New Bedford Journal

13 September 2009

The Morality of Scientific Understanding

 

In the course of my book, Walking to New Orleans – Ethics and the Concept of Participatory Design in Post-Disaster Reconstruction, I spend considerable time discussing the ecology of the Gulf coastal environment – the coastal marshes and wetlands – not only from the standpoint of the degradation of their function as a protective barrier to below-sea level New Orleans, but also in terms of their place in the entire culture of South Louisiana.  The Gulf waters are a major means of sustenance for what the Magnuson-Stevens Fisher Conservation and Management Act calls “fishing dependent” communities – ones substantially dependent on the harvesting or processing of fishery resources, including fishing vessel owners, operators, crews, fish processors.”  In Louisiana, these are the towns of Venice, Empire, Grand Isle, Golden Meadow, Cutoff, Chauvin, Dulac, Houma, Delcambre, Morgan City, Cameron, and include the many native American Indians who live there – bands of the Biloxi-Chitimacha like the Isle de Jean Charles or the Grand Caillou-Dulac band and the Houma Indians. 

 

Towards the very end of the book, I raise concerns now being voiced by the fishing and shrimping community about NOAA and the Federal Government’s efforts to promote offshore aquaculture in the Gulf – growing finfish in semi-submerged nets or cages, with other techniques for shellfish, between three and 200 miles from shore.  The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council recently developed a plan to streamline the permitting of large-scale deepwater fish farming of red drum, reef fish, stone crab, and coastal migratory pelagics [open ocean] fishery.  This caused great concern among Louisiana commercial fishermen who see aquaculture creating many problems:

 

·        destruction of net enclosures during hurricanes that release dangerous predator species

·        the effects of chemicals and food supplements used in fish farming that can cause mutations among existing native fish, etc. 

 

The ocean environment itself and human interactions with that environment – through fishing, shrimping, scalloping, but also inland agriculture – are highly complex and volatile.  Over time, there are natural changes in the ocean environment itself:

 

·        movements of fish populations from cycles of climate change

·        seasonal events such as hurricanes and storms 

 

But there are also the impacts of human behavior:

 

·        growth of population centers along the coast

·        the use of chemicals in upland farming that make their way to the sea and cause hypoxic zones – areas that lack oxygen in which plants and the marine life who eat plant residue can no longer survive

·        global increased demand for seafood resulting in over-fishing.

Coastal towns that are ‘fishing dependent’ live and die by these changes.  Here is a brief account by Marlene Foret, Tribal Elder of the Grand Caillou-Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha, describing the loss of a culture. 

 

Around Houma, eating places were closing because the Gulf shrimping business was closing up.  Restaurants couldn’t find the help they needed, and the shrimpers, discovering there wouldn’t be any levee protection for them, were pulling out.  What the Morganza to the Gulf Project protected and didn’t protect, then, was affecting shrimpers, crabbers, oystermen – everything south of Houma.  Marlene remembered that there used to be shrimp factories and ice factories and grocery stores, but they’re all gone.  Most were gone before the hurricane, but it was still because of the hurricanes that people moved up the road to between Ashland and the Comeau Bridge.  Anything below that was just fading away.  “That was sad,” Marlene added, “because I was raised in Dulac on the Shrimpers Row side.  There wasn’t much left there.”  With the closing of the Boudreau’s Super Value in Dulac, she and the tribal elders were no longer able to go to that grocery store and shop to give Christmas baskets to the community.

                                                                        WTNO, pp 540-541

 

The book relates a number of discussions I had with Prof. Edward Chesney of LUMCOM (Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium in Cocodrie) about aquaculture and the pressures on fishing communities.  Ed is from this area, received his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Oceanography at URI. 

 

The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act mandates annual catch limits to end overfishing.  But as fish stocks continue to dwindle, more drastic measures are enforced to cut down both on catch and bycatch.  Unfortunately, management of fisheries is complicated by politics, and the fact that recommendations of scientists have rarely been followed.  Some scientific arguments seem inherently threatening.  In Ed’s thinking, “many environmental problems in the world could be resolved by reducing the world’s population” – a view certainly not popular with politicians and religious people; Ed himself comes from a Catholic family of six children.  Yet the idea of ‘zero population growth’ – which dates from the seventeenth century and is supported by many environmentalists who believe reducing population growth is essential for the health of the ecosphere – hasn’t even been seriously entertained since the 1970s. 

 

Perhaps the strongest evidence for the harm of overfishing came from the hurricanes themselves.  “We had Katrina and nobody went fishing for six months.  The shrimpers stopped shrimping.  The recreational fishermen were too busy dealing with the mess to go fishing.  But we had a tremendous crop of speckled trout the following year.  The fishing was fantastic.  Everybody was saying, ‘Why is the fishing so fantastic?  Seems like there would have been a lot of damage from Katrina.’  Well I can tell you what it was.  It was six months without fishing.”  The fishing pressure on the Louisiana coast is not just from commercial and recreational fishermen.  In Louisiana each year there are 100,000 metric tons of fish killed in shrimp nets going after shrimp.  Ed finds it amazing that Louisiana fishers have been able to sustain that type of pressure and still be highly productive.

                                                            WTNO, p 531

 

Why do I raise these issues?  Because the same issues are being voiced for the New Bedford fishing community, and they represent the same potential impacts on the culture of South Coastal New England.  In the Standard-Times on September 2nd, there is a piece entitled Change is seen in Atlantic from climate, fishing.

 

The article points out that the basic makeup of the ocean waters off the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic region has fundamentally changed in the past 40 years because of climate change, commercial fishing pressures, and growing coastal populations.  Michael Fogarty, head of the ecosystem assessment program at the NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Falmouth, Mass, argues that “We need to consider these interrelationships and connections.  In some cases they aren’t obvious on the surface.  If we ignore them or don’t understand them, then we could come away with the wrong picture of what’s driving things.”  For example, Fogarty’s research team looked at variables such as water temperatures, circulation patterns, fishing pressure, pollution, and habitat loss in a 100,000 square mile area off the Northeast and mid-Atlantic coast – one of 64 regions in the world’s oceans designated as a ‘large marine ecosystem.’  Commercial fishing practices have contributed to changes in the composition of the region’s fishery population, now dominated by mackerel, herring, skates, and small sharks.  But the region’s water temperatures are also on the rise, which affects where fish live.  Fish that prefer warmer waters – such as croaker in the mid-Atlantic – are increasing in abundance, while fish such as cod are moving north, in search of colder waters, causing a shift in their population range.

 

Today’s Ingathering Service honors the place of water in our lives – including, of course, the mother of all water, the ocean. 

 

I believe we have a moral responsibility to become fully educated about the complexities of ocean environmental and species interactions. 

 

It is not enough to simply agree to the UUA’s largely unscientific “statements of conscience” or to participate in “days of climate action” without really understanding the science, the multiple factors involved.  There are many competing interests and rights that vie for our soul:

·        the right of people to provide for their families.

·        the necessity to manage fish stock for human consumption

·        the claim of natural species to exist

·        the freedom to live where one chooses

·        the preservation of human culture and ways of life

 

The moral life is hard work.  In previous generations – before widespread public dissemination of the results of scientific inquiry – people wrestled with the moral implications of theological positions such as Calvinist claims to there being a pre-ordained divine selection of the elect and the damned. 

 

I think what has largely replaced theological debate in our lives today is a greater awareness of the scientific aspects of being human, with the accompanying religious and moral dilemmas that must be addressed. 

The level of complexity in these matters is orders of magnitude higher.

 

Thus, it is our moral duty to educate ourselves to be ready for those tasks.

 

This is my New Bedford Journal for September 13th, 2009.