The Bermuda Sustainable Development Department is accepting comments on a proposed marine reserve.
Please take half a minute to answer these four simple questions!
Category Archives: Activism
Day 112 10/15/13: Endangered Sharks & Disappearing Moose
English: A timeline of the largest mass extinctions on Earth in the past 500 million years. Made using the numbers at Extinction event (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
At my writing class today, a wonderful woman who knew that I write about sharks, said I ought to find out why the moose are disappearing, which led us both to remark on extraordinary fact that we are living through a mass extinction that, in day to day life, few people really talk about.
Here’s a gesture against forgetting:
Although CITES granted protection for hammerheads, manta rays, white tips and porbeagles, five countries (Japan, Iceland, Denmark, Yemen and Guyana) still refuse to recognize these treaties.
Please sign this petition to ask President Obama to apply sanctions against these countries.
Related articles
- Moose die-off: 100,000 ticks on just one moose, is Lyme disease culprit? (sott.net)
- Moose Die-Off Alarms Scientists (nytimes.com)
Day 110: 10/13/13: Five Fascinating Shark Distractions
Great white shark (Photo credit: 126 Club)
I got a little distracted while correcting papers:
1. Check out this video of white sharks feeding on a dead whale near Anacapa Island.
2. Make a cup of cocoa and curl up with the latest Pacific Coast breathings, attacks and other shark encounters here.
3. Read the story of an Australian diver who survived his second shark attack in 10 years.
4. Behold gorgeous underwater images of a wily sea lion teasing a white shark near Guadalupe Island.
5. Ethics, Activism and Appetite: Read David Shiffman’s controversial “shark buffet” post on Southern Fried Science. Click here to read Shiffman’s later apology.
Day 109: 10/12/13: Shark Coffins & Doomed Stuffed Animals
These innovative creations are a welcome break from correcting a batch of opaque papers on sharks and fear.
I like the spare yet surreal look of this art show, but I LOVE that it’s
happening in Shanghai!!
Check out Banksy’s “Sirens of the Lambs,” a sad and weird traveling piece on animals
slaughtered for food.
Day 107 10/10/13: Be a Voice for Whales and Dolphins
Today’s action: small, but important.
Sign Oceana’s petition to President Obama asking the president to halt proposed underwater seismic tests (part of underwater oil & gas explorations) that disrupt the communication, feeding and general well-being of whales, dolphins and other marine mammals.
Related articles
- ExxonMobil Seismic Exploration Is Root Cause of Whale Deaths in Madagascar (huffingtonpost.com)
- Dolphin-killing town to open marine park (sbs.com.au)
Day 104 10/7/13: Ask Singapore Airlines to Stop Transporting Shark Fins
English: Fresh shark fins drying on sidewalk at Hong Kong (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
(With apologies for the awful and unintentional rhyme:
Do a sharks a kindness, sign this:
https://www.causes.com/campaigns/35520-encourage-singapore-airlines-to-stop-shipping-shark-fins
Day 103 10/6/13: Certified and Certifiable
David Foster Wallace (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“That’s great! That’s just great! You’re certifiable! Do you know that, Quint?” Brody (Roy Scheider) hollers after Quint (Robert Shaw) smashes the boat’s radio (no more calling in for a bigger one) with a baseball bat.
I replayed that “Jaws” scene endlessly in my head on the way back from Catalina as my dive teacher filled out my diver certification card. I am by no means “good” at diving, but I am no longer afraid of bleeding ears or the large sharks attracted by the ribbons of blood pulsing from my exploding lungs.
The ocean is beautiful—heart-rendingly so. But I don’t want to disturb its inhabitants. I don’t want to shine flashlights in crevices to see lobster, or play with sea cucumbers. Even as I thrilled at the glimpse of a retiring purple octopus curled up in a rock hole, I felt a rush of feeling for the little guy. I know that octopus LIKE to be left alone. And lobsters seem to value their privacy as well.
I felt glad that I would be teaching David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” in the morning.
The essential question is this:
How do I commune with animals, while not interfering with their nature, their ways of being?
It’s not that animal rights guilt precludes my enjoyment of the natural world, but thoughts about animal consciousness increasingly shape my experiences.
I grew up riding horses and still love doing it (as a way of seeing the countryside), but even that activity is fraught with complications: bits, and crops and heels into ribs. I recently discovered this observation (given in sign language) from the always candid Koko the Gorilla:
Koko looks at a picture of a horse with a bit in his mouth:
K: horse sad.
CD: Why?
K: TEETH.
(Check out more of Koko’s insights in this fascinating argument for the personhood of gorillas).
More on this idea of displacement & communion soon. The sea hath ignited in my mind the power and glory of language while it seemed to have sapped the very marrow from my bones.
Day 92: 9/25/13: Afternoon with a Shark Legend
I am still ecstatic from Ralph Collier’s lecture this afternoon at Glendale College this afternoon. Great turn out–students, teachers from all disciplines, and people from outside school–including one dazzled shark nerd in a Jaws t-shirt who sat in the front row, and my dear friend Lisa and her fellow shark fanatic pal, Jack.
Ralph covered some fascinating stuff about shark behavior including “spy hopping” in which white sharks (and apparently oceanic white tips) stick their heads out of the water to check out what’s happening on land and sometimes startle random seals off the edges of rookeries. They also spy hop to calculate which group of seals in the haul-out area might be easiest to sweep into the water via a giant breach. Essentially, I learned that white sharks ain’t dummies. Not by a long shot. They have memories. They make calculated decisions. Ralph doesn’t believe in calling shark encounters “accidents”–he gives the animals volition—whether the intent is to investigate or to launch a predatory strike.
I learned two more disturbing consequences of shark finning:
1. When the discarded bodies of finned sharks are thrown overboard, they sink to the bottom where ammonia leaking from their ravaged bodies destroys coral communities.
2. Increasing numbers of people in Asia who consume shark fin soup are developing neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and A.L.S. Researchers have proposed that the high concentrations of mercury in shark fin and flesh bind with other neurotoxins and create a lethal toxic compound. Could this new health concern become a powerful force in stopping finning?
Day 87: 9/20/13: The Lemon Sharks of Jupiter
You know what really pisses me off? When people use the word “harvest” to refer to hunting animals. As if bears were wheat or lemon sharks were lemons. Of course, “harvest” is only one of many really awful euphemisms like “animal research,” or “by-catch.”
Maybe the bigger question is why human beings seem hellbent on killing the things that are already disappearing?
For the vanishing lemon sharks of Jupiter Florida, the National Marine Fisheries Service has proposed that the new “harvest” date begin on January 1, 2014 just as the sharks are gathering to give birth to their pups.
Please read this post from Sharksavers and leave your comments for the NMFS asking them not to change the opening date of fishing season.
The comment period closes Monday, so please take action this weekend. It will only take 5 minutes or less!
English: Lemonshark (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Day 76 9/9/13: Mourning, Millennials & Melodrama in “Jaws”
I had to remind myself to take a deep cleansing breath when I noticed a few of my students texting during “Jaws” today. Later, one of the guilty boys confessed the movie was “just too scary” and with the acute senses of a predatory fish (or a fellow neurotic), I detected residual fear in the shuffling way he gathered his books and hid his eyes behind a lank of dark hair.
Several people laughed when the bereaved Mrs. Kintner slaps Chief Brody in the face for keeping the beaches open and letting her son Alex get chomped. Is this a kitschy moment? Perhaps. But I always found the scene too odd or mysterious to be pure melodrama. The black-veiled Mrs. Kintner is accompanied by a silent old man who might be her father or grandfather and the two of them progress in some odd inversion of a wedding march toward Brody.
As Antonia Quirke noted in her BFI essay on “Jaws”: “She’s much older than the other mothers at the waterfront. This child was her last chance” (35). Quirke also notes that a slap in the movies normally stands in for sex, but “[t]o be slapped by Mrs. Kintner in mourning is like being kissed by a skeleton, it has that disquieting taboo mixed in” (36).
The book store ran out of my shark texts which may have explained this group’s lack of enthusiasm for uterine cannibalism or the ampullae of Lorenzini. So other than typing up a quick shark biology quiz, I’ve been checking in with the STOP OCEARCH activists. Sad to hear that the New Yorker did a story about OCEARCH (thanks for the tip, Connie), but pleased to know that a film exposing these charlatans (Price of Existence) and other marine exploitation is in the works. I’ll try to do what I can to help with the fundraising/consciousness raising for this project.
Shark Dreams 