you can't see them from here, but there are whales out there!
I've been thinking about how to start this rant that has been growing in me, fed by the passions of Sylvia Earle, for the life that stirs in the ocean. See, ever since I started learning about the mistreatment of animals (well the whole planet really) so that people can over consume the flesh of animals, I've had a few problems wrapping my mind around the educated minds of people who choose to do said consumption, when they know the results. Its the environmentalists that know the difference. Its the former veg/vegan that goes back to eating fish, eggs, dairy, flesh.
Maybe its a judgement. Maybe its my regular befuddlement that occurs when people who know better act like they don't...doctors, nurses, massage therapists that smoke. Maybe it is my own issues of feeling hypocritical about other things. Seriously. If you know harm is caused so that you can behave a certain way, why would you not change the behavior so that there is less harm?
Let's say you learn about Nike using child labor to put shoes, shits, etc together so that a very small number of people can make more money than most of us can imagine. Do you still put that symbol of torture on your body? Do you wear it with pride and feign ignorance? NO. Really. I want to understand why people continue to buy it... knowing. It has to be more than status, please, it has to be about more than status.
So here is the information that Sylvia Earle has presented. Most of it is not that new, as far as numbers go; however, she is an eye witness. First, a basic, 97% of Earth is ocean... it is our life support system. The oceans breath so that we can. She reminds us that food chains shape the chemistry of where we live. When we, literally the universal we, put millions of tons of plastic and garbage into the ocean, we clog up our life support system. We remove hundreds of millions of tons of carbon based life (the kind of life that humans are a part of) we mess up the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, oxygen cycle, the water cycle...
These oceans of ours, hold 97% of life in our world. And we are removing it so quickly it can not replace its self. See some folks believe that we are "harvesting" (dang how I HATE that word for butchering animals for consumption) these life forms sustainably. But how is that possible? We are taking 200 year old orange roughly, 50 year old rockfish, sharks, sea bass out of the ocean for a nice dinner. Many of these fish that are taken at such an age, don't get to reproductive maturity until they are 10 to 25 years old! So there are these fish, that we are consuming so rapidly, that they can not replace themselves at the rate they are removed. That is not sustainable. It is creating endangered species.
So 90% of the common fish are now gone. Gone in the 20th century. There is a basic law in the world of preditor/prey/consumerism; the consumers can not out number the consumees.
And its not even like people have to consume water animals to survive. Less than 1 % of the population use fishing as their financial support. Less than that use fish as their primary food source... traditional peoples who are losing their fishing support system to the mass consumerism of the rest of the world. Face it, their little fishing boats can not keep up, or go out as far, as the giant commercial fishing ships. People in the Western world NOT consuming the fish in their waters, is not going to hurt their ability to provide for a family, in fact it might actually help.
So, I'm told by some that they eat fish now for the Omega oils... Well bullshit. Seems those oils are in the fish because of the algae/plankton the fish eat.... so we can simply eat the algae that has the nutrtional values we are looking for.
Look, we all have reasons for doing what we do when we know deep down in our hearts that we shouldn't be doing them. But lets at least be honest with one another about those reasons.
The U.S. is the largest consumer of the things that are killing this planet, clearing forests, causing huge animal extinctions, mining the life-blood out of the earth, slaughtering all kinds of life forms... all for the bloated consumption of greed.
We shop. Eat. Consume. to feel better about... what exactly? We are suppose to be the model nation of freedom and pursuit of happiness... then why all the anti-depressents? Why all the drinking, drugs, sugar, caffine? Why to we have to move at such fast paces? What are we trying to keep up with?
At a reading fundraiser for Bear Deluxe, a local quarterly journal, there was a guy reading, Mateo is what they called him. I just caught the end of his story. It was of a young guy returning from Iraq. He lost his legs under a tank. He came home with his pain and wounds a "hero". But when his nightmares became real. His raging pain and anger given voice, all his suport turned away.No help from the government that sent him there. No help from the medical community (no job no insurance). When he finally could take the pain no longer, he used the gun given him by the military, and killed himself. People turned further away. The question posed in the story was something like, why when people are injured in war, they are celebrated, but when they try and talk about the pain and suffering, they are ingnored or shamed?
He goes on... what is the memorial to this war going to be like and will it be made from the money saved from not caring for those that suffered on so many levels? (wish i could send you to some link to this story because he went on to amazing levels of discribing what a memorial would look like if he had the chance to build it... it would look, smell, taste, sound like war... like hell... no map.... no resting... just hell... i like it)
This led me to think about memorials. The ones I've seen. the ones I've heard about. the ones that i really have no idea what they are suppose to be for remembering. Right? Memorials are so that we remember a person or event for better or worse? In one of her books Terry Tempest Williams talks about going to Rawanda to work with people to build a mosaic style memorial to hold the bones that fell victum to the genocide there, and hold a healing space for those that meraculously survived.
But why? Why Americans going over there to build this? To alliviate guilt from not doing a good-gosh-darn-thing while it was happening? Is that what many of them are about? wishing we had done more to stop an amazingly horrible injustice, appriciated someone's love or innovation or creativity more while we had them live and in person?
Then, I read the Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch. Its a memoir. You could say it is a type of memorial. It is a story of someone's life. A life that was full of many many troubled moments. Moments that feed/starved responses to other moments. Its a way of telling a story that didn't match the story that others' wanted us to live to tell. We all have these stories with in us at some level. Something that moved us to the edges of what our social world says is acceptable. Sometimes, it goes by un-notices or tolerated on some level. Other times, not so much.
If we keep these stories locked inside us, we can pass for whatever people want of us/from us...expectations. But if we tell them push them to another level continue to make choices not pre-written for us... well things break: hearts hell dreams. Also some things are made and grow: dreams life joy.
What does this all have to do with Sylvia Earle, the ocean, being vegan....
Well, I'd like the ocean to survive. As you know I don't much care if the human species does, but the rest of the world is so beautiful... so breathtaking... so
I don't want there to be a memorial built or created when we take the last fish from the sea. I don't want to see some empty ice sheet made of plastic with a mechanical polar bear on it. I want us to take the knowledge that we have and I want us to DO SOMETHING BESIDES CONSUME!
Can we use a little less single use? Can we find more value in people, places, species then what we can make out of something/one and simply enjoy them for who they are, what they want to be, want to create.
I thought I might want to go into more information that Sylvia gives in her books and talks, but really, most of us already know it. I would rather we be more honest about why we can't stop ourselves from consuming the world. Like the health practitioner that can't stop smoking, we know better, but we can't stop. W H Y? Without judgement for the answer (self or others) I just want to know why. Its not enough to know that we are broken, that the earth is broken, that the ocean is broken. We must tell the stories about how it broke, why it is broken. In the story telling, we can find ways to heal it. Like in the telling of our broken selves we start to heal. It becomes harder and harder to fool ourselves that we are doing the "best that we can." We have told the story enough times, we aren't fooling anyone anymore.
