go away monk seal

The past 2 weeks have been....stressful. So I didn't post. I see that while I was gone my blog got spammed, really really bad. I am not pleased.

But what is more important right now is I learned that Hawaiian people hate the monk seals. They hate them so much that some of them go as far to kill them. It's a long but interesting article if you have time to read it.

The article touches upon the Hawaiians' lingering resentment of the US for annexing the island (which they believe was done unlawfully), and how the stringent rules NOAA has enacted to protect the monk seals and other animals has disrupted Hawaiian lifestyles, leading to further resentment. One example in the article was called "the situation with the birds".  Basically some species of bird flies through one of the islands every fall, which coincides with their football season. Coincidentally, these birds become disoriented by bright lights (aka football stadium lights) and often end up falling from the sky. Supposedly children would run around collecting the dazed birds and bring them somewhere nearby to be tended to. Problem solved, right? WRONG.

The bird is a federally protected species and the Hawaiians on this island were told that these downed birds were a violation of federal law and they could be fined up to $25,000 per bird. From there, they moved the football games to an earlier time, losing the games as a form of community entertainment, and retrofitted the stadium lights to get in bird-safe compliance, which also involved keeping track of the brightness of the moon. hard core. There was "anger, incredulity and T-shirts that read “Buck the Firds.”

Now come the big, blubbery monk seals, who seem to be good for nothing except taking up (a lot) of space in the sand, and everyone wants to coddle them, rope off the beaches, and protect areas where Hawaiians roam and fish. The implication is that no matter what-- be it tourists, birds, monk seals, whatever, the Hawaiians always come second. And in retaliation, the Hawaiians killed some monk seals. Very few leads have surfaced besides a man who was reported to be badmouthing a monk seal, but it didn't go anywhere.

It seems very ridiculous and serious at the same time. NOAA obviously doesn't understand the idea of "community buy-in". But the article raises some interesting questions--like how many monk seals are enough monk seals? How does one co-exist with so many monk seals? Can I badmouth the monk seals with impunity?

What is the ultimate goal here?

Certainly we can't be running around with thousands of wild animals. That's why they became endangered in the first place. The whole conservation balancing act seems tricky. Sure I can save the monk seals, or the tigers, or whatever else, but where am I going to put them? NIMBY!  No one truly wants to share their space with something that's made of blubber for a prolonged period of time.

I do have to admit though that it's unreal thinking about a whole species becoming instinct. I'd be so sad if I met the last living animal of a species whose whole line was about to vanish, never to be seen wandering around this earth again. If only we could all just get along right? I for one blame the animals for that--I'm pretty sure that no matter how nicely I asked, a monk seal would never scooch down a little to make room for me. Until it can learn to do so, we are always going to have problems.

My favorite part of the article was about a guy whose family bought a small Hawaiian island a long time ago and he still presides over the affairs on the island today. Here was one story about him:

A gifted horticulturist, he started growing many imperiled, native Hawaiian plants on his family’s land on Kauai in the 1980s. This included a particular subspecies of Caesalpinia kavaiensis, a Hawaiian hardwood, which was coming close to extinction in the wild; Robinson managed to produce a single tree from surviving seeds. But in the mid-’90s, he discovered a draft document from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service expressing the agency’s wish to “secure” and “manage” the tree on his land. He jumped to the conclusion that this meant seizure by eminent domain. (John Fay, a former botanist for Fish and Wildlife, told me, “Basically, it was a misunderstanding.” Deeper in the document, the agency asserted that Robinson’s work should be “supported and assisted.”) Robinson called the agency in a rage. He recounted the phone call to me several times, always in a single, Homeric run-on: “I also stated that if they wanted to take my reserve over, they would probably have to engage in a gun battle with me, and kill me, and I said that coming after the debacle at Ruby Ridge and the debacle at Waco, which had just happened a few months before, if the government’s next heroic exploit was to attack and murder a conservation worker in his own reserve to take over work that the government was too lazy and incompetent to do itself, that might look a little strange to the public.” Seventy-two hours after he hung up the phone, Robinson told me, his Caesalpinia kavaiensis tree was dead. The implication was, he killed it. He felt sick about it, he added, but freedom comes first.

Yes, I suppose it does.