As an environmental historian who has worked on fisheries-related issues for more than two decades, I’m not surprised by the popular discourse surrounding the oil gushing uncontrollably in the Gulf of Mexico. It is only the most recent assault in a long, destructive campaign by humans to bend Nature to its will.
The most frequent questions that have arisen from this crisis could have been written in advance out of the rhetoric of the last crisis: "What does this mean for fishermen and their ‘way of life’", "What does this mean for tourism and the dollars tourists bring to the region?", "What does this mean for the political futures of Governor Bobby Jindal, or President Barack Obama?", "What will this mean for the price of shrimp?"
In short, "What does this mean for me?"
Like the ancient Greek story of Narciss who couldn’t stop gazing at his own own reflection in a pool of water, we are mesmerized by our own importance, with Nature serving only as the convenient backdrop for discussions about our own narrow political, economic, or social concerns. So as it ever was. So it is now. Other than a few photos of dead and decomposing sea turtles, or pelicans encumbered in a death shroud of crude, there have been few who have asked the question:
"What does this tragedy mean for our planet’s already endangered biodiversity?"
"Voices for Nature" is a new blog series meant to probe that question by enaging some of Dkos’ most popular writers and subject experts in a discussion of the environmental dimension of the ongoing Gulf ecological disaster.
I hope that through popular discussions of classic works and current news events, vulgurisation of the science of ecology, and informative vignettes that will introduce readers to a representative sample of the multitude of species inhabit the Gulf of Mexico, we can begin to better shape our rhetoric to fit an awareness of the environmental dimensions of everything we do.
Let me begin this series with an inaugural essay, one that I hope will make you think about how we can re-imagine our place as a species among other species on a planet subject to laws more supreme than our own.
A Crime against Nature
Just for a moment, I’d like you to imagine that you are a Bottlenose dolphin swimming in the warm waters of the Gulf somewhere south of Alabama doing what dolphins do, which is mostly looking for food, hanging out with your pod and thinking about finding a mate. (Perhaps, not so different from your average American teenager.) Your well-developed dolphin brain is one of the largest in the animal kingdom, but it has no understanding of the parochial politics of the Gulf, or the ever-changing fortunes of the Washington Beltway elite. You can navigate huge swaths of the ocean and communicate with others of your group using complex language. Like humans, you are a mammal, but your hands and feet have long ago evolved for life in the open ocean. Outside of some of the more unfortunate of your species who have been eslaved in pens in Ocean Parks around the world, you have little contact with terrestrial creatures caled "humans." You have no idea who, or what, a Barack Obama is or why he is so loved and so despised, nor do you have the slightest understanding of human culture, including the perpetual feuding between incrementalists and radicals in the Democratic party.
All you know is that huge and deadly clouds of something foul has suddenly erupted from the sea floor. You have long staked out part of the ocean for your pod. But, now your home is become more and more difficult to navigate as you lose your points of reference. The older members of your pod have seemingly disappeared, as have the young. It has become more and more difficult for those who remain to find food, and the food you do find has made you feel ill. Swimming through the water your eyes begin to burn. As you rise to breathe the air from the surface, your body is filled with an odd smell of fire floating in the open ocean.
When next you arise your mouth and blow hole is filled with a hot sticky substance that slowly chokes you. Already blinded and slowly being poisoned from the effects of chemical dispersants. Listless and lethargic from the lack of food your struggles to swim and breathe eventually become impossible. As you choke to death, your body will float for a while then sink to the bottom of the Gulf. A sentient creature you can feel the pain, but you will, nevertheless, not understand its source.
You will have little knowledge that you are just one more victim—not of Darwinian evolution—but, of something for which natural selection has not prepared you; a catastrophic release of crude oil from a reservoir miles beneath the sea bed caused by humanity’s ever growing fossil fuel extraction footprint.
What I have just briefly described to you is an approach that is being used more and more by Environmental historians and historical geographers, such as Donald Worster and a growing array of young scholars whose work bridges the humanities and the natural sciences. They belong to an emerging discipline that seeks to better understand human interactions with other environmental actors, like dolphins, birds, or domesticated animals, over longer periods of time than those that have interested historians in social scientists in the past. Their approach is called bio-centrism, or eco-centricism.
Using such an approach, we can better appreciate our place on this planet; one in which the geyser in the Gulf is not simply a man-made pollution event, but part of an ongoing "Crime against Nature." A crime all the more heinous not because it kills harmless and beloved animals, like dolphins, but because it eschews any concern for a complex and complicated web of life in which all living things are connected—including us, homo sapiens sapiens, a latin phrase that means the "wise thinking creature that walks upright."
That approach can be applied to how we think and talk about what we are witnessing now by thinking about watershed human events in an ecological framework. All of us today, for example, have been schooled on how some of those "wise thinking upright walking men" committed atrocious "Crimes against Humanity" during the Second World War. We’ve all seen the black and white films of the skeleton-like corpses of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and political dissidents piled up like chord wood to be burned in ovens. We’ve been treated generation after generation to Hollywood productions, museums, and public campaigns of awareness that rightfully keep us sensitized to the fanaticism and the consequences of man’s inhumanity to man.
Yet, who among us—our leaders included—have decried the death of our oceans? Who has articulated, here I mean something other than mere sadness, exactly how we have ruined something of our Planet beyond our own semi-advanced neolithic tool-using ability to repair it?
Yesterday, the CEO of BP, Tony Hayward, sat in front of Congress in a political exercise of that amounted to little more than shaming. One member of congress, a representative from Louisiana, held aloft a photo of an oily pelican as a kind of prop. Lucky for the pelican (the one in the photograph is surely already dead) that Louisiana chose it as it’s state bird. But, pitty the microscopic plankton, that has not such a lofty place in humanities iconic schemes, yet remaines a keystone species for foundation of most of the web of life in the sea.
No, in this current crime, the multitudes of victims will find no one speaking on their behalf. Neither the fish, nor the birds, nor the sponges, nor the shrimp, nor the lowly plankton. Were they able to do so, the world would surely be a different place. The few corpses we have seen, have little to say to us beyond making us sigh in remorse. They are embarrassingly gathered up in plastic bags to be hauled off for "autopsy" before being burned or sent off to some landfill. Reporters and scientists, thus far, are being prevented from making a photographic record that any court of prosecution could use, or that could be shown to future generations of school children as a warning.
It matters little. Most of the victims will not wash up on our shores. The vast majority will float silently and unceremoniously to the bottom of the ocean to become another layer of sedentary biomass, where in another hundred million years, the forces of geology will transform them into what killed them.
For this "Crime against Nature," there will be no international tribunals or lofty or theatrical speeches by men in black robes who eulogize as they weigh evidence against pathetic little men sitting in dockets.
But, there will be justice.
For, Nature’s court is ruled by the laws of Darwinian evolution. Even if the "wise and thinking and upright" Tony Hayward never reaches a court room or a prison cell, the rest of his species will be judged nevertheless. And, in Nature’s court of laws there is no "Court of Appeals."
Let the geological record show it to be the most just verdict in cosmic history.
-------
To the Dkos community of authors,
I ask you to please help keep this series going by signing up in the comments below to write on one of the following subjects, and help give "Voice to Nature:"
Book Reviews:
(Classic environmental awareness literature)
Sylvia Earle, Sea Change
George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature
Aldo Leopold, Thinking Like a Mountain
Other suggestions are welcome.
Species Vignettes:
Choose a species of Fish, Bird, Mammal, Crustacean, Invertabrate (sponges, jellyfish, corals, etc.), that lives in the Gulf to write a diary of its Natural history and its importance within the biosphere. I'm happy to offer any suggestions and give you sources for up-to-date information concerning most of the fish that live in the Gulf.
Wolf Sushi: Bluefine Tuna http://www.dailykos.com/...
Blue Crab - Crose
Orcas - HowardfromUSA
You do not have to be a zoologist, or a biologist, or a chemist, or an environmental historian. You just have to care.
Thank you for reading and thank you for thinking.