Tag Archives: ocean plastic

Globalized Corporate Capitalism: Good, Bad or Just Ugly?

Posted on by under Uncategorized

Maxfield Parish, The Fisherman and the Genie

Before the pandemical pandemonium struck I attended a symphony concert that sent my heart and head spinning, as music often does.  How do those combinations of vaporous vibrations reach so deeply into our being? What neuronal maze do they electrify? What mysterious auras fluoresce in the mists of our souls?  And what process coordinates the strumming and plucking and huffing and thumping and sawing of all those individual artists? What creative magic gave the music birth in some genius composer’s mind, and what about the legions of genius minds before that which conceived of the notation that lets all those musicians read that dead composer’s mind simultaneously?

 

A stirring musical event exemplifies our amazing ability to work collectively.  Of course we’re not the only species to thrive because of our unusual ability to cooperate.  Ants, bees and a few other mammals share it. But as far as I know, there are no ant symphonies.  By synergising cooperative behavior with imagination, forward thinking and other forms of intelligence we’ve become uniquely able to concretize one another’s imaginings.  And the fact that a concert performance can then twitch the insides of a batch of microphones and instantaneously reproduce the concert in thousands of living rooms a continent away gobsmacks.  What a species we are! Little wonder people have trouble believing we descended from apes.

 

But we did.  Once upon a time a few globs of protoplasm obtained a competitive advantage over their peers by clumping together and coordinating their activity.  The great evolutionary clock ticked onward and a couple of billion years later the survival advantage of group hunting by those who could rein in their selfish instincts and work together to implement a group plan  surely made it easier to put a mastodon haunch on the table and assure the survival of one’s offspring. It doesn’t take much imagination to attribute the subsequent development of centralized government, nationalism, team sports, symphony orchestras and the modern-day corporation as steps along that same trajectory.  Combine that with a concatenation of ideas, culture, global diffusion and an economic system which pools resources, promises profit, protects investors from consequences and gives that abstraction personhood before the law and the colossus of corporate capitalism is born!

 

The benefits have been uncountable. When a group of us humans see benefit and profit in a common goal it is as good as achieved.  From health to welfare, from tawdry entertainment to profound intellectual stimulation, from convenience to comfort, we have been reaping those benefits.  Look what we’ve done to scourges like measles and poliomyelitis and what we no doubt will one day do to this damn coronavirus; how we fly around the globe in hours pushed by solar energy stored in distillates of the goop of rotten leaves hidden underground eons ago until we found a way to suck it out; how we’ve doubled our lifespan; shrunk suffering; warm or cool ourselves with the flick of a switch; and –  instead of having to make every implement we want or need by hand – we simply pluck it off the shelves at WalMart and soon will be 3D printing it in our homes!  

 

Unfortunately, like the loaded phrases buried in telecommunications contracts, there have been hidden costs. Like the creeping decrepitude of aging, they’ve been accumulating silently, at a speed just below our perception threshold.  Then one day we walk by a reflective storefront and don’t recognize the stooped old guy walking next to us.  

 

Once the scales fall from our eyes, the unintended consequences of our cleverness are everywhere. Some we’ve recognized early and been able to mitigate.  Let’s stop drenching our fields with DDT before all the hawks and eagles are gone. Get thalidomide out of the pharmacies pronto. Don’t attribute the bone marrow failure and jaw necrosis those radium girls are dying from to their “loose morals”; instead, stop asking them to lick their brushes in order to get delicate lines of radium on watch faces.   But there are many more consequences for which the solution remains elusive. The diffuseness, power and anonymity of the perpetrators are so great; the engines fueled by those thousands of points of self interest so powerful .

 

Climate change, of course, is the poster child of these creeping consequences.  Granted,the industrial revolution led to generations with steadily improving standards of living but we’ve known about the coming crisis for over a decade and the smokestacks and tailpipes keep spewing. The incredible promise of plastics foreshadowed in the single word of advice given to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate has borne incredible fruit but by 2050 the stuff is projected to exceed the weight of fish in the ocean and now,  with no knowledge of the consequences, we unwittingly slurp down microplastic particles in the flesh of every shellfish we consume without a clue of the consequences.  Enormous dams power millions but in the process trigger cultural, ecological and geophysical tsunamis that extinguish salmon populations, reduce forest floor fertility,  destroy ancient cultures, threaten orca extinction, and even cause polar drift and speed up the rotation of the earth! 

 

We need to rethink the  grand scale with which we produce and do things because now  (Warning – here comes a bouquet of mixaphors)  it’s looking more and more as if we’ve been making some pretty big Faustian bargains and the bill is coming due. Let’s admit we sorcerers’ apprentices have lost control of the Frankensteins we’ve conjured up.  It’s time to pay the piper or else our goose, and most everything else, including us, is cooked! 

 

We’ve been attempting to rein in the apocalyptic cayuse of corporate capitalism since the Interstate Commerce Law of 1817  followed by the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, The Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 but those were just directed at minimizing  economic injury to consumers.  Now, as grandiose at it may sound,  we need a second go at taming this beast if we are to salvage life on earth as we know it – including our own.  We need the hard working naturalists who are each documenting the decline of the species du jour, the geophysicists warning about the reconstitution of our atmosphere, the climatologists measuring the global temperature rise, the oceanographers following sea acidification, the multitude of reporters dishing this up in lay language we can all understand, the environmentalists working away in their NGO’s for a fraction of the salaries they could earn in the private sector and – yes, and, – every single one of us doing our share to generate the political will to take back control of the system we’ve brilliantly created.  We also need radical new ideas. 

 

How about an FDA-like body to oversee a thorough study of the possible unintended consequences of every industrially produced chemical  before it leaves the manufacturer’s door .  How about really considering all those cost externalities – maybe require plastic manufacturers (Exxon Mobil is the world’s largest producer) to be responsible for fishing a certain number of tons of plastic out of the ocean before they issue a stock dividend.      How about taking down the legal walls protecting CEOs’ personal fortunes from destructive blunders their companies make whether or not they covered up the problem. Sound like crazy pie in the sky? Social Security and Workmen’s compensation did before they were passed into law. So did women’s suffrage.   And you can be sure those snake oil salesmen squawked and hollered to try to block the establishment of the FDA.

 

We face a big challenge.  How do we unstick ourselves from the tar baby we’ve unwittingly smacked.   What twelve steps will lead us away from our addiction to comfort and convenience and the incredible power we’ve harnessed?  I don’t have an answer, but I take hope in a wonderful poem a dear friend sent recently:

 

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

                                                     Wendell Berry:  Standing by Words, 1983

 

Most of us will get through the corona crisis, but in the rear view mirror  it will look like a trivial bump in the road compared to the cataclysmic climate crisis we’re hurtling towards.  Between now and when that Big One becomes unbearable we’ll get back to going to concerts and watching all those hardworking musicians create music.  But to succeed at the troublesome task ahead we are going to need extraordinarily effective leaders, like orchestra conductors, who can get us all working together.   Coaxing the genie back into the bottle and all those furies back into Pandora’s box is going to be nowhere near as easy as it was to let them out. We’re going to need to work in an unprecedentedly cooperative and coordinated way and use all our creative and intellectual gifts, be they god-given or the product of evolution,  to turn things around.

Walt Kelly:  Pogo, 1970

Consider the Mussel

Posted on by under Uncategorized

 

Consider the mussel.  Not the invasive zebra or quagga mussel – those freshwater invasives that plug sewers and ruin turbines in the midwest – nor the foul tasting ribbed mussel that buries itself in salt marsh mud and tastes just like it.  No, consider the blue mussel, Mytilus edulus –  “edulus” from the latin: edible.

 

So edible, in fact, that Moules et frites  is one of Belgium’s national dishes.  A Belgian restaurant in Washington D.C.  we ate in once had what seemed like dozens of delicious-sounding variants on the menu. Moules marinière, Moules natures, Moules à la crème, Moules parquées, Moules à la bière, Moules à l’ail, etc. – the blue bivalve seems to electrify the culinary imagination.

 

Once steamed open, there are two distinctly different types of blue mussels – yellow and orange.  They taste identical and there are about equal numbers of the two colors. Turns out that the creamy white ones are male while females are described as being of a “warmish orange”.  It makes one wonder if our species’ propensity for racial bigotry might evaporate if the sexes of us humans were similarly divided by color.  

 

Blue mussels epitomize the word sedentary –  spending their adult lives stuck fast to the surface they first settle on – but “sedentary” doesn’t do justice to the tenacity with which they adhere to structure.  Wresting them off the rocks to which they typically anchor themselves can be nearly impossible thanks to a two part system involving a unique glue laid down at the ends of multiple thread-like structures known as “the beard” to mussel eaters and byssus to marine biologists.  For eaters, the beard is a bother. It feels like a foreign body in the mouth and tastes and feels like chewing on sewing thread. Attached to a muscular organ in the muscle’s innards it needs to be forcefully removed before the mussels are cooked. But to bioengineers and inventors, what byssus is made of and how it is formed is a beckoning path to fame and fortune.   The threads are unique among fibers since they combine bungee cord elasticity (stretchable to 160% of original length) with Herculean strength (5 times stronger than the human Achilles tendon) – an extremely unusual combination of fiber properties. https://www2.clarku.edu/departments/biology/biol201/2002/LBrentner/byssal_threads.html,https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124319594

 

How byssus fibers adhere to rocks has been another active focus of scientific investigation. There are mighty few good glues that can be used under water, yet mussels know how to make an excellent one.  Sadly, they never patented the process. Now, after slicing, dicing, crushing and otherwise murdering to dissect bushels of mussels, bioengineers from Genex and Bio-polymers have done just that. Soon heart  surgeons may have a glue to close bloody wounds, the U.S. Navy may be doing underwater glue repairs and we may someday see a ruptured Achilles tendon replaced with a byssal cable stuck to our heel and calf muscle with mussel glue!  Stockholders in Genex and Biopolymers will smile but it’s unlikely that marine ecologists studying mussel dieoff will see big grants based on mussel royalties.

 

We H. sapiens are not the only ones with a taste for Mytilus edulus. Like our own species, a blue mussel typically spends its youth drifting around aimlessly – though these little mussel trochophores, veligers and pediveligers face armies of filter feeders ranging from sunflower seed-sized crustaceans to schoolbus-sized  whale sharks. And even after they settle down and stick themselves fast to a huge chunk of granite they remain vulnerable to being harvested and boiled alive by us, swallowed whole by diving ducks, crushed by the toothy jaws of blackfish, drilled into by dog whelks,  or subjected to the dismal fate of being pried open by a starfish’s arms and then hosting that creature’s whole stomach which the echinoderm has everted onto the mussel’s newly exposed innards.

 

As a child, summering on the Rhode Island coast where the rock-drop from receding glaciers makes perfect mussel habitat, I could pick a meal’s worth in half an hour.  That was well before they started showing up in supermarket seafood cases in the ‘70’s followed soon after by appearances in NYTimes recipes. Since then, I’ve watched their price steadily increase and their numbers among the rocks steadily dwindle to the point that a summer supper of wild mussels is now almost unheard of.

 

Speculation about the causes of the decline includes over-harvesting, pollution, ingestion of microplastics, higher water temperature, excessive non-human predation, degradation of native DNA by the escaped gametes of coddled farmed mussels, a mussel epidemic or some villainous mix of all these usual suspects.  Scientific consensus seems to be settling on the fact that the decline’s causes are multifold and man-made, a fate now being suffered by untold numbers of other species. One peer reviewed paper documented that the southernmost edge of the blue mussel’s range drifted 350 km northward from Cape Hatteras North Carolina to Lewes, Delaware between 1960 and 2010.  In Rhode Island now, if we find any they’re hidden in deep crevices on the northeast side of rocks – protected from the intense heat of the afternoon sun. And now when we bring home a meal’s worth of mussels, they come from farms in colder Canadian waters.

 

It’s humbling to consider the mussel while watching surf crash on  the Rhode Island boulders where a few still remain . Here is a species that seems to have been around for about 200 million years.  It spends its infancy drifting defenseless in the ocean currents. Then after two or three months when it finally decides to settle down it typically chooses a spot regularly bashed by three or four foot waves every 15 seconds and by twelve or thirteen foot rogue rollers whenever an angry coastal storm comes along – and apparently loving it.  The fact that this hardy creature is now in trouble, as are so many other fellow travelers on spaceship earth is telling us something.  

 

Credible investigators  https://www.livescience.com/24805-undiscovered-marine-species.htm put the number of different species in the ocean at about a million, with about three quarters yet to be discovered!  Meanwhile we go on turning up the ocean heat with our greenhouse gasses and producing plastic from fossil fuel at a geometrically accelerating rate with annual production rising from zero to 400 million tons between 1950 and today https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution.   One can only wonder what kind of miraculously useful substances like byssus and mussel glue will come from those yet to be discovered marine creatures if we can just get to them before warmer oceans cooks them out of existence  or we clog them to extinction with plastic.