Remora

"The soul, being eternal, after death is like a caged bird that has been released. If it has been a long time in the body, and has become tame by many affairs and long habit, the soul will immediately take another body and once again become involved in the troubles of the world. The worst thing about old age is that the soul's memory of the other world grows dim, while at the same time its attachment to things of this world becomes so strong that the soul tends to retain the form that it had in the body. But that soul which remains only a short time within a body, until liberated by the higher powers, quickly recovers its fire and goes on to higher things."

This is from one of Plutarch's letters. We're thinking about Plutarch this morning. The consolatory vision expressed in that letter casts a different light on biography as a genre. If one soul can exist, serially, in a number of bodies, life's accidents among the troubles of this world becomes representative of something behind the life, some one prolonged thing. The biographical seismograph charts, within its variations and seeming contingencies, the wanderings of a spirit for whom variations and contingencies are distinctly secondary, through a comic throng of masks. By producing parallel lives of the Greeks and the Romans, Plutarch is looking for hints, cries and whispers, the secret joke, the code of that rare stuff, that metaphysical Puck, the Great One and Oneness, in its two main falls into history.

Well, Limited Inc is not the Platonist Plutarch was. However, we do like the idea that lives give us points of orientation for the spirit of the age. We were reminded of this today when reading an interview with Dr. Callum Roberts in the NYT (No, really, incredulous reader, we were. Plutarch is always on our mind, just like Georgia's on Ray Charles' mind. We don't know why).

Roberts is a marine biologist who has become, as he says, the kind of scientist that didn't exist when he was a young man: a conservation biologist. As such, he works to conserve fish and the environment of fish. Well, that's hard work, especially given the attitude of fish em all and let God sort em out that prevailed in the 90s. He makes that point in the interview:

"The history of the problem is this: in the 1970's and 1980's as shallow- water fish got into trouble from overexploitation, the fishing industry worldwide began looking to the deep sea as virgin territory to work. By going to sea mounts (undersea elevations) and canyons that had never been trawled before, people were able to take huge catches � thousands of pounds in only a few minutes.Then, in the 1990's, after the cold war ended, military technology developed for underwater spying and sea floor imaging became available for civilian use. Thanks to multibeam sonars, sea floor mapping, and positioning systems, fishermen could suddenly exploit deep underwater terrains that previously had been unknown."

Robert has helped create fish sanctuaries, and has recently made the claim that virtue is not only its own reward, but rewards unworthy others, as far as fish are concerned:


"The research [Robert's research] into this controversial area is published in the journal Science (today, 30 November 2001), and examines the evidence that marine reserves, in which fish species are conserved, improve fish stocks in neighbouring areas. The research, centred on marine reserves in St Lucia and Florida, suggests not only that more fish appear in reserves following protection, but that they are also larger. They produce more offspring than exploited populations, and those offspring are exported to fishing grounds by ocean currents. There is also a spillover of adult fish migrating from the reserves as protected stocks build.
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Robert's interview in the NYT won't change the minds of many regarding the cuter qualities of fish -- he seems to find the critters adorable -- since to experience fish as Robert experiences fish, you have to don your wetsuit and dive miles and miles from shore.

Our parallel to Roberts is an oily pseudo-conservationist, one Thor Lassen. Mr. Lassen has become the Whole Food's favorite conservationist, because Mr. Lassen's group eases Whole Food's conscience about shrimp, salmon, and the dripping edibles that Whole Food would like to purvey to your upper middle class consumer. Mr. Lassen is the alpha and omega of an organization called Ocean Trust. According to an admiring portrait of the man in Sea Food Business, Ocean Trust arose from some loose change flung at Lassen by the seafood companies:

"Ocean Trust�s annual budget in 1999 was $253,000, raised through donations from seafood companies, grants and marketing partnerships. In the day-to-day work of running a business, it�s difficult to keep on top of scientific reports about where the problems are and what should be done about them. That�s what Lassen does. "

Before becoming a conservationist as a result of such munificence, Lassen was a lobbyist. Lassen's character became, briefly, the focus of a fire fight between Whole Foods and Earth Island Institute in 1999. That year, the CEO of Whole Foods talked down EII because he claimed that Earth Island Instititute was guilty of negativism regarding shrimp. Yes, the folks at EII had the gall to consider boycotting shrimp harvests that endangered the habitats of the Sea Turtle in the Caribbean. So Whole Foods shopped around for a more compliant conservation group that would label its shrimp eco-friendly. Here's a rather hostile portrait of the Lassen, Whole Food's eventual choice for eco-friendly arbiteur, from Earth Island Journal:

"NFI [National Fisheries Institute] also founded Ocean Trust, a faux-green group run by Thor Lassen, a former NFI lobbyist. The group's stated mission is to "enhance the productivity of the marine environment as a source of food." Its biggest donor is the Long John Silver's seafood chain.Most frontline environmental workers have never worked with Ocean Trust, yet the group representing itself as having expertise in sea turtle conservation. Ocean Trust distributes expensive educational materials and videos that shift blame for sea turtle deaths away from the shrimp industry (although the US National Academy of Sciences identifies the industry is the primary human-related cause of these deaths). Ocean Trust's website links directly to NFI's web page and many NFI press releases quote Lassen.Ocean Trust is focusing on US/Mexican efforts to save the critically endangered Kemp's ridley sea turtle in the Gulf of Mexico near Rancho Nuevo. Based on a very recent infusion of aid - a minute fraction of industry profits - the seafood industry is taking credit for more than 30 years of conservation work."

Ocean Trust's website is a "rich and strange" product of the sea. Its banners proclaim a happy green message about protecting the Sea Turtle, but it wastes no time getting to the main subject: nasty enviro exaggeration about the world state of fisheries. To make its points, it employs the pitiful jargon of the industry, along with industry statistics. Lassen's prose brings back the Vietnam era, in which the Military in Saigon was always proclaiming victory through better body counts. Here's the man on Sea floor damage:

"Much of the recent reports from environmental groups have focused on the impacts of fishing on the environment. The continued productivity productivity of sea clams and scallops harvested with dredges and shrimp, flatfish and other bottom species caught with trawls casts legitimate concern of the highly inflamed claims of ocean floor damage from fishing. We are just starting to learn whether gear has harmful or beneficial impacts like nutrient resuspension."

Ah, we are just starting to learn about the wonderful effects of littering the ocean with those one hundred yard trawler nets! Nutrient resuspension is a term that would turn one of Georgie Porgie Bush's speechwriter's green with envy. Redescribing litter in this way has a poetry, a fairy tale charm, all its own.

This is starting out to be Lassen's decade. Surely it is time to launch the phrase, compassionate environmentalist, meaning compassion should extend to fishery companies and their many employees. Surely we are going to hear that phrase echo from the Bush Administration. Nutrient resuspension will follow, soon after.

Life and rhetoric, folks. That's what we are all about.