I was watching a handful of Right Whales last week in their element not a half-mile out off the golden sands of Provincetown. They are the last of an ancient and dying species. It was a glorious sight to see them feed. After having nearly decimated them, the Yankee race might do something to ensure they survive, I thought. Do the right thing: show them some much deserved courtesy, forbid fishing where it might endanger them, and make ships slow to 10 knots in areas where whales are feeding or calving. Sounds reasonable? Well, somebody wants to put a stop to that.
It turns out the ubiquitous vice president has successfully delayed a ruling that would make ships slow down slightly to avoid killing or maiming these animals. Again, there are “questions” about the scientific findings supporting a ban, just as there are “doubts” about climate change.
Political hacks dictating scientific rules instead of the other way around is nothing new. There was a time not long ago when Joseph Stalin insisted on imposing a bizarre and discredited genetic theory called Lysenkoism on his country. Dissenters, who happened to be right, faced Siberia. In America, the martyrs of scientific truth simply get fired from their jobs or ignored.
Not content in destroying the salmon population, a tentacle of Cheney or one his proxies now moves to intervene on the behalf of God knows what special interest that has some sort of bizarre justification to kill off another species. There is nothing much to say about this—it speaks for itself.
One shouldn’t be surprised. This “administration” has spent seven years effectively and joyously conducting an active war on the environment and successfully been killing off as many natural resources as it could get its hands on. (Well, all right, it did designate sections of Hawaii as a marine sanctuary—which, if we take the abuse of Stellwagen bank as an example, is fairly meaningless.) Then again, one asks, could it at least once do something, even by accident, that is decent for the treasures given to us by God as his custodians?
Marc Songini 