Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Soft Shell Crabs

Last night’s (Oct. 9, 2018) PBS Newshourfeatured several segments that were enough to drive a sane person mad. I’m not sure I can get to them all, but the one that sticks most vividly in mind is the one about the tiny island of Tangiers in Chesapeake Bay. It consists of mostly fishermen who for generations have plied their trade in the rich waters of the Bay, earning most of their income from the abundance of blue crabs to be found there. I believe this is the same crab that is used, at specific times of year when the crabs are molting, for the soft-shell-crab sandwiches that I loved when I lived in Connecticut. It’s far and away my favorite shellfish, if not my favorite seafood overall. It was not the food, however, but the crab fishermen of Tangier Island who were the subject on the Newshour. 
            John Yang interviewed several people for the piece, mainly Earl Swift, who has written a book, Chesapeake Requiem, about the disappearing island, and James “Ooker” Eskridge, a fisherman who’s the mayor of Tangier Island. Swift explained the main problem: the island is literally disappearing because of the rising ocean to which Tangier is exposed. Using several different methods to show this, Swift demonstrated how huge portions of the island have already been flooded, with the remaining parts increasingly invaded by the encroaching sea. Since 1850, according to the Army Corps of Engineers, Tangier Island has lost fully two-thirds of its land mass. Swift describes the devastation clearly:

The uninhabited marsh island that forms the northern third of Tangier was a pretty solid expansive marsh. Today, it’s a loose macrame of strands of marsh just pocked all throughout with water.

In other words, there can be no doubt that Tangier Island is losing usable land rapidly, with the loss clearly documented by aerial photographs, graphs and simple visual evidence as cited by Swift. The cause is hardly in doubt either: the sea rise that has long been predicted as a result of climate change, especially for low-lying coastal areas such as Tangier Island. Like large portions of Miami Beach, these areas are the ‘canaries in the coal mine’ when it comes to the dangers posed by the rising oceans. 
            And yet. The residents of Tangier Island refuse to believe the evidence. They know something is happening—which is why they want the Army Corps of Engineers to spend $30 million to build a seawall to surround their island (the Engineers have refused, saying it would be cheaper to move everyone to the mainland). But they won’t credit rising seas as the cause. As Mayor Eskridge says, 

…we can see the effects of erosion daily, weekly for sure. But the sea level rise, things just look the same to me as they did when I was a boy. I have been working the bay for 50 years, and pretty much day in, day out. And I just don’t see any difference in the sea level. 

In other words, for the mayor of Tangier Island, and presumably for most of his constituents, climate change and the predicted sea level rise is a chicken-little hoax cooked up by government bureaucrats. As Yang points out, “no less than 87 percent of the island’s voters went for President Trump, a climate change skeptic.” Indeed. Earl Swift adds that among islanders, as among their hero, President Trump, “there’s a great distrust of expertise, of scientific expertise.” 
            This just boggles the mind. Here is an island which informed sources with empirical data say is clearly in danger from encroaching seas. The evidence seems to confirm that the main livelihood of the island’s people stands to collapse. And yet, they would rather believe their anecdotal impressions of the water (things just look the same), confirmed by a fraud like Donald Trump (Eskridge says: “I love Trump as much as any family member I got”), than those who base their predictions on cold, hard science. 
            This really summarizes the problem of the United States as a whole. Entire segments of our population have decided that they cannot trust the data of experts, especially if they work in government. Whether this is because the ‘experts’ are believed to be ‘eggheads’ with no practical experience, or because these ‘experts’ have an interest in faking evidence to protect their cushy government jobs, or because what the ‘experts’ are saying is inconvenient to those who don’t want to believe that their lives must change to avoid catastrophe, the opinions of scientists seem to carry no weight with these people. They would rather believe the ravings of an idiot, a proven fraud and con-man, who has convinced them with his comforting message that he has their best interests at heart. So when Donald Trump said during his campaign that Tangier Island would survive fine, they believed him and voted for him en masse. 
            This is our problem, folks. People are too stubborn or too stupid to see the danger bearing down upon them, even when it is the ocean which is gobbling up the very ground upon which they stand. They refuse to believe what is difficult for them to comprehend. And since most of the dangers in our modern world are almost impossible for the average person to comprehend, a huge percentage would rather ignore them; ignore the evidence coming from their godless science. Or better still, be diverted to problems with apparently simpler solutions, like immigration, or abortion, or crime in the streets. Build a wall. Simple. Put a sexual predator on the Supreme Court to get rid of Roe. Simple. Give the police more power to shoot the bad guys. Wonderful. Kill ‘em all. 
            So when, on this same program, we learn that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (those damn scientists again) has just issued a report warning that if governments around the globe don’t cut carbon emissions drastically, millions of people in low-lying coastal areas will suffer dire consequences, we can predict the skeptical reactions from Trumpworld. Just more blather from self-interested, UN-sponsored eggheads. And when, on this same program, we learn from journalist Michael Lewis, as noted in his new book The Fifth Risk, that Trump has been literally gutting the civil service so that U.S. government agencies are and will be for the future too crippled to take the action that is needed to avoid catastrophe, we cringe even more. Because what Lewis demonstrates is that in critical agencies like the Department of Agriculture, the chief scientist who has just left (Cathie Woteki, a distinguished agricultural researcher) has been replaced by a right-wing talk show host from Iowa with no background in science at all, nor any idea what his Department’s mission is. His qualifications for the job? He was a loyalist who backed Trump in the election. Lewis points out that this same pattern has been repeated throughout the government: people with expertise are being replaced by know-nothings. And what makes this worse is that the dedicated bureaucrats who run many of these agencies have become so discouraged that fully twenty percentof them have simply resigned or been fired. This leaves the most important agencies of the United States government—the agencies that do the critical work of government without which a nation cannot function—crippled at their core. Agency websites like FEMA and the EPA and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and many others have been ‘cleansed’ of controversial data—FEMA removing data about electricity and water in Puerto Rico after the hurricane, for example; climate change data removed from the Department of Energy. In short, in the face of some of the greatest challenges the world has ever faced, the Trump Administration and its minions have responded by burying their heads in the sand. If we don’t know about it, if we ignore it, then it doesn’t exist. 
            I don’t know about you, but this is the kind of thing that makes me question how long the whole corrupt mess will even last. Because corruption is one thing. This kind of willful ignorance is a mess of a deeper, more pervasive kind. It suggests that people simply don’t have the stomach to face the deep-seated problems that human greed and hatred and ignorance have created. It suggests that even if some courageous souls are willing to confront such problems, most of humanity would prefer to dig a deeper hole in which to bury its collective head. If that is truly the case, then we may find our true kinship with those blue crabs whose soft shells during molting season make them delicious to us, but very, very vulnerable indeed when it comes to species survival.   

Lawrence DiStasi

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