Of Starfish & the Sea

I know- it is more correct to call them sea stars, but my thinking about that goes along these lines. It was only recently that I recall hearing of those star shaped sea creatures being called anything but starfish, and while I am not averse to altering a long held incorrectness, given recent events it may not matter what one calls them. To the suggestible imagination, the self-generated mental picture of legions of a certain variety of starfish dissolving into blobs of white goo all up and down the Pacific coast is unnerving at best. And in googling (pun intended, no matter how unfunny) "dissolving sea stars" one also finds that the brittle sea star is dissolving in sea water in other places because its exoskeleton cannot hold up to the increases in ocean acidification resulting from the excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which combines with water to turn into carbonic acid. One could draw a cartoon starfish with a witch’s hat and broom stick and a cartoon balloon overhead with the words "I’m melting" inscribed inside, but it wouldn’t be funny. With the mystery pathogen(s) and the carbonic acid infused into their environment, there is no where for them to go. In much the same way as the doomed starfish, the imagination stands still, knee deep in a toxic, terminal spiral downwards.
 
And then there was the recent report from ocean sailor Ivan Macfadyen titled "the Ocean is Broken". He tells of a recent voyage he made from Australia to Japan to Hawaii to San Francisco in his sailboat, the Funnel Web. He tells of the differences he has seen in the relative health of the Pacific Ocean in the ten years that passed between his two trans-oceanic sojourns along the same route. He speaks of his previous voyage where he found a sea teeming with life, as opposed to his recently completed trip where seabirds were gone from the skies, and catching a fish to eat was at times an exercise in futility. From the way he tells it, there is not so much a Pacific garbage patch now, but rather that the entire Pacific is the garbage patch, with debris everywhere from the Japanese tsunami disaster and an unending succession of plastic water bottles and fishing buoys and tangled lines and nets stretching from the western to the eastern shores.
 
I think of these two stories as I stand ankle deep in the waters off Jensen Point and wonder how the sea life is being affected there. I think of the immensity of these problems, and how Kim and Kanye’s latest spat or Jennifer Anniston’s bad hair day or Taylor Swift’s awesome red carpet looks are such non-issues on their own and certainly pale in comparison to anything of real social import. At the same time, it is this very blither-fest of celeb travails which clogs the so-called web "news" pages with their irrelevance, while real news of earth-shattering import is buried far off the information superhighway in the dungeons of the internets. The problem with the big, bad news, unlike say, a fashion faux pas on Rodeo Drive, is that you can’t just say "that’s too bad" or "who gives a damn?" in response to them. There are potentially horrible consequences to the real world realities of really bad news, which is why people don’t really want to hear it, and feel satisfied that they’ve done something in a positive sense by clicking on a save the dolphins online petition or by laughing at a politically savvy and damning skit on the Daily Show. One keeps hoping that common sense will prevail, but then one sees that the Washington State GMO labeling initiative is currently trailing by ten percentage points, or reads a headline that says: "London firefighters urge common sense after freeing penis from toaster." It seems that common sense is neither, so one wonders where to go from here.
 
Probably the easiest answer to that is that one doesn’t have to go very far at all. I know it’s been said any number of times, but starting at home is usually best. We currently have a brand new monument to arrogance and stupidity in the V.E.S. Fields project. On an Island that has been declared a sole source aquifer, one ponders aloud as to why it was thought by a few that pumping millions of gallons of water along with tons of fertilizer in order to grow grass on sand was a good idea. We no longer live in times when waste like this can be both planned for and accepted as a norm or a given. Hopefully with the beginnings of a new board in place, excesses like this will be a thing of the past, and ways to reduce the need for excessive water and fertilizer can be implemented over time. Along those lines, we could follow the lead of a few others and work toward Vashon becoming a Monsanto free zone. We could opt for fewer, not more ferry sailings, ride more bikes, and on a very small scale within a common sense framework, not fish in salmon spawning streams, which someone was seen doing just the other day off Shingle Mill Creek. There are any number of things we can do here- we just have to do them.