Some time between now and January 4th, the National Marine Fisheries Service will list the Steller sea lion as an endangered species.
It may strike you as odd that the Fisheries Service would choose the year-end holiday season as a moment to add a member to the endangered species list. So many people – journalists, for instance – are busy with other things.
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If you listen to these comments each week, I’m going to assume you’re a serious consumer of news and if you are, I’m going to assume you heard last week that the federal government is offering Texan Charles Hurwitz $300 million in public assets in exchange for 7,500 acres of old-growth forest in northern California.
The old-growth forest in question – the Headwaters Grove – is well worth saving, so the federal government is acting with good intentions. Problem is, our federal officials have forgotten where the road of good intentions leads.
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Five weeks ago, in this commentary, I speculated George Bush must have nothing to do now that voters have deprived him of the opportunity to send troops off to be poisoned in Iraq.
Well, I was wrong and I admit it. It turns out George Bush has plenty to do. It seems our former president has turned into something of a cottage industry. I recently read a newspaper account of Mr. Bush and former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney lobbying Indonesian President Suharto on behalf of a Canadian gold-mining firm.
A few days earlier, I read in a different newspaper that Mr. Bush was traveling in South America with Reverend Sun Myung Moon. The newspaper said Mr. Bush was helping Rev. Moon launch a newspaper in Buenos Aires and dedicate a Unification Church seminary for women in Uruguay.
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Today is Thanksgiving and we here at WebActive are celebrating by playing a tape of something recorded a few days ago, because in that fine American tradition, we’re not working on a holiday.
This year, we’re celebrating Thanksgiving with the official Thanksgiving song, which many people may think is “over the river and through the woods,” but it’s not because while that song does mention pumpkin pie, it doesn’t mention Thanksgiving, at least not directly and so it will have to settle for runner-up status. And if you haven’t guessed the official Thanksgiving song by the way I’m talking – I’ll have to tell you that it’s Alice’s Restaurant, which of course will make some of you immediately afraid this commentary is going to go on for eighteen and a half minutes, and while WebActive is progressive, I don’t think Sam is about to let me talk for a quarter of an hour.
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I went to the opera a few weeks ago. The local opera company had gotten up a production of Turandot, so I squeezed myself into my cheap suit and spend three hours being thrilled by Puccini. Getting tickets for Turandot was not easy. Many of the performances were sold out and for those that still had tickets available, it was difficult getting four cheap seats together.
As I waited for the curtain to rise on Act One, I remembered reading a statement by the poet Gary Snyder, to the effect that opera was self-sufficient in San Francisco in the 19th century. The fact that opera is no longer self-sufficient can be attributed to the fact that the economies of opera cannot be simplified by subsidizing fossil fuels.
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I’m traveling this week, calling in from Gloucester, Massachusetts. I’m here to talk about fish, or more accurately, the lack of fish. Fish or no fish? Gloucester is a prototypical American fishing community. It’s on Cape Ann, north of Boston. Ethnic neighborhoods of clapboard houses end at the water’s edge, at the wharves, but there are very few fishing vessels working out of Gloucester anymore.
For 500 years, the Gloucester fleet worked the Georges Bank, living off what seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of cod, hake and haddock.
When I was a boy, I read and reread Captains Courageous, about stoic men like Discobolus Troop, who coaxed from the waters not just their livelihood, but a culture. Their supply of fish was inexhaustible, it replenished itself with the flow of the tides and the seasons.
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In the Bleak Midwinter
This year marks the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ. I know that sounds premature, but when the current calendar was devised, it was off by four years.
Two millennia later, how fares the spirit of Christmas? Each year, in the weeks before Christmas, I have that uneasy Charlie-Brown, what’s-this-all-about feeling. I had it this year as Adrienne and I set off to drive from Seattle to New Mexico. We drove straight into four days of blinding snow, sleet, slush, ice and high winds. Each day we saw accidents, cars and trucks sliding off the road. Each night, we and other travelers were forced off the road by snow. As it was two thousand years ago, the inns were full or there were no inns at all. I didn’t see anyone sleeping in a stable, but I saw many people sleeping in their cars, which is the twentieth century equivalent.
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