At a city/borough meeting in late March 2012 the
Wrangell assembly voted unanimously for a resolution of support for a $100
bounty on sea otters introduced in the Alaska State legislature this year by
State Senator Bert Steadman. The Alaska State Legislature recently voted unanimously
to condemn the Obama administration F.D.A. approval of genetically engineered
salmon made to grow twice as fast. Super-sizing clunkers grown in Panama in a
tank that will be sold to American consumers could be the larval stage of a
nascent industrial vector of genetically super-sizing animals people want to
eat.
Inconsistent Alaskan political opinions regarding marine ecology
intervention is a consequence of scientific ignorance and greed as
usual-fundamental human economic traits supported with empiricist antinomy.
Sea otters eat echinoderms that eat shellfish
harvested commercially yet killing sea otters because they also eat shellfish
is the homo loquax way of moderating the environment for narrow self-interest.
It is an ineffective approach that sets off a cascade of ecosystem trophic
alterations generally reducing the size and number of top-level predators.
The Obama administration approval of genetic
engineering for fish raises the possibility of creating fast grow giant piranha
for sports angling excitement, 1000 pound crabs, hybrid carnivores on land and
sea sports hunting reserves, 3000 pound cattle riding computer driven platforms
to feeding fields and so forth. With no boundaries on the use of
bio-engineering the sky's the limit for inventions- maybe 10,000 pound catfish
can swim in the south, or fast-growing giant squid 300 meters long could be
ranched in deeper areas of world oceans or ten foot tall turkeys raised in the Midwest
as products of mind-plan evolution changing dining habits at Thanksgiving
through New Years with leftovers going on till President's Day.
President
Obama has repeatedly said that only native Americans are from here and that
anyone else came from somewhere else. That implicit denial of the native home
of all Americans born in the U.S.A. that didn't arrive here before St. Brendan,
Columbus or Leif Erickson is a common rationale for redistributing wealth from
the poor and working class to globalists and the rich. Hence those born in
Chicago are not from Chicago, really, they are from Turkmenistan, Siberia,
Lesotho, Britain or wherever. For President Obama racial, tribal origin is the
sole criterion for nativity.
Though no
human beings evolved in the Americas and all American ancestors originated in
the Eastern hemisphere within the past 30,000 years, the President's special class
of citizens is a divisive political lever to support illegal immigration as normative.
The Presidents exploits the term 'native' in reference to America First
Peoples-not an illogical slip of tongue for the globalist first politico.
It is 'native Americans' that are being encouraged
to kill otters for a $100 bounty in Alaska. Understanding the problems with
genetically engineered wildlife (otherwise why not tweak all Alaska wild salmon
to make them grow twice as fast and ten times as large) the political class
wherever they are from (some migrate here from the Georgia State Legislature to
serve in the Alaska State Legislature) provide maladroit advice with wrong
marine biology knowledge to goad on crass editing of the balance of nature.
Observing
the shoreline the past couple of months along Wrangell Island I saw no otters
at all where in the past I saw them routinely floating on their backs munching
on echinoderms or whatever. The senseless, brutal taking of sea otter life
seems to support a profusion of echinoderms and the loss of kelp beds, muscles,
barnacles and clams from near shore and intertidal regions. In the photos below
you may see the intertidal layers where echinoderms have picked clean the rocks
covered most of the time by water, as well as photos of some echinoderms
stranded on rocks above the low tide line.
In a decadent era politicians may seek to bribe
America First People to do their dirty work for them for the practical reason
of plausible deniability for martinets.
There is a federal exception on the fundamental
ban on taking sea otters for certain North American aboriginal clans. The
Alaska State law would tramp on the line of Tlingit legal self-interest and
bribe Tlingit hunters to kill sea otters with a $100 dollar pay off for each otter
slaughtered.
Federal courts
decided recently in favor of the right of aboriginal clans to have their own
criminal law cases with non-clan members charged with rape on the reservation.
That bit of legal independence granted to aboriginal tribes was
counter-cyclical to the traditional bribe and corrupt tribal legal status
perpetrated over centuries. One never forgets that General Sherman brought
restoration of some Navajo land to a people that had been exploited by
pre-civil war local politicians and even dispossessed of land.
Though Alaska First People were the last in the
land area of the present United States to relinquish slavery- stopping only
after the purchase of Alaska in 1867 by the Federal Government and arrival of
Union Brevet Colonel Jefferson Davis to enforce military law in the new
territory, corrupt politicians have never quit trying to co-opt, corrupt, dump
drugs, gambling, alcohol, and even sundry evils upon aboriginal clans and moieties.
At some point one hopes for moral political leadership with wisdom and justice
for all including the right to life of sea otters amidst the natural realm of
wild and free biological life.
Politicians may be a sort of people that say 'kill the fish eating
ducks' in the belief that reducing competition would increase commercial fish
harvests. Killing sea otters they believe would increase commercial shellfish
and sea urchin harvest without thought to collateral damage.
Efforts antipathetic to protecting the entire
ocean and saltwater archipelago ecosystem disregard conservation of the entire
complex compresence of life including sea otters. Scientifically uniformed
politicians believe females and males are the same, that marriage occurs
between members of the same sex, that marriage is not in reinforcement of the
procreative phenomenon and that killing sea otters would increase the overall
health of the marine ecosphere of S.E. Alaska. Politicians that believe a
couple of men or a couple of women are the same as a man and woman forming a
couple regarding procreation might believe in the tooth fairy and the endless abundance
of ecospheric resource if managed by scientific illiterates.
An
abundance of sea otters might provide a food source for endangered killer
whales starved from the general decline of healthy whale populations in the
North Pacific. There are so few land mammals in the forests of S.E. Alaska that
it is stupid to cull one so well adapted for land and sea as the sea otter.
Perhaps the real reason the Wrangell assembly hopes for a bounty on sea otters
is so local trappers can have more of a take since everything else including
mink and sable were preponderantly trapped out long ago reduced to minimal
numbers for species continuity.
Since the closure of the Alaska Pulp Corporation
mill in 1994 the city-borough of Wrangell has followed a long, challenging
course of economic adaptation to the new facts of life without a logging mill
payroll that employed 200 people in a city with a population of just 2000. A
golf course was built as well as a new small boat harbor at cemetery point.
Bike trails and beautification went slowly ahead while the state government
pumped in occasional cash. Even so there remained a backward looking
anti-environmental sentiment without much of an economic industrial reason.
Vestigial illogical, unscientific political opinion continued to molder in the
populous and occasionally surface such as in the 'Kill the sea otter'
resolution.
The
better source of relocatable capitol for Wrangell is eco-tourism, eco-science
and eco-education. Wrangell is a kind of optimal pristine environment in the
remnant of true wilderness in the U.S.A. With a population of fewer than 2000
souls situated on an island near the mainland, glaciers, a mighty river flowing
from the Canadian interior, several saltwater straits and innumerable islands
in the most accessible region of Alaska the prospects for development of
advanced regional ecospheric economic synergetic and ecospheric studies is
optimal. A vacuum of leadership exists at the local, state and federal level on
ecospheric economics. So though locally a return to the 19th century industrial
outlook is possible, state and national prospects are not better. The late
Jacque Cousteau was probably accurate when he extrapolated that the human species
has fewer than 200 years to go before they bring a crashing ecosphere and human
extirpation down upon themselves.