Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

With its putrid smell, bony flesh and rancid oily taste, the menhaden would seem the least likely candidate for “The Most Important Fish in the Sea,” the title of H. Bruce Franklin’s brilliant new environmentalist study. But Franklin is not being ironic. The menhaden is the most important fish in the sea if you understand its ecological purpose.

While it is understandable that groups like Greenpeace would take up the cause of sea creatures at the top of the food chain, like the great whales or the bluefin tuna, Franklin understands that without the easily dismissed menhaden, those above it on the food chain do not stand a chance. This includes the human race as well, since the menhaden is particularly suited to cleaning up plankton-ridden waters. As one of the few marine specimens that thrive on microscopic plant life or phyloplanton, it is uniquely positioned to purify waters that have become virtual swamps as a result of the massive influx of nitrogen-based fertilizers from farms, lawns and golf courses. With much of the Gulf of Mexico having been turned into a vast dead zone by fertilizer run-off from the Mississippi River, there is a drastic need for the humble menhaden.

The villain in “The Most Important Fish in the Sea” is industrial fishing in general and a particularly odious company called Omega Protein, whose website informs us that they “market a variety of products derived from menhaden, an inedible fish found in abundant quantities in coastal waters off the U.S. mid-Atlantic and Gulf Coasts.” It might be inedible to human beings, but fish love to eat them. Franklin explains that what makes them unappealing to human beings has an irresistible appeal to prized food fish, including the striped bass and the bluefish. Once the menhaden eat phytoplankton, they convert it into omega-3 fatty acids that all living creatures require but are available from only limited sources, such as flaxseed, soybeans and walnuts. Unfortunately, the striped bass and the bluefish cannot stroll into the local grocery store to pick up a bag of walnuts.

Reading Omega Protein’s website, one would get the impression that they are mainly in the health food business. “Omega Protein is the nation’s largest producer of Omega-3 fish oil, protein rich fish meal, and fish solubles.” What they don’t tell you is that most of what they produce ends up as chicken or pig feed. Chickens and pigs of course can flourish on other foodstuffs, but the striped bass and the bluefish cannot. Like most corporations, Omega has one and only one goal and that is to make a profit. The top stock holders could probably care less if the ocean was turned into a vast dead zone as long as they are prospering. As a symbol of the irrationality of the capitalist system and the looming environmental crisis that threatens all life, it is difficult to imagine a more cold-blooded and criminal outfit than Omega.

Omega was originally a subsidiary of the Zapata Corporation that was launched by George H.W Bush in 1953 as Zapata Oil. It sold off Omega in 2006 to Wilber L. Ross, a leveraged buyout expert. So it should be obvious where this outfit inherited its corporate ethics. If they could make money processing human flesh, they probably would.

H. Bruce Franklin first found out about the menhaden plight on salt water fishing expeditions off the New Jersey coast and in Chesapeake Bay, where Omega still has the right to use industrial fishing techniques to catch millions of the endangered menhaden. Deprived of the menhaden, the local game fish were showing signs of malnutrition:

This first fish looked healthy and normal enough to me, though I wasn’t used to seeing stripers this small being kept (the minimum Chesapeake size was eighteen inches, compared to the New Jersey minimum then of twenty-four inches, and now of twenty-eight inches). But Joe pointed out a small, rather unremarkable lesion near the anus, something I would have missed. This rockfish was the healthiest-looking we caught, however, except for one. The next fish, with bright red open sores gnawing deep into its side and belly, gave me a taste of that revulsion Jim must have felt back in 1997. One after the other, we caught diseased rockfish, each with horrifying symptoms.

If Omega Corporation only considers the menhaden in terms of what Karl Marx called “exchange value”, the original inhabitants of the New World–being primitive communists–were far more tuned in to its “use value”. They understood that the menhaden and other fish had enormous value as fertilizer and taught the pilgrims to bury them near corn. The Narragansett Indians called them munnawhatteaûg, which meant “fertilizer” or “that which manures”.

Not only are the menhaden useful as fertilizer, their oil can be used in the same way that whale oil was used in the 1800s–as a lubricant and as fuel. Not surprisingly, this led to the same kind of industrialized fishing techniques that came close to wiping out the whale. The menhaden were also reduced to a relative handful as vast purse nets in offshore waters on the Atlantic Coast yielded billions of fish. When alarms were raised about their possible extinction, the 19^th century versions of Julian Simon dismissed them as chicken-little stories as Franklin’s epigraph to chapter five (“The Death of Fish and the Birth of Ecology”) would indicate:

I believe, then, that the cod fishery, the herring fishery, the pilchard fishery, the mackerel fishery, and probably all the great sea fisheries, are inexhaustible; that is to say, that nothing we do-seriously affects the number of the fish. And any attempt to regulate these fisheries seems consequently, from the nature of the case, to be useless.

–Thomas Henry Huxley, 1883

Considering the New York Times’s long-standing record of hewing closely to the agenda of corporate America, it is totally to be expected that they would repeat Huxley’s argument. When evidence began to mount in the early 1880s that the menhaden were being fished into extinction, the newspaper of record tried to get the commercial fishing industry off the hook:

It has been shown over and over again that man’s take of the sea fishes is utterly insignificant when the whole bulk of the fish is considered. Predaceous fish and birds, all the natural enemies of the fish, destroy more perhaps in a single hour than man captures in the year.

Although most of H. Bruce Franklin’s impressive scholarship is focused on the records of newspaper, magazine, industry associations and government agencies over the past 125 years or so, he does make one foray into popular culture that demonstrates this scholar’s eclectic and multifaceted approach (he has written on science fiction). He notes that a Simpson’s episode from 1997 very possibly alluded to the menhaden crisis. C. Montgomery Burns, the nuclear power plant owner that employs Homer Simpson and an all-round villain, launched a new business that sounds a lot like Omega. Trying to pull the wool over Homer’s daughter Lisa, a committed environmentalist and vegetarian, he has come up with something called “Li’l Lisa’s Patented Animal Slurry”, a high-protein feed for farm animals, insulation for low-income housing, a powerful explosive, and a top-notch engine coolant. When Lisa tells Burns that he is up to something evil, he responds, “I don’t understand. Pigs need food, engines need coolant, dynamiters need dynamite…and not a single sea creature was wasted.”

Considering H. Bruce Franklin’s long-time involvement with Herman Melville studies (he was the Program Director of the Melville Society in 1978 to 1979), his decision to write about the menhaden appears consistent with his own approach to Melville. Along with CLR James, Franklin is convinced that “Moby Dick” is a quintessential indictment of American capitalism. As one might expect, “The Most Important Fish in the Sea” is constructed around a rigorous historical materialist methodology and a sure command of the economic data.

If this wasn’t enough to recommend this powerful and insightful book, there is also the beauty of the prose that takes on Melvillian dimensions on page after page, especially the opening paragraphs of “The Most Important Fish in the Sea,” which is very likely the most important book you will read this year:

First you see the birds—gulls and terns wheeling overhead, then swooping down to a wide expanse of water dimpled as though by large raindrops and glittering with silver streaks. The sea erupts with frothy splashes, some from the diving birds, others from foot-long fish with deeply forked tails frantically hurling themselves out of the water, only to fall back into their tightly packed school. More and more birds materialize as if from nowhere, and the air rings with their shrill screams. Boats too begin to converge on the scene: the boiling cloud of birds has told anglers everywhere within view that a school of menhaden, perhaps numbering in the tens of thousands, is being ravaged by a school of bluefish.

Attacking from below and behind to slash the menhaden bodies with their powerful jaws, the razor-toothed blues are in a killing frenzy, gorging themselves with the severed backs and bellies of their prey, some killing even when they are too full to eat, some vomiting half-digested pieces so they can kill and eat again. Terns skim gracefully over the surface with their pointed bills down, dipping to pluck bits of flesh and entrails from the bloody swirls. Gulls plummet and flop heavily into the water, where a few splash about and squabble noisily over larger morsels. As some lift with their prizes, the squabbles turn aerial and a piece occasionally falls back into the water, starting a new round of shrieking skirmishes. Hovering high above the other birds, a male osprey scans for targets beneath the surface, then suddenly folds its gull-shaped wings and power-dives through the aerial tumult, extends its legs and raises its wings high over its head an instant before knifing into the water in a plume of spray, emerges in another plume, and laboriously flaps its four-foot wingspan as it slowly climbs and soars away with a writhing menhaden held headfirst in its talons. Beneath the blues, iridescent weakfish begin to circle, snapping at small lumps sinking from the carnage. Farther below, giant but toothless striped bass gobble tumbling heads and other chunks too big for the mouths of the weakfish. From time to time, bass muscle their way up through the blues, swallow whole menhaden alive, and propel themselves back down with their broom-like tails, leaving telltale swirls on the surface. On the mud below, crabs scuttle to scavenge on leftovers.

A modified version of Alexander Cockburn’s Nation Magazine article “The Greenhousers Strike Back, and Strike Out” has just shown up on Counterpunch. The main difference between the two articles is that Counterpunch version puts one degree of separation between our contrarian left journalist and the sleazy Frederick Seitz, who is to climatology as Judith Miller is to the subject of arms control in the Middle East.

Frederick Seitz, the Judith Miller of climatology, took money from RJ Reynolds

Patrick J. Michaels, another Cockburn expert, received money from big coal and mining

In the Nation Magazine piece, Cockburn invoked Seitz’s trashy name directly, while in the Counterpunch article, he allows one Fred Goldberg to do the dirty work. Goldberg, a Swedish scientist whose main area of expertise appears to be welding technology, accuses Bert Bolin, another Swedish scientist and former chairman of the IPCC, with suppressing counter-evidence on global warming. Cockburn cites Goldberg as follows:

Professor Fredrik Seitz, former chairman of the American Science Academy, wrote in the Wall Street Journal already the 12th of June 1996 about a major deception on global warming: “I have never before witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.” He gave many examples of changes and redefinitions and finished by demanding that the IPCC process should be abandoned.

Had somebody subordinate to Bert Bolin within IPCC made these changes it is reasonable to think that Bert Bolin himself would correct the errors. That he has not done is why I draw the conclusion that it must be Bert Bolin himself who is responsible for the changes and no subordinate person has dared interfere with his boss.

As much as I understand Alexander trying to put a bit of distance between himself and Seitz, we are obliged to provide some background on this shady character:

The first mention of Frederick Seitz in Lexis-Nexis is a November 12, 1980 article that informs us of his inclusion on a panel of scientists that will help President Reagan “strengthen programs in military, industrial and space technology as a means of reasserting American strategic and economic supremacy.” No doubt Reagan felt that Seitz’s involvement with a pro-nuclear group Scientists and Engineers for Secure Energy recommended him highly. Throughout the 1980s, Seitz would write articles to the NY Times arguing that a Chernobyl could not happen here. The irony, of course, is that Cockburn now views alarm over global warming as a conspiracy to promote nuclear energy. When he wasn’t pumping for nuclear power, Seitz was making the case for SDI.

At the end of the 1990s, Seitz switched gears and began to take up the cause that global warming was a lie. Long before the ruling class began to wake up to the fact that global warming might threaten the ability of the capitalist system to reproduce itself, the bourgeois press was using Seitz as a cudgel against the environmentalists, just as Cockburn is doing today. An April 5, 1995 Washington Post editorial titled “And Now the Good News About the Environment” cites Seitz:

Despite success, many environmentalists are still “proclaiming emergencies that do not exist,” as Easterbrook writes. Health hazards are routinely sensationalized. The “crisis” of the moment is the “greenhouse effect”: the danger that temperatures will rise because carbon dioxide (a product of carbon fuel combustion) will trap heat in the atmosphere. As Easterbrook shows, the threat may be overstated. Carbon dioxide is a tiny part of air (350 parts per million). Small shifts may not matter; or temperature changes may stay within a range that might occur naturally. A new report from the George C. Marshall Institute — headed by Frederick Seitz, former president of the National Academy of Sciences — goes further; it dismisses chances of a major global warming as “inconsequential.”

Eventually it became difficult for Seitz to exploit his past affiliations with the National Academy of Sciences, especially when current members became upset with his use of stationary that to the casual eye looked like the Academy’s. The April 22, 1998 NY Times reported:

The National Academy of Sciences has taken the extraordinary step of disassociating itself from a statement and petition circulated by one of its former presidents that attack the scientific conclusions underlying international efforts to control emissions of industrial waste gases believed to cause global warming.

The petition, which its backers say has been signed by 15,000 scientists, calls for the Government to reject the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty imposing limits on emissions of gases like carbon dioxide that was negotiated by more than 150 countries in Kyoto, Japan, last December.

The petition was accompanied by what appeared to be the report of a scientific study concluding that emissions of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, pose no climatic threat and instead amount to “a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution.” The article was attached to a letter by Dr. Frederick Seitz, a past president of the academy and president emeritus of Rockefeller University, urging people to sign the petition and calling attention to the article.

Many atmospheric scientists and ecologists who believe global warming to be a serious threat had expressed anger and alarm over the article because it was printed in a format and type face similar to that of the academy’s own journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In his letter, Dr. Seitz, a longtime skeptic on the question of global warming, also identified himself as a past academy president.

On Monday, citing “confusion” created by the petition and the unpublished article, the Council of the Academy, its governing board, disassociated itself from them and said in a statement that the petition “does not reflect the conclusion of expert reports of the academy.”

Of course, in Alexander’s contrarian universe, this might actually bolster Seitz’s credentials since his detractors are those typical fake scientists who use those phony computer models as part of a secret plot to pave the way for nuclear power.

Seitz was never one to pass up an opportunity to make a buck. Consulting fees for his “expert” advice on global warming was supplemented by payoffs from the tobacco industry that was anxious to find a scientist friendly to their cause. In the May 2006 Vanity Fair, Mark Hertsgaard reported:

Call him the $45 million man. That’s how much money Dr. Frederick Seitz, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences, helped R. J. Reynolds Industries, Inc., give away to fund medical research in the 1970s and 1980s. The research avoided the central health issue facing Reynolds—”They didn’t want us looking at the health effects of cigarette smoking,” says Seitz, who is now 94—but it nevertheless served the tobacco industry’s purposes. Throughout those years, the industry frequently ran ads in newspapers and magazines citing its multi-million-dollar research program as proof of its commitment to science—and arguing that the evidence on the health effects of smoking was mixed.

In the 1990s, Seitz began arguing that the science behind global warming was likewise inconclusive and certainly didn’t warrant imposing mandatory limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. He made his case vocally, trashing the integrity of a 1995 I.P.C.C. report on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal, signing a letter to the Clinton administration accusing it of misrepresenting the science, and authoring a paper which said that global warming and ozone depletion were exaggerated threats devised by environmentalists and unscrupulous scientists pushing a political agenda. In that same paper, Seitz asserted that secondhand smoke posed no real health risks, an opinion he repeats in our interview. “I just can’t believe it’s that bad,” he says.

I should also mention that there is one other rogue that Alexander relies on to build his case against global warming, Pat Michaels of the University of Virginia. In a December 1995 Harper’s Magazine article titled “The Heat Is On: The Warming of the World’s Climate Sparks a Blaze of Denial,” Ross Gelbspan reports:

But while the skeptics portray themselves as besieged truth-seekers fending off irresponsible environmental doomsayers, their testimony in St. Paul and elsewhere revealed the source and scope of their funding for the first time. [Pat] Michaels has received more than $115,000 over the last four years from coal and energy interests. World Climate Review, a quarterly he founded that routinely debunks climate concerns, was funded by Western Fuels. Over the last six years, either alone or with colleagues, Balling has received more than $200,000 from coal and oil interests in Great Britain, Germany, and elsewhere. Balling (along with Sherwood Idso) has also taken money from Cyprus Minerals, a mining company that has been a major funder of People for the West-a militantly anti-environmental “Wise Use” group.

In the past Alexander Cockburn would have not made common cause with anybody connected to the Wise Use movement, just as Christopher Hitchens would have avoided lining up with the CIA or the State Department. Somebody more expert in the field of abnormal psychology might have an explanation for this peculiar evolution, but I will just stick with the facts.

Manmade global warming theory is fed by pseudo quantitative prediction from climate-careerists working primarily off the big, mega-computer General Circulation Models, which include the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Department of Commerce’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab.

Alexander Cockburn, “Who Are the Merchants of Fear”, Nation Magazine, May 18, 2007

* * * * *

From chapter three of “The Fate of the Forest” by Alexander Cockburn and Susanna Hecht:

THE GREENHOUSE QUESTION

Combustion of petroleum products in the First World provides most of the carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides and chlorofluorocarbons going into the atmosphere, but Third World energy use and deforestation contribute to the ever-increasing amounts. One index of the changing situation is the rising curve of complaints from satellite photo-analysts that they are unable to get decent dry-season shots of the Amazon anymore, because of the great clouds of smoke and particulates hanging over large parts of the forest. The reasons for this pall are quite clear when one examines the numbers of fires and the consequent contributions of particulates and ‘greenhouse’ gases. Compton Tucker and his colleagues at the Goddard Space Flight Center have monitored the numbers of fires during the burning period of July through September 1987 in a quadrant from 6.5 to 15.5 degrees latitude and 55 to 67 ‘ degrees west longitude, an area that includes Rondonia and western Mato Grosso; i.e., that of the most severe burning on the Amazon flank. What they have shown is that more than 8,000 fires burn each day during the burning season. Factoring in the average duration of fires, Tucker’s group arrived at a total of 240,000 fires over the season. On the average each fire belches out some 4,500 metric tons of carbon dioxide, 750 metric tons of carbon monoxide and more than 25 metric tons of methane. By the end of the burning season more than 10 million metric tons of particulates have darkened the sky.