The vast
majority of us 7+ billion humans are aware that there are oceans, but they are
so huge we can’t really get our heads around their expanse. The fact that oceans cover 71% or
almost 3/4ths of Earth’s surface may evoke a dismissive nod or a
blank stare because all it means to most people is that there’s a lot of water
out there, it’s too salty to drink, and it has a lot of weird creatures in it:
some of whom we eat, some of whom bite or sting, and some of whom eat us if
given the opportunity or invitation . . . like sharks. They are known and
greatly feared for their statistically rare attacks. (Ironically, any
human-shark encounter is termed an “attack” even if the shark is apparently
just swimming by and decides to investigate you out of curiosity with no intent to harm (1).)
Sharks are generally not well-loved and are feared (much like
wolves) beyond reasonable cause.
There are 400 species of sharks in the world’s oceans, ranging from the
Dwarf Lantern Shark at 8” to the Whale Shark at more than 41’ & 47,000 lbs.
or 23+ tons. Great White Sharks
are the most feared, due in large measure to Stephen Spielberg though I don’t
think he can be blamed for the current shark holocaust of 100 million slaughtered
each year for their fins. 90% of
the oceans’ shark population has been wiped out for soup (2). Who cares?
Although he’s
been dead 66 years, revered American author, scientist, ecologist, forester and
environmentalist, Aldo Leopold, would have cared most deeply (3). His Sand County Almanac is widely
known for its ground-breaking Land Ethic and contains his celebrated and most
reprinted piece, “Thinking Like a Mountain” (4). In it, Leopold recounts the day in the 1920s when, while
working for the U.S. Forest Service in New Mexico and charged with killing
predators, especially wolves, he and his trigger-itching (by his own admission)
co-rangers came upon a mother wolf and her half dozen grown pups: “In a second, we were pumping lead into
the pack....”
But what
happened next was profoundly transformative for Leopold: he describes watching the mother wolf
and seeing “a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.” He, like others, including the U.S. Forest Service, had been
of the mind that “fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean
hunters’ paradise.” Leopold
continues, noting that “after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither
the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”
This moment of
catalyst sparked Leopold to think outside the anthropocentric box and to
realize that considering the health and balance of the greater ecosystem would
be far wiser in the long run.
When wolves and
other apex predators were wiped out in the American West, Leopold and his
colleagues witnessed and recorded a literal balding of mountains. Without
predators, deer and elk reproduced and ate out of control. A bald mountain means not only
diminished trees and brush, but small mammal populations out of balance: some
threatened, some whose populations explode. I think of the Rabbit Population Explosion in Australia
which compelled the government in 1907 to erect about 3,000 miles of fences in
an attempt to keep the rabbits (introduced by the English) out of Western
Australian pasturelands.
Eco-systems out of balance call for unusual measures, some of them,
frankly, stupid. (The fences didn't work: rabbits leap and burrow quite effectively.)
Humans are just
barely beginning to realize the impact of their actions on the oceans’ ecosystems
and how the alarming spread of imbalances is already, but will increasingly,
impact our lives on local scales. The top of the food chain predator in Earth’s
oceans is the shark. Like the wolf, it is an apex species, which means if it is
wiped out or its prevalence diminished significantly, which is happening, then
marine ecosystems collapse.
It is really
quite simple, and parallels to the role of wolves in a mountain’s ecosystem are
obvious: sharks keep marine ecosystem food webs in balance. Much the same way a mountain loses its
trees when deer populations grow unrestrained, an ocean area loses its sea
grass beds and other nourishing vegetation habitats when sharks aren’t around
to keep prey populations in check.
For example,
turtles in Hawaii will ravage sea grass beds till there is no growth remaining,
but when tiger sharks are in the area, their natural intimidating presence encourages
the turtles to graze in a broader range, keeping growth balance (5).
Additionally,
sharks feed on sick, slower, weaker, older prey. By culling these, they help healthier and stronger prey to
reproduce with better genes, keeping prey populations strong and in
balance. (Some sharks even
scavenge the ocean floor to feed on dead carcasses . . . though they aren’t
quite considered vultures of the deep.)
Anyway, where I’m headed with these wolf, shark, apex predators,
ecosystem balance/imbalance reflections is to Australia where recently, against
protest from 57% of Australian citizens, the government conducted a shark cull,
which sparked the largest protest ever anywhere in the world in the interest of
protecting one species (6). The cull resulted in the taking of more than more
than 170 sharks.
In the seminal
Oneida Nation story at the heart of my website, “Speaking for Wolf,” practicing
ethical thinking in human-species relationships is or should be the controlling
central principle of any decisions we make in an infinitude of local and global
contexts.
Six Australians were
killed by sharks last year. So
Colin Barnett, Western Australia’s right wing Premier decided to make legal the culling of all the sharks they could find. He argued this would make beachgoers
happy. Sadly, the tax payer funded sea hunters
failed to gather a single Great White (which is who they were looking for), so,
to make the cull seem worthy, they killed all the big sharks they did get. “Fisheries Minister Ken Baston called
the program a success, saying it ‘restored confidence in beachgoers’” (7).
What kind of
people are we? We share this Earth
with species who are directly and indirectly impacted by cumulative human behaviors. The oceans are acidifying; global
warming is changing ages-old ocean currents, which confuse billions of marine
predators and prey: their populations either explode or they move closer to
extinction. The human population
is exploding, too, so we are showing up in places we have never been before,
places that were feeding grounds for sharks for millions of years. Suddenly a whole lot of us are around tossing beach
balls. Can it be such a shock or
travesty that once in a while a shark takes a human for lunch?
According to
Sydney, Australia’s Taronga Conservation Society, which keeps the official Australian Shark
Attack File, in the last 50 years there have been 53 shark fatalities (8). Tell me again why the Australian
Government needs to cull sharks from its waters? Perhaps it is a distraction meant to keep the public focused
on trivial endeavors while government-backed contractors are arguing with
citizens about whether or not Australia should start fracking the fuck out of
the continent.
If Australia
would start to think like an ocean, then it would rethink its Shark Culls,
which have full funding pending for three more years, and its current plans “to dump three million cubic metres of dredged ocean bottom
into the waters of the Great Barrier Reef” (9) for a coal terminal to continue
shipping this known climate changer to other parts of the world. (The dredged ocean bottom will raise significantly the temperature of the water, increasing the threat to the already threatened World Heritage Site.)
So long as we continue to give first
consideration to humans in the short-term, and put off long-term considerations
of living species in our multitude of greater eco-systems, we will continue to
think like the 19th century Americans who slaughtered 5+ billion
Passenger Pigeons into extinction because the European newcomers were too
stupid and self-focused to see the greater picture.
We are hardly better today; in fact, we’re worse because we
have what we need to see the greater picture, but we continue to let our
corporations and governments think like the distorted stereotypes of the wolves
and sharks we act against with hatred and fear, instead of thinking like the mountains and oceans in whose balanced contexts survival depends.
(1) http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/wildlife/2013/07/ultimate-guide-to-australian-sharks
