Yucatan Diary Day 17
Holbox, Yucatan
by Ben White
posted 01/27/05
Maurice Ewing pounds the coast, Day 5, just (tantalizingly) visible about 4 miles north of Progreso. Boats and gung-ho skippers found. Great expectations.
Stopped by computer glitch from filing my daily missive; I discover how attached I am to it. This is an odd and unasked- for conversation we have begun, you and me, and I am very grateful for it. Somehow, like dreaming, my telling you helps me make some sense out of my day.
I left off this diary running out the door to meet with fellow guerero para los animales Juan Carrateca and the two boat captains he thought might be willing to rent us a tourist boat to get out to the Ewing. They were waiting outside the internet cafe in the town square underneath the spreading flamboyant trees. We walked a half a block to the Viva Zapata bar and restaurant and sat down upstairs under the raised palapa roof. The two boat captains ordered two tequilitas (just little tequilas) and we got down to business. With Juan nodding, I told them the whole story of the Ewing, but they already knew quite a bit and told me how upset the fishermen along the coast were with the Ewing totally ignoring their livelihoods in their search for ???.
These guys were into it- totally, and had already cleared their rental to AWI and their taking me and some journalists out. Now that doesn´t guarantee the Progreso Port Captain will agree, but we have jumped every hurdle he has given us to make this trip out to the Ewing legal. So, I guess you folks can stop visualizing bringing to me a committed skipper and a legal tourist boat. Now, if we are able to actually shut down the Ewing for one day, it may actually come down to funding to see if we can persevere. I guess the new thing I need visualized is dollars falling from the skies into AWI so I can continue this struggle.
When it came for setting a price on the daily rental, the captains had to check some things the next day and get back to me at eight that (Tuesday) night. So, I was stuck in Holbox with nowhere to drive or people to agitate for a day. Tough luck. Cut adrift in island paradise.
I walk out of my palapa at the Hotelito Mawimby, hit the water and take a right, headed toward the long curving beach beyond where the cabanas stop and I can see no human being. Nothing hurting, nothing wrong (except for the Ewing working, Iraq, Bush and all of the dark world beyond). But at that moment at that place, it was just the bluegreen water swishing in, the wind rattling the palms and palmettoes, ospreys whistling, and the sun warming up the land and spreading the clouds. I walked for hours.
When was the last time you walked a beach? I live on an island surrounded by beaches that never fail o blast me in the face and make me glad to be alive. But I hardly every go. Maybe this is one reason why we find it so easy to dismiss the ocean, stop protecting it. We are not listening to it very often anymore. Seems we only really protect what we feel is part of us- our family, our home, and these frames of reference are shrinking. Now if we saw all people and all creatures as part of us, and the streams and lakes and oceans as bloodstreams, and rain a miracle, and each moment of sunlight glistening a personal gift from a kind universe, maybe then....
At one point in my walk I accidentally disturbed a big mixed flock of seabirds, each with their own distinct personality: perturbed and whistling oystercatchers, dowdy gulls not wanting to move, and the sleek, racing model terns.
I have been asked by some of the people reading this daily diary to hand out some assignments, give people a way to help other than just hitting them up for scarce dollars. I hear you. So I am going to try something- a tiny task a day, sort of like your own chance to do something very small but important when combined with everyone else. The thing we can all do today is to contact Mr. G. Michael Purdy, the boss of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (operators of our present nemesis, the seismic vessel Maurice Ewing.)
Now, Mr. Purdy seems like a nice guy, but he is about to make a big mistake. LDEO is about to retire the Ewing, that’s the good news. The bad news is that they have bought a bigger a better ship to do the same damn thing all over the earth. In fact, the RV Marcus G. Langseth will have even more power to blast the oceans, although out of the goodness of their hearts, LDEO has promised to go no louder than the Ewing. It is intended to obtain more information with fewer passes because that is environmentally safer. Why?, one must ask, if it does no harm whatsoever? Why try to reduce the number of passes?
But the mistake is that instead of retiring this stupid old heavy handed way of obtaining information about the bottom of the ocean, they are putting into a new package and just carrying on, as if the world doesn´t have their number already. Once dynamite was used to perform a similar function as intense blasts of sound now do with the Ewing. We need to graduate to the next generation of tools. Maybe it would help to let Mr. Purdy hear from us. At this minute the Langseth is being fitted in Narragansett Bay Rhode Island to do more of the same as the Ewing. LDEO has a brilliant chance to change directions.
I suggest that we email Mr. Purdy in whatever is your operative language, and put in the subject line of your email SHUT UP, MAURICE, or MAURICE, WOULD YOU KINDLY BE QUIET NOW, or MAURICE, YOU CAN SHUT UP, NOW. Something along those lines. And then ask him to lead the world in developing creative ways to find out what they need to know- be in front of the curve instead of behind it. His phone number is 845-365-8348, his fax is 845-365-8162 and his email is...............
Maybe a good story to share with Mr. Purdy is that of the conversion of FJ O´Reilly, the CEO of Heinz a few years ago. At the time, the tuna boycott was hot. American tuna boats were killing tens of thousands of dolphins yearly by encircling them with fishing nets to catch the tuna beneath. Many of us whale activists were going around to schools to urge kids not to let their moms and dads buy tuna fish. It was enormously successful. One of my colleagues, Shawn White with the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society in the UK, spoke one night at a fancy girl´s ¨finishing¨ school in Ireland. Unbeknownst to him, one of the girls in the audience was O´Reilly´s daughter. When his talk was over, the story goes, the girl promptly had her dad on the line back in the states and asked him, ¨¨Daddy, are you killing dolphins?¨¨. Within a little more than a week, O´Reilly held a press conference to announce that Heinz (Starkist), the largest packer of tuna in the United States, was no longer going to buy tuna caught by encircling dolphins. And they haven´t. And within another week or so, the other two major packers in the US- Bumble bee and Chicken of the Sea also flipped, forced to by the market. Thereafter, dolphin safe tuna is worth far more on the international market than that still caught by encircling dolphins, and the number of dolphins killed has dropped by many tens of thousands to a number still too high. (Both methods, of course, are still fatal to tuna- a whole ´nother discussion.)
Mr. O'Reilly was smart enough to listen to his daughter, make an unprecedentedly bold decision, and come out of it leading the industry. Beauty. Maybe Mr. Purdy can be convinced that it is just too late in the life of man on this earth to be using such a device as seismic airguns to find out about stuff (now that the Paris conference just announced that species are disappearing at ten times the rate of the fastest extinction ever known by Earth.) And don´t let him convince you that their pounding is more necessary than ever after the horrible Asian tsunami, in order to find out about plate movement and, presumably, save us the next time. For LDEO to offer such succor at this time is as intellectually dishonest as if I swore to the people of the Yucatan that the Ewing would certainly cause earthquakes. It is the eternal carrot held out by science- we will save your lives- just give us a blank check. Scientists will not be able to accurately predict earthquakes in time to save lives for a long time, no matter how much banging away they do.
Why some science has to have such a heavy hand has always been one of my curiosities. I once developed this theory that there seem to be two schools of field biology working today- the Marlin Perkins school (spokesman for Wild Kingdom years ago on TV- where they would always wrestle the anaconda into submission and cut open its stomach to check its contents) and the Jane Goodall (or Paul Spong) school of research where one goes to where the creatures are, park yourself there as inconspicuously as possible for the rest of your life and just keep track of what goes on with free creatures being what they are. I finally met Jane at lunch at AWI one time and asked her what she thought of my analogy. Never willing to say a bad thing about anyone, she said, "I think you are being a little hard on Marlin." Hah.
At eight I meet with the boat captains and sloe eyed Juan again. How much will it cost?
More soon about snapping shrimp and acoustic daylight with new information back from our far-flung friends.
Things are getting interesting real quick. Don´t go away. Thanks for all of the prayers and good wishes. Oh yeah. Start blowing again on Sunday.
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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