Leave it to the old Kennedy assassination researcher to come up with a good one. As we read about the decimation of the striper’s principal food supply – a small, boney fish called the menhaden – by commercial fishing operations intent on exploiting it for use in Omega-3 fish oil, we find ourselves back at “the Bay of Pigs thing”, as Nixon put it. For who is America’s largest purveyor of Omega-3 fish oil and the major destroyer of the menhaden supply but … Zapata Oil!
Oh, yes, dear reader. The same Zapata Oil that was run by George H.W. Bush until he sold it in the mid-1960s, believed to have been a CIA front for the Bay of Pigs invasion. We will never know all the details because, as Russell reminds us, potentially revealing financial documents were “accidentally” destroyed at the SEC when Bush became vice-president under Reagan. The company is now known as Omega Protein, and it is owned by the same man who bought the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Manchester United: Malcolm Glazer.
So what does all this tell us? Nothing we don’t already know: big money and Washington politics, hand-in-hand, protecting corporate profits and destroying the environment in easy stages. What Russell’s book does reveal, however, is how a handful of determined people were able to force the issue and save the striped bass from extinction. They were successful, Russell and his colleagues, but the fight is far from over. The environment is constantly in flux and needs careful husbanding by its people, the prime benefactors: ordinary people with a passion for the beauty and majesty of nature, committed to acting on behalf of a client that cannot speak in its own defense.
Those of you who consider all environmentalists to be nothing but tree-huggers and starry-eyed New Agers should well consider one incontrovertible fact: maybe the environment cannot plead its case in the media or the courts, but it can exact a terrible vengeance. Predictions of the effects of global warming have recently been moved up. We will start seeing more serious results not in our children’s lifetime but in our own. Striper Wars is a case study on how to take charge of the situation now, before it gets totally out of hand. That old saw, “think globally, act locally”, never sounded so insistent as it does now.
Pub:NB
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