Just about as far opposite...

We're about to head for Florida for a week - can't think of anything more different from Maine. I hope I survive.

Red herring

More fall-out and folderol over the federal government's decision in November to cut the fishing quotas pretty drastically for the Atlantic herring:

The fall-out this week is that Bumble Bee, owner of the last sardine canning factory in the US, in Prospect Harbor, Maine, will be closing it shortly, costing some 130 people their jobs.

Herring is a vital fish. It's not just that the Dutch and the Danes like it raw, and the Brits like it smoked, as kippers, for breakfast; it's not just that millions like the little ones packed in oil and called sardines. Herring is the bottom of the fish food chain, protein for whales and tuna and cod and seals and, ominously for the lobster industry, the main bait for those millions of traps. Like cod and salmon before it, herring used to be so common that you could practically walk on the water when they schooled (see some of Elisabeth's Ogilvie's descriptions in her Tide novels of the great excitement of herring running in the harbor of Bennett's Island). Maine used to have a hundred canneries on its coast. But unlike cod and salmon, herring aren't yet fished out. And that's what the fisheries scientists are trying to prevent, for the signs are there: big trawlers have been vacuuming up the fish close to shore, before they spawn, so that the herring is pretty much gone from the coastal waters.

The folderol is that the truth, amidst all the carping and complaining, is hard to find. Scientists admit they don't have all the answers yet. The big commercial fishermen say they're reluctant to fish farther out, because of cost and time. Bumble Bee claims to be closing now in anticipation of a shortfall of fish in the next three years. And the little guys, the inshore fishermen and lobstermen and of course the employees of the former Stinson Seafood plant, in continuous operation for a hundred years, are helpless and mad. And everyone blames the government, as usual.

I don't believe any of them. These days every issue is instantly polarized. No one says what they think, only what they think will play well on the screen.

The best available scientific evidence, which the government by law must act on in fishing management, says the herring fishery could be in danger. History tells us that any resource will be depleted unless regulated. So something must be done.

But let's do it so that the big vacuums out there are banned. Do it with the little guys in mind. Be civil and honest. If the citizenry had reasonable discourse, maybe the politicians would follow suit. And don't get all heated up and say the government lost those jobs in Prospect Harbor - I'd bet the real reason Bumble Bee is closing that factory relates to demand and not to supply. There's a reason it was the last sardine factory in the US.

The standing of trees

There are many lovely words that describe a group of trees - copse, grove, thicket, wood, coppice, stand. And when the soft, wet snow clings to every twig, as it is doing today, a thicket of oaks becomes thick with loveliness, a grove is grave in its new white clothes, a stand has new standing in its ceaseless, seasonal transformations.

I'm reminded of an old article I recently ran across, published in 1972 in the Southern California Law Review by Christopher Stone. Its title is “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects.” Whether nature has rights is a relatively new subject in philosophical discourse, coming to a little prominence alongside the great environmental legislation of the 70s. People tend to laugh at the notion in these shell-shocked and unimaginative days, and even though there are some minor advances (a dozen US towns have passed some kind of natural rights ordinance for the environment and against the corporation, and Ecuador in its recent new constitution has some bold language written in response to the predations of the oil companies), I don't see Poland Spring's (ie, Nestle's) water miners or HydroQuebec's dam builders quaking in their boots. But I'd love to come back to life in a couple of hundred years and see trees and vistas and lynxes in court, defending their rights and winning. (If corporations can be people, why not mountaintops?) After all, it was only 150 years that women and slaves were considered to be property to be exploited.

Maine is 90% forested. That's a lot of votes in the campaign to elect our future judges.

Black and Blue

On my walk today I saw a blue jay flying about among the spruce and the birches on Bayview Terrace. Seeing a jay is sufficiently rare these winter months that when I got home I consulted Sibley as to its winter range, thinking that perhaps climate change was increasing it even into Maine's dark months. I should not have been surprised to see that the jay covers pretty much all of eastern and central US all year. Just by its insouciance I should have known that winter would hardly be enough to curtail its activities.

I also should not have been surprised to see the jay in the same family section as the crow (also the magpie - of course). Both are social birds with loud mouths who, as Sibley says, "mob predators." When a group of crows sets up their hollering, you can safely bet that some owl or fisher is being harrassed. I've witnessed this: several times the congregation has sung in the trees near the house and a couple of minutes later I see a fox slinking and skulking down the shore, found out again. Sibley heads this section of his book "Jays, Crows and Their Allies," which seems especially appropriate in their bruising war of words against the flesh-eaters.

The range of the crow covers the entire US except for the deserts of the southwest (very sensible creature). It really should be the national bird. It's intelligent, articulate, sociable, courageous, common and adaptable. It's a democrat. Who cares about some soaring, warlike, endangered and unreachable eagle, however magnificent?