The extra whitespace

In this week’s Sunday edition of the New York Times there was an editorial, Late Encounter with a Bluefin, that seemed to almost an afterthought, something the editors decided to squeeze into some extra whitespace. In fact, the byline was omitted because there wasn’t enough room for it.

I found it online. The author is Lawrence Downes, whose editorials mainly appear in the Westchester, Long Island and City weekly sections.

The bluefin tuna is at the pinnacle of the sushi and sashimi kingdom, and suffers greatly for it. Its numbers have plunged 90 percent since the 1970s. The bluefin is nearing collapse, and its abundant misfortune is passed on to countless other creatures — the unwanted fish, turtles and seabirds killed as bycatch, the immense tonnage of smaller fish vacuumed up to fatten captured bluefin in Mediterranean “farms….”

In a book about another ferocious and majestic fish, “Blues,” John Hersey defended fishing for sustenance while mourning the unhinged global slaughter that shreds fragile webs of ocean life. “We’d better marvel while we can,” he wrote.

It’s a short, understated, and very powerful reminder of the biodiversity that we stand to lose in our lifetimes. Future generations will look back and wonder what we were thinking — were people so dumb 30, 50, 100 years ago that they would allow the bluefin and other animals to die out? Apparently so.

The fight for more restrictions on fishing is identical to the one for better old growth forest management. We could have cut down more old growth trees, but ecosystems would have be destroyed. It was never about the Spotted Owl; it was always about whole ecosystems. The fact of the matter is that we’re only beginning to understand the web of life in old growth forests (or any forest ecosystem for that matter) and its consequences for people.

At a dinner party, a friend of a friend of ours works for the Nature Conservancy. He told me that old-growth forests hold the most carbon of any type of ecosystem. We’ve cut down 95% of them. If we got that 95% back, or even just 50%, what effect on global warming would we see?

We don’t really know what will happen when the bluefin are all gone, or the Great Barrier Reef, or anything else in the sea, but the cumulative ecological, aesthetic, and sociological effects could be massive.