Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Humpback Whales: The Past and Future of Wildlife

Counting Species: What It Says About the Human Toll on Wildlife

By analyzing mitochondrial DNA, scientists now can make more accurate estimates of the numbers of individual species that existed centuries ago. What does it tell us about our impact on the natural world and about our own future?

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

from Yale Environment 360 (www.e360.yale.edu)

 

There is one good thing to be said about 19th-century whaling. It produced a cache of biological data that is unparalleled for its time. Whaling — largely an American industry then — was a truly global scourge, profitable, destructive, obscene, and bloody beyond belief. Yet when it came to the details of the kill — time, location, species — whaling captains were often punctilious, because being punctilious about the ship’s log has always been part of a captain’s duty.

The same year Moby Dick was published, 1851, the great oceanographer Matthew Maury published a global “Whale Chart,” showing the distribution of whale species based on evidence gathered from whaling logs. Maury’s work has been expanded more than once over the years, culminating in a recent study called “Spatial and Seasonal Distribution of American Whaling and Whales in the Age of Sail.” 

By their nature, though, even the earliest whaling logs can’t answer a vital question: How many whales were there before large-scale whaling began?The answer matters for many reasons. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) uses estimates of pre-whaling populations as a basis for regulating whaling. And knowing the pre-whaling numbers is a way of measuring the recovery of whale species. For instance, there are some 17,700 North Atlantic humpbacks now, well up from the mid-twentieth century when there were probably fewer than a thousand individuals. 

But the real measure of recovery depends not on how few but on how many whales there once were. That number is found nowhere in human records. It is found in the DNA of the whales themselves.

By analyzing mitochondrial DNA, scientists in a recent study have been able to use genetic diversity within the humpback population as a way to estimate pre-whaling numbers. The current IWC estimate of the number of pre-whaling North Atlantic humpbacks, using a model based on whaling records and current sightings, is between 20,000 and 46,000. But the new genetic estimate — based on a far more accurate measure — suggests that the long-term population of North Atlantic humpbacks may have been about 112,000. This means that full recovery for humpbacks is much farther off than expected.

A new genetic study indicates the pre-whaling population of humpbacks was far higher than previously estimated.

For a couple of decades now, scientists have been using mitochondrial DNA (and other genetic tools) to sort out questions of speciation and geographical origin. Who is kin to whom? Where did their ancestors come from? These are fascinating questions. But I’m struck by the question this new study asks: How many were there before we thought to count them?

Get that question lodged in your head, and you begin to realize that the history of our awareness of the biological world around us is a history of numerical indeterminacy. How many species are there? Estimates differ by the millions. How many bison were there on this continent before European contact? There is a wide range of estimates — nearly as wide as the range of estimates for the number of Native Americans living in those days. I somehow find myself wondering just how many dodos there once were.

We are the only species that goes about counting itself. As a result, knowing how many humpbacks there once were seems peculiarly important to us — as a measure of an historical industry, as a guide to conservation management and, not incidentally, as an index of our environmental turpitude and righteousness. It matters too that the language we use to speak about whales has changed utterly. To be convinced of that, you need only dip into Moby Dick, where the whale is more than leviathan: It is the dark beast within nature itself. Melville would not have understood the young Italian woman beside me out in a small boat watching humpbacks in Mozambique last summer. Whenever a fluke appeared or a whale breached, she would croon softly, almost maternally, “La balena! La balena!”

To me, the real point in knowing the mitochondrial estimate of a long-ago whale population is what these numbers say about the world itself. Could the North Atlantic now support a population of 112,000 humpback whales? And what’s the difference between a North Atlantic with 46,000 humpbacks in it — to accept the IWC’s highest estimate — and a North Atlantic with 112,000? After all, each humpback is a multiplier of sorts, an occupier of habitat, a utilizer of food resources, breeding opportunities, migratory routes, etc. To imagine a North Atlantic with the number of humpbacks that their DNA suggests must have existed is to imagine an ocean we would be unable to recognize. It would be a richer place than we can conceive.

I would like to know the mitochondrial numbers for the historical population of every species — how many there were before we thought to count them — just as I would like to have a far more accurate fix on the number of species on this planet. The reason is the most basic kind of biological accounting. A baseline is needed to understand the well-being of any species as well as the well-being of the robust yet infinitely delicate interlacing of life on this planet. Scientists have been working hard to establish such a baseline in our time so we can measure the adequacy of our conservation efforts.

But I’m interested in the baseline well before our time, centuries ago yet well within human history. Think of it as a way of discovering one of the real costs of being who we are — or, if you’re an optimist, who we happen to have been. If you go back 160 years to Matthew Maury’s “Whale Chart,” you get a momentary glimpse of the destruction humans brought to a handful of species within a handful of decades. You could construct a similar, if less accurate chart for other megafauna, like the gray wolf or the grizzly bear or the African elephant. But the real cost of the Anthropocene — the era of our dominance — must be measured against the damage done to the collective web of all species, of which ours is only a single one.

Very soon, scientists will be able to extract even more accurate population data from mitochondrial DNA. Through relict populations, we will get a clearer and clearer glimpse of how richly this earth has been inhabited. I would like to believe that these numbers will help guide us toward ambitious new conservation goals. I hope too that they will carry the shock of revelation.

Noah is supposed to have counted the animals two by two as they got on the ark. We face the risking of counting them two by two as they — and we — get off. 

Mary Oliver on prayer

Words expressive of spiritual experience — especially our very conceptions of psyche and spirit, God and religion — but also others to which I've devoted attention in Reckonings, such as Sabbath, pilgrimage and prayer, tend to suffer in our popular culture from constrained and reductionist definitions that fail to do justice to their richness of meaning and distort our awareness of the interconnectedness of things. In conventional usage and understanding they deny us access to the fullness of experience available to us.

The very religious traditions in which many of us were immersed in the formative years of our childhood too often set the pattern for such impoverishment, leaching into our adult lives. 

It's often useful to put aside conventional questions of of belief and existence in order to dwell on the importance of attention.

In doing so we can remind ourselves of and become more alive to what we've missed, and of that for which, knowingly or not, we yearn. Poets whom I have invoked in Reckonings, like T.S. Eliot, Stanley Kunitz, Adrienne Rich, Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver, have written of this opportunity for redemption. Here, for example, is Mary Oliver's short poem on prayer, from her book Thirst. 

Praying

 

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

 

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway

 

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

 

~ Mary Oliver ~

 

Rethinking U.S. Relations with Cuba

Robert White, former Ambassador to Paraguay and El Salvador, and recently president of the Center for International Policy, offers an astute analysis of U.S. policies towards Latin America, and makes a compelling case for abandonment of the misguided half-century of the U.S.'s embargo of Cuba.

After Chávez, a Chance to Rethink Relations With Cuba

By ROBERT E. WHITE

New York Times, March 7, 2013

ALEXANDRIA, Va.

FOR most of our history, the United States assumed that its security was inextricably linked to a partnership with Latin America. This legacy dates from the Monroe Doctrine, articulated in 1823, through the Rio pact, the postwar treaty that pledged the United States to come to the defense of its allies in Central and South America.

Yet for a half-century, our policies toward our southern neighbors have alternated between intervention and neglect, inappropriate meddling and missed opportunities. The death this week of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela — who along with Fidel Castro of Cuba was perhaps the most vociferous critic of the United States among the political leaders of the Western Hemisphere in recent decades — offers an opportunity to restore bonds with potential allies who share the American goal of prosperity.

Throughout his career, the autocratic Mr. Chávez used our embargo as a wedge with which to antagonize the United States and alienate its supporters. His fuel helped prop up the rule of Mr. Castro and his brother Raúl, Cuba’s current president. The embargo no longer serves any useful purpose (if it ever did at all); President Obama should end it, though it would mean overcoming powerful opposition from Cuban-American lawmakers in Congress.

An end to the Cuba embargo would send a powerful signal to all of Latin America that the United States wants a new, warmer relationship with democratic forces seeking social change throughout the Americas.

I joined the State Department as a Foreign Service officer in the 1950s and chose to serve in Latin America in the 1960s. I was inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s creative response to the revolutionary fervor then sweeping Latin America. The 1959 Cuban revolution, led by the charismatic Fidel Castro, had inspired revolts against the cruel dictatorships and corrupt pseudodemocracies that had dominated the region since the end of Spanish and Portuguese rule in the 19th century.

Kennedy had a charisma of his own, and it captured the imaginations of leaders who wanted democratic change, not violent revolution. Kennedy reacted to the threat of continental insurrection by creating the Alliance for Progress, a kind of Marshall Plan for the hemisphere that was calculated to achieve the same kind of results that saved Western Europe from Communism. He pledged billions of dollars to this effort. In hindsight, it may have been overly ambitious, even naïve, but Kennedy’s focus on Latin America rekindled the promise of the Good Neighbor Policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt and transformed the whole concept of inter-American relations.

Tragically, after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, the ideal of the Alliance for Progress crumbled and “la noche mas larga” — “the longest night” — began for the proponents of Latin American democracy. Military regimes flourished, democratic governments withered, moderate political and civil leaders were labeled Communists, rights of free speech and assembly were curtailed and human dignity crushed, largely because the United States abandoned all standards save that of anti-Communism.

During my Foreign Service career, I did what I could to oppose policies that supported dictators and closed off democratic alternatives. In 1981, as the ambassador to El Salvador, I refused a demand by the secretary of state, Alexander M. Haig Jr., that I use official channels to cover up the Salvadoran military’s responsibility for the murders of four American churchwomen. I was fired and forced out of the Foreign Service.

The Reagan administration, under the illusion that Cuba was the power driving the Salvadoran revolution, turned its policy over to the Pentagon and C.I.A., with predictable results. During the 1980s the United States helped expand the Salvadoran military, which was dominated by uniformed assassins. We armed them, trained them and covered up their crimes.

After our counterrevolutionary efforts failed to end the Salvadoran conflict, the Defense Department asked its research institute, the RAND Corporation, what had gone wrong. RAND analysts found that United States policy makers had refused to accept the obvious truth that the insurgents were rebelling against social injustice and state terror. As a result, “we pursued a policy unsettling to ourselves, for ends humiliating to the Salvadorans and at a cost disproportionate to any conventional conception of the national interest.”

Over the subsequent quarter-century, a series of profound political, social and economic changes have undermined the traditional power bases in Latin America and, with them, longstanding regional institutions like the Organization of American States. The organization, which is headquartered in Washington and which excluded Cuba in 1962, was seen as irrelevant by Mr. Chávez. He promoted the creation of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States — which excludes the United States and Canada — as an alternative.

At a regional meeting that included Cuba and excluded the United States, Mr. Chávez said that “the most positive thing for the independence of our continent is that we meet alone without the hegemony of empire.”

Mr. Chávez was masterful at manipulating America’s antagonism toward Fidel Castro as a rhetorical stick with which to attack the United States as an imperialist aggressor, an enemy of progressive change, interested mainly in treating Latin America as a vassal continent, a source of cheap commodities and labor.

Like its predecessors, the Obama administration has given few signs that it has grasped the magnitude of these changes or cares about their consequences. After President Obama took office in 2009, Latin America’s leading statesman at the time, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then the president of Brazil, urged Mr. Obama to normalize relations with Cuba.

Lula, as he is universally known, correctly identified our Cuba policy as the chief stumbling block to renewed ties with Latin America, as it had been since the very early years of the Castro regime.

After the failure of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, Washington set out to accomplish by stealth and economic strangulation what it had failed to do by frontal attack. But the clumsy mix of covert action and porous boycott succeeded primarily in bringing shame on the United States and turning Mr. Castro into a folk hero.

And even now, despite the relaxing of travel restrictions and Raúl Castro’s announcement that he will retire in 2018, the implacable hatred of many within the Cuban exile community continues. The fact that two of the three Cuban-American members of the Senate — Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas — are rising stars in the Republican Party complicates further the potential for a recalibration of Cuban-American relations. (The third member, Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, is the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but his power has been weakened by a continuing ethics controversy.)

Are there any other examples in the history of diplomacy where the leaders of a small, weak nation can prevent a great power from acting in its own best interest merely by staying alive?

The re-election of President Obama, and the death of Mr. Chávez, give America a chance to reassess the irrational hold on our imaginations that Fidel Castro has exerted for five decades. The president and his new secretary of state, John Kerry, should quietly reach out to Latin American leaders like President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia and José Miguel Insulza, secretary general of the Organization of American States. The message should be simple: The president is prepared to show some flexibility on Cuba and asks your help.

Such a simple request could transform the Cuban issue from a bilateral problem into a multilateral challenge. It would then be up to Latin Americans to devise a policy that would help Cuba achieve a sufficient measure of democratic change to justify its reintegration into a hemisphere composed entirely of elected governments.

If, however, our present policy paralysis continues, we will soon see the emergence of two rival camps, the United States versus Latin America. While Washington would continue to enjoy friendly relations with individual countries like Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, the vision of Roosevelt and Kennedy of a hemisphere of partners cooperating in matters of common concern would be reduced to a historical footnote.

 

Robert E. White, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, was the United States ambassador to Paraguay from 1977 to 1979 and to El Salvador from 1980 to 1981.

W.S. Merwin's poem, "Alba"

W. S. Merwin's poem "Alba" is set in the literal flowering of spring time: 

a journey afoot and on mule, the blossom and fragrance of new life, 

unexpected companionship, a gift of breath, song, a repeated song of praise, 

a kind of prayer, indicative of a greater gift for which we haven't words.

Alba

Climbing in the mist I came to a terrace wall
and saw above it a small field of broad beans in flower
their white fragrance was flowing through the first light
of morning there a little way up the mountain
where I had made my way through the olive groves
and under the blossoming boughs of the almonds
above the old hut of the charcoal burner
where suddenly the scent of the bean flowers found me
and as I took the next step I heard
the creak of the harness and the mule's shod hooves
striking stones in the furrow and then the low voice
of the man talking softly praising the mule
as he walked behind through the cloud in his white shirt
along the row and between his own words
he was singing under his breath a few phrases
at a time of the same song singing it
to his mule it seemed as I listened
watching their breaths and not understanding a word

            - W.S. Merwin

Is the war on terror turning against the lives of those whose governments pursue it?

I've had an increasingly troubled sense in the last few years that the War on Terror was itself becoming a war of terror, not only in Afghanistan and Pakistan but with global reach, including the citizens of those whose governments avidly pursue it. So it was with interest that I came upon the short essay I attach below by the English journalist and playwright Victoria Brittain, who used to edit the Guardian and whose most recent book, just out, is Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror. 

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175657/tomgram%3A_victoria_brittain%2C_fighting_a_global_war_of_terror/#more

Climate change: increasingly critical, not so hard to fathom

Global warming is demonstrably occurring—that is fact, not hypothesis; the scientific consensus is clear and unambiguous, not, as some political and fossil fuel corporate contrarions continue to insist, unlikely, false or merely predictive. 

Yet it is striking—perilous for the earth and generations of diverse species including our own—that climate change, its demonstrability and the severity of its impact, is thought by many hard to grasp, impossible to change, looming, inevitable end-of-times catastrophe, without tangible personal consequence for our own lives. We avert our eyes. The learning curve seems too steep, the tangle of evidence daunting. We are like live lobsters in a slowly heating pot of water.

If we are not to abandon the issue to our children and our children's children, we must find a way to learn and to act, so that support for a host of necessary policies to reduce global warming, like the elimination of further coal-fired power plants, becomes truly compelling.

Here is a brief primer.

Michael Klare summarizes in TomDispatch: 

"Essentially, climate change will wreak its havoc on us by constraining our access to the basics of life: vital resources that include food, water, land, and energy.  This will be devastating to human life, even as it significantly increases the danger of resource conflicts of all sorts erupting.

"We already know enough about the future effects of climate change to predict the following with reasonable confidence:

* Rising sea levels will in the next half-century erase many coastal areas, destroying large cities, critical infrastructure (including roads, railroads, ports, airports, pipelines, refineries, and power plants), and prime agricultural land.

* Diminished rainfall and prolonged droughts will turn once-verdant croplands into dust bowls, reducing food output and turning millions into “climate refugees.”

* More severe storms and intense heat waves will kill crops, trigger forest fires, cause floods, and destroy critical infrastructure."

James Hanson of NASA pioneered the path to understanding. I attach below reference to Hanson's still relevant 2008 interview, and a couple of important more recent articles on the subject.

Hanson interview

Where Is Everybody? Why It’s So Tough to Get Your Head Around Climate Change, by Tom Engelhardt 

Andrew Revkin and Bill McKibben