Last weekend I ran across a reference to a new PBS series called Saving The Ocean. I frequently write about human destruction of marine ecosystems and species, so I was eager to take a look at it. The first video I tried to watch was the trailer for the episodes Shark Reef and The Sacred Island. Here's the opening voice-over, the very first words I heard—
Saving The Ocean — a new kind of TV series featuring good news stories about the environment.
Stories of hope, endurance and innovation.
Oh My God! Then I watched the first few seconds of the episode Destination Baja. Host Carl Safina is narrating—
On this edition of Saving The Ocean, we're petting whales in a Mexican lagoon.
JFC! Did that man say we're petting whales? I could see immediately what we were dealing with here. Saving The Ocean is the Greatest Whitewash In Human History, the Biggest Snow Job—Blow Job?—Ever Conceived. I went over to Carl Safina's website. I found the Saving The Ocean page, where I read the following—
Join host Carl Safina as he chronicles the unsung heroes who are hard at work inventing and implementing solutions to save the world’s oceans.
Most of us have heard about the effects overfishing, pollution and industry are having on the world’s oceans.
It’s time for some good news.
Join Carl as he introduces us to marine biologists, fisheries scientists, conservationists and activists who are helping fish populations to rebound, bringing endangered species back from the brink and… creating hope for today’s oceans.
There is no hope for today's oceans! Or rather, there is no Authentic Hope, as I will explain. I anticipated today's post in yesterday's post Hot, Sour And Breathless. I discussed the meaning and dire implications of a prediction made by Jean-Pierre Gattuso.
By the end of the century, said French biological oceanographer Jean-Pierre Gattuso, "The oceans will become hot, sour and breathless."
I am going to assume you read that post, and my previous writings on the perilous state of the world's oceans. Yesterday's post contains tips for finding those articles.
In a word, this PBS series is despicable. The intention is to pump people full of hot air, to inflate them with what I called False Hope. As such, it is a cover-up, it is an attempt to preempt, downplay or undermine the urgent, alarming messages of real scientists like Jeremy Jackson and Daniel Pauly, who agonize over the rapid degradation of marine ecosystems. It is a heinous lie. And to the extent that it succeeds in whitewashing the dire state of the oceans, this PBS series is Evil.
Here's the Big Lie in Safina's text—
Most of us have heard about the effects overfishing, pollution and industry are having on the world’s oceans.
No we haven't! Americans, for whom this PBS series is surely intended, are almost completely unaware that the oceans are being destroyed to foster endless growth of populations and economies which support unconstrained human consumption. Based on this false premise, the series will create hope for today's oceans because it's time for some good news! In short, clueless Americans will be reassured about a problem they hardly know anything about! JFC!
I've often talked about obligatory hope on this blog. Well, this is obligatory hope on steroids. This is where false hope seamlessly morphs into Pure Denial. This is why some people think Homo sapiens doesn't deserve a future, that our species will get precisely the fate it has asked for, that our species will get its just desserts.
Let us contrast false hope with authentic hope. First off, authentic hope is the rarest thing in the world. Authentic hope demands self-knowledge from us. It demands from us that we acknowledge what we are doing to the world's oceans and all the rest of this wonderful planet, it demands a level of self-awareness which forces us to look at our behavior and change it. Authentic hope asks us to recognize and do the right thing. In short, authentic hope seems to make impossible demands.
In the context of the oceans, we have what Garrett Hardin called A Tragedy Of The Commons. Everyone sees it as being in their best interest to exploit ocean resources before others do the same. If a few people like the Mexicans Safina interviews have figured out that it's in their best interest to preserve whales in the Mexican Baja in order to exploit them for tourism dollars, then you can be sure that untold billions of other people have "figured it out" the other way—they will take from the oceans what they want or need, heedless of the consequences. They will consume energy which emits CO2 as a byproduct, which is absorbed by ocean waters, thereby acidifying them.
Authentic hope requires that everyone—I mean every human being, from every nation on Earth—get together or at least be faithfully represented, figure out what they are doing, recognize the destruction being wrought, and make a genuine, concerted effort to put a stop to it. Every single human being on Earth must buy into this effort to save the oceans from increasingly certain death. Those who won't buy in must be forced to cooperate.
When we put it like that, we immediately see the near impossibility of authentic hope, for the very qualities which make hope authentic are also the qualities which make it rare, if not non-existent. Humans naturally lead unexamined lives, just like the other animals. That's simply who they are, as I said in John Gray In Conversation—
What is important for our purposes is the idea—I would say the observation—that human beings live in a self-constructed world of illusions. And they will fight to the death to maintain those illusions. Gray seems to be saying that we can distinguish between the essential illusions which make human life possible and less crucial illusions we can do without. Well, let's see. Is the illusion that humans can endlessly grow populations and economies on a finite planet an essential illusion? Or is it a subsidiary illusion we can identify and do without?
I know what my answer is: it is an essential illusion because the urge to have babies and increase our material comfort is an essential part of the human animal. That's why I believe our species is doomed, regardless of whether our self-destruction occurs sooner or later...
Clearly human beings are conflicted at their core. They won't acknowledge what they are—they seem to reject it as Gray says—but more importantly for me, at all times and places human beings are being exactly who they are, regardless of what they are pretending to be. This is the one jail from which there is no escape. Or as I like to say, with Homo sapiens, what you see is what you get.
You can recognize this Saving The Ocean whitewash in my remarks. Human beings live in a self-constructed world of illusions. At all times and places human beings are being exactly who they are, regardless of who they are pretending to be. Carl Safina and those who produced this PBS atrocity, standing in for all of humanity, want to pretend that a few "unsung heros" here and there on our troubled planet are somehow "saving" the ocean. Nothing could be further from the truth. Petting whales doesn't cut the mustard.
If false hope obliterates unacceptable truths, truths we must acknowledge in order to move forward, and such hope is thus the embodiment of Evil, which is certainly the case here, authentic hope requires us to be "Good" to the extent that is possible. But sad to say, authentic hope is the rarest thing in the world. Authentic hope has never been spotted in the wild, although it surfaces occasionally on the printed page.
False hope is everywhere... that is the only thing it has left, it seems, see:
http://www.skysails.info/english/power/
Not happy?
Alex
Posted by: Alexander Ač | 10/15/2012 at 10:59 AM