Fouling everything
There’s never a good time for an oil spill. But the most recent ones — in the Gulf of Mexico after Hurricane Ida last month, and then this past weekend, in the ocean off Huntington Beach, Calif. — have come right in the heart of the fall migration of hundreds of millions of birds.
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These journeys are perilous, even in the best of times. Flying thousands of miles requires vast amounts of food and protected habitats. But more and more of the wetlands, marshes, forests and fields needed to support migrating birds have been filled in, cut down and paved over. As a result, the remaining refuges are few and far between, overcrowded and vulnerable to even slight disruptions.
The Southern California spill is the worst sort of disruption. It tarred beaches and fouled a rare, fragile coastal wetland. And it happened at the peak of fall migration, in a spot especially important to the Pacific Flyway.
Southern California’s beaches and remnant marshes offer sanctuary for thousands of migrating birds, including threatened and endangered species. Oil from the spill penetrated these marshes before adequate protective barriers could be put in place, raising the prospect of long-term damage. Birds are already dying.
Oh look, a cruise ship.
The coast of Orange County hasn’t fully recovered from the 1969 spill off of Santa Barbara. That environmentalist wacko, Richard Nixon, even recognized that the disaster should be prevented from repeating (of course, he was directly affected since his western residence and retirement home was in San Clemente.)
Speaking of cruises, I don’t get them. I joined a cruise from Santa Barbara to Ensenada. It was three days and other than 4 hours docked in Ensenada it was just endless days of karaoke, buffet lines, bad comedy and entertainment, and I felt removed from the ocean I wanted to experience floating on. I was happy to debark.
On the third night, the dining crew did a ceremony thing to tell the passengers how much they loved serving us, how wonderful we were, how they would never forget this cruise and even sang a song. Okay. I bet they say that on every cruise. The teenager that still resides in me rolled my eyes at the phoniness.
David Foster Wallace has a brilliantly funny essay about taking a cruise.
The ones that leave from here are partly understandable, because they go up the Inside Passage to Alaska and that’s pretty much the only way to do that unless you own a (rather large) boat. Understandable but still not ok.
Those cruise ships tend to stop off in Victoria, and Americans get to say they officially visited a foreign country and patronise the Bastion Square Market when it’s in season, which helps to support the local handcraft industry. But I really rather wish those tourists would take the Black Ball Ferry in order to patronise the market, and leave the fjords alone.
I vividly remember standing in the old city in Dubrovnik years ago and watching two gigantic cruise ships in the harbour. They seemed to just dwarf the entire city.
The obscenity of it.
I can’t imagine it’s got any better.
It hasn’t. Seattle is a hub for the damn things, and they are completely repulsive – like giant apartment blocks tipped on their sides and lumbering around in the water. Burning 80,000 gallons of fuel per day.