By Michael Miller
For most of us, terms like “critically endangered” and “mass extinction” are mere abstractions. They are realities that we don’t experience directly in our insular daily lives – something in fact that we might not hear about at all if we don’t pick that particular channel from our cable lineup or get actual news in our Twitter feed.
However, in real time and right in our own backyard, we are likely seeing the tragic and entirely avoidable end of the vaquita porpoise – the world’s smallest aquatic mammal, found only at the very northern end of the Gulf of California. As a final morbid rite in this sad burial-at-sea, the Mexican government recently took action effectively giving up on the continued existence of one of the planet’s most docile and adorable creations.
In 1997, the vaquita’s numbers were estimated at about 570, in 2008 at around 250, in 2015 at around 60, and this year no more than 9 – a decline that has been due almost entirely to illegal fishing for a particular species (the Totoaba) using a particular kind of equipment (gillnets) within a very specific area (the Upper Gulf of California).
On whose doorstep does the responsibility for this tragedy fall?
No doubt the Mexican government has failed on at least three levels: Totoaba fishing was banned in 1975, all commercial fishing was banned within the approximately 750 square miles of the “Vaquita Refuge” in 2005, and gillnets and night fishing were banned throughout the Upper Gulf in 2017. Clearly, none of these bans was ever effectively enforced.
Some fishermen are certainly guilty of breaking the law; but, again, their government needs to follow through on supplying them with legal gear and with finding creative career alternatives. Out of desperation, some fishermen have given into pressure from criminal cartels that supply Totoaba swimming bladders on the Chinese black market – for as much as $150,000 per pound!
So, just as with the illegal drug trade, there is culpability on the demand side of the equation. As with rhinoceros horns, there is no scientific evidence of medicinal properties for this product, so the slaughter of Totoaba – itself critically endangered – and, indirectly, vaquita, is based essentially upon superstition.
Totoaba fishing isn’t the only problem, though; gillnets are used for other cash harvests, too, such as shrimp. International conservation organizations finally have resorted to embargos of seafood caught in the Upper Gulf, but such measures are mostly symbolic. The truth is that any of us who have eaten fresh shrimp in recent years, especially while vacationing in San Felipe or Puerto Peñasco, are implicated in the demise of a vaquita.
To spend a lot of effort blaming any of these parties, though, is really just to distract ourselves from the real underlying issue. After all, the vaquita is only a regional and local example of today’s environmental holocaust. Scientists now accept as fact that we are in a “sixth major extinction event,” the result of human activity, driven by population growth and over-consumption of the earth’s natural resources. From Wikipedia: “Holocene extinction. Currently ongoing. Extinctions have occurred at over 1,000 times the background extinction rate since 1900.”
Among mammals alone, more than 200 species and numerous subspecies are officially listed as critically endangered, including a couple of elephants, 5 rhinoceroses, 63 primates, 15 aquatic mammals and their “even-toed” land cousins, various wolves, tigers, cheetahs and leopards, numerous rabbits, possums, rodents, and dozens of bats. The list of those recently departed goes on for pages. More will be gone while you’re reading this article.
Clearly, this is about something much bigger than making a few adjustments to our consumer habits, or trying to persuade a group of tradesmen within a limited area to follow the law, or stiffening enforcement of that industry on the national level, or even negotiating agreements between one country and another. It is a problem that finally will impact all countries and all cultures equally, and so can be solved only by evolving a cooperative approach to our shared ecosphere. (Good luck, you say, in this era of rising nationalism.)
To cite a case with more immediate implications, it is not only Brazil that will suffer from the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, which we might think of as the lung of the planet. Far more serious still, however, are the changes taking place in the world’s oceans – in one lonely corner of which we are witness to the sad fate of the vaquita.
The consequence of recent decisions in neighboring Mexico is that we can anticipate the official announcement, probably within the year, of yet another higher life form being gone forever. And which of our sentient cousins, like us the miraculous product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, will be next at the sacrificial altar?
Perhaps this should be the rallying cry of the day, appropriated from President Kennedy’s famous 1963 speech at the gates of the Iron Curtain and translated into the language of the region in question: “¡Yo soy la vaquita!”
Sonoran Visions 