Category Archives: Marine Conservation

Day 70: 9/3/13: Back to School

by in Education, Literature, Marine Conservation | 1 Comment

First shark-themed class. Babbled about my project. Showed a seal hunt from “Air Jaws”–trying to exploit/explore that weird human position: thrilled by the predator, empathetic  to the prey. Human beings as part of nature & observers of nature.

Trying to judge the silence of the audience. Were they bored? Enraptured?  Too soon to tell what the chemistry of the group will be. Some classes feel like interminably dull parties in which people with little in common engage in 16-week  conversations. Prattled on about how conservation being fun.  Offered extra credit for seeing Blackfish at the Laemmle in Pasadena.

“Can we watch it online?”

“Buy a ticket,” I snapped.

My God. Sometimes they’re just so lazy.

Talked about shark stereotypes. Of Megalodon. Of Mindless Eating Machines. Made a series of self-deprecating jokes. Realized how hard teaching is. Got a few laughs. Tried to scare away the slackers by telling them they’d be forced to memorize and recite a poem about the sea, remembering when I had to memorize and recite poem about the sea in a 7th grade science class. “I must go down to the sea again to the lonely sea and the sky….” Was I mindlessly repeating the lessons inculcated into me when I was 12? I flashed on my science teacher, Mrs. McClure, staring moodily through her goggles into the quick flame of the bunsen burner.

“Memorization is a lost art,”  I said, fondling my inflatable shark head. Gave my standard, if-you-think-you-might-drop-this-class-hand-in-your-syllabus-on-the-way-out spiel.

A sweet boy with Buddy Holly glasses stopped by my desk. “I have to admit,” he said. “Sharks might be….too overwhelming. I’m was hoping for….you know….Modernism?”

Day 69: 9/2/13: A Woman of Letters

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Shark fin soup

Shark fin soup (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I had this bright idea to try to send a letter to every restaurant in the U.S. that serves shark fin soup. So far I’m half way through Massachusetts with a few scattered throughout the South and West.

While a restaurant manager will probably just toss a single, random but polite request in the garbage, if I enlist my student army to help me, maybe we can start making an impact. I imagine truckloads of letters being delivered into steaming kitchens all over the map. Letters are becoming rare things–they have a material weight that e-mails with their digital ephemerality (is that a word?) lack.

Perhaps this accounts for the lack of drudgery I feel stuffing envelopes, buying stamps, depositing messages into the dark unknown of the mailbox.

To access Sharksavers’ resources for restaurant letter writing, click here.

Day 55 8/19/13: 10 Things I Did Instead of Studying My Dive Manual

by in Activism, Diving, Environment, God, Humor, Marine Conservation, Meditation, Shark Attack, Shark Conservation, Writing | Leave a comment
Shark!

Shark! (Photo credit: guitarfish)

1. Read about the swift but gruesome death of abalone diver Randy Frye in the waters of Northern California.

2. Watched a mini-documentary on technical diver David Shaw who died trying to retrieve the remains of another diver from the depths of a dangerous cave.

3. Meditated for 20 blissful minutes that were occasionally invaded by thoughts of decompression chambers.

4. Felt less alone after reading several articles criticizing OCEARCH’s machismo and brutality.

5. Marveled at Denise Levertov’s briskly paced poem The Sharks. 

6. Tried to do the dishes mindfully, but spaced out and started worrying about August almost being over, a reverie broken occasionally by hummingbirds.

7. Ate fruit

8. Thought again about Thom Knoles–of the failure of the stressed out intellect and how the expansive silence of meditation feels so nurturing, so full of presence.

9. Wondered for the trillionth time about the basic goodness or evil of mankind.

10. Marveled at the ability of writing to redeem boredom and to reveal the miraculous within the ordinary.

Day 54: 8/18/13: Everyone Should Read This (and I don’t mean that as arrogantly as it sounds)

by in Activism, Education, God, Humor, Inner Turmoil, Marine Conservation and tagged , , , , | 6 Comments
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, The Beatles and their c...

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, The Beatles and their companions posed on a dais, image by Paul Saltzman. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Thom Knoles is a funny, grounded and warm meditation teacher who studied with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the late 1960s, I think he may have overlapped with the Beatles’ tenure in Rishikesh. I felt like too much of a Beatles nerd to ask when I learned Vedic meditation from him last year.

Learning to meditate  was one of the greatest decisions I ever made.

Thom opened the lecture with this anecdote about speaking at the G8 summit. “I was the only one there wearing beads,” he laughed.  “Everyone here is suffering from chronic brain failure,” he said to the assembled leaders of the world. “Nothing’s going to come of this summit. Any questions?”

I don’t know how the G8 leaders reacted to that, but the crowd at the Santa Monica Marriott really dug it.

In a metaphor I remembered from the meditation class, Thom compared the human brain to an overloaded iphone that can barely process any new information. Decisions made using 2% of the stressed out overtaxed human brain are never going to solve terrorism, global warming, etc.

That’s where meditation comes in. And dharma. And karma.

Dharma is our personal role in the evolution of the universe. When we are living in dharma, doing what we’re meant to be doing at any particular moment, living is effortless and expansive.

To understand what we need to do, to know our dharma, Thom says we must learn to recognize and be receptive “in our least excited state”(meditative) to what “charms us” and to recognize what we have an aversion to.

Karma, on the other hand, is not the word plastered on tip jars in coffee shops. Karma is, according to Thom, “an action that binds.”

“The universe is not angry with us,” he explained. “It’s not punitive. It’s just hoping we figure things out.”

Unlike dharma, karma is restrictive. It is what we experience when we base our decisions purely on intellect and inaccurate assumptions. For example, “If I just keep doing this work (that I don’t really love) it will become something I love.” Or “I will repeat  the familiar even though the familiar makes me unhappy.” Karma is that corrective suffering that happens when we refuse to take risks, when we cling to the known world, when we are not courageous.

And like Thom’s brief address at the G8 summit, today’s talk at the Marriott was ultimately about courage:

“Find out what you should be doing. Embrace potential. Is it enough for you to continue eating, sleeping, pooping, taking up space on the earth? We must make our existence relevant. Urgently examine what you’re capable of giving to the world. Be courageous.”

Day 49: 8/13/13: 7 Recent Wins for Sharks

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New protections. New sanctuaries. Check out these 7 Wins for Sharks! 

Meanwhile, I’m back to my restaurant letter writing campaign with a little help from Sharksavers.

Day 48 8/12/13: Two Blocks of Sea

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Today I went to Santa Monica for a beach clean up, but I must have got the details wrong since I couldn’t find anyone there. No loss. The air felt nice. The ocean looked a little bit wild. My friend Jen and I picked a bit of trash here and there and waited out the traffic over beer and sweet potato french fries and talked about the writing life and our fathers who are both gone but who loom large in memory.

At home again, late with homework to do, I still wanted to do something about sharks. Since I’m going to South Africa, I decided to go donate Two Blocks of Sea to the great whites of Dyer Island, a rich nature reserve. The stretch of water between Dyer Island and nearby Geyser Rock (an island home to 60,000 Cape Fur Seals), is also called Shark Alley, a treacherous stretch of sea familiar to anyone who watches shows like “Air Jaws Apocalypse.”   I felt moved by the language of the donation form: 2 Blocks of Sea to the Great Whites of Dyer Island.

On a recent architecture tour in downtown L.A., the docent talked about a guy who purchased “air rights” so he could build skyscrapers. Air real estate. Two blocks of sea. I imagine some cut-away science text book diagram of green-blue water and a curved ocean floor.

Measuring the sea seems like trying to measure time. In November, my father will have been gone a year. But what does one year even mean? In a few minutes, I walk two blocks in a city that is both utterly foreign and oddly familiar. A thousand memory fragments surface and dissolve. Time is scrambled. What does a shark experience in two blocks of sea—the electromagnetic fields of distress, the rise and fall of tides?

Sharks don’t strike me as nostalgic creatures, but I wonder if they experience that confusion of memory when they move through some well-traveled stretch of open oceans only to discover it strewn with a ragged web of nets, or find a channel once plentiful with fish, strangely, suddenly empty.

Day 46: 8/10/13: “Life is a Great Surprise”

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The title is a quote from the great Vladimir Nabokov. I always think of Nabokov’s words when I have a particularly lovely experience. Today I went on a hike led by my friend Dan, an intrepid urban explorer. These hikes are always a surprise, as Dan has mapped so many forgotten and unseen places—odd urban pathways between hotels, a gorgeous park that smells of mountain sage hidden in the middle of a desolate nameless neighborhood between downtown L.A. and Echo Park. Exploring the unknown heightens the beauty of the familiar city places:  the gorgeous Victorians of Angelino Heights, the lotuses and lilies of the reborn Echo Park Lake.

I met so many bright, interesting people on the hike–professors of Latin and Math, a fellow English instructor and a guy who told me about rescuing a small blue shark from a reactionary mob of Santa Monica bathers during the height of “Jaws” mania/paranoia. Even though the poor shark was only about three-foot long, the hysterical swimmers and even the lifeguards were ready to beat the creature to death when it beached itself until this kind man set the shark free again in the ocean.

This anecdote is a nice transition to the benefit–using “Jaws” as a tool to save sharks rather than argument for their destruction. In Elysian Park, Dan introduced me to the hikers and I gave a brief little spiel about the JAWS benefit for Sharksavers.

Talking about my shark project, I always try to balance the humor with the dire truth about shark extinction, which is sort of tricky. While I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news,  we tend to forget that we are  living through a mass extinction event. As  Derrick Jensen once wrote, “there is no roll call on the nightly news” for the 200 plants and animals that disappear from this planet every day.

But this entry was about joy. Surprise.

I usually write about “forgetting” in the context of human denial and selective memory. But I’m just as guilty of picking and choosing.

It’s easy to remember the angry mob on the beach and forget the solitary guy who saved the little shark.

Day 44: 08/08/13: Cranky Quint & The Horror of Gill Nets

by in Activism, Animal Welfare, Environment, Jaws, Marine Conservation, Pop Culture and tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Here is a rather candid remembrance of Robert Shaw from Jeffrey Vorhees, who played “the doomed Alex Kintner” (a.k.a. boy on the raft) in “Jaws”:

“Everyone filming it here was really nice, except for one guy, the old drunk, Robert Shaw. He ignored the island kids. They would have baseball games and cookouts for all the extras and kids on the island—-all the actors would show up, except for Shaw. He wanted nothing to do  with “The Island People,” as he called us. As a little kid, I would go over and talk to him, “Hi! How are you today?” He would just glare and say, “Just go away.” He was always drunk, just a mess….”   From “Just When You Thought it Was Safe: A Jaws Companion.”

Hopefully a small donation I made to ban gill nets made the ocean a little safer for sharks. Here’s the deal:

Each year, California drift gillnets kill more than 3,500 thresher, mako, and blue sharks as they fish for swordfish. The bycatch rate of sharks – as well as ocean sunfish, marine mammals and sea turtles – in California’s drift gillnets is the highest of any fishery along the US Pacific Coast.

Day 38 8/2/2013: Absurdly Simple Shark Activism For All Ages

by in Activism, Animal Welfare, Environment, Marine Conservation, Shark Charities, Shark Finning and tagged , , | Leave a comment

SharkSavers is a great resource.

Click here to find out what restaurants in your area are serving shark fin soup.

Click here to download & print a “FINished WITH FINS letter to send to the restaurant.

This is so cool/cute. Click yet again here to download an educational shark coloring book for your kids or for yourself if the waxy intoxication of crayons makes you nostalgic for those early years when you fell in love with utter terror and majesty of apex sea predators.

Day 36: 7/31/2013: Hear Ye! Hear Ye: Auditions for “JAWS”

by in Activism, Humor, Jaws, Marine Conservation, Shark Charities, Shark Finning | Leave a comment

Today with the help of my dear friend Dan, we brought the “JAWS” charity reading one step closer to reality with our Facebook group.

Check it out:

https://www.facebook.com/events/546709615393682/546809945383649/?ref=notif&notif_t=plan_mall_activity

Many people have graciously volunteered to read. If you’re interested, PLEASE let me know.  Perhaps you’ll channel discontented, philandering housewife Ellen Brody, her beleaguered husband Martin, or the GREAT FISH himself!

We’re still deciding on a venue, so if you have a cavernous net-strewn sea shanty you’d like to lend us for an evening, gimme a holler!