"We're just doing our thing," she says, "living, but living
without the awareness of connections between what happens to the
oceans and what happens to us." It has taken 10,000 years to face
up to the fact that "we cannot make a living on a sustained basis
from terrestrial wildlife. Not to say that we didn't try. We have
become frighteningly effective at altering nature." Her worry now
is that people are altering the ocean. If you want to eat fish,
grow them, she argues, offering support for the burgeoning
aquaculture industry--in which such delicacies as salmon and trout
are raised in aquatic pens--as long as the pens themselves do not
despoil the coastline.
As of 1995, 22 percent of recognized marine fisheries were overexploited
or already depleted, and 44 percent more were at their limits of
exploitation. Nontarget fish are swept up in the process. Dredges
and trawls destroy habitats--Earle calls the invaders "bulldozer
equivalents"--as they drag the ocean floor.
Another threat comes from man-made fertilizers, which wash off
fields into streams and eventually into the ocean. This spurs the
harmful overgrowth of algae and the spread of toxic microbes that
can kill fish and cause human health problems, such as liver and
kidney ills and amnesia. Billions of fish died along the Middle
and Southern Atlantic coast in recent years because of suspected
pollution from upstream sources. On a tour of the land area
around Big Sur, my guide from the California Coastal Commission,
Lee Otter (yes), noted as a caution and as a fact that "something
always lives downstream from something else."
Earle notes that the world's decision makers are as culpable as
the smaller fish. "How about the people in the Soviet Union who
authorized the dumping of nuclear subs and other radioactive
waste, the use of rivers as open sewers, the taking of endangered
whales when other nations agreed to abstain?" she says. "Or
decision makers in the U.S. who gave the go-ahead years ago to
reroute waterways in South Florida at great expense--a decision
that has now been reversed, at great expense?"
Some of her suggested solutions to these problems are enchanting,
if unlikely, such as her urging citizens to take a two-by-four to
complacent politicians. A less picturesque solution is
volunteerism--getting the public to clean beaches, lawyers to work
pro bono for the environment and so forth. The third solution is
knowledge. "Far and away the greatest threat to the ocean, and
thus to ourselves, is ignorance," she says. "But we can do
something about that." After recent explorations of the galaxies,
she concluded that all we really know is that the earth is
unique. "The future is here," she says, "this aquatic planet
blessed with an ocean."
Our last day together, she is asked to sit for a photograph at
the shore near Point Lobos. She hops from rock to rock, settles
and stares out. What does she see? What does anybody see who
gazes longingly, devotedly on that great wet wilderness? Melville
said that people find their souls in the ocean. That may have
been his way of paying tribute to our microbial past. Out there
does some poor fish imagine its evolutionary future? If people
work to preserve the sea, will we also save our souls?
I doubt that Her Deepness is thinking about any of that. You have
to love the ocean before you are moved to save it. She stares out
at her world where tuna roar, groupers have attitudes and the
Vampyroteuthis infernalis stares back with its God's blue eye,
and winks.
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