abusive treatment of the Catholic Mexican population). They joined the Mexican army; eventually 16 were hanged as traitors. They and the cadets remain honored as heroes in Mexico.
By 1898, Spain was losing territories regularly; Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines were in revolt. Cuba’s revolution was bad news for the U.S. owners of Cuban sugar, tobacco and iron industry properties (valued at over $50 million – about $1.2 billion in today’s terms). Main stream media, dominated by newspaper magnates Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst (that era’s Rupert Murdoch and Koch brothers), fabricated stories of horrible conditions under Spanish rule. Ships were deployed to strategic locations for war against Spain’s empire, and then, at 9:40 p.m. on Feb. 15, 1898, the quietly at anchor Maine suffered a massive explosion and sank. 255 to 266 crew members died. The U.S. Navy convened a board of inquiry, which, without forensic evidence, declared the sinking to have been due to a mine - a trumped up story that the Hearst press used to accuse the Spanish of causing the explosion by remote-control. The US declared war, and annexed the Philippines, Guam and Cuba. Later investigations revealed that the explosion originated inside the Maine; the cause hasn’t been definitively determined, but may have come from a time bomb inside the battleship. Definitive scientific analysis says the Spaniards could not have sunk it, and Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the US nuclear navy, decided that a coal fire began aboard the Maine caused the explosion. That seems unlikely to me, but at any rate, the Spanish-American War was begun on the strength of an outright lie: that the Spanish had mined a U.S. ship.
On May 7th, 1915, the Lusitania was sent where German military vessels were known to be, despite carrying passengers and the German embassy having put advertisements in the New York Times telling people that if they boarded the Lusitania they did so at their own risk, as, by sailing from America to England through the war zone, the ship would be liable to destruction. As expected, German U-boats torpedoed the ship, exploding stored munitions and killing 1198 people, including 128 Americans. The ship went down in only 18 minutes - improbable if only hit by one U-Boat torpedo. However, a 1982 examination of the sunken Lusitanian concluded that there were, indeed, explosive munitions on board, and those explosives caused the ship to sink. A large section of the keel area, totally away from where the torpedo entry occurred, was missing; the vessel was certainly sunk by a massive internal explosion. 148 tubs of butter, shipped to the British admiralty by Remington Arms and its parent company DuPont Chemicals, was stored at the place where the massive damage was located; apparently what was shipped was gun cotton, a volatile explosive used in mines, and which can be set off by contact with seawater. The ship was also secretly transporting 6 million pounds of artillery shells and rifle ammunition (in December 2008, divers found 4 million US made bullets in the Lusitania’s holds), as well as other explosives (on behalf of Morgan banking corporation), despite it being against US laws to transport war materials and passengers in the same ship. But, as losses at sea were not quite enough to bring isolationist America into a European war, in January 1917, British “intelligence” turned over a telegram they claimed to have intercepted, sent by Germany to Mexico, promising return of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to Mexico upon successful “joint conduct of the war.” The telegram was leaked to the American press on March 1; it appeared that Mexico was being encouraged to invade the U.S., and subsequent public outcry helped make possible a U.S. declaration of war on April 2. German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmerman at first denied, and then admitted, sending the telegram, but claimed it was intended as a warning to Mexico about Germany's intention to wage unrestricted submarine warfare against the U.S., and was certainly not an invitation to join in a war against it. World War I yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits, and is how about 21,000 millionaires and billionaires and got that way.
WWII is a bit more difficult to show as a set-up, but the fact is that the preponderance of citizenry in the USA was decidedly against entering into it. From after WWI until 1941, US foreign policy was dominated by isolationists determined to prevent the United States from being drawn into another European war. With the Neutrality Act of 1935, Congress passed a series of laws designed to minimize American potential involvement with belligerent nations. Shipping arms from the USA to any combatant nation was banned (in 1937, Congress passed an even more stringent act).
As WWII began (with Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939), Congress and most of the American public continued to favor neutrality. President Franklin Roosevelt proposed that peace-loving nations quarantine aggressors, but his proposal created such alarm that he quickly backed off from it. Although well aware that the public wanted America to stay out of the war, Roosevelt was determined to do all he could to thwart Hitler. In October, 1938, he held secret talks with French officials on how to bypass the neutrality laws and allow purchase of US aircraft (which the French couldn’t even pay for). Inadvertent disclosure of these talks led to major isolationist uproar against Roosevelt, and a Senate probe. Because of the prevalence of isolationism, Roosevelt made a series of contradictory statements to the American people. In the winter of 1939 he warned that France and Britain were America's “first line of defense”, and required American aid; meanwhile he also claimed that he was following an isolationist foreign policy that would do nothing to involve the US in another war. When the French offered up colonized islands in the Caribbean and Pacific to pay for aircraft, orders were placed; when the aircraft were ready, they were diverted to the British, as France had already been overrun by Germany. FDR continued in secret negotiations to assist Britain and France, against the wishes of the public and laws passed by its other representatives.
After France fell, FDR pursued his policy by aiding the British against Germany, facilitating the placing of British orders for munitions and making various arrangements for the transfer of surplus American war matériel to them. On September 2, 1940, FDR openly defied the Neutrality Acts by passing the Destroyers for Bases Agreement, which gave Britain 50 WWI-era US destroyers in exchange for 99-year leases on 8 British naval and air bases in the British Caribbean Islands and Newfoundland. British PM Churchill believed that that exchange set in motion a process towards US entry into the war which no one could stop, and indeed, soon FDR had persuaded Congress to revise the 1935 Neutrality Act. By December, ’40, Britain had placed orders for war materials far in excess of what they could possibly muster the dollar exchange to finance, and in March, ‘41 a Lend-Lease agreement began to direct massive military and economic aid to Britain and the Republic of China. Before long the Soviet Union was included in this. The Lend-Lease Act empowered FDR to transfer defense materials, services, and information to any foreign government whose defense he deemed vital to that of the United States, and left to his discretion what he should ask in return. From the time of the German invasion of the USSR, FDR was clearly determined to aid the Soviet Union, but the American public’s suspicions of that country, and Communism in general, delayed his declaring that country eligible for lend-lease - until November 1941. American deliveries of aircraft, tanks, and other supplies to the USSR began shortly thereafter.
By raising the specter of a German invasion of the Western Hemisphere, FDR convinced Congress to enact the first peacetime military draft, a decisive step in preparing the United States to enter the war. As opinion polls showed the American public heavily favoring a policy of “all aid short of war” to Britain, at least, and isolationist sentiment remained strong, FDR's campaign for US intervention had to remain deceptive. He made an unqualified promise to a Boston audience on October 30, 1940: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” When the Japanese sank an American gunboat on the Yangtze River early in December, ‘41, most Americans feared that the attack would lead to war, and were pleased that FDR accepted Japan’s apologies. Meanwhile he secretly stepped up a program to build long-range submarines that could blockade Japan.
By December 1941, the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy and Japan were doing well; Hitler’s troops dominated most of Western Europe, and Japan was gaining control of the islands of the South Pacific. There was enormous pressure on the US to enter the war. On July 26, in pursuance of a new agreement with Vichy France, Japanese forces had begun occupying bases in southern Indochina. FDR froze Japanese assets under US control, imposed an embargo on oil to Japan and restricted exports to Japan of other supplies essential to making war. Dismay at the embargo drove the Japanese naval command, which had hitherto been more moderate than the army, into collusion with the army's extremism. Japan tried to negotiate restoration of trade in curtailed supplies, particularly petroleum products and scrap metals (which Prescott Bush was still supplying to Germany). Negotiations failed, and Japanese leaders planned an attack on the United States - which may have been exactly what Roosevelt wanted. By backing Japan into a corner and forcing it to make war on the US, he’d become able to enter the European war.
He’d pushed Japan into a corner, provoking it into attacking enticing bait at Pearl Harbor. This was done using “8 insults”, including a total blockade of Japanese oil imports, forbidding Japan use of Panama canal (impeding Japanese access to Venezuelan oil), freezing all Japanese assets in the United States; making public loans to Nationalist China, and supplying military aid to the British (in violation of international war rules). Demands that Japan could not concede included renunciation of the Tripartite Pact (which would have left Japan diplomatically isolated) and withdrawal of Japanese troops from China and Southeast Asia (to which it had invested in an overt commitment of four years' standing). The success of the Flying Tigers (a volunteer air group) in downing about 100 Japanese military aircraft, mostly bombers, was seen by the Japanese as part of these insults. The Japanese could see no point in continuing the talks; peace with the US seemed impossible, so Japan set in motion plans for war, which would now be waged not only against the USA, but also against Great Britain (the Far Eastern colonies of which lay within the orbit of the projected Japanese expansion) and the Dutch East Indies (the oil of which was now essential).
FDR and his advisers knew there’d be important Japanese military action on December 6–7. Most historians say that they didn’t know where the attack would come, that intercepted Japanese diplomatic and military messages indicated an attack somewhere, but that information suggested the target would be British, Dutch, or French. The British, Dutch, French and American military forces in the entire Pacific region west of Hawaii amounted to only about 350,000 troops, most lacking combat experience (and including many disparate nationalities). Allied air power in the Pacific was weak, consisting mostly of obsolete planes. If the Japanese, with their large, well-equipped and battle-hardened armies could quickly launch coordinated attacks, they could overwhelm Allied forces and overrun the entire western Pacific Ocean as well as Southeast Asia. Then those areas’ resources could be used to Japan’s military-industrial advantage. The Japanese planned to establish a strongly fortified defensive perimeter extending from Burma to the southern rim of the Dutch East Indies and northern New Guinea and on to the Gilbert and Marshall islands. The Japanese believed that any American and British counteroffensives against this perimeter could be repelled, after which those nations would eventually seek a negotiated peace that would allow Japan to keep her newly won empire. The only truly important impediment to this plan was the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.
The US had broken Japanese encryption codes in 1940, and knew what was going to happen, when and where: US Naval intelligence intercepted and translated hundreds of transmissions to the Japanese attack fleet while it was en-route to Hawaii, dispatches which left no doubt that Pearl Harbor was to be the target of a Japanese attack. On December 7th, 1941, the Japanese killed 2400 soldiers, triggering US entry into that war. Despite giving the information to the British, FDR didn’t give it to his troops in Hawaii. His administration failed to notify the military of decoded Japanese messages indicating that an attack would take place on December 6–7.
Interestingly, despite the amazing lack of military preparedness at Pearl Harbor, enough of the Pacific Fleet, including 3 aircraft carriers, remained available to successfully enter into war. The Japanese attack failed in a crucial respect, as the aircraft carriers were out of port, at sea at the time of the attack, and so escaped harm. These aircraft carriers became the nucleus of US military action in the Pacific. Pearl Harbor’s shore installations and oil-storage facilities also escaped damage, but the attack unified the American public and swept away most remaining support for American neutrality. On December 8 the U.S. Congress declared war on Japan, with just one dissenting vote. The other Axis powers then declared war on the US.
FDR used deceitful tactics to increase U.S. involvement gradually and to stir up pro-war sentiments in the American public. He clearly believed - with good reason - that he could obtain a public consensus in favor of war only if the country were attacked by a foreign power. Circumstances surrounding the attack on Pearl Harbor, when interpreted in light of Roosevelt's behavior in preceding years, strongly suggest that he intentionally provoked the Japanese attack. Perhaps it was right of FDR to carefully not commit the USA to greater involvement in fighting than public opinion would support, while doing all he could to contain the Axis powers, but he clearly did not stay within the letter of the law, nor adhere to clear public sentiments.

There’s evidence that South Korean incursions (the Tiger regiment etc.) into North Korea (1949) led to the Korean “police-action” - and that covert activity by leaders of Taiwan and the US military-industrial complex helped organize those hostilities. 2 to 4 million North Koreans and Chinese, and 54,000 US, killed.
In 1964, while Lyndon Johnson was campaigning as a peace candidate, North Vietnamese allegedly fired on two US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. Johnson ordered retaliatory action after "renewed attacks" now known not to have occurred. By 1967 Johnson had sent some 550,000 US troops into Southeast Asia. More were sent by allied countries, and about 10% of that number died. Like the Maine and Lusitania disasters, the North Vietnamese PT boats attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin were little more than lies: there had been no unjustified, provocative attacks, only a perceived need to enter into war.
Now we hear of “Islamists”, and that “Truthers” complaining about massive misinformation on WTC 9-11 are as psychologically unstable as the “Birthers” calling their own President an anti-American atheistic Islamic commie Socialist… and nobody seems to know what’s going on in 3 separate wars, wars some see as united in a “War on Terror” – another War to End all War, I suppose…

An organized self-contradiction

The intent of organized religion being to help the individual achieve something transcendent, its orientation is essentially selfish. As it doesn’t aspire to maintain its base (us, struggling humanity), but rather aspires to something “higher”, its complete success would be its complete demise (and not all that much eventually). Thus self-defeating, its selfish nature is at odds with itself, and involves no rational, pragmatic sense whatsoever (except to assert control). Organized religion involves but pageantry, fantasy and promises – in other words, deceit, but is as addictive as any hedonistic behavior. Sometimes it’s good that so many of us so regularly fail to learn from teachers.

amazing movie

http://www.truththeory.org/quantum-communication/

The Hip-list:

The Rockies, Rainforests and desert;
Jim, Jimi and Janis, the Fab Four and Rolling Stones;
Fellini, Clint Eastwood, and “Black Orpheus”;
Certain novels for a while, some TV shows too (Star Trek remains kinda cool);
Balkan Sobranies, Cavendish and James Whitcomb Riley’s “I Smoke My Pipe”;
Mr. Natural, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Captain Marvell;
Organic health food, food co-ops and recycling;
Army Surplus, Goodwill and Salvation Army stores;
Hemp sandals, Vibram soles, Stetson hats;
Panama Red, Acapulco Gold and Black Afghani;
Psilocybin, peyote and Owsley’s refrigerated sugar-cubes;
“A season in Hell”, The Wasteland and “Four Quartets”;
Aboriginal and ethnographic art; pick-up volleyball and softball,
Poppy-seed bagels, solar power, hitch-hiking;
Guinness Stout and Labatt’s Blue Light (until Bud bought it, anyway);
Austin Tejas when it’s not too hot or cold,
SanFrunCisco when it’s not too gay,
And some other places far, far away;
India cotton, denim and Pendleton Mills;
Harrison Ford, Michele Pfeiffer, George Carlin, Steve Martin,
Sex, hair, cars, bikes, campers and ball-point pens;
Ziploc baggies, flash-drive memory sticks, coolers, coats and retro advertising,
Live music, Godzilla and old tokens and funky foreign coins.

Why Opening Myanmar to the West is Bad.

Why Opening Myanmar to the West is Bad.
In a word – Monsanto. Here in ChiangRai, we still have bees and butterflies, pollinators. We, and everyone everywhere, need them. In China, they’re now often pollinating by hand. Without a large pool of poorly paid and desperate people, that would make the price of fruit (among other things) exorbitant.
The root (and trunk) of the problem is that the “scientists” (engineers) producing genetically modified seed have neglected to consider important interface mechanisms of the natural world. Just as genes function through mechanisms in their genetic sheaths (which have yet to be modified), nothing stands alone or operates alone. It’s like the “domino effect” – change one piece, and a long chain of subsequent activity becomes affected. Much as we digest with the aid of bacteria, plants propagate themselves with the aid of non-plant life-forms (insects, birds, worms). And corporate greed has been blind to these realities.
And corporate greed is the reason the opening of Myanmar may prove even worse than the horrific genocidal activity of the military regime there. Even with human mine detectors, rampant poverty and extensive fighting, the village community has thrived throughout what once was well-known as Burma. People there look out for each other, co-operate in their work and celebrations, and have loving families.
With the coming of “development” there is usually increased social alienation, and curtailing of extended social connectivity. People become in competition with each other: individualized units for production and consumers subject to the manipulations of advertising.
“Western multinational corporations, and American empire, are desperate to continue on a course of expansion, despite that there remains hardly any potential remaining for that. This is also a “domino effect” – which needs to be stopped before all of our dominos have fallen. The less humanity retains connection to its past, the less future it has.

Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One

The World Is Blue
How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One
SYLVIA A. EARLE
Foreword by BILL MCKIBBEN
National Geographic, $15.95 paper
ISBN 978-1-4262-0639-9

World Without Fish
Text by MARK KURLANSKY
Graphics by FRANK STOCKTON
Workman Publishing, $16.95 cloth
ISBN 978-0-7611-5607-9

Let Them Eat Shrimp
The Tragic Disappearance of the Rainforests of the Sea
KENNEDY WARNE
Island Press, $25.95 cloth
ISBN 978-1-59726-683-3

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, . . . the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. —Albert Camus, The Plague

Since long before the Industrial Revolution, we humans have generally assumed the world, our planet, to be a horn of plenty that can never be exhausted, endangered, or despoiled by anything other than natural (or preternatural) forces. This attitude helped formulate what we in Western cultures have believed for centuries, writ large in the Judeo-Christian holy books. While we have seldom acknowledged that our own exploits might be fraught with irreversible error, we came quickly to expect the occasional natural disaster—a hurricane, tornado, a drought the size of the Dust Bowl, a tsunami, an avalanche, a devastating flood, etc.—and perhaps even the purposeful destruction of the world as imagined in biblical terms by an angry god, as the only inevitabilities that lie in the path of our survival. Within the context of this assumption, a dangerous mythos has formed that goes something like this: Because the Creator has placed humankind at the center of worldly importance, and at the top of the food chain, He/She/It has favored us above all other creatures of the earth, and will, if we are “good”, supply us with an inexhaustible plenitude of all that we require to maintain our lives forever and forever until the “end of days.” We bear the responsibility only of being “good” and exercising our mandate to “rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Genesis 1:28). Though this is a prelapsarian determination of the status of humankind, it persists among Christian, Muslim, and other Judaic cultures especially, though many other creation myths bear the same assumptions about humanity’s exalted status, unto the present day.
Running counter to this mythos are the lessons of science, particularly those that derive from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which not only challenge creationism but also delve deeply into how life on earth actually transpires and set forth sound natural laws, derived through observation, applicable to the interdependent survival of all that we know to be carbon-based life forms—mammals, fish, birds, plants, us, et al. Throughout the two centuries since Darwin’s discoveries, however, we have continued to live our industrious lives as a grand opportunity to more efficiently harvest and utilize in countless ways the material prosperity that is part and parcel of our semi-divine birthright, all the while ignoring and even scorning the dictums of Darwin. We have also procreated and procreated, as our biblical mandate has set forth, so as to “fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). During much of this process, we have seldom also recognized ourselves as stewards of the earth and its resources; we have largely ignored the possibility that we ourselves—overcome by greed, arrogance, need, and a habituated loss of what the poet John Milton called “right reason”—could put an end to our plenitude, befoul our own nest, and render the bounty of the earth into a toxic wasteland. The books under review here, and many others besides, seek to restore our sensibilities and help us avert such a self-made apocalypse. They focus principally on the current state of the oceans of the world, without whose healthy waters of life we will certainly perish, and bear witness to their rapid deterioration.
The best overview of our present predicament lies within the pages of Sylvia Earle’s The World Is Blue, who views the fabric of planetary life as an interlocking matrix of essential elements and life forms that make life on Earth suitable for human existence. But her focus is on the vitality of the oceans, wherein, as she says, “Water—the blue—is the key to life. With it, anything is possible; without it, life does not exist. Those seeking life elsewhere in the universe focus first on this: Find the water.” [p. 15] Certainly anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the earth sciences—biology, chemistry, physics, genetics, geology, etc.—can easily confirm this dictum, but what Earle wants to ask is, Who’s listening? Who cares? “Knowing is the key to caring,” she avers, “and with caring there is hope that people will be motivated to take positive actions.” [p. 256] And Earle—the recipient of 19 honorary doctorates—is the consummate teacher; her credentials as an oceanic scientist are beyond reproach, and as she makes clear throughout this book, they stem from a profound lifelong love affair and physical interaction with the ocean itself.
Earle makes it crystal clear that what we once regarded as an inexhaustible resource is quickly becoming a dying sea, and that this accelerating deterioration is due largely to human activities, from overfishing to pollution to climate change. The statistics over the last 60 years are staggering:

• Since the middle of the 20th century, hundreds of millions of tons of ocean wildlife have been removed from the sea, while hundreds of millions of tons of wastes have been poured into it.
• Ninety percent of many once common fish have been extracted since the 1950s; 95 percent of some species, including bluefin tuna, Atlantic cod, American eel, and certain sharks have been killed. . . .
• Every year industrial fishing wantonly kills thousands of marine mammals, seabirds, and sea turtles and hundreds of millions of fish and invertebrate animals [that are simply discarded as bycatch].
• Half of the shallow coral reefs globally are gone or are in a state of serious decline since the 1950s; in much of the Caribbean, 80 percent are dead. . . .
• The ocean’s pH—the measure of alkalinity or acidity—is changing owing to increased [anthropogenic] CO2, that in turn becomes carbonic acid [a known threat to most all forms of oceanic life]. [p.19]

We could add to this list the fact that over 70 million sharks are killed each year to support the shark fin trade in China (shark fin soup for everyone! says Chairman Hu Jintao), and over 3 million whales were killed during the 20th century by Norway, Japan, the USSR, and the United Kingdom. “The question is,” Earle goes on, “what can we do to take care of the blue world that takes care of us?” [p.20]
Roughly 70 percent of the oxygen in our atmosphere (and in our lungs) is supplied by ocean-dwelling photosythesizers—notably microscopic bacteria and other phytoplankton equipped with chlorophyll that convert the sun’s energy, in combination with carbon dioxide and water, into oxygen, just as terrestrial plants do. Phytoplankton also serve as the basic food source for hatchlings and several small species of fish called copepods (krill) or menhaden (sardines, anchovies, herring), which in turn provide food for ever larger and larger fish all the way up the ocean food chain. Thus phytoplankton, and the small creatures that feed on them, are what biologists call “keystone species,” for without them there would be no ocean-dwelling creatures at all, so far as we know.
Humans, by eating our way down the ocean food chain, are accomplishing the same end, except in reverse. Mark Kurlansky’s World Without Fish is a history of fishing and fisherman; he was once a fisherman himself, and has a deep understanding of the problems engendered by overfishing, coupled with a delightful youth-oriented writing style that captivates without a lot of scientific jargon getting in the way. Graphically interesting font styles, interspersed with one-page segments of a graphic novel that introduce each chapter, lend accessibility to the essential scenario of oceanic collapse.
Relying on Darwin, not dogma, Kurlansky introduces simple scientific concepts to show how the survival of ocean species depend first of all on biodiversity—“The greatest amount of life can be supported by great diversification” (Darwin). [p. xix] As fishermen, especially since the invention in the 1880s of large factory ships that trawl and dredge the ocean bottom with huge nets, began to catch more and more of the larger fish that humans prefer to eat—tuna, cod, halibut, flounder, swordfish, grouper, salmon, etc.—“fishermen were able to hunt down every last fish in a dying population without realizing that it was dying.” [p. 74] For example, cod virtually disappeared from the Grand Banks in 1992, where they had flourished for centuries, and have not recovered to this day, illustrating another Darwinian precept: “Rarity [of any species] . . . is the precursor to extinction” [p. 63]
The sudden appearance of orange roughy in fishermen’s nets in the 1970s, and its equally sudden disappearance in the 1990s, illustrates another of many problems with deepwater fishing. At first, roughy became so fashionable to diners in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States (among others) that demand grew and commercial fishermen responded accordingly, without knowing one crucial thing: orange roughy can live approximately 150 years, and don’t reproduce until they are 20 years old. Because they were being caught extravagantly before they could reproduce, this species is no longer available.
Which leads Kurlansky to yet another common misconception that has survived among fisheries scientists for centuries: “that it was impossible to catch too many fish because fish produced so many eggs,” as many as 3 million per fish among cod, for example. [p.53] “Only recently,” writes Kurlansky, “has science come to understand [as Darwin did] that a fish will usually only have between one and six surviving babies, just like a mammal or a bird.” [p. 55] In short, Kurlansky concludes that by overfishing—abetted by warming seas and, with the melting of the polar icecaps, declining salinity and increasing acidity in the world’s oceans—we “have upset nature’s balance [and] it becomes extremely complicated to put it right again.” [p. 148] If these destructive trends are not reversed, and soon, Kurlansky predicts that the world’s oceans’ ecosystems will collapse within 50 years, leaving only species such as reddish-orange algae, jellyfish, and certain bacteria that don’t need oxygen to survive.
Both Earle and Kurlansky imagine that sustainably raised and harvested land-based fisheries, i.e., human-run enterprises in aquaculture, might take enough pressure off our overfished oceans to allow open-water species to recover over the coming decades. Indeed, the idea and practice of aquaculture has caught fire since the 1970s in many nations around the globe, but there are grave problems associated with many of these operations that further threaten the complex integrity of the seas. In Let Them Eat Shrimp, veteran journalist and mangrove ecologist Kennedy Warne takes us on a worldwide journey into the mangrove forests, which he calls the “rainforests of the sea,” that are being widely decimated by aquaculture ventures and land developers. A native New Zealander, Warne developed an early fascination with the relationships between mangroves and the margins of the sea in which they thrive, introducing us along the way to the thousands of local people whose main sources of survival depend on a reverent reliance on mangrove environs.
From Bimini to Florida to Belize to Panama, to Equador and Brazil, and then on to Malaysia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Eritrea, and Tanzania, Warne’s picaresque inquiries into the fate of various mangrove populations lead him to almost every exemplary locale. Here’s what he discovered, in a nutshell, and why his arguments against mangrove deforestation make sense, vis-à-vis those for aquaculture and resort development. First and foremost, aquaculture projects most of often involve ocean-side sites that include ancient mangrove forest that must be simply bulldozed up to allow shrimp-farm ponds, for example, access to the tidal waters they occupy. This practice has traditionally gone on for decades without any environmental study into the true value of mangrove forests and the coastal populations they serve, not to mention their value to the ocean waters they have their roots in.
So what exactly is their value, calculated not only in economic terms but also in human and ecological terms? Warne’s extensive research divines the following answers: (1) as plants, “they consume carbon dioxide, release oxygen, and create carbohydrates during photosynthesis,” just as the great rainforests of the world do; (2) “they form soil, store and sequester carbon, and cycle water and nutrients through the ecosystem”; (3) “they act as biofilters, controlling nutrient [and toxic] runoff from the land and maintaining the quality of coastal waters on which other ecosystems such as coral reefs depend”; (4) “they are key suppliers of organic carbon to the oceans, drip-feeding a source of primary productivity to marine food webs”; (5) “they provide nursery habitats and havens for marine organisms” that later migrate into open waters (up to 90 percent of commercial fish species), “and nesting and roosting space for birds”; and (6) “they are a source of pollen and nectar for bees, and a source of fodder for browsing herbivores.” [pp. 149-150]
Thus a 100-hectare (250-acre) shrimp farm constructed by clearing mangroves incurs an annual environmental deficit of $1 million—a cost that, if it were included in the price of the product, would take farmed shrimp off the fast-food menu. . . . Since the Industrial Revolution—the commencement of the era of carbon profligacy—developed nations have racked up a huge debt with one particular ecosystem service: carbon dioxide storage in atmosphere and ocean. Now that bill is being collected. [p.150]

In addition, citing a study in the Gulf of California on only the value of mangrove forests to marine fisheries, we might add another $15,000 per acre per year just for “fish-related services,” putting the annual total value of an acre of mangrove forest at $19,000, which is over “600 times the value that the Mexican government places on mangrove land.” [p. 151] And still we have not yet included the cost of human suffering by the displacement and/or impoverishment of coastal dwellers through the ruination of their ancestral homes.
We are all familiar with the “inconvenient truth” of anthropogenic global warming and the many reasons behind it. Whether we believe it or not is a matter of personal responsibility, and if ignorance is our bliss we will refuse to even consider that it might be true, and this plague will continue until we perish of it. If instead we choose to do what we can to mitigate the effects of carbon dioxide in our air and oceans, we will listen to the science and the advice of scientists and other researchers, we will read all we can about it, we will petition our government about it, we will seek out new sources of energy for our homes and cars, we will eat sustainably raised or caught seafood (I was recently gratified to learn that Whole Foods, for instance, has a highly responsible rating list for its offerings of both farm-raised—no mangrove destruction allowed—and wild-caught seafood), and we will refuse to add any toxic waste to our rivers and public water systems. There are long lists of changes we can and must make, available in the books above, along with equally long lists of what will most certainly happen to our planet if we continue on our present course. The earth’s ecosystems will naturally recover over time, with or without our help. The question is, do homo sapiens want to be here when it happens.
To borrow a quote from Earle’s book, “Patriarch Bartholomew I, spiritual leader of the world’s 250 million Orthodox Christians, has declared”:

For humans to cause species to become extinct and to destroy the biological diversity of God’s creation, for humans to degrade the integrity of the earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the earth of its natural forests, or destroying its wetlands, for humans to contaminate the earth’s waters, its land, its air and its life with poisonous substances, these are sins. [no citation listed]

One hopes that such sentiments from this so-called “Green Pope” will help close the divide between science and religion when it comes to the salvation of our planet from human folly.


REVIEWER: Scott Vickers lives in Denver. He took up scuba diving in 1992; since then he has logged over 700 dives, and over those 20 years has noted some disturbing changes among the reef systems of the Caribbean. He would without hesitation call his intimate relationship with the oceans vital to his own existence.
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Orders from the Top

With the oligarchy’s fear of those it sees as underlings gaining wisdom and capacity through education, and also mankind’s bazaar fondness for self-delusion, not only have many been manipulated into foolish mistakes, but these mistakes have become used to demonstrate their own inevitability, and thus the necessity of oligarchic interventions, despite the oligarchs’ own many mistakes. The full result is that it’s become the responsibility of us all to protect not only ourselves, but the oligarchs themselves, from their prideful mistakes. Indeed, we have no choice, if we want the generation being born now to survive past early maturity – for those with more access to knowledge and wisdom have certainly not used it well, a situation we have little reason to expect to change.
As some folk clearly have no real capacity to work at re-arranging things, or be much more than followers, it falls to the rest of us to do whatever we can, and it best not be but little!