Wrangell Alaska Assembly Approves of Bounty on Sea Otter

 

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.