Here follows the final version of the speech Edward Myers delivered to rapt attention, sustained gentle laughter, and thunderous applause in this trap for people set by a mouse:

World Aquaculture Society-- Keynote Address-- Orlando, Florida, 22 January 2001

Title: Leading a Double Life Can Be Fun

Thank you for that rather over-generous introduction. When you find yourself more than a third of the way through your ninth decade, it’s not always easy to distinguish an introduction from an obituary. As James Boswell said, "In lapidary inscriptions one is not under oath." You will have noted from close attention to the intro, I am not a scientist. This allows you to relax and pay not the slightest bit of attention to whatever I might say. But I wish you would, anyway, as our world may be running out of time. Some weeks ago, I asked a conference official about the tessiture of the audience here today. The encouraging reply was that most attendees tried to miss any plenary session, as it was mostly housekeeping disguised as an event by tossing in a speaker. If any number came, it would be composed of three groups (and I quote my source): "Scientists, whose average work week might be 35 to 60 hours, in inverse proportion to their number of graduate assistants; aquaculturists, generally 80 hours unless there was a crisis, which there usually is; and bureaucrats." I did some original research on them; went back to the Pentateuch ? Leviticus, I think, which says to avoid cormorants at all costs. Last year a plan was proposed to permit cormorant control. This sets the usual bureaucratic interval for response to an emergency at a hair under 2800 years. Having established your varying attention spans, we may proceed. In another life I was, as noted, involved in the "controlled" (that’s in quotes) growth of the blue mussel, Mytilus edulis. The goal was to "create" (also in quotes" a mussel so beautiful and tasty as to command a price higher than Maine steamer clams. We made it half way ? Mytilus to $50 a bushel, as Mya arenaria moved to a hundred. Ninety percent of what I think I know about mussel aquaculture I would prefer not to have learned. If some of you agree, see me after class. Having had a decade to reflect, after passing on to another generation the venture into using the water column of the implacable North Atlantic Ocean, I am not at all sure that I would try it again in 2001 or beyond. Never mind the stricture not to try anything new after sixty. That said, I admire the courage of you young people ? and some not so young ? who have chosen to make careers out of growing and marketing, regulating, and purposively studying a spectrum of marine and aquatic animals and plants. If this were a sermon, I would begin with some scripture. This is not a sermon, but I am old enough to be the parent of most of you, so this is a form of parental advice, and I will therefore lean on some other authorities to buttress the advice I plan to give. After all, who ever listens to their parents?! The first is T.H. Huxley, in 1880 ? The chessboard is the world. The pieces are the phenomena of the universe. The rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature. The Player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that His play is fair, just, and patient. But we also know, to our cost, that He never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. The second is Richard Leakey, anthropologist, in 1972 ? We have to face the fact that one day humanity will disappear. The only question is ? WHEN? The third is from McDaniel and Gowdy, anthropologists, in 2000 ? Scientists have established that the earth is now in the sixth mass extinction of the last 600 million years. Humans have been the primary cause in extinguishing more than 2000 species of birds ? close to another 2000 are endangered. 40 million bison inhabited the Great Plains; in less than a century . . . only several hundred. The devastation is carefully documented in thousands of studies, which have been summarized and analyzed in hundreds of books. It is not a question of whether or not we have a mass extinction, but how severe it will be. Oh, and we might as well throw in a fourth, which could have been written by any entrepreneurial aqualculturist, by the late Louis Agassiz of Woods Hole: "I cannot afford to waste my time making money." You can’t just have a career and a moneyed pension any more; you have to lead a double life as both professional and planetary citizen. And it will be fun if our side wins, in spite of Leakey’s or anybody else’s gloomy prediction. This is not a doomsday recital, but it does seem that we are all part of a world-wide chemical experiment. Beginning with carbon dioxide, for openers ? because carbon dioxide is the most easily measured of the greenhouse gases, and the most easily convertible measure linking the living and non-living parts of the natural and unnatural world ? How much of it can the earth stand before all life depending on oxygen will be gone, and the Creation will, in Annie Dillard’s phrase, be playing to an empty house? Let’s run some numbers, simplistically. The surface of our resident sphere is 126 billion acres. The current production, annually, of CO2 is 14 trillion, 850 billion pouns, or about 118 pounds over every acre, on the average. For those of us in the Northern hemisphere, where most of the land is, there is a special problem: the nine leading CO2 producers live in that hemisphere. No need to name Number One, whose followers are China, India, the former Soviet Union, Poland, Pakistan, and so on. And the northern two-thirds of Africa. What with Coreolis Force, tidal drag, and the jet stream, this hemisphere doesn’t stay at the average, but is 165 pounds of CO2 over each acre, not 118. The jet stream comes whaling overhead at 200 mph or so and trends northward ? which is why the polar bears from Hudson’s Bay to Svalbard are going to have a rough time trying to nail baby seals; the area around the North Pole is becoming a lake, predictions run that the meltwater could drive the Gulf Stream south to Bordeaux or La Coruna and leave every bit of Europe north of there 5 degrees colder. This enormous Disney World playground has a physical footprint of 30,000 acres, so the annual load of CO2 overhead is about 5 million pounds. On Christmas Day, I strolled down to check the dock and floats, and, behold, there were about a thousand comb-jellies around one float. These are the same beasts presumably pumped out of a freighter’s bilge in the Black Sea, which by 1998 became half of that Sea’s biomass and took it anoxic. We learned about the speed of the Jetstream from Chinese nuclear tests, by dividing 200 into the distance from China, waiting that many hours, and finding I-131 or some such isotope in our mussels, right on time. Sure enough, Maine Yankee Atomic power plant, west-by-south 5-3/4 miles as the plutonium flies from where I live, wanted to be clear of all blame and sent over a local television team to interview us. One of those beamish types stuck a microphone under my chin after asking, "Do you mind selling mussels when they are full of I-131?" If I said yes, we were out of business, and if I said no, it meant we didn’t give a damn. This is a scientific meeting in search of the truth, so I must reveal that I was inspired to say to the pushy young man, "Have you stopped masturbating yet?" ? which ensured that the interview didn’t get on the evening news. Now, so far I haven’t told you much that you don’t already know. I no longer read very deeply into stories about global climate change ? my take on it is local, and your take should be the same for your area. In the 1970’s, we peaked on breaking ice out of the mussel gear ? the equivalent of 17 full working days a year using a scow with a snow-plow blade on its bow; a 25-horse outboard can move a 3-acre piece of ice out into the tideway. The chore dwindled in the ‘80’s; we’ve had no ice for the past five winters, and may go a sixth now that the sun is only eight weeks away from the equinox. On the other side of the season, the 16 degree C water temperature peak in the Augusts of the ‘80’s has been replaced by 22 degrees C, the point at which Maine mussels get a death wish. A colleague 60 miles further east lost 50,000 pounds of market mussels in one over-warm night. (As we say in Maine, he didn’t lose $50,000; he just doesn’t have it.) A local dragger friend came back from a trip north of Cashes Ledge (25-30 offshore) and gave me an armored sea robin (Peristidian miniatum). The books give this fish’s range as Nantucket south to the offing of Charleston, South Carolina. A lobstercatcher who fishes from our dock brought in Chesapeake Bay blue crabs trapped in front of our dock and on upriver last summer, on three occasions. Teredos have found it inviting in Maine’s Belfast Harbor, at the head of Penobscot Bay ? and destroyed in five months 60 brand-new red oak pilings, none less than 12" on the butt. The Santa Maria in the Caribbean in 1493, OK. The docks of New York and San Francisco in World War One, ditto. But Belfast, Maine, in 2000, looking at 60 toothpicks between wind and water? And our own Damariscotta River, with new oak runners disappearing from traps in a single season, and 2x6 framing timber good for nothing but honeycombs in a mere six months? Not finally, I cleaned an 11-1/2 foot fiberglass rowboat, the works ? wire brush, putty knife, non-phosphate detergent, fresh water ? on November 20th. "There," I said, "Won’t much grow on that during the winter." We had a gale of wind on December 16 et seq, so I took her out and turned her over. Not quite two five-gallon pails of tunicates! Incredible!!… I remain convinced that none of us here needs to leave home to be convinced of climate change. I am equally convinced that aquaculture all over the world will be unalterably and materially changed by 2020, unless we ? and I mean WE ? get busy enough to slow our collective sprint down the roiled road from 280 ppm CO2 to 560 ppm. And, despite whatever progress we make in this direction, there may also be a roadblock known as the Law of Unintended Consequences, otherwise called Murphy’s Law. A cloud no bigger than a man’s hand at about an arm’s length would do to cover it when the ozone hole was first noticed some 25 years ago. Then they went to Montreal and did a wonderful job of phasing out chlorofluorocarbons. Hurrah. Now the ozone hole is eleven million square miles ? that’s almost 6% of the earth’s surface. Chilean salmon farmers, lathered with SPF 30 sunblock, may have to shade their pens, or triple the depth of the nets, or get predator nets when Maine seals migrate to where the livin’ is easy. Or if the anchovetas move to Tahiti to get out of the sauna, the Chileans may have to compete with Archer Midland Daniels’ humanitarian efforts to corner the grain market. A computer model has the ozone hole starting to shrink about 2050. Maybe that’ll be too late. Now let’s move to Kyoto in 1997. Security was lax ? they hadn’t yet had Seattle’s WTO as a model ? and they let in two or three times as many fossil-fuel lobbyists as the US had delegates. The American political will, what there was of it, crumbled. "Hay," said the fossil-flacks, "If this treaty was ratified, regular gas might go as high as $1.69.9!" Then the coal lobby teamed up and hired three scientists for as much as 300k each to feed the media with stories keeping climate change in doubt and up in the air (if you’ll pardon the expression) for three years. Be reminded of Teddy Roosevelt’s head of staff: "Chief, you knew he was offering you a bribe. Why did you hesitate? Why didn’t you throw him out?" The Rough Rider: "I had to be polite. He was dangerously near my price." It was a closer call at The Hague a month or so ago. The Dutch know what’s going on and know the appalling cost of higher dikes; the Germans do, too, and are leading the wind-power parade. So do the Swedish ? they have 22 manufacturers of urine-separation toilets, with the liquid pipe to a tap outside the house. Used to be meter-maids; now there are micturition maids, who ride around collecting it, and then the 5.4% solids become fertilizer and the rest is irrigation water. Incidentally, the Swedes have a National Pee Outside Day, saving a lot of flushing for those without the new toilets, and adding to the non-prudish camaraderie of the special day. Back to The Hague: the US agreed to a 7% reduction in CO2 production by 2010 or later. You may remember that W.J. Clinton, once President, campaigned in ’92 with a promise of 10% reduction by 2000. Our CO2 production went up 15%, so if we cut 7% in this decade, our achievement will actually be a net increase of 8%. Hurrah, again. In two decades, that’s about one-half of one percent a year UP. This doesn’t even begin to address the problem. It’s a cynical joke. Our government just does not get it. The last one didn’t, either, or the one that was sworn in day before yesterday (I do hope somebody read them their Miranda Rights first). The problem isn’t a 7% reduction in CO2, but a 70% reduction, and it’s perfectly possible by 2010 and it has to be done by 2020. We and the young are the ones to do it. Is it wind or solar or biomass or OTEC or combinations thereof? Hydrogen instead of fossils? Certainly less consumption by everybody. You tell the rest of us. There probably isn’t as much time as we hope. Log on to www,panda,org and the Living Planet Index will tell you the rate of ecodecline since 1970 is 33%, while the ecofootprint of humans has increased toward 50%, with the conclusion that the biosphere’s rate of regeneration has now been exceeded by human impact. Pity the people around dams ? hundreds of millions have been displaced ? the World Bank has built so many dams that the planet’s angle to the sun has been tipped measurably. Think of living on the Nile Delta, losing eight meters of soil a year because the Aswan High Dam traps 9 million tons of formerly nourishing sediment. The fisheries are down 70%, with a million people already displaced; 19 million more will have to move by 2020 ? where will they go? To Cairo? 2020 may seem distant, but six more of these triennial conferences and you’ll be right on the cusp. I am indebted to the Rijksinstituut voor Volksgezonheid, C.G.M. Klein and J.J. Battjes, who listed the increase in the number of domestic animals during the period 1890 to 1990. I extrapolated a conservative rise to the ensuing three decades and then went to the Britannica to get the numbers on flatus, a-k-a methane, one of the most durable and compelling of the greenhouse gases. For once, humans were not #1; our one-and-a-quarter daily liters wasn’t a patch on those exuberant ruminants, the two trillion cattle followed by almost 2 trillion sheep, almost one-and-a-half billion pigs, nearly a billion goats, and 17 billion poultry (horses weren’t counted because there are fewer than 50 million of them). These synanthropes, most of which are consumed by northern hemisphere humans in the form of Big Macs, T-bones, veal cutlets, and so on, will be joining with their consumers directly or indirectly in producing 12 cubic kilometers of methane per year. Drs Klein and Battjes deposed that 5% of the world’s animate biomass is people, and 15% consisted of domesticated animals, except for horses and pets. That was in the late 80’s. So, a billion people equals 1%, and a billion domesticates equals 3%. In 2020, then, the billion humans should be 8% and the 23 billion domesticates toward 24% for the effects of over 30% of the world’s biomass. These percentages assume, of course, the parallel expansion of the rest of the natural world’s biomass, which seems neither likely nor even possible. Egad. What a dreary way to go extinct. Not with a bang like the dinosaurs, but with a whimper, from a lot of animate biomass needing Rolaids (Q) My doctor said Mylanta. Of course, that’s not all. Look at pictures from Alaska of telephone poles at crazy angles because the permafrost is melting. It may not surprise you, as it did me, that the tundra occupies 20% of the world’s land surface. In some places, a mile deep. What does the tundra release? Methane, lots of it. Oh let it warm up and the tress will migrate. Some, maybe, but not when they get to the tundra, at least for a geologically significant time. Ever tried to grow a tree in a methane bath? Let me ask another question ? How many here have not heard of Pearl Harbor? Raise your hands. What happened there 55 years ago last month somehow galvanized this nation and many others, so that, within five or six years, from 1941 to 1947, this country was changed forever. The longest depression (so far, as they say in Vermont), at its worst in ’38 and ’39 after six years of Franklin Roosevelt’s working on it, came to an end; soldiers training with lengths of iron pipe and 1903-model Springfield rifles got modern equipment; fliers training in canvas-covered biplanes flew armored monoplanes built one every couple of minutes; destroyers were turned out every 13 days to replace the old four-stackers. This was an astonishing period of international mobilization, set in motion by what was an essentially minor event, but it demonstrated that a focussed and directed international will could meet its real challenges. Incidentally, Tyrone Cashman, a philosopher, and now aide for wind power to California’s governor, tells me that a mechanic can convert the most complicated SUV to hydrogen in one day. With a million trained people and the infrastructure provided by the Chairman of Ford ? who knows he is presiding over the dissolution of the internal combustion engine ? the transition from gasoline to hydrogen for all US autos and trucks would takes 250 working days. The other encouraging fact about the world’s response in World War Two is that many of its aspects continue to be sustained: wider access of higher education and foreign aid to name only two. The world-wide ecological crisis ? the context in which your efforts in aquaculture are pursued ? is William James’s moral equivalent to war. What we appear to need now is a fairly modest but compelling episode like Pearl Harbor. If possible, it should be what one learned justice called "An act of God under suspicious circumstances," so that all the countries of the world could be galvanized again and stay that way. Fossil resources can be used for lubrication only. The fuel of choice should be hydrogen, number one for planetary availability, with clean exhaust and the only by-product water fit to drink. Seven states on or near the Great Plains of the US, for example, could produce all the power this country needs via wind. This is addressed to the citizens of the US in this audience: going toward 4% of the world’s population while using 49% of the world’s resources is out. We shall never in God’s world give up our love affair with the big vehicle, but we owe it to the Creation and the rest of the world to stop fouling up either one. Staying our old path, globalization a la WTO, GATT, etc., becomes insane. The attempt to raise four to six billion people to our Western DisneyWorld standards of living would require, from what I have read, anywhere from 4 to 13 new planet Earths. Well, there ain’t any ? at last report, the nearest star is four light-years away, and at present space travel velocities, it would take 85 people-years to take a look ? we haven’t got that kind of time. Near as we can tell, photosynthesis has been around for about 3 billion years, and the earth’s atmosphere has stayed pretty much in balance, with forests’ taking the carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen for us, and with plankton doing the same job in the ocean. Now, humans have overcome the balance, and have only one billionth of that long time to get the planet back in balance and stay alive. Money? Scads of it available. Jobs? Zillions of them. Growth companies? Countless. Do what needs to be done, the money will follow. If we don’t ? if YOU don’t ? aquaculture will be a mere petroglyph at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Your first job, then, is to make your living raising the highest quality unadulterated food you can -? with all the reliance on nature you can afford. And your success will depend utterly on your second job. So what’s your second job in the double life I’m asking you to lead? For starters, to be stewards of the water ? salt and fresh ? from the icebergs the size of Connecticut sliding off the Larsen B Ice Sheet, to the Ogalalla and all the other aquifers; from getting the dirty dozen persistent organic pollutants out of the ocean and off the shelves, to more water reclamation and drip irrigation. Read. Beyond your own field. Want to know more about the gap between rich and poor? Try Thucydides