Yucatan Diary Day 7
Merida, Yucatan
by Ben White
posted 01/12/05
Executive Summary-
Maurice Ewing Seismic Vessel coming but not here- thumpa thumpa thumpa- like the shark in Jaws, ever closer. Expected tonight or tomorrow in test area north of Yucatan. Press coverage leaps international, thanks to this diary, alert grandmothers and their contacts. Still looks like Thursday is Get Wet Day #1.
What is it about color in the tropics? Is it just me or does there seem to be twice the number of primary colors down here as in Washington state? Is it that there is just ten times more light in the Yucatan than the northwest, and that it splinters into jillions of micro-colors upon striking the hard ground and flies into the eyes of artists?
At the market, some vendors sell nothing but habanero-almost-too-hot-to-eat peppers. They sort through a huge pile of both green and orange ones and then build these tall delicate pyramids of the fluorescent shiny orange ones, looking like a psychedelic version of that dripping cathedral in Barcelona.
All of the traditional women walk about awash in colors all the time- little pools of bright flowers across the front, back and shoulders of their white outfits, with just their kind brown lined faces floating there, graying hair back in tidy buns, tied with more bright colors.
I have been building and translating a chart to give an inkling of the depth of our global collective ignorance on the subject of what effect a pulse of sound the volume of 255 decibels (like the Ewing hopes to hit the ocean with every twenty seconds) would be expected to have on the creatures that live within the big rectangular test area across the top of the Yucatan.
Across the top of the graph, leaning to the right like dominoes about to fall, are the names of some of these creatures. There are, of course, hundreds of species. But lets say we pick 20: beaked whales, sperm whales, bottlenose dolphins, boquilete fish, sea turtles, benthic organisms, rays, sharks, and on until we get twenty.
Across the left side of the graph- are horizontal columns with questions. Like, at what point does one hit with this sound cause a startle response? Injury? Death? How about multiple hits? How many times might one creature be hit by one airgun discharge as it bounces from the shallow bottom to the surface and back again? What is the synergistic effects between the seismic airguns and the two active sonar arrays the Ewing has also blasting away at more than 200db?
It will be easy to think of at least fifty of these questions. When you combine the questions with the particular answer for each species, that gives us a thousand things we don't know, just to begin with. And the answers to any of these questions might take years to figure out even if we are cruel enough to try.
But after this sad exercise, the question that jumps out to me is why the burden of proof on us- normal citizens of two countries and more- to prove this thing is unsafe- long after the bodies have been washing up? Why isnīt the burden of proof on the scientists to prove their big whomping toy is safe before being allowed to play with it outside of their sandbox?
In the realm of governmental controls, they are allowed to do this stuff through the smokescreen of the word mitigation. The same word is used for why it is ok to destroy 2,000 year old redwood forests in California as for why it is ok to put enough sound to permanently shiver your timbers into the living waters around Mexico. All they have to say is that we are going to do all this stuff to minimize the effects, we are going to do absolutely everything we can to be careful, except of course for limiting the amount, volume or distance covered by our blasting.
Their (the bad guys) entire claim to safety is based on a concept they know is wrong: that the onset of problems with sound and marine mammals is at a minimum 180 decibels. They figure, with perfect concentric spreading, their source diminishes to 180 after about a kilometer, and with marine mammal "experts" looking hard into the waters, they will be able to see any before they come into harms way. Baloney.
The US Navy and NMFS collaborated on a modeling of the sound that killed the beaked whales in the Bahamas a few years ago and came up with 138db as the median level of sound that hit those whales. Many stranded. Not one of the population was ever seen alive again. The sound the Ewing puts out is above 138db for far beyond the horizon from the bridge of the ship. Plus, the people in the world most expert about beaked whales say, that with their inconspicuous blows and dorsals, the chances of spotting them on a perfect day is about 1%. It appears this detail didnīt overly worry the permit givers in the US (NMFS- part of the Department of Commerce) who permitted the ship to work at night too. At least the Mexican government stopped that.
You donīt have to prove your mitigations work. You donīt need to do any population studies before or after. You just state clearly your little fantasy of how easy it is to clean up your big mess, how you are going to try real hard to reduce mortalities (at least of the glamorous megafauna), then you can blast away until you learn what you want to, and then get your selves back to your nice homes in the States. Its the awesome arrogance of the thing that gets to me.
In 1971 my teacher, Rolling Thunder, told me that it would be OK to hang around him for a while. I stayed for 18 months. When I first got there we were sitting in ragged old overstuffed chairs in his living room. He made me nervous by looking at me in a piercing way from under his huge wild eyebrows, squinting against the tobacco smoke rising from his corncob. Finally he said,
"You have an inherited spiritual disease. Your people have already taken our land, our health, our sacred things, our ancestorīs bodies, and now you want our knowledge. You are arrogant and all full up with yourself. You have to humble yourself and cure your arrogance before you will free up space to learn anything. See that hill? I want you to go up there and find the worst, ugliest, scraggliest bush you can find up there, whatever is ugly to you. Then I want you to sit there and look at it. Moving. In the wind. Drenched by thunderstorms, lit by lightning, and stung by sandstorms. I want you to stay there until you honestly believe that old bush is at least as good as you. See you later."
Arrogance.
Like an addiction, I am still not healed. But one of my self-treatments is direct action. To try to serve, stand under: understand.
I think about the Mayans that live across this hard land. Many have lost their little chunks of barren limestone where they could plant at least corn and beans. Many have been forced into the cities to work at the lowest wages in lousy jobs. (A new friend here works seven days a week at the fish market, ten hours a day for less than $50.) But many still make their living from the sea. And almost all are held together by their rock steady devotion to the old ways, by the grandmothers, and by the ceremonies that connect them to the land and the spirits.
The Ewing has every intention of coming and taking without asking or getting permission from the people who will be affected, much less the whale and dolphin or urchin nations. Then it leaves. With knowledge derived by raping a whole sea. No. Unh- unh. Not this time, Maurice. Go home. Call it a day. Figure out better ways to find out stuff.
We are all set, ready to go. Tomorrow we buy food, take it to the fishermanīs boat that we are using, pack some blankets and a couple of towels. What else? A book, wetsuit, Virgin of Guadalupe, cameras, coat. Trailing all of your prayers like flowers on the waves.
Ready to load up the journalists early the next morning and head out. Anything can happen. Stay tuned.
Love and Revolution,
Ben
Yucatan Diary
Day 7
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