It seems the seas are like Culture, Healthcare, Education and America's
height and health index. Being eaten alive by the ideal of the invisible
hand. It seems that the seas are like the arts. They too can get down to
a depression equilibrium. As for the Cod, if the earth mother IS cognizant
I can imagine her getting even with those Canadian fisherman and hiding her
Cod until the current generation of fish eaters die off.
But we don't need the environment for this lesson. Its right there in our
faces with those who taught us these principles in the first place. The
same principle in health care means that even the low upper class can't
afford to take care of their elderly these days. The current crop of young
people can't go do their jobs and still stay home to take care of mom or dad
as they suffer the strokes that form dementia. There are very good drug
cocktails that can retrieve memory, lower strokes and reduce depression but
you need someone to be around to monitor them and the elderly react to
Nursing homes in the same way that children in the Rene Spitz studies
reacted to a lack of touching and care. They simply wither and die.
How long does a profession have to fail before it either dies or a new more
violent revolution takes its place? It happened to the church. It
happened to the Kings and now it is happening to the economists. How long
will the dominant economic religion simply talk about fake money and a dumb
consumer condemned to either New Age ideas or factory drudgery created by
their ideas of market efficiency?
When I was taking debate in high school I was taught that you should limit
the argument to your ideas and ideals and then you would have a chance of
winning. I see voice students do this on a regular basis and they
eliminate the possibility of creativity. They seem hard wired to fail.
The same seems true of today's profit oriented intellectuals.
Unfortunately the important tasks aren't "cost effective" so they don't even
try.
Creativity uses a different part of the brain from number crunching or the
following of an old musical score. Creativity requires questions,
improvisation and looking into unusual circumstances. It requires holistic
thought from the whole organism. Today's education has destroyed
creativity in the name of 19th century science and as a result today's
culture is historically schizophrenic. Instead of seeing what isn't there
in this reality, they insist that what they see shouldn't be there and act
as if it isn't.
Someone accused me recently of running people off the list. I submit that,
given the trouble that the society is in, simply telling the same old tired
maxims, that have gotten us here in the first place, does not speak well for
the utility of the list. Reducing exploration to the "wrong execution of
universally believed truths" is no exploration at all. Real creativity
begins when you don't talk about those things but work to get beyond them to
the wisdom of your own intuition.
Its hard to get a person out of work and depressed to used their free time
creatively. It is hard to get a retired person, who is angry, to use their
experience and free time creatively as well. Some are afraid that to
admit mistakes means to demean the value of their lives. I submit that
learning what you did wrong before you die and passing that knowledge on is
a noble thing to do. But you must have the courage to begin with where you
screwed up. Our mistakes are often the doorways into the solutions.
Uttering other people's mistakes or yesterday's truths that do not fit
current reality are worse than useless. They begin to create the
helplessness that gives us the current unwillingness to do anything about
the oceans or the weather.
Tor has published an URL to a fine article that shows something with
statistics that we have all been feeling. It could only be done by an
outsider. Its conclusions about the American market system compared to
the European welfare system we feel in our bones and in our guts. It
hurts to be wrong just like it will hurt to know that we allowed greedy SOBs
to destroy the ocean. The mother of all existence.
True sustainable life does not begin with a farm or an alternate currency.
It begins by realizing that the world is limited and the human soul and
imagination are not. That we must discipline both and not act out our
fantasies without first exploring the problem thoroughly and giving up these
fantasies about nature as a mechanism that is balanced. The only thing
about nature that is automatic is death and change. Birth is not assured.
I never was and never could be a deist. I think that God is evolving
through our level of consciousness and that if we decline, so will our Gods.
We should care more for our children, our elderly and our Gods. But most
of all stop the prevarications in defense of winning an argument.
I submit that if the list is not more creative, given the level of the
emergency then its only purpose is education. Who are the students? I
also submit that writing books are good for the writer but I think any
damage done as a result of the reading should be an issue of liability.
Otherwise stay with the list and keep talking for your own growth. There's
protection in discussion. That's what I tell myself anyway. Yes there is
a through line Harry and it was an improvisation based upon the death of the
oceans. That is Jazz and that is why we do in the arts. Its another part
of the brain according to a scientist that I had a barbeque with on Sunday.
To Arthur or Sally. I have not been receiving Harry's posts. I'll give
up the paranoia on that and just assume its a glitch.
REH
Troubled Seas
Ninety percent of the big fish have already been caught. Will rampant
overfishing cause the ocean's ecosystems to collapse? No one knows.
By Fred Guterl
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL
July 14 issue - Scientists aboard the research ship Tangaroa had set out
from Australia in search of a particular underwater mountain. It was located
in the Norfolk Ridge, out in the middle of the Tasman Sea, and sonar maps
suggested that it was just what they were looking for: gentle slopes free of
rocks and crags, and a peak that rose to within 2,000 meters of the water's
surface. But on day five of the voyage, the seas were rough and the seamount
was nowhere to be found. Reluctantly, they decided to explore another
underwater mountain. They lowered their "dredge"-a metal box with a net
lining-and began dragging it up the slope. Immediately it snagged. "The
bottom is very hard and deceptively flat but fractured with fissures and
valleys that are nearly impossible to tow our gear over," reads the log
entry for 11 a.m. on May 14.
THAT DAY THE CREW managed to pull up a small haul of creatures-spider fish
and long-legged crabs and others known to frequent seamounts. Two of them
looked especially odd: a dragonfish, less than seven centimeters long, that
had a barbel-like protrusion on its chin with a light organ at its tip,
probably for attracting prey; and a type of grenadier fish with distinctive
markings and coloration. That evening, an addendum to the ship's log
referred to "two species new to science."
New to science-the phrase is usually accompanied by the sound of
popping corks. But marine biologists are spoiled for diversity: the
Australians and New Zealanders on the Tangaroa came back with more than 100
possibly new species. That's less a sign of the ocean's profusion than of
our ignorance: scientists know shockingly little about what makes the oceans
tick. Only in the past decade or so have marine biologists taken an interest
in seamounts, where strong currents bearing precious nutrients and oxygen
tend to support abundant marine life; of thousands scattered throughout the
world's oceans, they've visited only a handful.
The problem is that what we do know is frightening. While the
Tangaroa was plying the Tasman Sea, Canadian biologists Ransom Myers and
Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax were publishing, in the
journal Nature, the latest and most comprehensive estimate of the state of
the world's fisheries. Scientists have known for more than a decade that
fish are being removed from the ocean faster than they can replenish
themselves. But Myers and Worm have now attached a shocking figure to the
debate: in the past 50 years, they say, overfishing has removed nine of 10
large predators-the big fish like tuna and cod. Scientists have sounded
similar alarms for years, but always about this fishery or that-the North
Atlantic in the 1980s, the North Sea and the waters off Japan in the 1990s
and, more recently, western Africa. This time, the data is global. "The
beauty of the paper is that it has a nice, round number," says Jeremy
Jackson, a scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San
Diego. "Ninety percent of the world's fish are gone. Anybody can understand
that."
Can we? Ask most marine biologists, and they'll tell you that the
more they learn about the oceans, the less they know. Eliminating predatory
fish is bound to have wide-ranging repercussions. "You can't just remove the
top layer of an ecosystem without having a knock-on effect," says Larry
Crowder, a Duke University biologist. As a worst-case scenario, it could
eventually turn the oceans into deserts. But this is unexplored territory,
and scientists are fumbling around like the Tangaroa with its dredge. "What
would the oceans be like without predators?" says Barbara Block, a marine
biologist at Stanford University. "It's like asking what Africa would be
without lions. What it means is almost completely unknown right now." What's
undisputed is the need to answer this question, and soon-not least to build
the political case for preserving the last earthly frontier.
If you didn't know where to look, the deep oceans might seem to be
almost devoid of life. Beyond the narrow continental shelves, the ocean
bottom drops to tens of thousands of meters. At such depths, pressures reach
1,000 atmospheres-enough to compress a human body down to the size of a
doll. Be-cause the sun's rays can't penetrate beyond a few meters of
seawater, energy and nutrients at the ocean floor are few and far between.
Bottom dwellers, like sea cucumbers, clams and bristle worms, live slow,
monotonous lives of minimal activity.
As if to make up for this dreary vastness, the oceans support the
occasional oasis. Warm currents-like the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic, or the
Kuroshio Current off Japan-collide with cooler water, creating a
discontinuity, like oil and water, that traps tiny phytoplankton.
Zooplankton arrive to eat them, small fish come to eat the zooplankton and
the big fish, the turtles, the seabirds follow in turn. A similar
proliferation occurs on seamounts, on the continental shelves and at
upwellings of cold water from the deep. The paucity of sunlight, nutrients
and oxygen-the very thing that makes the ocean so forbidding-also imposes a
structure on marine life.
The propensity of life to congregate is one reason scientists worry
about overfishing. The oceans may be vast, but the number of oases is
finite. In the Grand Banks in the northern Atlantic, for instance, cod were
plentiful a hundred years ago. Then fishing trawlers came in the early 20th
century and, 50 years later, factory trawlers-mammoth ships that can net,
fillet and freeze enormous amounts of fish. In a few decades, the fisheries
were depleted. In 1992 the Canadian government was forced to impose a
moratorium on cod fishing, but in 11 years the cod have not come back.
Nobody knows why.
With the decline of shallow-bottom feeders like cod and halibut, the
fishing industry has redoubled its efforts in the open oceans. The preferred
method is so-called longline fishing, which entails stringing out lines,
supported by buoys, that stretch tens of miles over the water's surface, and
attaching other lines with baited hooks. The technique is particularly
effective for tuna, billfish and swordfish. (It also nabs sea turtles,
sharks and albatrosses, and is a major factor in the decline of these
animals.) Myers and Worm studied historical data from longline fish-ing
going back more than 50 years and found that catch rates for all types of
fish had dropped more precipitously than scientists previously thought.
The report is the first documented decline of predators throughout
both coastal and deep ocean waters. Stanford's Block thinks that's not
merely a question of fishermen ranging farther afield. Since 1996 she has
studied the migratory patterns of tuna and sharks, tracking them with
satellite transponders. She's found that unlike cod, tuna and sharks don't
confine themselves to any one area. Sharks off the western United States
have been observed swimming the 3,700km to Hawaii. Block once traced an
Atlantic bluefin tuna as far north as Iceland, as far south as the
Caribbean, and even to the Mediterranean. "We cannot tell you where almost
any of these species go to feed or breed," she says.
On the one hand, that means the oceans are interrelated-and thus
that the removal of predators can have far-reaching effects. But it reveals
nothing about the lower layers of the food chain. Scientists have only
piecemeal examples of what happens when marine eco-systems become
unbalanced. The collapse of the cod fisheries in the North Atlantic has been
a boon to shrimp and sea urchins, the cod's prey. It's given urchins free
rein to devour the kelp forests, turning vast stretches of the sea floor
into "urchin barrens." In a study of coastal ecosystems two years ago,
Jackson found overfishing of predators, rather than pollution and global
warming, to be the probable cause of oceanic "dead zones"-areas of complete
ecosystem collapse, where microbes fill the void left by fish and
invertebrates.
Dead zones are found in the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay and the
Baltic and Adriatic seas, and they're spreading to the open oceans. Coral
reefs in the Caribbean have been hurt by overfishing of algae-eating fish,
such as parrot fish. Sea urchins took up the slack for years, but when a
disease outbreak wiped them out the corals grew fuzzy and green with algae,
and died.
Since so little is known about marine ecosystems, scientists are
reluctant to speculate where all this might lead. It doesn't take much
imagination, though, to extrapolate from what we do know. If overfishing
continues for the big predators, it's possible that many of them may fall
below a critical mass and lose the ability to reproduce, sending populations
into a downward spiral. That would throw millions of people who depend on
the fishing industry out of work. If the cod and herring fisheries are any
guide, the damage would take decades to reverse. It would be a global
crisis; treaties would be signed; -the United Nations would be granted the
power to enforce fishing bans-and we'd all wait out the decades hoping the
fish would return. But they might not, ever. The removal of so many big fish
could have a ripple effect, killing off invertebrate and microbial life
forms we haven't even heard of yet, but which serve as essential links in
the food web. How long would it take-50 years? 100?-to find that cod, tuna,
halibut, mackerel, marlin and other big fish were creatures only of farms or
museums?
This is speculation, but it isn't idle speculation. The Myers and Worm data
may be telling us that a global catastrophe is already underway. It sounds
laughable to put it this way. It would have been laughable, too, to suggest
a hundred years ago that fishermen would someday catch the last Atlantic
cod. Cod, as everybody knew, was as close to a limitless resource as you
could get. Maybe then. But tens of thousands of unemployed Canadian
fishermen have been waiting a decade for the cod to return to the waters of
Labrador and Newfoundland. Earlier this year, Canada put the Atlantic cod on
its endangered-species list
The public hasn't much noticed the decline. More fish are being raised on
farms, and fishing boats have pushed farther and deeper in chase of a
dwindling catch. The dearth of tuna isn't yet reflected in the price of a
tuna sandwich. But the decline is having some impact. Mahi-mahi has appeared
on the menus of Western restaurants, as a replacement for swordfish. Fishing
boats are plying treacherous Antarctic waters for the Patagonian toothfish,
known by its more salubrious moniker, Chilean sea bass.
Relatively simple fixes, such as enforceable quotas on fishing
nations, could halt the damage to the world's fisheries. The problem is, the
oceans are largely a free-for-all. "We manage fish on a species-by-species
basis and we manage on a crisis basis," says Leon Panetta, who headed the
Pew Charitable Trust's recent report on the world's fisheries. "We have to
approach the management of all fisheries in an ecosystem type of approach."
And yet, neither the United Nations nor the big environmental groups have
found an effective way to address overfishing.
Barring drastic action, the world is headed for an environmental
disaster whose proportions are unknown. "What's most depressing," says
Jackson, "is there's no new frontier. The ocean has had it." And we may
never know what we're missing.
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With Kristin Kovner and Emily Flynn
� 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
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