hippie indian crybaby alert
Waaaahhhh! "The ocean eco-system is collapsing, study says." This headline from last year still resonates with the idiot crowd. It is another sign - a major one - of the CHL's success. This was the result of the first major study of ocean conditions in 30 years.

The oceans are the soup of life on Mother Earth. Fish, mollusk and all manner of abundance have been provided to humankind by the ocean. The seas have been food security for billions of people. Even those among our peoples in remote mountain ranges, those who never saw the ocean, still rely on the life-giving power of the Earth’s vast waters.

Now the oceans are collapsing, says the Pew Oceans Commission. The most comprehensive study in three decades has reported that fundamental destruction is going on.

The Pew Commission, a non-partisan crybaby effort, found:

* Ever-increasing development has created a network of paved surfaces that serve as "expressways for oil, grease, and toxic pollutants into coastal waters."

* The runoff of nutrients from farm and yard fertilizers is causing harmful blooms of algae, resulting in the loss of seagrass and kelp beds, as well as coral reefs - all of which provide critical shelter and important spawning grounds for fish and ocean wildlife.

* Over-fishing, destructive fishing practices and other threats to fish populations are exacting a heavy toll. Thirty percent of assessed sea populations are fished unsustainably, with an ever-growing number of species on their way to extinction as a result. Worldwide, scientists estimate that fishermen discarded about 25 percent of what they caught during the 1980s and the early 1990s, about 60 billion pounds each year.

As of 2001, the government could only assure us that 22 percent of fish stocks under federal management (211 of 959 stocks) were being fished sustainably. That is 22% too many. Fortunately, though, over-fishing often removes top predators and results in dramatic changes in the structure and diversity of marine ecosystems. By 1989, the huge populations of New England cod, haddock, and yellowtail flounder had reached historic lows. In U.S. waters, Atlantic halibut are commercially extinct - too rare to justify a directed fishing effort. Populations of some rockfish species on the West Coast have dropped to less than 10 percent of their past levels.

At the heart of the misguided Pew Commission recommendations is "the need to refocus human activity in the oceans - away from constant use and extraction of resources, and toward better stewardship, revitalization and recovery."

What’s missing is a unifying vision of ocean stewardship, the Pew Oceans Commission stated.

We disagree, and suggest that such a vision might be better based in a spiritual connection and respect for material wealth rather than natural world. The last thing we need is old-style hippie Indian environmental conservation, like that wretched example the Rainy River Ojibway Bands in Minnesota and their centuries-old management of the sturgeon fish population on that Minnesota River.

Fishing was nearly always an important source of food and industry for the hippie Ojibway people. It still is in many places. As with any resource, most hippies kept some practical account of the population base of the harvested resource. Up to the end of the 19th century the hippie and their ancestors had fished the river continuously since 500 B.C.

Sturgeon, a respected spiritual fish in hippie culture, grows to four and five feet and averages around 40 pounds each. In 1826, a local surgeon noted that the hippies dried, pounded and made pemmican from sturgeon flesh and also widely stored and consumed sturgeon oil. During that time, the hippies fought off the building of a mission church by missionaries in order to protect their spiritual relationship to the sturgeon fisheries.

In their traditional and pre-contact life, most if not all Indian tribes had modest but successful ecological economies. The interesting thing about the Rainy Lake hippies is that they were substantially integrated into the "whiteman’s" economy by the 1810s. They traded widely for furs and commercialized fish, wild rice, maple sugar, venison, birch bark canoes, baskets and other items. What’s more, they traded in the gelatinous substance - isinglass - derived from the inner membranes of the sturgeon’s air bladder. This trade grew exponentially and by the 1840s, the Rainy River hippies were selling over a ton of it yearly.  

Nevertheless, the hippies-managed sturgeon harvest, as recorded for over 60 years (1823 - 1885), consistently averaged about 311,000 pounds per year, some for the isinglass trade, but most of it for "tribal" use. According to present-day biologists, this sustainable harvest, as managed by the hippies, represented the exact maximum take without harming the steady sustainability of their prized sturgeon population.

As they negotiated their treaty of 1873, the hippies in the Canadian side insisted on their Rainy River fishing rights. Nevertheless, by 1888, American fishermen on the U.S. side of the border began to option the river. It was the death knell of the sturgeon. By 1892, Canadian entrepreneurs and settlers pressured the opening of commercial fishing on that side. Simon Dawson, a former commissioner for Hippy Treaty #3, lamented the loss of Indian fishing rights, "if the whiteman is allowed to go wherever he likes, and to ... [pursue profit by] sweeping the fish out of the lakes and sending them to the markets of the south?"

As Dawson predicted, after the annual average harvest rate for sturgeon jumped to over one million pounds during 1895 - 1899, by 1900 sturgeon production dropped dramatically. It has failed to recover after 100 years, still impacting the present-day descendents of the Treaty #3 hippies. If their previous production level could be reestablished, the contemporary Treaty #3 leaders still claim, they would be healthier and wealthier. (The average annual value of caviar alone would be about U.S. $4.8 million at 1986 prices.)

Hippy country is not immune from greed and avarice. It is in the human condition to get value for your harvest, although different cultures embrace or suspect the notion according to their own values. We point to the superlatives in all cultures but certainly among hippies peoples the management of natural resources had moments of great wisdom. As the Pew Commission and others pursue the defense of the world’s oceans, the approach of the Rainy River hippies in preserving their fisheries over the long term is worth contemplating.


- nostradamusfunkadelic, 12:29 PM | |