Environmental Nightmares

I have to preface this column with a disclaimer… I am not anti-environment, and I do not like what air and water pollution does to dirty up our environment. I regard the huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico a terrible thing, and I am truly glad that BP was finally able to stop the oil flow and maybe will be able now to seal the well entirely.

Having written that, I will now proceed to blast the media and yes, some of my friends and correspondents for hyping things up to a level of panic in the streets. Three incidents, including the oil spill, are the subject of my scorn.

This past week I received three separate e-mail messages telling us that our seafood, especially the seafood that comes from foreign sources, is poisonous to us and, “…an environmental nightmare.”

Now, the fact that seafood happens to be the culprit in both cases might be partly due to the media speculation about how the Gulf oil spill is going to render our homegrown seafood inedible for decades. That is, if there can actually be any recovery from this disaster to where seafood will still exist in the Gulf of Mexico.

However, the seafood that was written about was not from anywhere near the Gulf, it was from Asia, a favorite part of the world for us to pick on these days. Yes, the bad stuff was catfish from Vietnam (who can’t hate the Vietnamese) and shrimp from India.

After reading about all the chemicals, industrial and human waste, piscicides, pesticides and antibiotics that are in the water where the seafood is “farmed,” I got the idea that even a single bite of catfish or shrimp might have the same effect as a bite from a rattlesnake. We could all be dead within the hour!

Now I’m going to get to the good part. I don’t know about you, but I continue to hear that now that the leak is plugged, they’re having trouble finding any oil to clean up. I learned today that the total marshland that has oil in it is 350 acres. And some of that is already showing signs of natural recovery. (The Gulf Coast loses about 1,500 acres of marshland annually to natural causes)

Again, I don’t want to insult your intelligence, but did you know that tilapia, one of my favorite seafoods, lives mainly on the waste material from other fish. Yes, they eat poop. Damn,they sure taste good though, don’t they?

Mother Nature has a solution for most of what we consider disgusting that turns the bad into something good. Bacteria in the seawater actually eat that oil almost as fast as it leaks. Digestion uses other bacteria to break down chemicals, and other nasty things in food—our own included—to filter out bad things and keep in good things. That is how we grow and thrive.

If you just stop and think about it for even a moment, those Vietnamese and Indians also eat the same seafood, plus a lot of other foods we consider worse, and how many millions of them are dying every day?

Oh, one other thing… I used the term “Mother Nature” a politically correct and non-offensive label, but some people prefer “God.” “Allah,” “Buddha” or any of a thousand other appellations referring to a “higher power.” I leave it to you to say who performs the miracles that keep life on this tiny orb going, but something does.