What’s the worst thing you’ve ever smelled? For me, it’s liquefied turbot.
I smelled it, oddly enough, on a bright December day about a week after one of those lovely big blizzards we used to get in Michigan. I was 11 or 12, walking with my mother along a stretch of sidewalk that hadn’t been shoveled since the storm.
Our route home alternated between icy piles of snow as yet impervious to the sun, and short patches of bare, wet concrete. My mother was a couple of steps ahead of me, picking her way along to find the path of least resistance so I could follow.
She saw it before she stepped in it, and called back over her shoulder to me, “Oh look! Someone dropped a package of fish!”
It was one of those Styrofoam trays from the supermarket, covered in plastic wrap. A corner of the packet was still embedded in a patch of ice. It had clearly fallen out of someone’s bag just before the snow hit, and had been covered up until very recently.
Before she could break her stride Mama’s heel hit the tray, which was now filled with a noxious, gloopy liquid rather than anything recognizable as groceries. It released a punch of ungodly stench – a distinctive, almost physically palpable reek that I can summon up to this day.
My mother, completely sickened and with the heel of her boot coated in odiferous slime, leaned down, took a squint at the package, and started to cackle. “It’s turbot! It’s deliquescing turbot!”
I haven’t knowingly touched turbot since, even though I know it takes a week on the sidewalk in the sunshine to morph from a firm, white-fleshed delicacy into a liquefied mass of stinking goo.
I was thinking about that the other day when I read that Florida Governor Rick Scott recently declared a state of emergency in 7 counties due to a red tide that has been killing fish and other marine wildlife and turning lovely stretches of beach into charnel houses of rot and decay.
The irony is stunning. Scott sides with climate change deniers, claws back money from conservation programs, and is a dedicated foe to clean air and water regulations.
This is the governor who reportedly BANNED the use of the term “climate change” in his administration, yet he’s now forced to declare a state of emergency to handle a problem that, yes, was likely exacerbated by The Thing Whose Name He Dare Not Speak. This is the same governor who is BEING SUED to force him to take action on global warming, and while he’s being hit over the head – repeatedly – by evidence that IT IS REAL, he still refuses to admit that he is wrong.
And this isn’t just about the disgusting reek of dead fish – it’s also about human health. The Washington Post reports that:
Citizens in retirement communities are reporting respiratory distress from the vapors of the microscopic red-tide organism called Karenia brevis. A recent study found a 50 percent spike in hospital visits due to respiratory problems during red-tide blooms.
It’s about the lifeblood of Florida’s economy, too. Shouldn’t a “business friendly” governor care about that?
Let’s head over to the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences and see if there’s anything there about toxic algae and climate change, shall we? Of course there is.
A paper by one Karl Havens, titled Climate Change and the Occurrence of Harmful Microorganisms in Florida’s Ocean and Coastal Waters, says:
Climate change is expected to result in increased temperatures of nearshore ocean water, and this could lead to increased growth of harmful microorganisms. These include algae that form noxious or toxic blooms, including red tides, and bacteria and other pathogens. This situation could have negative consequences in regard to human health and also Florida’s ocean-related economy.
The WaPo, again:
The red tide has been gradually moving north, to the mouth of Tampa Bay, according to state tracking data. For many places, the daily reports continue to say “Water Color: Dark” and “Respiratory Irritation: Intense.” Worst of all are the reports that state “Dead Fish: Heavy.”
Dead Fish: Heavy?! This is another sign of a planet – of ecosystems – in distress, out of balance, in decline.
The modern GOP has been a disaster for the environment. Seemingly since 1970, even in the first few nanoseconds since President Richard Nixon established the EPA, “business-friendly” politicians, mostly of the conservative sort, have been waging war on what they call “job killing regulations.” This includes lobbying to prevent legislation against harmful chemicals in pesticides and animal husbandry, doing their darndest to prevent the creation of wildlife refuges while working industriously to open pristine natural wilderness areas to depredation by logging and other extraction industries, voting to build pipelines over primeval aquifers, and most recently, attempting to roll back fuel efficiency standards for American cars.
Since the election* of Trump, we’ve been fired up and ready to go: typing and yelling and marching and phone banking and raising the roof. And damned rightly so!
It’s all on fire or about to go up in flames these days – immigration, a woman’s right to choose, LGBTQ rights, the deficit, income inequality, healthcare, our nation’s standing in the world…
But all of that – from every person being detained by ICE to every craven GOP legislator voting to force some immoral crap written by a lobbyist down our throats – all of that takes place IN THE ENVIRONMENT, on a planet we’re despoiling and cannot leave, inside a closed system with finite resources and ever-mounting parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere.
So that’s another reason why I am fired up and ready to go for this November. We need Democrats back behind the wheel – or at least we need a majority in the House to put the brakes on the Great GOP Eco-Unraveling until we can make like Hercules at the Augean stables and sweep Trump out of the White House and banish craptasatic, environmentally disastrous apparatchiks like Rick Perry , Andrew Wheeler, and Ryan Zinke along with him!
To combat a Red Tide, we need a Big Blue Wave. And I can hear one coming.