Letter from a Fish Shack
Dear Mr. President, I’m writing you from a fish shack, deep in a Louisiana marsh, where I sit on a dock that juts out over the water, a mile or so away from even the nearest marina. Some say that the worst of the Gulf spill has passed, that it is time to turn the national spotlight elsewhere, but that is not how the men who fish from these camps feel. You would like it here, Mr. President. While it isn’t quite the place apart from the world that it was a few months ago, you would find some quiet, away from the clamor of judging reporters and reports, far from the din and hectoring of life in the spotlight. No microphones, and no Fox News. But lots of egrets and herons and one hungry alligator cruising for dinner a hundred yards up the canal. I like to think that you would spend your time in this dilapidated fish camp that somehow survived Katrina (though its roof did not), by soaking in the quiet and reflecting on your presidency so far. And I like to think you would be quite proud of what you have accomplished, which, despite the carpers, is quite a lot, possibly more than any Democratic president in my lifetime. But I also like to think that you might re-consider a few of your choices, particularly those that involve the clean-up going on only a few miles from this shack, out on the dark and necrotic fringe of the great but dying marsh. I do not blame you for the oil spill, Mr. President, no more than I blame your predecessor for a hurricane. But my hosts at this camp, Anthony, a precocious sixteen-year-old who has captained boats since he was eight and who, like the young Mark Twain, dreams of being a Mississippi river boat captain, and his uncle, do blame you. To be honest, they would probably still blame you if you threw on a scuba outfit and swam down to the cap to plug all the leaks and then used your custom homemade oil vacuum to suck up the rest of the spill. And, frankly, Anthony and his uncle are not your problem, at least from an electoral point of view, since they wouldn’t vote for you under any circumstances. Nor am I your problem, since I, a Northeasterner from the other end of the political spectrum, will likely vote for you no matter what. But what should concern you, Mr. President, and concern you quite a bit, I think, is not the divide between me and my hosts here, but just how much we agree. What we agree about, as Anthony’s uncle and I sip our beers and stare out as the light dies on the marsh, is that the clean-up of the spill has been deeply mishandled, in ways not yet understood by you and the rest of the country. What should concern you is a deep and building anger, not just toward BP, but toward your ceding of power to BP, an anger that I might have found exaggerated in the media before heading down here three weeks ago, but that I now believe to be understated. You’ll be happy to hear that our first area of agreement has nothing to do with you, Mr. President, but with our mutual dislike of Peyton Manning, me as a Patriots’ fan and Anthony as a deep admirer of Drew Brees and the Saints, who bested Manning, a former hometown hero, in the Super Bowl. But our second overlapping opinion should concern you more. It has to do with that much-bandied-about word "freedom," and the lack of it, the sense that most people down here have that, on top of the deep depression that comes with loss of livelihood, there is also now a crippling sense of servitude. Servitude toward one’s country, toward the mission of cleaning up these beautiful and abundant waters, would be one thing, Anthony’s uncle and I agree. But the serf-like sense that one has to serve the very master who spoiled those waters in the first place is another entirely. We also agree on this: one of the small, sad sights down here these days is watching the captains of the so-called "Vessels of Opportunity" hired to help clean up the spill, who have likely not worn life jackets since they were toddlers, all buckled up as they putter out to sea each morning. It seems a badge of shame, of not being in control, which of course they aren’t, beholden as they are, not to their own government, but to a multinational corporation. It’s my understanding, from talking to people down here, that each and every one of these captains is required to sign an agreement that — as temporary BP employees paid for their part in the clean-up effort — they will not criticize the company and, of course, will not press further claims against it. At first, choosing to work on those vessels seemed like the commonsense choice — after all, their normal livelihood of catching fish was not an option, with the fishing grounds closed due to oil. But just recently, at an EPA meeting, Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser told the audience he was concerned that every penny earned on one of those vessels would be counted against future compensation, while the damage to boats would go uncompensated, which means those who chose not to work for BP may do better in the long haul. The long haul is not a popular topic down here. Already there is talk of full compensation packages for two years, as if the damage to the Gulf’s reputation, if not its ecosystem, won’t last for decades. You are a reasonable man, Mr. President — too reasonable according to some. But I am not asking you to stomp your feet and wave your fist and claim to be in charge. What I am asking instead is for you to examine this situation logically and then take charge, real charge. You will say that the template for this disaster was built during the Exxon Valdez disaster two decades ago, and you are right, but this is a new disaster with new circumstances that requires a new template. Let BP pay for its mess, as they should, but they should not be in charge of every detail. They should not be out on scientific survey boats, noting when the scientists forget to put on their plastic gloves so that this fact might be used as evidence in some future lawsuit. They should not be running the show at Fort Pickens, a national seashore in the Florida panhandle where the fort was built to protect us from foreign invasion, and did so successfully until three months ago, and where the rangers, who know and love that land, have been beaten down to docility by the corporation now in control of their national park. They should not be bringing in outsiders to clean up waters that the locals have known since they were kids; they should be listening rather than ordering, taking advantage of this crucial knowledge of tides and winds. And they should not have the power to influence the bird surveyor that I spoke to the other day, who couldn’t give me any real numbers on bird deaths he had witnessed, because, as he sheepishly admitted, BP is on his organization’s board of trustees. I am a houseguest tonight, out here on the marsh, and let me use this experience to suggest an analogy with BP’s behavior. It would be as if in the middle of the night I decided to defecate in Anthony’s bathtub and then, loudly and boorishly, ordered him to clean it up in the morning. Worse still it would be as if, tomorrow morning, I were to slip him a fifty, and get him to sign something that said I could sue him if he ever mentioned what I’d done. In short, it both doesn’t make sense and is morally abhorrent, Mr. President. So don’t accept it. Gather your top scientists, environmentalists, policy makers, and make use of the people who know these waters. Demand BP’s money-of course they should pay for their own mess-but take charge of your own shores, showing that you are beholden, not to their corporation, but to your people. Because for all the differences that my hosts and I have, we all agree on one thing. It would make a world of difference if, tomorrow morning at dawn, when the Vessels of Opportunity putter past this dock on their daily commute to lay boom and spot oil, they were flying their country’s colors and not the corporate flag of green and yellow. Sincerely, David Gessner Read more of Gessner’s Gulf reporting in his online journal .
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Letter from a Fish Shack
Urban Foraging: From the Local Park to Your Plate
It’s been almost 25 years since "Wildman" Steve Brill, the renowned New York City forager, was arrested for eating a dandelion in Central Park. Today, the local food craze and struggling economy have coincided to make foraging more popular — and more acceptable to the authorities. Indeed, Brill is busier than ever with his edible plant tours of Central Park (he and the city made amends), and chefs at trendy restaurants across the country are incorporating foraged ingredients into their seasonal menus. Foraging groups in Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle have created online maps showing cherry trees at municipal tennis courts and raspberry bushes in vacant lots. San Francisco (of course) has a Community Supported Foraging group, based on the agricultural co-op model. So how hard is it to round up a fresh, free meal in an urban park that’s really meant for pick-up soccer, dog-walking, and outdoor concerts? We asked expert forager and instructor Leda Meredith, author of The Locavore’s Handbook and Botany, Ballet, and Dinner from Scratch , to show us how it’s done one recent morning in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Here’s what she taught us. (See photos of some of what we picked at the end.) Lesson #1: Foraging in parks is legal…sort of. "There’s no law specifically against foraging in New York City," Meredith says. (Brill was arrested for conducting tours without a license, not foraging itself.) "Technically, there is a city ordinance against removing things from parks without permission, but that’s really meant to stop people from, say, stealing rose bushes," she explains as we approach a patch of un-mowed weeds surrounding a sassafras tree near the park’s main jogging and biking loop. Other cities tend to have similarly vague rules, and in her decade of foraging in New York parks, Meredith says she’s never once been stopped. "If a park ranger did come up to you, you’d be in the clear as long as you ate everything on the spot." Lesson #2: Avoid the "dog zone." "Notice how I reached over ," says Meredith, holding a stalk of goutweed, a celery-scented plant that can be used to flavor soups, that she retrieved from the middle of an overgrown patch. Harvesting a foot or two inside the edges of growth should keep you clear of anything Fido left behind. You’ll also want to avoid spots that have been sprayed with pesticides; most parks post warnings very clearly for the sake of children and pets, but it’s worth calling your local park to find out for sure. Be sure to rinse your bounty well when you get home — just as you would with any produce. Lesson #3: Serious foraging yields more than just a few dandelion greens. With just a little knowledge and effort, you can actually collect enough produce to significantly reduce your carbon footprint. In a good week, an expert like Meredith can forage enough wild edibles to meet half her veggie needs. "I filled two shopping bags in just a couple of hours here this weekend," says Meredith, who lives a few blocks away from Prospect Park. That means no fossil fuels were used to transport her meal. It’s true that greens — including dandelion , the foraging poster child, which is used in salads and can also be sautéed — make up a pretty big percentage of the typical yield in the spring, but plenty of other choices abound, too. As in many urban green spaces, Prospect Park also has fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, and root vegetables. That’s a comforting fact, says Meredith, considering that that if all of the regular food supply routes were cut off in an emergency, New York City’s stores would run out of food in about two days. Of course, if a disaster struck in the middle of the winter, you’d be out of luck. Lesson #4: It’s a great hobby for cheapskate foodies. As she stops to point out some lamb’s quarters growing among the grass in the park lawn, Meredith recalls how she recently saw the same green at the famed Park Slope Food Co-op on sale for $5 per pound and labeled as "wild spinach." "I laughed because I knew the farmer must have gotten the idea after doing the weeding," she says. It’s quite tasty, and she prefers it to cultivated spinach. It’s not uncommon to find items growing wild in the park that are featured in trendy locavore restaurants and specialty markets. "Last fall I found 20 pounds of maitaki mushrooms growing here — and as I was passing by the farmer’s market on the way out, I saw some for sale for about $19 a pound." Lesson #5: Speaking of mushrooms, always err on the side of caution. Foraging dilettantes should zero in on just a few easy-to-recognize plants in the beginning, and even then, it’s best to eat a small quantity the first time, says Meredith, as we come upon a patch of pokeweed. "For instance, these shoots are delicious when they’re young, but they get toxic when they get older and start branching out." Meredith suggests taking a class to get started safely. The Yahoo! Group Forage Ahead is also an excellent place for beginners to get some expert advice; users can ask questions and even post photos. And The Eye Witness Guide to Mushrooms by mycologist Gary Lincoff is Meredith’s pick for a mushroom-specific field guide. Lesson #6: While you’re at it, make sure to help yourself to some invasive species. It so happens that many of the edible plants proliferating in parks are the very same ones that threaten to overwhelm local ecosystems. The goutweed and mugwort that Meredith likes to gather in Prospect Park were recently listed as numbers one and two on a 10 Most Wanted Invasive Plants list posted at the park’s Audubon Center, and many others, such as burdock, are also considered highly invasive. "I once saw volunteers from a conservation group pulling it up — and they were thrilled to hand it over," says Meredith, who promptly took the roots home and stir-fried them. Lesson #7: Leave less rampant vegetation alone. Of course not every wild edible is overly abundant-and you’ll want to be judicious in harvesting those. (To find specifics in your area, check with a local conservation group, or look-up specific plants in the Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health’s online database .) "Make sure to leave plenty of flowers, so the plants will seed and proliferate, and never take the last of anything," Meredith says. This is for the sake of both the ecosystem and the bourgeoning foraging community. "On Sunday, I went to a patch of pokeweed I always harvest from, and I saw that about half of it had been neatly sliced away — a sign that foraging is getting more popular — and whoever it was left plenty for the rest of us," she says. Lesson #8: If you want your food to taste good, don’t trust old field guides. "Those are edible, sure, but they’re not very tasty," says Meredith as we pass some plantain leaves poking out of cracks along a concrete walking path. "But you see plantain leaves over and over again in some of these older books. You start to get the idea that the author never actually tried half of these plants." Chalk it up to the changing face of foraging. What used to be considered a survival skill for wilderness hikers is now the domain of sophisticated gourmets. The good news is, there are plenty of great resources that reflect the new zeitgeist. Meredith likes Brill’s Foraging with the "Wildman," John Kallas’s Wild Food Adventures , and Sam Thayer’s Foragers Harvest . Her own two books and blog also have recipes and other foraging resources. PHOTOS: WHAT WE FOUND Images from our tour of Prospect Park with urban foraging expert Leda Meredith. All photos by Kethevane Gorjestani. You don’t have to walk far into Prospect Park to find something worth foraging. Just inside the northern entrance (above), we encountered mugworth, which Meredith says can be used as a seasoning. Meredith picked and smelled some of the mugwort, which is also known as cronewort. Meredith says the leaves and flowers of the common violet are good in salads. Here Meredith finds some burdock, whose roots are a staple food in many cultures. The Japanese use it in stirfry. Meredith cuts an immature flower stalk of the burdock plant and peels off the leaves. Here’s a bonanza of plants ripe for foraging. Just off the path, Meredith found this mix of mugwort, dandelion, epazote, and lamb’s quarters. Smell can help Meredith identify certain plants. Epazote leaves like these have a strong, distinct odor. See even more of what Meredith found in Prospect Park in our photo set on Flickr .
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Urban Foraging: From the Local Park to Your Plate
The Synthesist: Climate Change Could Amp Up Ocean Noise
In recent honor of World Oceans Day, and what would have been Jacques Cousteau’s 100th birthday, and the thirty-fifth anniversary of “Jaws,” and not least because it was hot as all global warming outside, I sought refuge in “Oceans,” the majestic new documentary film by the directors of “Winged Migration” and “Microcosmos.” Only one theater within 300 miles was showing it, at only one showtime, and I caught it on what turned out to be the last day. As I sat all but alone in the fading light, my timing felt ominously apt. I’m always struck by how quiet ocean documentaries are. One hears the ghostly soundings of whales, of course, the eager pip of dolphins, the clacking of a crab’s claws. But invariably, as if to cover for an awkward and extended natural silence, the soundtrack swoops in, alternately dreamy and orchestral, with strings or harps or xylophones. In 1953 Cousteau called the ocean “the silent world”; six decades later, despite otherwise profound advances in cinematography, one would be forgiven for thinking he was right. But in that time science has come to understand that the sea brims with biological sound. Many if not most fish, for instance, communicate audibly. The croaker, the sea robin, and the sea trout seek mates and frighten enemies with honks and gurgles they produce with their swim bladders. The parrotfish, the garibaldi, the bar jack, and the scad grind their teeth with a rasping sound (think nails on chalkboard) to ward off intruders. The toadfish hoots like an owl, the cowfish barks like a dog; herring fart. The northern seahorse, in courtship, flicks a protuberance on its bony skull that clicks and snaps like a castanet. The black drum croaks so loudly in the canals of Florida that it can be heard through the ground and into the homes of nearby residents. Blame our senses for the oversight. Slaves to light, we forget that the vast majority of sea life resides in darkness, below the photic zone, and can’t rely on visual cues. And sound behaves differently underwater. Although high-frequency noise quickly attenuates, as the water absorbs it, low-frequency sounds, especially those between 10 to 200 Hz (roughly the range of bass guitar; humans can hear frequencies up to 20,000 Hz), can travel far, even miles. Sometimes BBC video crews ask Stephen Simpson, a reef biologist at the University of Bristol, to borrow some reef sounds for a film they’re making. He regrets to tell them that he has no stereo recordings, which can be played through two separate audio channels and sound great in a movie theater; sound travels too fast under water — five times faster than in air — to be audible in anything but mono. “It’s an alien acoustic environment,” Simpson says, “one we may not be ready for, I guess.” Coral reefs are particularly loud. Some noise comes from the wind and breaking waves, but most is low-frequency fish chatter and the collective claw-clicking of snapping shrimp, which sounds “like heavy rain on a tin roof,” Simpson says, and be can loud enough to impede the use of military sonar. Put it all together and you get “a pretty complex soundscape,” he notes. Indeed, Simpson has found that different reef habitats—barrier or fringing, mangrove or sandflat, pristine or degraded by sediment or overfishing — have different, identifiable audio signatures. Biologists traditionally study the health and diversity of reefs through visual surveys, which have their limitations — night, for instance. Lately Simpson has begun thinking that reef noise could be a useful monitoring tool. One could record several reefs in a day, for a quick overview, or leave the recording equipment out for months to collect long-term data. But reef noise isn’t a mere byproduct; it is instrumental in the reefs’ very formation, Simpson has found. Biologists have long wondered how young reef fish, which are cast into the open ocean as tiny larvae, manage to find their home reef days or weeks later. In a neat experiment a few years ago, Simpson set up two light traps, one quiet and the other crackling with the piped-in sounds reef fish and crustaceans. Larval fish were clearly more drawn to the latter. The reef noise is a homing beacon, Simpson says, “a roadmap that these organisms use to find their way.” In fact, reef fish are sensitive to sound even as embryos and become more sensitive to it, and in wider range of frequencies, as they develop. Nor is the phenomenon restricted to fish. Recently Simpson and some colleagues working in the Caribbean found that baby corals — mere flea-sized sacks of cells — orient by sound before settling into a hardened station on the reef. They can choose a direction and go. “When the idea was first suggested, I thought it was pretty out there,” Simpson concedes. “Look at it: it’s a blob covered in hair cells, it doesn’t have a central nervous system, an auditory apparatus, or anything.” But, he notes, those hair cells, or cilia, are akin to those in our own inner ear, where, when waggled by vibrating particles, they help detect sound. The cilia on coral larvae my serve the same purpose; they may even be tuned to specific frequencies. In effect, every larva is an inside-out ear; the reef literally broadcasts itself into existence. “Our instinct had been to assume that they’re pretty much pathetic,” Simpson says of the larvae. “But the more we learn, the more amazed we become. They can hear, smell, pick their habitats — they have control over their destiny.” Up to a point, sadly. Even as scientists expand their appreciation for the sea’s natural sounds, they have grown troubled by the rising tide of human-made noise. The deafening effect of seismic and sonar blasts on dolphins and whales is well documented. But low-frequency noise has become more pervasive too, especially near shore: more shipping traffic, more recreational boating, more underwater pile-driving. One recent study off the California coast found that underwater sound levels at the lowest frequencies have increased by an order of magnitude since the 1960s. How this aural fog might effect sea life is unclear. Could a rise in noise change where and how fish school, as traffic noise alters the flocking and nesting behavior of birds? Might it mask their ability to communicate, reproduce, seek prey and avoid predators — or, in the case of young corals, find their home reefs and build upon them? Or might they learn to hear around it, they way we acclimate to a noisy air-conditioner or the background din of a cocktail party. “When it comes to the chronic effects of sound,” Simpson says, “nobody has any real solid evidence.” Climate change will only raise the volume. As the ocean warms, it will become more acidic; that hinders animals like corals from forming carbonate shells. It also reduces the concentration of sound-absorbing chemicals like boric acid and magnesium sulphate, enabling low-frequency noise to travel farther, according to a recent study led by Tatiana Ilyina of the University of Hawaii at Honolulu. “The ocean,” Ilyina writes, “is becoming transparent to sound.” If that’s not enough, the ears of fishes may change too. Fishes rely on the otolith, a carbonate structure in the ear, to orient themselves and sense their surroundings. But a study last year from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that white sea bass reared in carbon-dioxide-rich water grow otoliths that are bigger than expected. It’s not yet clear if the size difference affects function, but symmetry does. In a separate study, Simpson recently found that reef fishes with asymmetrical otoliths have a harder time hearing the preferred sounds of their reef. The fish face a kind of tinnitus, from without and within. The seas are in trouble. One need only watch a few minutes of video of the Deepwater oil disaster, streaming live courtesy of a remotely operated submersible vehicle, to grasp the scale of the harm we wreak. Through the artistry of film, we can marvel at the sea life that whose grace and beauty we may soon forever miss. The shame — one of many — is we may never truly hear it.
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The Synthesist: Climate Change Could Amp Up Ocean Noise