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.