As humans we are constantly asking questions. But, are the questions we ask the right ones? More than a century ago, Herman Melville asked his own question in his epic tome, Moby Dick (a book universally panned by contemporary critics and ignored for a generation following its publication):
Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
Like Narcissus, we humans are mesmerized--to the peril of our own species--by the arrogance of our own self-importance. Nature serves as a material and mostly utilitarian backdrop as we play out our lives engaged in our own narrow political, economic, or social concerns. Is our species' gross indifference to what Melville called, "the ungraspable phantom of life," or as we know today as our biosphere and its intricate and interlocking collection of ecosystems, something more than a tragedy?
We have seen the photos of dead and decomposing sea turtles, pelicans encumbered in a death shroud of crude, or the browning blades of marsh grasses dying from the root. Some look upon them out of curiosity. Some look upon them with fear and trepidation. Some look at them with a sense of shame. Even more do not look at all. No matter how we see them, they remain mere anecdotes--tiny and fragmentary glimpses of a massive ecological transformation that is nearly inperceptable from our own limited terrestrial perspective.
Indeed, it is what we do not see that would, and should, horrify us the most.
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If we could slip into the skin of a Bottlenose dolphin how would our perceptions change? At once swimming effortlessly in the warm waters of the Gulf with your pod, perhaps somewhere in the open ocean south of Alabama. 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, nevertheless, navigate huge swaths of the ocean and communicate with others of your group using complex language. 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 your blue world has suddenly turned black. Huge and deadly clouds of something foul is now erupting deep down on the sea floor. As days pass, your territory has become more and more difficult to navigate as the darkening and strange smelling waters cause you to lose your points of reference. The older members of your pod, along with the young, have mysteriously disappeared. So have the fish. You move closer to shore, in hopes of finding food. But, the closer you get to shallower water, the more your eyes begin to burn. As you rise to breathe the air from the surface, as you've done all your life, your blow hole is filled with a hot sticky substance that slowly begins to choke you. A sentient creature you can feel the pain, but you will, nevertheless, not understand its source.
Already blinded, the red bloodcells exploding from the toxic effects of chemical dispersants you becoming increasingly listless and lethargic. Your struggles to swim and breathe eventually become impossible. When you finish painfully choking and bleeding to death, your body will float on the surface only for a while then sink to the invisible depths of the Gulf. You have become just one more unseen victim--not of the forces of Darwinian evolution—-but, of something far more insidious. Something for which you, one of the great success stories of a billion-year old process of 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.
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You are a victim of the actions of another species, homo sapiens sapiens, a latin phrase that means the "wise thinking creature that walks upright." Those actions amount to nothing less than crimes of the highest order against Nature, itself. These crimes all the more heinous not because they kill harmless and beloved animals, like dolphins, but because they eschews any concern for a complex and complicated web of life in which all living things are connected—including ourselves.
All of us living today 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 man's ongoing and persistant inhumanity to Nature? We are saddened by the death of men and women, but who mourns the death of an entire ocean? Who has articulated, here I mean something other than mere human sadness, exactly how we have ruined something of our Planet beyond our own semi-advanced neolithic tool-using ability to repair it?
A few days ago, 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 who would gasp at the ignorance of their forefathers.
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Most of the victims of this crime 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 slowly into the very goo that 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, rest assured, 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 and his ilk never reaches a court room or a prison cell, the rest of his species will be blindly judged nevertheless. And, in Nature’s court of laws there is no "Court of Appeals."
The verdict will be our own extinction.
Let the geological record show it to be the most just verdict in cosmic history.
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Addendum:
This is a re-publication of my introductury essay that is intended to launch a new series on Daily Kos, entitled: "Voices for Nature." It has already inspired some of Dkos’ most popular writers and subject experts to engage themselves in a deeper discussion of the environmental dimension of the ongoing Gulf ecological disaster.
So far, murrayewv has looked at the plight of the Bluefin Tuna, a species that migrates and resides in the Gulf, in his diary, Wolf Sushi.
Pakalolo has taken a snapshot of the Florida coast before the arrival of the oil, in order that we understand better what we are losing in his diary, Before it Arrives.
Pam LaPier has examined the natural history of the Whale shark, another resident of the Gulf.
I hope that through popular discussions of classic works and current news events, vulgurisation of the science of ecology, and informative vignettes that this series 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.
I ask you to please help keep this series going.
You do not have to be a zoologist, or a biologist, or a chemist, or an environmental historian. You just have to care. Sign up to write a diary in the comments below 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.
Thank you for reading and thank you for thinking.
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