November 22, 2013
By Mickey Friedman
I just learned that something I’ve been doing for decades actually has a word to describe it. Who knew that when I left a party without saying goodbye, I’d been ghosting. Or pulling a ghost.
For me, it’s just too much to go person to person, or worse yet, to make oneself the center of attention by announcing to everyone it’s time to hit the road.
Many people think it’s impolite but I’ve always been a ghost.
The older I get, the more ghosting I seem to do.
Like most ghosts I’m haunted. Lately I’ve been haunted by several things I’ve read. Unconnected on the surface but indicative of what seems to me an ever-increasing darkness intruding upon the light.
Which brings me to the first bit of tragic news that has taken ahold of me. The penguins are dying, in different places, in different ways. My love affair with penguins began at the Bronx Zoo. I loved them as a boy; I love them still.
There are many threats. The most massive of all: the melting ice. While we humans dither, the climate crisis proceeds. A third of a Chinstrap penguin breeding population succumbed during the last two decades. How about we forget about “global warming” – a phrase that seems to provoke a certain kind of conservative apoplexy – and instead imagine a warming globe. Melting sea ice in Antarctica.
Ironically, the chinstraps prefer sea water without ice, unlike the Adelie penguins. So researchers imagined the chinstraps would thrive as the ice receded. Unfortunately, so much ice was lost that it critically impacted the krill population, the shrimp-like critters the chinstraps eat. And, it turns out, the krill depend on the algae that attaches itself to the ice.
Such a complicated dynamic. So much more complicated than those who imagine the climate crisis a far-fetched, left wing enviro-sponsored conspiracy. Melting ice, shrinking krill, a big penguin problem. Penguins dying.
There are so many kids like me, mouths open, eyes wide, visiting zoos everywhere, aquariums galore, entranced by those weird, so very human-like birds waddling, diving, swimming with such grace and speed. Penguin watchers, penguin lovers all.
But there seems to be no safe place for the penguins. For many of the zoo penguins are at risk, dying, death by mosquito, dead of malaria. For there is a malaria all its own for separate species. And another aspect of our warming globe is the spread of disease. Diseases once found only in the tropics have moved north with the warmth. And penguins, because most of them come from the very cold, and others from the very arid, have no experience with mosquitos, haven’t over time built up a resistance.
So despite the zookeepers vigilance, providing their penguins with malaria pills, the disease often wins. In 2012, six Humboldt penguins died at the London Zoo. Since, there have been outbreaks at zoos in Baltimore, South Korea, Vienna and Washington, D.C.
And by the way, though preventable and curable, 660,000 African children died of malaria in 2010.
But I was glad to read that my beloved Bronx Zoo wages its own version of war against malaria. Stocking its ponds with fathead minnows to eat mosquito larvae; draining standing water; and dosing water with insect-killing bacterium.
But I’m a ghost. And just maybe it’s easier for one ghost to see another.
You might care less about penguins than me. But how about farmers? I mean, here in The Best Small Town in America, there is much talk about Farm-to-Table. Some snazzy new notion that it is best to eat foods grown in real dirt by real farmers.
Maybe people care about farmers who have the farms that grow the very food that those Farm-To-Table restaurants put on their tables.
And maybe what’s happening to French farmers might haunt you?
A recent study by the French Health Institute has found that between 2007 and 2009, 500 French farmers committed suicide. Which is twenty percent higher than the suicide rate for the general population. About a suicide every other day. The sad thing, and what makes this news even worse, is that France already has a higher suicide rate than its neighbors, and double the rate of the UK and Spain.
The livestock farmers have suffered the most. Feed and fertilizer prices go up, and their profit margins are minimal. For French farmers, there’s cancer, heart disease, or killing oneself.
This makes me profoundly sad. And seems to me a warning.
We humans like the idea of canaries in the coal mine, of bellwether species, leading indicators, of turning non-humans into an early-warning system. But increasingly we are providing our own early-warnings. If anyone besides the spies of the NSA are listening. If anyone else is watching.
The penguins are dying. And now the farmers are dying. Ghosts. Leaving without saying goodbye. Ghosting.