Radical Environmentalists: Radical in Whose Mind?

In just about every other speech he makes, former Senator Rick Santorum, when he’s not proselytizing and driving his religious myths into the electoral process and attempting to erase the distinct line between church and state, cries foul at the “radical environmentalists” who fight and question what the oil, gas and coal companies are doing to our environment. He sneers as he utters the phrase “radical environmentalists” with the same intensity as when he decries Satan’s attack on, and infiltration of, America and American values. He conveniently forgets/ignores/ disregards/conceals the fact that he was a spokesman and defacto lobbyist for the coal industry after his failed attempt at reelection to the Senate in 2006. An online article published by Mother Jones  discusses how, after his defeat, Rick Santorum received $142,500 for fronting for Consol Energy, one of the largest coal mining companies in the country, which Santorum depicted as a local Pennsylvania mining concern. During his tenure in the Senate, Santorum also received more than $73,800 in donations from Consol at the same time the coal company lobbied Congress “on pollution limits, mine reclamation, worker health benefits, and tax policy” and the industry spent millions on its fictitious “clean coal” campaign. Paul Blumenthal’s Huffington Post piece, posted January 5, 2012, links Santorum, while still in office, to disgraced Republican Congressman Tom Delay, convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and the Republican/Christian fundamentalist, anti-environmental lobbying efforts of the K Street Project.

Santorum never mentions any of these connections when he sneers his “radical environmentalist” taunts before his like-minded audiences.  After all, he is just a company man defending his livelihood.

Radical environmentalist is one of those skeletal, value-loaded phrases, without much meat attached to it. It reeks of panic and phobia. It also echoes the labels (and threats) put on a radical environmentalist from the 1960s who, in her book Silent Spring, identified the dangers of saturating our ecosystems and food chains with persistent insecticides. Chemical company executives, using scare tactics, claimed that Rachel Carson, a reserved marine biologist, wished to return to times of crops lost to great insect plagues resulting in national and worldwide famine. They referred to her as a fanatic in the cult of the balance of nature. Some (many) birds, fish, beneficial insects, and other wildlife species were poisoned and brought to the edge of extinction by disrupted reproductive cycles and pitiful chemical-induced birth defects. Entire ecosystems were in danger of destruction, but the millions of pounds of DDT applied to farmlands and forests and ultimately our lakes and rivers, in the name of national interest put fortunes into the pockets of chemical companies.

When did the American public hand over rights to the environment to corporations? Never is when. If Rachel Carson hadn’t spoken out how many species would be gone now and how many more waterways would be poisoned beyond reclamation? How many cancers? How many birth defects? Ask the chemical companies that ridiculed her findings in the face of repeated scientific conclusions.

Today’s “radical environmentalists” fight, among other things, Rick Santorums’s unfounded, anti-environmental, ant-science scare-tactic claims that environmentalists are destroying “clean coal” jobs and endangering our national interest, not to mention his paycheck. Sound familiar?

My book The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict is now available in a  hardcover version at www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com and the University of Michigan Press, www.press.umich.edu which also offers an E-book edition. Also, check your local booksellers for availability.

For insights into the book, log on to my Author Page at Amazon at www.amazon.com/author/dennis-wild.

The Real Value of the "Getting Published" Process

A year or so ago I attended a writer’s conference in New York. I had looked forward to it for a few months and gone through the seminar schedule several times to make the most of my one day there, being careful not to miss the most interesting speakers.  The hotel was wall-to-wall writers, every one excited about the day, and for some the entire weekend. As I checked in, sat through the short orientation, and engaged some of the other attendees, I soon realized that few, if any of them, had ever been published, and fewer yet had any idea of how to go about getting published. They were there at the conference to work the process out in their heads.

The vast majority of the writers worked in fiction – historical, science, romance, horror, mystery, short stories, and novels.  I enjoyed hearing how other writers had chosen their specialties and how they had developed their characters and plot lines. As a nonfiction writer I was definitely in the minority, but I had anticipated as much from the catalogue of speakers and topics. Everyone chatted about their aspirations, but no one showed all their cards; there was certainly a sense of camaraderie, but we were also competitors. I came out, unintentionally, as the battle-scarred veteran with a book contract and publication date, even with the nonfiction tag.

During the lunch break, when I broached the subject of submissions and collections of rejection letters, faces around the table went blank. I sensed no one in my lunch group had ever submitted a manuscript.

 I also surprisingly heard several presenters, including the keynote speaker, discuss how simple, and uncomplicated a matter it was to get published.  This paradigm in no way matched my book or magazine writing experiences, but I was eager to hear of a different paradigm. And shortly out came the secret: self-publishing.

The myth of self-publishing is that it allows writers to see their words, ideas, and characters in print without facing the selective judgment of acquisition editors or the cruel strokes of the copyeditor. The myth of self-publishing also preaches the gospel of absolute control of authors over their words, content, copyright, format, marketing, and sales. The myth doesn’t have much to say about what is lost in by-passing the revision process, incurred costs, advertising campaigns, distribution, reviews, exposure to the know-how of experienced editors, and the fact that few booksellers, especially the chain stores, show little or no interest in self-published works.

One of the most irritating aspects of the self-publishing world is an examination of who promulgates the myth. The conference I spoke of was promoted and organized by Writer’s Digest, publisher of the magazine of the same name and a series of how-to writers’ guides. The same magazine advertises products and supplies without which writers cannot create or exist: coffee mugs, T-shirts, and baseball caps, all emblazoned with the label, “Writer.” The recent addition to Writer’s Digest’s catalogue of goodies is their entry into the world of self-publishing. Aside from the numerous revenue-producing ads inviting authors to publish their own creations, the magazine now offers its own book publishing services to writers. The process offers consulting, publishing, editing, and other services, all with fees attached. And conveniently, the number of articles in the magazine espousing the values and advantages of self-publishing over traditional publishing has markedly increased.

Writers put their efforts, thoughts, and hearts into their evolving manuscripts. In that pouring out of personal visions, promoting the idea that a mug or shirt will make better, more successful writer or will let others know they are writers, puts a smile on everyone’s face, writers included. No harm done. But when vulnerable writers are encouraged by a self-publishing company, which they otherwise consider a reliable source, to self-publish, one has to re-evaluate the integrity of the source.

Self-serving conflicts of interest must always be suspect. But the misrepresentation of self-publishing as a viable alternative to traditional publishing with comparable success, intentionally leads novice writers astray, diminishes their real chances of success, and ruins the priceless learning models discovered through re-writing and revision, probably the real value of the “getting published” process.    

An Atlantic Fishery in Trouble, or Thriving, or Something

Gadus morhua, is a very strange name for what some people see as an even uglier fish. A fish that can reach lengths of over four feet weighing of 55-77 pounds or more, living as long as 20 years, although most fish landed are in the 2-4 year-old class. Millions of this species come to U.S. ports and markets through the efforts of American commercial fishing. We see fillets from this common fish in restaurants’ “fish and chips” platters, in frozen food supermarket coolers, and in the cases of local fish mongers. Its tasty white flesh is accepted and enjoyed even by landlubbers who ordinarily might not seek out fish as their protein source. What is it? It’s the once ubiquitous Atlantic cod.

The head of NOAA’s fisheries section called the Atlantic cod “one of the iconic fisheries.” This is the same fish that fed early European settlers all along America’s northern to mid-Atlantic coast, from near-shore fisheries to the edge of the continental shelf; a species whose overfished stocks collapsed, some in the 1990s, or are in danger of imminent collapse. A stock is considered “collapsed” when it declines by more than 95 percent of its maximum historical biomass. An amazing reversal of fortune.

These commercially valuable fish are tracked, monitored, and managed in the Northwest Atlantic (northeastern U.S. coast) as two defined stocks: (1) the Gulf of Maine and (2) the Georges Bank and Southward. Commercial and recreational cod fishermen are active year round; commercial operators using trawls and gillnets, recreational anglers dropping lines from charter and large overnight party boats. In 2010 the commercial catch was valued at more than $15 million, obviously an important component of the Northeast’s economy.

The New York Times, in a February 11, 2012 article, reported that recent data revealed that the cod faces such enormous fishing pressure that if all human pursuit of the species ended right now, it would not rebound to federally required levels even by 2014. Federal regulators therefore proposed an 82 percent reduction from the previous year’s catch, a limit that would effectively shut down much of the cod fishery and, at least temporarily, retire many of the boats, crews, and skippers. Another drawback to such a large catch reduction in cod is that G. morhua is only one of a group of 20 groundfish species, including flounder and haddock, that are monitored and regulated as one unit because these bottom-dwellers often travel, swim, and feed together, resulting in them turning up in the same nets at the same time. The fate of one of these species often affects the others.

No one doubts that fishing is hard, sometimes dangerous, work performed in every sort of weather and sea conditions. It is also an old industry that has fewer and fewer new entrants. The sons and daughters of owners and captains, searching for careers far away from the cruel seas, increasingly shy away from following in their family’s or father’s footsteps. This aversion to fishing also runs counter to the increasing demand for seafood to feed an ever-growing human population: fewer boats and skippers, fewer fish.

The current cod situation exemplifies how immediate needs often supersede what really has to be done to better protect future needs. It is rare that a fisherman, commercial or sport (and I am a sport fisherman) ever utters that he is catching too many fish. If fact, there is an economic principle called the Tragedy of the Commons, which applies more to the fishing industry than probably any other, which maintains that a fisherman, knowing he is damaging his livelihood in the long run, would prefer to take his share or more of the common bounty just to prevent his competitor from doing the same. It’s a short term self-defense tactic. It is also not unusual for fishermen’s associations to question the science involved in setting fishing limits and seasons, even challenging the idea that certain fish stocks are in trouble at all. They often reject any finding that reflects poorly on their industry practices until the conclusion is proven true to an absolute degree and it’s too late to do anything to effectively correct it.

So, to placate the industry and stall the inevitable, NOAA regulators, adopting a one-year emergency rule, saw fit to reduce the 2012 catch by only 22 percent from the previous year. Fishermen are happier, regulators have the fishermen’s lobby temporarily off their backs, consumers will continue to see cod and their groundfish neighbors in their markets, and the cod stocks will continue to get smaller and smaller, perhaps until they become so scarce that they are no longer worth pursuing, by trawl or rod-and-reel.

My book The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict is now available in a  hardcover version at www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com and the University of Michigan Press, www.press.umich.edu which also offers an E-book edition. Also, check your local booksellers for availability.

For insights into the book, log on to my Author Page at Amazon at www.amazon.com/author/dennis-wild.  

The Sandhill Crane: Tastes Like Pork

Double-crested cormorants faced the challenge of becoming “overabundant.” Their numbers were so low for so long that more than one human generation grew up never seeing large gatherings of cormorants, either at their northern breeding grounds or favorite southern wintering quarters. When cormorant numbers rebounded after DDT was finally banned in 1972, fishermen, politicians and even bird watchers were astonished at their numbers. And for some, even though cormorant populations were probably still below their historic highs, the bird’s large flocks were seen as “out of control” and the birds were eating too many fish. So they, meaning catfish farmers, fishermen, and government technicians, shot them – by the tens of thousands. The remains of the birds were usually composted onsite or elsewhere since the meat is inedible. A cruel, terrible waste of food chain energy and biomass.

Now it is the Sandhill Crane, Grus canadensis, that comes under the gun as an “out-of-control” species. After decades of conservation efforts in many locations to protect thinning numbers of rare sandhill cranes, threatened due to overhunting in the 1930s, conventional wisdom now turns to lethal measures to control a perceived overabundance. The evolutionary line of cranes goes back about 10 million years, with distinct sandhill crane ancestors appearing about 2.5 million years ago. Like cormorants, there are several subspecies of sandhills, but unlike cormorants some are rare or endangered.

Sandhill cranes, typically do not deal with fish in their diets, so they’re not in competition with fishermen or fish farmers. The cranes are basically opportunistic herbivores, living off whatever plants or seeds are available, so they can manage to find food in drier upland areas as well as shallow wetlands. Sandhill cranes dine on wild berries, seeds of many kinds, and when the possibility presents itself, small mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates such as snails and insects. What actually brings them into conflict with man, farmers in particular, is their decided taste for cultivated foods such as corn and wheat. Sandhills frequently target recently planted corn and wheat fields, much like cormorants raid the densely stocked catfish ponds in the South in search of an easy meal.

To protect their fields, farmers in Wisconsin are requesting the creation of legal hunting seasons for sandhill cranes. More than a dozen states, with more in the offing, have established seasons, bag limits and takes for this once rare bird. Unlike cormorants, however, the flesh of sandhill cranes is edible and is reported by hunters to taste much like pork chops, so the birds are not merely killed, but also consumed.

Regardless of whether the carcasses are destined for the compost or the dinner table, it seems, at best, inefficient to spend decades reviving a rare, threatened species only to turn around and put it in hunters’ sights. What is really ignored here is the questioning of why the birds feed at agricultural sites rather than at open upland ranges or food-rich shallow wetlands. The one-word answer is habitat. Every day more and more open land is taken out of the natural food chain and converted from prairie or open range or upland habitat or wetland to real estate – development or reclamation projects, leaving wildlife without a natural home, driving it into conflict with humans.

In science fiction literature and physics thought experiments it’s common to postulate what happens when human subjects are locked in suspended animation and time goes on without them. When they awaken the world has changed and there is no place for them in the future. The return of nearly-extinct species sometimes falls into this type of scenario. There often comes a point when threatened wildlife species regain some of their original stature, attempt to re-colonize former territories and expand into new ones, but during the decades of their absence people forgot what they were, how plentiful their numbers had been, and their place in the ecosystem. In that future the returning wildlife has lost its claim to respectable habitat and moves into territory appropriated by humans in its absence, setting the stage once again for lethal control measures of “overabundant” species, even the ones that taste like pork.

My book The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict is now available in a  hardcover version at www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com and the University of Michigan Press, www.press.umich.edu which also offers an E-book edition. Also, check your local booksellers for availability.

For insights into the book, log on to my Author Page at Amazon at www.amazon.com/author/dennis-wild.  

What's Happening to Our Bats

Bats. Thought threatening by some people, our bats, rather than fearsome creatures, are harmless minders of nature and keepers of its balance. Bats, like bees and their cousins are pollinators, not only helping to produce our fruit and decorative flowers, but at the same time devouring millions of insects that might otherwise torment humans or damage fragile, economically important crops. And like other animals such as birds, squirrels, mice, and chipmunks they transport plant seeds as they search for food, ensuring continued plant diversity.

The problem now is they’re dying off, by the millions.

The cause, White-nose Syndrome (WNS), was discovered and photographed in a New York cave in 2006 where hibernating bats were observed with unnatural white noses. It was further documented and named the following year by biologists from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) who witnessed erratic bat behaviors and hundreds of dead bats in scattered bats across the state. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported that “more than a million hibernating bats have died since then, making WNS the worst wildlife health crisis in memory.” The disease plagues multiple species of bats in caves and mines in sixteen states and four Canadian provinces with lethality of near 100 percent in hibernating bat populations.

Although the actual cause of death in these bats is not understood, the Fish and Wildlife Service describes the white muzzle growth as a newly discovered cold-loving fungus, Geomyces destructans. In lab experiments, 100 percent of bats exposed to G. destructans developed WNS. The spores of the fungus are apparently spread bat-to-bat, but like many pathogens may have other paths of infection.

G. destructans is undoubtedly the culprit, but where did it come from and why now? Some species of bats in Europe are known to display white noses, but show none of the symptoms of the disease. A paper published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases uncovered data showing that the white-nose growth in European bats was caused by G. destructans infection. The authors of the article proposed that the fungus had probably originated in Europe but did not kill the bats because the flying mammals and the fungus had evolved together, with the bats eventually developing immunity to the attacking fungus. North American bats evolved in the absence of G. destructans and so had no such immunity when it attacked.

The question the paper does not attempt to answer, or even propose a theoretical model for, is how the fungus or its spores were introduced to a new continent and how it managed to find its way into the depths of North American  mines and caves. The transport mechanism is still unknown, and may never be understood. It seems though another invasive species has found a new home with no natural controls to keep the fungus in check.

Why be concerned about the bats? Why spend the time and research dollars? The bat’s insect-killing potential replaces tons of insecticides that would be needed to protect crops and eliminate swarms of biting mosquitoes. The same mechanism that allowed the fungus to gain a deadly foothold in the caves could someday be responsible for the introduction of an invasive species that attacks farm stocks, fish farms, agricultural products, or perhaps even humans.

Thriving bat populations are another indication of a healthy environment. Millions of dead bats tell us that something is very wrong.

My book The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict is now available in a trade hardcover version at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, and the University of Michigan Press, which also offers an E-book edition. Also, check your local booksellers for availability.

For insights into the book log on to my Author Page at Amazon at www.amazon.com/author/dennis-wild.

Learning To Be Big

There is a waterway on Cape Cod, actually a number of them by the same name, this one in Wellfleet, called the Herring River. Several towns on the Cape have named streams after the once ubiquitous river herring (now protected and prohibited from use as bait by recreational anglers and from harvests by commercial operators) that enters their tidal streams every spring to spawn. Like many other game fish, striped bass follow and ambush the herring on their spawning run. Herring are to the bass like Snickers bars are to trick-or-treating kids on Halloween.

The tidal Herring River in Wellfleet flows under Chequesset Neck road into Wellfleet Harbor, a beautiful corner of Cape Cod Bay. The river is physically separated from the bay by a dike equipped with self-adjusting tidal gates, creating a tailwater situation on each side as the tide floods and ebbs.

The river side of the dike, because of its warmer water and flow of nutrients and plankton, has become a tidal nursery for juvenile forage fish, particularly menhaden, an oily filter-feeding fish, known locally as “pogies” or in some areas “bunker,” greatly sought after by game fish such as striped bass and toothy bluefish. The Herring River, in nature’s whimsy, is also a summer nursery for “snappers,” juvenile versions of “slammers,” the jumbo adult bluefish that perpetually pursue schools of roaming adult pogies.

It was a clear, bright day in October, Columbus Day actually, when I stood on the river side of the dike observing the interplay between the huge schools of two-inch pogies and the roving schools of voracious snappers.

The pogies when at rest aligned themselves facing into the fast current feeding on the rich plankton crop drifting past. Virtually every single-celled planktonic organism, animal, plant and crossovers, contains a droplet of oil within its membrane or cell wall to help regulate its depth in the water column; the same oil that gives pogy flesh its oily texture. This type of feeding behavior is a rehearsal for later life when, as twelve-inch fish, pogy schools filter millions of plankton on an almost continuous basis. And like the rehearsal by the pogies, the snappers of Herring River prepare for later life as ten-pound-plus marauding predators, by cruising beneath the tiny pogies, individually charging toward the surface attacking a individual pogies from the rear and devouring it, either completely or leaving behind a shocked, bleeding head. The flash of silvery bluefish scales told the story each time a young pogy lost its future prospects.

The pogies somehow, in their own way, recognized the protective benefits of living and feeding in schools, and at the same time, accepted the reality of being converted to omega-rich bluefish flesh at almost any time in their lives.

This snapper -pogy interaction takes place every fall in virtually every bay and estuary on Cape Cod. There is a certain peace that comes while observing the process from atop the Wellfleet dike. In a time of great despair for some people, it’s possible to stand there and imagine the sequence playing out on the Cape for the last hundred centuries, since the last melting glaciers deposited their sandy burdens creating the Cape. It also produces a sense of reassurance, reflecting on how that same predator-prey relationship might continue forever, or at least until the last factory ship grinds up the last pogy for cat food or fish oil capsules.

My book The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict is now available in a trade hardcover version at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, and the University of Michigan Press, which also offers an E-book edition. Also, check your local booksellers for availability.

For insights into the book log on to my Author Page at Amazon at www.amazon.com/author/dennis-wild.

Natural Cormorant Controls

One of the major issues I discuss in my book published by the University of Michigan Press, The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict, is the role the southern catfish industry played in the extraordinary recovery of cormorant populations following the species’ near annihilation due to DDT.

The ban of DDT in the United States in 1972 promised a better future for Phalacrocorax auritus, the double-crested cormorant. Every year thereafter the birds would face lower burdens of the persistent insecticides in their food, eggs, offspring, and environment. What effectively was a booster shot to the cormorant recovery was the virtually simultaneous depletion of predators such as Atlantic salmon and lake trout in the Great Lakes due to overfishing and pollution. As the predators disappeared, populations of both native and non-native forage fish species, preferred food of cormorants, bloomed entirely out of proportion. The birds’ higher reproductive success rates coupled with massive schools of prey there for the taking at their breeding grounds drove cormorant numbers toward previous historic highs. One of the remaining population-controlling factors was the food sources at the cormorant’s southern wintering grounds.

At about the same time commercial fisheries crashed on the Great Lakes, southern row-crop farmers turned to the channel catfish as an alternate or supplemental crop. Catfish farmers never anticipated the fantastic growth in cormorant numbers, so gave little thought to protecting the heavily stocked catfish ponds from wintering cormorants. Thousand, perhaps tens of thousands of double-crested cormorants, fed all winter on the millions of unguarded catfish offered up by the growers. With rich plentiful food at both ends of their migration, cormorant numbers surged further – some local populations doubling in three years. Soaring bird numbers brought increased conflicts with Great Lakes fishermen and southern catfish producers resulting in cruel culling programs legally and illegally killing and wounding thousands of wild, federally protected cormorants.

The issue of the catfish industry affecting cormorant numbers should be taken into account when considering future lethal measures in cormorant management. Many catfish farmers facing huge increases in the cost of corn/soy catfish feed products closed some or all of their production ponds. Some were drained, plowed over, and restored to corn and soybean production. Other ponds were converted to the raising of largemouth bass, cultivated in less densely populated ponds, making them more difficult targets for P. auritus to attack. In either case, fewer catfish were available to hungry wintering cormorants, reducing the number of fatted, healthy birds prepared for the arduous migration north. From 2002 to 2011 every southern catfish-producing state experienced large decreases in acreage dedicated to channel catfish cultivation; overall acreage for U.S. catfish production shrank by 49% in those nine years.

This decrease in U.S. catfish production does not at all relate to the continuing, if not increasing, popularity of catfish fillets as table fare. In the seafood game, domestic farm-raised channel catfish products rank sixth in the United States. The gap in the U.S. between lower catfish production and increased consumption has been filled by foreign imports – particularly Pangasius catfish, farm-raised on the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. If the term Pangasius catfish doesn’t ring a bell it’s because domestic catfish producers lobbied U.S. government agencies to prevent importers from calling this product “catfish.” In American stores it is marketed as Basa fish or bocourti, also two unfamiliar names.

On top of cormorant predation, high production costs, low market prices, and foreign competition, American catfish producers faced another opponent with uncontrollable parameters – nature and the epic floods of 2011. Catfish farms along the Mississippi River Delta faced storm-driven waters which flooded roads, reduced feed supplies, topped their catfish pond levies, released their fish stock into the wild, and in some cases flooded their buildings. The damages and loss of production are yet to be tabulated, but surely what it means is, temporarily at least, catfish farming and production will be reduced even further.

So, all in all, what does this have to do with brutal, bloody sanctioned cormorant kills? Double-crested cormorants have little taste for corn or soybeans. They’re not grain-eating crows or geese; cormorants eat fish and have a predilection for catfish, particularly the penned-up, farm-raised variety. Fewer ponds produce fewer catfish – less winter chow for cormorants. The birds will have to return to foraging the Mississippi River and its tributaries for wild bluegills, perch, and wild channel catfish. And the whole package taken together means fewer healthy cormorants producing fewer healthy offspring.

Since the availability of food is a major limiting force for the expansion or contraction of wildlife populations an alternative then to government contract technicians killing tens of thousands of wild birds might be to let nature simply take its course. The birds wintering in the delta migrate from the northeast and mid-west so anything that places limits on their numbers in the South will send fewer cormorants to their traditional northern breeding grounds and cormorant populations may find newer, reduced numbers, naturally. And maybe the rifles and shotguns can be put away – at least for a while.

My book The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict is now available in a trade hardcover version at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, and the University of Michigan Press, http://www.press.umich.edu/  which also offers an E-book edition. Also, check your local booksellers for availability. 

For insights into the book log on to my Author Page at www.amazon.com/author/dennis-wild .

Shark-Fin Soup: The Uncivilized Food

Some of the most disgusting photos seen on the Internet and elsewhere are depictions of men “harvesting” shark fins. Sharks of numerous species are hauled aboard fishing vessels via baited longlines and the fins are cut off the living animal and retained for the market. The writhing shark is then thrown overboard to die a slow, painful death. Shark meat itself has little market value and is not worth the on-board freezer space or the fuel required in transporting it. The dried fins, on the other hand, are easily transported, take up little space, and command ridiculous prices in predominately East Asian markets.

All the statistics surrounding shark-finning are in staggering proportions. The numbers of sharks killed annually around the world for a bowl of unremarkable soup ranges not in the thousands, tens or even hundreds of thousands, but in the tens and perhaps in scores of millions. Exact numbers are impossible to determine since shark fins take up so little cargo space and can come ashore with little tracking. The United Nations estimates that about 10 million sharks are killed each year for their fins and other products, but conservationists claim that number is far below what is actually taken, given that many nations conducting the shark-fin harvests are U.N. members whose governments financially support the industry. Some studies of the fishery estimate the take at 38 million, with others at 100 million. Remember at 52 million, we are talking about a million sharks a week pulled out of an already stressed ecosystem.

This rate of shark “take” is unsustainable. Many shark species are slow growing and may not reach sexual maturity for twelve to fourteen years. Therefore, many sharks, taken regardless of size, sex, or species, are killed before they have had a chance to go through even one reproductive cycle. Sharks are disappearing from the sea and as top predators it is their job to help maintain a balance in the ecosystem. Time after time, when humans remove predators from the natural equation, such as wolves, bears, cougars, and coyotes, the system goes all to hell. On land, deer, rabbit, squirrel, and other rodent populations soar, tear up the environment, and eliminate all kinds of natural balances. Without top marine predators, other species bloom, affecting environmental threads throughout the world. Instead of deer and rabbits we see spikes in the populations of the large, six-foot long Humboldt squid and bottom-dwelling rays, which in turn disrupt salmon and bay scallop fisheries.

The Pew Environmental Group reports that for all shark products Indonesia, India, Taiwan, Spain, and Mexico are responsible for landing the most sharks. On the civilized end of the spectrum some countries and cities have taken humane actions to limit the brutal shark fin trade.
According to the Humane Society International, Canada is working on federal legislation to prohibit the import of shark fins into the country. Also in Canada, the city of Toronto has banned the sale, possession, and distribution of shark fins or their products within city limits. Across the Atlantic, the European Union, an economic association of twenty-seven nations, has legislation pending requiring all EU fishing vessels, regardless of where in the world they fish, to have all harvested sharks landed with their fins naturally attached to the carcasses.    

How much cruelty goes into a bowl of soup? Watery soup at that, reserved for special occasions such as weddings, New Years, corporate dinners – anywhere opulence is thought appropriate. How opulent? Dried shark fins sell for about $300 a pound, a bowl of the soup for about $100. It is prepared and served not necessarily for its nutritive value or its epicurean worth. It is served as a sign of power and wastefulness. This attitude is more than an attack on shark populations, it reflects on what we condone as a species evolved from other species, with some common ancient relatives of the sharks we slaughter. We should be better than this.

In a sort of passive counter-attack – the revenge of the sharks – it seems that shark fins, because of the bioaccumulation of contaminants in food chains, carry more than their fair share of mercury. As a metal usually deposited in the seas by industrial runoff, mercury is known for its toxicity to nervous systems, so those who choose to frequently treat themselves to shark-fin soup may come to realize that that “tingling” sensation may not be due to the ecstasy of excess, but instead due to numbers of their neurons, axons, synapses, and brain cells dying as they slurp the glorious elixir. 

Parallel Overabundance: Snow Geese and Double-crested Cormorants

My previous blog discussed the relative meanings of the term “overabundance” to various stakeholder groups and touched on what was happening with snow goose populations in North America. What is amazing and what I will show is how nature repeats itself and wildlife management falls into the same repeated traps.

The double-crested cormorant, Phalacrocorax auritus, the main topic of my blog site, survived the onslaught of DDT to come back into the environment after the EPA courageously banned unregulated uses and production of the bioaccumulated insecticide. Cormorants also thrived after they were finally included in later provisions of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA), protecting nearly all wild birds from unlimited shooting and feather hunters. In addition to these birds encountering cleaner water and less-toxic prey fish, on the Great Lakes where they breed in the summer, they found fantastically increased food supplies of forage fish because natural predators such as lake trout, Atlantic salmon, and others disappeared due to overfishing and pollution. At about the same time, on their wintering grounds, cormorants stumbled on and exploited a new food source in the form of farmed catfish in the South’s Mississippi Delta region. All this free-for-the-asking food at both ends of their range allowed double-crested cormorants to produce larger numbers of healthier, stronger youngsters and to stay fit and vigorous over the course of the winter for the return flight north.

The snow goose, Chen caerulescens, is a medium-sized white goose that breeds in summer arctic tundra regions in Canada, Alaska, and Russia, and migrates south in a number of fixed flyways. This goose also has a blue version that was once thought of as a different species, but proved to be merely a “morph” of the more common white form. The snow goose suffered from unrestricted hunting, reducing its numbers to about 5,000 until it was protected by the MBTA early in the twentieth century. When their numbers increased to what federal wildlife managers considered acceptable levels hunting seasons were established in 1973.What happened after that closely parallels the progression of cormorant populations.

During their southern migration snow geese once settled on marshes on both coasts to feed on the grasses and their tuberous roots. Much of that is in the past now since many of the coastal marshes are gone or greatly reduced due to commercial and residential development and urban expansion. Ordinarily, as food supplies decrease, so does the wildlife population dependent on that food. The expected decline in snow goose numbers never materialized. What happened? Humans intentionally created an alternate food source: flooded rice fields. Flooding prepares the fields to receive the next planting while at the same time provides aquatic forage for thousands of migrating snow geese. The flooded fields in fact filled with so many birds that the thousands of snow-white birds became an attraction for birdwatchers, naturalists, and the just plain curious. And not unlike the convenience of unguarded catfish ponds in the delta that supported tens of thousands of cormorants, the rice fields bolstered snow goose numbers on both coasts. More food, more birds.

Then there’s the arctic breeding ground. It is postulated that warming climates and higher tundra temperatures created improved breeding conditions resulting in more, stronger, healthier chicks ready for the rigors of a long migration. Better breeding, better birds.

The result of all this improved feeding and breeding is the proclaimed “overabundance” of snow geese. The negative effect is that the geese are literally and figuratively eating themselves out of house and home. Their dining practices of tearing grasses from the ground or marsh bottoms kills the plants, weakens the tundra substrates and increases erosion, allowing ocean tides deeper access into the marshes, virtually drowning them.

The great snow goose flocks have also crowded and pillaged the rice fields making them difficult for growers to manage and have become pests to northern farmers when they descend on corn and grain fields like falling snow, as their common name suggests.  

How do wildlife managers control the bird’s numbers? Not an easy question to answer. Several states, including New York, with the help of more flexible federal regulations, have expanded their legal hunting seasons and daily bag limits for snow geese. The problem arises that killing and dressing twenty-five geese a day quickly fills the family freezer. With about a million snow geese using the Atlantic flyway and another three million or so settling in the Rocky Mountain states, plus huge numbers in the other flyways, killing tens or even hundreds of thousands of geese may slow, but not curtail the growth in snow geese numbers. Managers faced some of the same problems in trying to reduce the two million cormorants in North America, but in the case of those birds, they are inedible, so hunting seasons to put meat on the table were never seriously considered.

One measure that was applied to reduce cormorants was the cull, in which paid “technicians” armed with suppressed (silenced) weapons brutally shot thousands of birds, often leaving wounded adults and starving chicks in their wake. The carcasses were then buried or somehow composted. All that violence to reduce cormorant numbers by mere fractions of one percent. And now, with the failure of the expanded hunting seasons, the use of snow goose culling programs is being considered, but again, with the taste for snow goose dinners waning, the slaughtered birds will probably be destined for ignoble composting.

What is the alternate solution to massacring wild birds? Just as the cause of their growth in numbers had multiple roots, the answer to snow goose “overabundance” has multiple remedies. The first of course is to do nothing. If the geese are making their breeding grounds less habitable then it’s reasonable to assume that recruitment (new individuals added to the population) will fall and the species’ reproductive capacity will reach a new reduced level. Another choice is to somehow separate the geese from their food sources during migration. Rice farmers need not flood their fields to the same extent to kill off old growth after the grain harvest. At one time growers burned their fields, but faced criticism for the added air pollution. They then decided to flood the fields instead, and to justify the use of such massive quantities of water and come down on the side of the good guys, flooded adjacent fields to provide additional habitat for migrating snow geese.

So, as the converse to “more food, more birds” and “better breeding, better birds,” wildlife managers can encourage efforts to reduce the food available in the rice fields and let the geese temporarily reduce the productivity of their own breeding grounds.

That way we can tell the “technicians” to put the guns down, stay home, and take the day off.

To respond or make a comment click "comment" below or contact me at denniswild@earthlink.net . 

Overabundant?

One of the value-laden terms applied to the double-crested cormorant is “overabundant.”  It carries a weight to it that is so subjective as to be meaningless. To whom are they overabundant? Commercial and sport fishermen? Southern catfish farmers? Bird watchers? Politicians? Conservationists? Environmentalists?

Each of these groups has their own ideas of how many is a scarcity, how many is enough, and how many constitutes too many.

·        Fishermen see breeding cormorant populations as a threat larger than overfishing, pollution and overdevelopment so a lot of cormorants are too many because the fish belong to fishermen. Simple, uncomplicated logic.

·        Catfish farmers stocking unprotected ponds with tens of thousands of fingerlings consider all cormorants, in any number, a threat to their business and none is a better population than any other.

·        To bird watchers and enthusiasts there rarely is a bird population that is too large to their liking. Birds to them are the sign of a healthy ecosystem, and greater populations signify greater natural production and protection of the outdoors.

·        Politicians look for easy ways out of delicate situations so it’s easier to blame an “overabundant” species for declines in fish stocks than it is to fault their own environmental inaction and support of rampant development  and overfishing, generating greater and greater challenges to wild fish populations.

·        Conservationists and environmentalists attempt to manage cormorant and other wildlife populations to ideal numbers determined by a jumble of input information from all the other stakeholders, sometimes reflecting economic interests over true conservation goals.

So the terms “scarce,” “abundant,” and “overabundant” reflect how individuals and groups of like-minded individuals see species populations, and their fluctuations, such as in the case of the double-crested cormorant, as positive or negative trends.

Another bird species, the snow goose, is also coming under increased pressure due to its overabundance, its phenomenal population growth rate created by management practices that failed to acknowledge and react to changing environmental and agricultural conditions until it was too late. Like the cormorant they can't seem to kill enough of them. I’ll look at this in my next blog.

To respond or comment click "comments" below or contact Dennis Wild at denniswild@earthlink.net.