About a week before the USA decided to take part in World War One, this columnist came into the world with his four and a half pounds and moan and bustle. Then a couple of weeks ago he came up all standing with the realization that every day from now on he’d be getting nearer to 90 than he was to 80. So if he ever wanted to get everything done, it was time to get serious. Ergo, he comes up with a simple wish list:
1. Let us have our oceans back. Humans and animals rely on those oceans for at least 60 percent of the oxygen they both need to breathe. Three billion years ago, give or take a few millennia, carbon got the upper hand, nothing was left but bacteria, and it took them two and a half billion years to straighten things out, so that we humans could appear in the fullness of time. Now the USA is leading a parade of nine nations, all of them in the Northern Hemisphere, with a billion tons of carbon dioxide a year. Better we get things back into balance, lest we get included in a mass extinction. This could ruin the whole day for a lot of people.
2. Since the 1920s, about 73,000 organic compounds have been invented, all mostly untested and admitted to the market on the say-so of manufacturers that they are harmless. Well, most of them are not harmless, like why is there chlorine in the milk of Eskimo mothers? Most of the compounds reach the sea eventually. Start with the “dirty dozen,” the POPs, “Persistent Organic Pollutants,” and get rid of them.
3. There are now approximately 30,000 merchant ships plying the world ocean; the traffic is measured in billions of ton-miles, and it has doubled since 1970. Most all of them use ballast water to help stability at sea, taking it on for every passage and pumping it out as they approach a destination. Christopher Bright five years ago estimated that 3,000 species are being pumped overboard, day in and day out; Dr. Edward O. Wilson cites a more recent study that alien species with a foothold in the USA could now exceed 50,000. The ships’ bilges are never entirely dry, unless in drydock; on the big vessels, there’s an interesting soup of a couple of hundred tons of ballast water with everything from microbes up to live fish. there is no remotely feasible way to set up pumping stations in every port – some ships have to pump ballast to get into a harbor, and others have to take it on to slide under bridges. Thus green crabs since 1950 and Asiatic crabs today for us, the former now rounding Cape Breton and infesting Prince Edward Island, and East Coast comb jellies taking over the Black Sea, twice the size of the Gulf of Maine. The only solution – and the problem has to be solved – is to invent a sterilizing system for every vessel, with enzymes, ultraviolet light, lasers, or something new. Let’s put up a big international prize and do it.
4. In the most delicate possible way, let’s not hear any more about “Cyanide” and “You are destroying our way of life” every time NMFS or a half-dozen eco-groups stir up Madame Judge Kessler. Just who was it that guaranteed you, or us, or anybody else, the Good Life? Other than the constraint of law on NMFS and Judge Kessler, the “Cognitive Dissonance” (fishcrat phrase) between fisherpeople and the “environmentalists” with standing is that the first group is concerned with this year’s income and the second is concerned with a much longer view in the fisheries. Whatever the outcome, the numbers won’t make anybody happy, the biggest reason that nobody can consult with the fish. The fact is, with almost all of the world fisheries in trouble, that fishing effort has tripled while the total catch has dropped at least to only half. Sure, belts may be worn tighter in this and the next couple of years, but supposing it turns out right and there is a sustainable fishery for the next 400 years? You guys will have set a marvelous example to all our children and grandchildren, you’ll be heroes, and also you’ll be positioned to share in the bounty. That’s exciting.
5. We know, we know. Back along, the govt declared a war on poverty, when the executive got 16 times the wage of a worker. Now its 75 times (not counting Enron), so the gap is wider and now one percent of the people have 80 percent of the wealth, with more homeless and 35 million without a shred of health insurance. After that victory, the govt declared a war on drugs, and you and we know that illegal drugs are completely unavailable in this country now. Just to make sure, the Colombian Army was given a couple of billion to spray the peasantry’s gardens and their families with glyphosate (A.K.A. Roundup by Monsanto), doing a number on both and driving off the land and into the jungle. Next there was a terrible crime, and indeed it was, staged by a group of Saudis plus a couple of Egyptians, and a few from other Arab nations (but no Afghanis) which killed almost 3,000 people of many nationalities in the World Trade Center. What an idea case for the FBI, Mossad, Interpol, Scotland Yard, MI-5, NSC, CIA, DIA, the Secret Service, etc. to bring the criminals to justice before an international court. But no. Instead, the govt declared a war on terrorism and picked the poor benighted Afghanis as the culprits – at a cost of a cool billion a month so far (and 5,000 innocent lives), plus 3 billion a month around the year for homeland security, with another 1.7 billion to grow on. You don’t have to agree with us, but it’s hard to disagree with old Ben Franklin when he said anyone who would give up his liberty for a bit of temporary security didn’t deserve either.
In the Washington theater, fishing has virtually no clout – it’s all about money and the fishery totals about 0.01 percent of GNP. The fishery is nonetheless on the world stage, because it won’t be long before there are about 8 billion people, and they’ll want to be fed. And the fishery is now intertwined with merchant vessels, pollutants, the price of fossil fuels, govt regulation, and wars which upset the export and import markets. (Not to speak of the first fishing industry to disappear – Tuvalu, a nine-island UN member in the Pacific, has gone under water; all the people will be taken in by New Zealand.)
We don’t hold out much hope for our wish list, urgent as we may think it is. Fisherpeople value their independence, and what with all else that’s going on, it’s time to be careful – well, anyway, measured in dissent – when there’s so much to get done. A professor at Stanford, not to many zip codes away from San Francisco Bay, now laden with over 200 exotics plus over a hundred species defying identification to be joined by four new ones every year to drive out the native fauna, mildly suggested that bin Laden be brought before an international tribunal for his crimes. A dot.org founded by Mrs. Cheney cited the prof as “negligent in defending civilization.” Meanwhile the Congress, which took over ten years to pass a bill on campaign finance reform, let only 45 days go by after 9-11 to put through something called the “Patriot Act,” which repeals large parts of the Bill of Rights – the which doesn’t happen to be within the powers of Congress. Did you know that you can simply be declared a domestic terrorist, be tossed in the jug and be held indefinitely without charge, have your houses and offices secretly searched, have your savings frozen, and everything maybe confiscated, with nary a trial? Scary.
Our idea of defending civilization is a clean ocean without chaos, clean air to breathe (we don’t approve of having Maine No. 1 in asthma per capita), and a nice legal 64,000-lb. trip of haddock with no by-catch, and a vibrant working waterfront at the end of the voyage. Let’s work for that.