‘See that sea otter? It sustains us,’ I say
Today let us praise jobs. Indisputably, jobs are helpful in paying mortgages and buying groceries. They build moral character too, with the possible exception of employment in politics. That is saying the obvious. Now let us examine the apparently unobvious.
Some of us are so happy to work we have jobs in retirement. My job does not pay much—in fact, nothing—but I have the great outdoors for an office. I am a volunteer guide—a docent—at a stunningly beautiful nature reserve in central California called Point Lobos.
While I do not wear a ranger’s hat, I have an impressive green jacket with a bear patch, making me look like Smokey the Docent, so it is necessary to say that the views expressed here are my own and I do not write in any official capacity. I am just here to tell you what I have learned.
This docent occupation is deja vu of sorts. When I was paid to work, I was a volunteer guide for visitors who came to tour the Post-Gazette newspaper’s old premises in Pittsburgh.
Today, instead of taking visitors past the journalists, whom sadly some people regard as a species of weasel, I take them to see the sea otters, which are in the weasel family. Everyone agrees sea otters are cuter. They have thick fur, the thickest of any mammal, and for that reason were hunted to almost extinction over a century or so.
Indeed, they were believed to be extinct. Then when a road was built down to Big Sur in the 1930s, someone looked out to sea and saw about 30 “extinct” southern sea otters that had been overlooked. Now strictly protected, the otters have since multiplied to about 3,000 spread across several hundred miles of coast.
Something remarkable has happened. When the otters were gone, the kelp forests in the sea were diminished, because they were being munched by abalone and sea urchins. When the otters came back, they ate the creatures that ate the kelp. And when the kelp came back, more fish life came back. Everything is connected. Everything is in balance.
At the same time, the sardine fishery in Monterey Bay was going full steam ahead, polluting the water with fish guts but providing good jobs. The sardines came in cycles good and not-so-good but the fishermen hauled them out in any season, oblivious to the warnings to conserve. By the early 1950s, the sardines had largely disappeared and with them the jobs.
This saga is not limited to Monterey but continually plays out across the world. When the push for profits and good jobs goes hand-in-hand with the blind belief that Mother Nature can be plundered without consequences, then profits and jobs are themselves inevitably doomed.
It’s not just the depletion of resources; we can be done in by fouling our own nests. Pittsburgh, once the city of polluted air and darkness at noon, decided in the 1940s—thanks largely to corporate leadership— launch a renaissance. The success of the transformed city today was because political and business leaders who prized both dollars and sense made a bet on the future.
Not that a backward-looking president has noticed. When Donald Trump announced that he was pulling out of the Paris climate accords, he said he was “elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”
Actually, Paris is just where the accord was signed; it is not a plot to have cheese- and snail-eaters get the better of us. But in the world according to Trump, Paris and Pittsburgh are not on the same planet and have nothing in common, such as breathing air.
It’s the same old dumb deal. We can’t be put at a jobs disadvantage, so we must be hellbent on a course that will put all jobs in jeopardy on an increasingly inhospitable planet. Even an otter would know better.
Last year was the hottest year on record. This summer, heat waves have baked much of the country with temperatures soaring high above 100 degrees. Teenagers wanting to let off steam have needed only to walk outside. In short, we have been living the sort of extreme weather predicted by climate change theory.
Global warming is a hoax? So say the snapping lobsters in a pot slowly growing ever more humid. No, the sky is not falling but the sea gives every sign of rising to meet it. Jobs are important but our lives also depend on them being sustainable.