"[I]f you lose that undercurrent of divine reverence..."

"...you lose the point of all life. Even if it's the final bite of bluefin, even if you watch in horror as the polar bears starve to death, even as you hear of nations murdering each other over dusty strips of dirt and pathetic definitions of God, you must, without fail, hold that sense of wonder and awe, nurture it at every turn. Because once that's gone, we're doomed for certain."


From Mark Morford Notes and Errata, "The Last Tuna Nigira."


Morford turns an essay on dwindling blue fin tuna fishing stocks into meditation on the nature of humanity, ending with the paragraph quoted above.


[Simply put, we are gorging our way to the bluefin's oblivion. Stocks in the Gulf of Mexico are now considered to be in full collapse with maybe 9,000 total fish left, all suddenly made far more dire and irreversible by the BP spill, which is destroying millions of fish eggs right at the start of spawning season.

The Atlantic stocks are faring little better, as international fishing boats race to cash in before it's too late. Japan -- by far the largest consumer (but certainly not the only one) -- is taking 80 percent of the catch, caring almost not a whit, citing dubious claims of "tradition" and a cultural need for its rapaciousness. Most depressing, with the exception of Greenpeace and a handful of other groups, few people seem to care about the fate of the bluefin.

Perhaps they should. These astonishing, warm-blooded creatures represent, as the story points out, more than just the last wild food stock in the ocean -- a staggering enough idea all by itself considering the extent of our dependency on the ocean as an essential food. Bluefin are not like salmon or shrimp. They cannot be easily farmed. They cannot be replaced. They are a huge and hugely wild creature, more powerful than we even fully understand.

Destroy them, and we destroy more than just another everyday, "disposable" species. Their destruction will be a profound marker, a signifier of something far larger and more ominous. Like the honeybees, like the drowning polar bears, like the fresh water crisis, the end of tuna will be of those epic fails we look back upon in a few years and say, "There. Right there. That was one of the signs." We don't get many more.

My Republican moment came as I was nearing the end of the piece, feeling sickened and increasingly depressed, to the point where a sense of abject fatalism finally struck, a sense of just giving up, that wickedly painful moment where the heart has to step away from the scene before it implodes, and the survivalist/capitalist mind takes over and just powers through the nightmare, greedily gabbing on to whatever bits of gristle it can suckle.

This ugly voice said: Fine. If we're about to run out, if this is the last gasp of this splendid creature, if there's really nothing I can do about it anymore, well, to hell with it. I'd better get to my fave sushi joint quick and order a big batch of spice tuna rolls before it's too late

.

I mean, might as well, right? Isn't this what humans do best? Isn't this the Republican way, applicable to everything from SUVs to guns, cigarettes to global warming, to mutter something along the lines of: "Really, who f-ing cares if it's the last tuna on earth? Who cares about words like sacred, ethics, reverence? The fish tastes good! It's ours to gobble up as much as we like! Top of the food chain, baby!]