Yucatan Diary Day 14
Merida and Celestun, Yucatan
by Ben White
posted 01/21/05
Wind fades. Ports of Progreso and Yucalpeten open for the first time in 6 days. Rumors abound but no report Ewing has begun. Chuburna is up in arms.
Been thinking a lot about sound. Strange to be fighting the use of an instrument whose job is the generation of unbelievably huge amounts of sound. Like creating the heat of the sun here on Earth and extolling its ability to find out things.
Sound is music, wind through trees, a lover´s whisper, the trickle and gurgle of water, a Water Ouzel´s trill, plates being cleaned in another room, a crackling fire, a mother´s coo (now figured out to have a specific neurological function), a silverback gorilla roar, the banshee scream of a hurricane, Tuva throat singing, all the throat and mouth popping sounds you learn as a kid, a dolphin smacking you with a doorcreak echolocation.
But we are just pikers in the sound world, us visually oriented critters. Imagine living all your life underwater. Everything is sound and pressure. Everything.
It is said that once upon a time, before ship motors, blue whales might have been able to hear each other all the way around the world, their whole bodies acting as sounding boards, the sound traveling to their jaw, then ear then brain. Maybe using the LOFAR channel down deep to transmit with very little loss like a fiber optic cable.
Ever heard of acoustic daylight? The Navy is very interested in it. The idea is that with a sensitive enough instrument one can ¨see¨ with sound by picking up on how shapes interrupt background (ambient) sounds. So you have this continual white noise made of millions of clicking shrimp and waves and whale songs and croaker chirps coming at you and the shape of a turtle passes between you and the static. You ¨see¨ the outline of the shape of where the sound isn´t. Some people think that this is the primary way that many whales and dolphins perceive underwater: Doesn´t matter how deep or how dark. Maybe that's what those big melon foreheads are for. We don´t know nothin.
The best idea of what happens to a deep diving whale when hit by intense manmade sounds like the Maurice Ewing produces goes like this: take a Couviers beaked whale for example, the clearest example of a sonic canary in the oceanic coal mine. When the whale dives, the size of the air in its lungs is about the size of a football. But at 6,000 feet deep, the air compresses to about the size of ping pong balls and gets squeezed out of the lungs to a little area by the ears. Some of the whales found in the Bahamas that were driven ashore by US Navy mid-frequency sonar had ear hemorrhages leading to brain hemorrhages- about as close to a smoking gun as one can find. (Besa me mucho plays in the background, Baysa, baysa may mooocho). But still, Dr. Darlene Ketten (Office of Navy Research funded scientist and apologist and perhaps foremost whale ear specialist) still asserts that the whales died of stranding, not provably from a sonic event. Which prompted Ken Balcomb, legendary friend to whales, to say that Darlene´s evasion was like saying that, if I shot you with a 45, the cause of death would be loss of blood.
It sounds like even now, the US government wants to set noise criteria for marine mammals based only on physical injury to ears. A corollary would be for a community to decide that the only noise they would limit is that loud enough to cause either temporary or permanent deafness of its citizens, as if there is no harm from repeated or chronic exposure to sound. Sure, none of us mind at all to be stopped at a light with a jackhammer pounding away next to our ear. Or a car alarm going off. Or a (someone else´s) baby screaming next to us.
I have told you all, incredulously, that the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) (part of Columbia University, and the operators of the Maurice Ewing), in explaining why this ship is harmless and they are not total jerks, say that fish and other creatures will just move when the sound starts up. But I haven´t shared some of their equally cogent reasons such as:
this is a down fishing season so the fishermen won´t be harmed (wrong, this is the most critical season for octopus); they and others have used seismic airguns for years and their is no proof of harm (wrong); there are lots of loud sounds out there like earthquakes and icebergs calving, what's wrong with a little more? (huh?); in the grand scheme of things, individuals don´t matter, just populations (OK, we won't kill everyone, just your mother); the Gulf of Mexico has been pounded by airguns for years and seems OK (Except for the big dead zone)
We need, it seems to me, to step back and think about what it would be like without a living ocean. Once, years ago in this long fight, a vice admiral once told Mac Hawley that if Low Frequency Active Sonar (LFA) could save one American service man or woman on an aircraft carrier then it was worth sacrificing the life of the oceans. Seems like there is a basic misunderstanding of how the world works and the proper ordering of threats. The ocean is our mother. Losing it would not be losing the place we go sunbathe. Losing it would end human life on earth.
The oceans are in big trouble. They only look like they can take anything we throw in them forever. Over seventy percent of the major fisheries are either collapsed or collapsing, despite ex- Representative Helen Chenowith´s incredulity about the fuss about endangered salmon ¨when you can buy it at any grocery store.¨
This threatened sound blasting of the Yucatan by the US scientific establishment is not occurring within a vacuum. It is happening when we are desperately trying to figure out how to save some of the fish, the corals, even the krill. Ninety percent of the large prey species are gone already. What morons.
There is a great poem by Gary Snyder in his Pulitzer winning book Turtle Island. It was a poem he delivered at the Stockholm Conference for Peace, I think in 1972. It says something like,
¨Rise up ant people, deer people, turtle people and pull back your giving from the arrogant head heavy bureaucrat robots who run this place.¨
Indeed.
What would happen if we all just stopped cooperating anymore in the funding or supporting of violence? Tomorrow when we wake up. Violence in the name of research, peace, religion, oil, water, clothes, love, drugs, our children, or food. Violence disguised as commerce, efficiency, curiosity, order, security, or education. To use our best natures, in harmony and love with the rest of Nature, to walk away from our habits that are eating this world alive. What would happen to Bush and his gang of thugs if we didn´t need them anymore?
We don´t need our taxpayer dollars going to fund the Research Vessel Maurice Ewing to seismically blast the Yucatan coast and impact the already-struggling thousands of fishing families that live here. And we are not going to just let it happen anymore.
Volunteers today brought in the names of dozens of fishing families in Chuburna on a petition to stop the Ewing. They are apparently really riled and want to raise a big ruckus, have a big demonstration and bring their families. Good.
Another day without blasting. Sometimes the best blessings are the absence of things. Like pain. Grief. Noise. Addiction. Abuse. I give thanks for one more day of just normal life for the creatures here. No big deal. Just plain old life.
Thanks for everyone´s prayers and good wishes. It ain´t over.
This campaign, and my salary, is being paid for by the Animal Welfare Institute. Tax exempt contributions will be happily accepted at Animal Welfare Institute, Box 3650, Washington, DC., 20027.
Love and revolution,
ben
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