The Dead Zone

by Natasha Chart

categories: Biodiversity, Corporate Kneebiters, Health, Pest Management, Policy, Pollution

Published May 28, 2009 @ 01:58PM PT

No, not the TV series. The fish kill:

... Wilma [Subra] explains, “Nitrogen and phosphorous from fertilizers travel down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico. This makes algae blossom like crazy. As the algae grow, they use up all the oxygen. When they die off, they sink to the bottom of the ocean and use up more oxygen there, too. So there’s this layer of water in the Gulf that is void of oxygen—that means nothing can live there.” ...

As they explain over at Twilight Earth, the fertilizer used to grow plants on land (including and especially the corn used for animal feed) is killing off ocean fisheries near the mouths of our rivers, pitting one food sector against another.

Fishing is particularly dependent on the health and vibrancy of wild ecosystems, and humans are very dependent on fishing. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, fish make up 15 percent of the world population's protein intake. That's a fairly sizable supply of food for which there isn't a ready replacement.

Nor is that the only threat to our fishy food supply. Along with overfishing, other agricultural chemicals threaten the continuity of safe seafood consumption, such as direct pesticide fish kills and the tissue accumulation of organochlorine pesticides (including those that have been banned in the US but are still used abroad,) and mercury from coal plants.

Our dependence on the health of our environment for food is another of the ways in which these points by George Lakoff about how to properly discuss environmental issues are absolutely vital to creating a political climate that values long-term biosphere viability. Emphasis mine:

... First, the public's very understanding of nature has to change. We are part of nature; nature is not separate from us. Nature nurtures us. The destructive exploitation of nature is evil. What is good is the use of nature that doesn't use up nature.

... Finally, for those in the business world: Corporate interests are constantly putting forth arguments based on cost-benefit analysis. But the very mathematics of cost-benefit analysis is anti-ecological; the equations themselves are destructive of the earth.

The basic math uses subtraction: the benefits minus the costs summed over time indefinitely. Now those "benefits" and "costs" are seen in monetary terms, as if all values involving the future of the earth were monetary.

As any economist knows, future money is worth less than present money. How much less? The equation has a factor that tells you how much: e (2.781828...) to the power minus-d times t, where t is time and d is the discount rate. Now e to a negative power gets very small very fast. Just how fast depends on the exact discount rate (that is, interest rate), but any reasonable one is a disaster. The equation says that, in a fairly short time, any monetary benefits compared to costs will tend to zero. That says there are no long-term benefits to saving the earth!

Cost-benefit analysis is just the wrong paradigm for thinking about global warming. ...

Take this sentence, "That says there are no long-term benefits to saving the earth," and insert 'fish' or 'ocean ecosystems' or any living thing or living community, and you have the corporatist perspective in a nutshell. If a benefit, a profit, can be had now from destroying estuary ecosystems, then the cost of not having those ecosystems in the future must be minimal.

That's just insane. There's really no nice way to edge around it.

The dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, the Chesapeake Bay and at the mouth of the Columbia River, to name just a few, are reflective of dead zones in our public ideology. Dead money is valued over live habitat, narrowly accumulated profits valued over general quality of life, and the future has essentially no value at all.

Such a perspective stands in nihilist opposition to the most basic human values. To the desire every parent, regardless of creed or ethnicity, has for their children and grandchildren - that their future will be better and brighter than our present.

Some equate this mental dead zone with 'science' and 'progress'. Yet the uncreative refusal to try new ways forward when early results prove problematic, whether those problems were intentional or not, hardly reflects the best of the human spirit of exploration. Giving up on the resolution of technical difficulties in order to redouble one's efforts to paint them as not even worth fixing, minor things like causing cancer or killing off entire estuaries, is not science but an exercise in public relations.

There's a mocking description of this mindset in the software industry, where tired programmers and marketing departments pushing up against release deadlines may give up on fixing their product or processes and proclaim, "It's not a bug, it's a feature."

Bull.

You can be hungry or you can be poisoned. You can have beef and corn to eat, but we have to kill the fish. You can be fed a sufficiency of Twinkies or you can starve on whole grain bread.

Are we too dumb as a species to escape these constraints? Really? Is this the best we can do?

How much more defeatist and insulting is it possible to be?

(Photo credit: Svenstorm on Flickr.)