Yucatan Diary Day 9
Merida, Yucatan
by Ben White
posted 01/15/05
Executive Summary: Situation frozen, but life blooms. The press is in feeding frenzy mode.
A big lumbering iguana starts to cross the road, gets caught exposed halfway to the median when my jeep comes by, gives me a baleful glare, swings his big head around and fast-waddles back to where he came from, squeezing sideways into a crack in the concrete wall. Quintessentially Mexican but it sends me right back to being ten years old catching lizards in Spain when my family moved there. I was lonely and did poorly socially but I was the king of lizard catchers. I let them go, but I just couldn´t resist.
This passion came to a screeching halt when I was about twenty-one living with Rolling Thunder. One time I was way out in the country preparing a site for a sacred ritual with a couple of Indian warriors (their label). As we were leaving I saw a big fat snake sliding across the sand and insisted they stop the car so I could mess with it; catch it, pick it up, look at the colors, let it go. When I got back into the car, I overheard one say to the other,
'Why do you think they always have to do that?'
Why indeed? Shamed, I never did it again.
As far as we know the big bad Maurice Ewing seismic ship is right at the northeast corner of the Yucatan peninsula about 180 kilometers from shore. Today´s paper has new pictures of her riding in the high seas. Still not cleared for working. Hopefully there will always be just a few more details to iron out until their US permit expires at the end of February.
Meanwhile, the word goes far and wide for a vessel outside of Yucatecan jurisdiction that we could use to get out to the Ewing and shut them down by our presence in the water. Ric O´Barry, longtime activist brother-in-arms and comrade is scrambling to find a boat in Florida for us. I am hitting up Paul Watson to bring the vessel Cleveland Amory down from Bermuda where it is preparing for the Canadian seal hunt early this spring. The thought of it makes me chuckle. Having a tow vessel as big as the Ewing. That is one ship the Mexican Navy will not be seizing.
Tomorrow my daughter Julia and I leave for Cancun, just across the state line into Quintana Roo. I need to meet with Mayan high priestess and animal activist Araceli Rodriguez and get a powerful dose of her wisdom, wrapped in copal smoke and Conchs blown to the stars for help. Then we will check out the possibility of a gringo boat in Cancun that might like to wade into a little purpose-for-being. On the way back we will check in at the little fishing villages along the north coast for a barca rapida to rent.
Today Rosario called a press conference in the park in front of my hotel. We were just sitting there drinking coffee at the little sidewalk cafe when they attacked. Nice folks, but very hungry. Soon, Rosario was off on a tear with twelve arms holding little tape recorders up to her mouth. I just sat back and hid behind her, enjoying the scene. Then, of course, some guy asks me a question. I think it was, 'What will you do now?' And all the arms swing to me and all the eyes swing expectantly to me, nodding in encouragement like I am a baby just learning how to talk.
Which, in fact, I am. I am only about half fluent in Spanish, and when people are talking fast or I am trying to explain something complicated, it is a struggle. So, when I am sitting in a radio station like for every one of the last three days, with a microphone in front of me and an elegant, deep voiced person asking me a fast complicated question, and I know that I am going live to a bunch of people, I feel like a gun is cocked to my head. Don´t get me wrong. I wouldn´t have it any other way. I am especially delighted that we have been able to get the message to thousands to keep an eye out for stranded animals along the coast and call either us or the radio stations. But it is a moment of anxiety.
Over and over, I spiel out the same spiel to the press. According to the US government the maximum safe level of sound intensity for human beings in the water is 145 decibels. They know that from blasting Navy divers, and hurting some before backing off to something more conservative. The government at the same time absurdly sets the maximum safe level for cetaceans at 180 decibels and for pinnipeds at 190.
This says that they believe that whales, acoustic creatures where we are visual ones, are 5,000 times less sensitive to sound than humans, and seals 50,000 times. I presume this is because they can´t ask their victims, 'OK, How does that feel?' The level of sound that the Ewing intends to emit every twenty seconds during daytime hours is 255 decibels. You can do the math and run out the zeros. Like the Richter scale, the decibel scale is logarithmic. 255 decibels is 100 billion times more pressure than the maximum a human can take. Asked today if it would kill me if I were close, the only possible answer I had was, in a heartbeat.
Just now, ladies and gentlemen, the US government is trying to pull a fast one and slip some bad Noise Criteria by you. A panel of 'experts' (put together by the primary architect of raising the allowable level of sound in the United States, NMFS scientist Roger Gentry) is coming out with their recommendations of how much sound should be considered acceptable to each species of marine mammal. Dr. Gentry is the guy who patiently worked to ratchet up the allowable level in the US from 120 to 180 over about a decade. (This is a million times greater pressure of sound).
The level was changed precisely to accommodate the US Navy that argues, as explained earlier, that they can keep a good lookout from a ship and make sure no marine mammal gets closer than a kilometer. This is the point where they assert, lo and behold, that the sound drops to 180db. Now, as just announced in the federal register, Dr. Gentry´s panel is asking for an Environmental Assessment for the criteria they are coughing up. Forgive me for being suspicious, but I am pretty sure not one of the scientists on the panel has not received funding from the Office of Naval Affairs through the generosity of Dr. Gentry´s good buddy, Dr. Robert Gisiner.
This stinks. The official levels of sound considered injurious or fatal should not be set by scientists with a vested interest. I ask all interested to submit comments either in writing to the: Office of Protected Species,
National Marine Fisheries Service
Silver Spring, Maryland
or go speak your mind at one of the public hearings being held over the next couple of weeks in Seattle, Boston and Silver Spring. (More information available from Susan at AWI at 703-836-4300.) Don´t fall for the jive that you are not an expert and have no right to an opinion. It is only your involvement as citizens that will stop this panel's recommendations from setting the standard used for the world.
Personally, I believe the maximum level allowed for the discharge of ocean noise pollution should be set back where it was ten years ago in the US - 120 decibels. Maximum. We have, as my best friend Mac Hawley has eloquently testified, alternatives for every one of the loud things that plague us: loud ships, active sonar, and earth shaking airguns. All of this stuff is old blunt, brutal technology. And those in search of money, oil, information or promotion will keep using them until we organize sufficiently and globally to insist they stop. Bad things happen because we allow them. When we stop allowing them, they will stop.
As dusk quickly falls, the caoba birds swoop across the rooftops south toward the magnolia-like almendre trees in the park by my hotel. They throw themselves forward with the woodpecker´s classic dip and rise, even though they (proud, of course) are members of the corvid family. They come singing. A couple, then dozens, then hundreds. They sit in the treetops and along the edges of the buildings, their profiles in silhouette against the darkening skies, beaks thrown up in a concentrated croon. Gurgles, plaintive upswinging whoops. Biologists have long argued why birds sing. Hard to believe that all of that variety and emotion is just to declare territory. Maybe sexiness. Courting birds and courting humans look equally ridiculous and dorky and vulnerable. But not always. I watched the other night a pudgy middle aged couple dance a fine salsa across the worn bricks in the blocked off street. Every step right, hips swinging, elbows out. Back and forth. Like gods. Like chickens.
I have learned that teachers are using these diary entries with their children, and organizing meditations where the ocean creatures are envisioned surrounded by light and safety. I am overwhelmed, grateful and humbled. I think about the animal books, the Wonders of Nature books read to me as a kid. Sitting on a parent´s lap. Maybe only two or three years old. One of those picture books with closeup pictures of the faces of glamorous megafauna: lions, tigers, anacondas, mandrills, dolphins of course, giraffes with the come hither eyes and eyebrows, all holding secrets and mysteries and untouchable wildness. They were what made me excited to be in this world. What a world it must be to have creatures that roam the earth like this. What a hoot it will be to grow up into such a wonderful world!
Now many are going or gone, you know. More tigers are in captivity than living in the wild. The wild and wonderful places on earth, all of the different perspectives of the great spirit seeing the world through all of these persons living in different forms than our own. Going going gone. Like puddles in the sun. But it is not too late.
I don´t believe in hope. Hope was the white dove that Pandora released from the box last, after all of the little evils got out. Perhaps the cruelest of all, faith´s sister, hope is something we make up when we think we really have no chance. I believe in something more solid. I believe in the power of humans to love this miraculous world enough to save it. Enough to confront our own spiritual diseases. Enough to heal our own confusion so we are not constantly lashing out. Enough to confront and stop the misunderstanding bullies among us. Enough to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Enough to help each other.
You are certainly helping me. The love coming from you and the people of the Yucatan directed towards my effort down here chokes me up. I pray to be good enough to justify your support.
Great thanksgiving to all. Teach the children. The opposite of love isn´t hate but fear. Bush and the world of head heavy bureaucrats want you afraid. Don´t obey. You can be exactly who you want to be.
Love and Revolution,
Ben
Anyone wanting to financially support this campaign and the larger one of internationally regulating intense sounds in the oceans can send tax deductible checks to the:
Animal Welfare Institute
Box 3650
Washington D.C. 20027.
And special thanks from me to AWI, for giving me the job I was made for.
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