Art, nukes, & ethical energy

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE
Morals & Society
EDITORIAL, April 2011

Is there no the ethical limit to what humans can do to helpless animals?

Evaristti and unwitting "partner" in art.

BY MERRITT CLIFTON, Animal People Magazine

CHILEAN SHOCK ARTIST Marco Evaristti won global notoriety in February 2000 with an exhibit at the Trapholt Art Museum in Kolding, Denmark,  consisting of 10 blenders containing live goldfish. Visitors were invited to puree a goldfish.

Friends of Animals/Denmark,  not affiliated with the U.S. organization Friends of Animals,  won an injunction ordering that the electricity supply to the blenders should be cut off.  When two goldfish were pureed anyhow,  FoA/Denmark pursued criminal charges against Evaristti and museum director Peter Meyer.  The case against Meyer went to court in May 2003.  Meyer was acquitted,  but even in Denmark,  whose national identity is intertwined with commercial fishing,  whale massacres in the Faroe Islands,  and the Copenhagen fur trade,  public opinion clearly rejected the notion of pulverizing live fish as “art.”

Evaristti,  however,  took the show on the road.  On April 20,  2006 the blenders and goldfish arrived in Dornbirn,  Austria. That night four animal advocates broke into the art gallery,  smashed the blenders,  and took the fish.

The methodology of Evaristti’s exhibitions could be compared to the use of live maceration by agribusiness,  in routinely killing unwanted male chicks and “spent” egg-laying hens by the multi-million.  People who fish for sport cause more prolonged animal suffering just by impaling a worm or other live bait on a hook,  then hooking and reeling in a fish.

From a traditional animal welfare point of view,  which accepts the use of animals to satisfy human needs,  the argument that Evaristti’s exhibits are uniquely depraved and cruel rests on their evident lack of redeeming purpose.

From a conservation point of view,  Evaristti’s exhibits are without consequence.

But from an animal rights point of view,  pulverizing a live fish would not be any less wrong if done for some socially acceptable pretext.

Stopping Evaristti is easy compared to stopping the practices of the poultry and fishing industries,  but stopping the poultry and fishing industries are longtime acknowledged goals of the animal rights movement.  Indeed,  some of the activists who publicized the break-in at the Austrian museum saw it as a symbolic gesture of opposition to the entire spectrum of cruelties inflicted on fish killed for food,  and hoped that the episode would help to promote public awareness about the capacity of fish to suffer.

Rocky alliance with enviros

Surveys of animal rights advocates have repeatedly demonstrated that upward of 90% also define themselves as environmentalists,  yet most acknowledge a wide gulf between animal rights perspectives and the prevailing views among mainstream environmentalists.

Mainstream environmentalism,  for example,  accepts the paradox of the “hunter/conservationist,”  who kills wildlife in the name of protecting wildlife.  Mainstream wildlife conservation is funded in part by the sale of hunting,  fishing,  and trapping licenses–and,  in consequence,  wildlife conservation policies and priorities are often warped to suit the interests of hunters,  rather than the needs of wild animals.

Mainstream environmentalism also accepts–and promotes–ecological nativism,  a pre-Darwinian theory of habitat which holds that only the species who evolved in a particular geological location actually belong there.  Thus mainstream environmentalism encourages the massacre of “non-native” species, regardless of how well-suited to the habitat they may be,  and how integral to the ecosystems which have evolved as result of habitat change.

Mainstream environmentalism exempts much anti-animal activity from the ecological precepts it selectively advances,  and is especially self-contradictory in opposing pollution from factory farms without opposing the products of factory farms.

However,  despite the clear conflicts between the perspectives of animal advocacy and mainstream environmentalism, animal advocates mostly perceive parallel interests in protecting habitat and endangered species,  preventing pollution,  seeking to remedy effects of climate change,  and pursuing the safest,  least ecologically damaging forms of energy development.  Emerging at about the same time in the mid-1970s,  the contemporary animal advocacy and environmental movements have sometimes found themselves in awkward alliances despite often being at odds.  Animal advocates have generally regarded environmentalists as acceptable political partners,  despite the tendency of mainstream environmentalists to prefer to keep company with hunters.

Along the rocky way,  energy policy has been among the few areas of consistent agreement.  No major animal advocacy group has an independent energy policy,  but almost all of them frequently endorse energy-related legislation and policy statements originating with the major mainstream environmental organizations.

In all likelihood the alliance of animal advocates and environmentalists on energy policy will only strengthen in the radioactive aftermath of the apparent triple and possible quadruple meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear complex in northeastern Japan.  Few people in either camp appear to favor expanded nuclear energy development,  despite the acknowledged contribution of fossil fuels to global warming.  Both animal advocates and environmentalists have reservations about wind power,  as well,  since wind turbines have become recognized as major killers of bats and birds.

There is considerable reason to regard both nuclear and fossil fuel generating stations as of concern from the animal welfare and animal rights perspectives,  too–even if they run perfectly, with no catastrophic failures of technology,  such as meltdowns,  oil spills,  and coal mining disasters.  The greatest harm to animals occasioned by energy production occurs not as result of nuclear disasters of Three Mile Island,  Chernobyl,  or Fukushima magnitude, nor as result of oil spills as huge as the Ixtoc I,  Exxon Valdez, and Deepwater Horizon debacles,  but rather in routine operation of generating stations with “once through” water cooling systems–and amounts to repeating the Marco Evaristti exhibitions several billion times per year per plant.  There are about 550 such plants in the U.S. alone,  which together puree and boil alive more than one trillion fish per year.  Though both nuclear and fossil fuel generating stations are culpable for sucking fish through their cooling systems,  nuclear reactors are proportionately many times more so,  because they use vastly greater quantities of water.

This is no more a new insight than the recognition that earthquakes and tsunamis can destroy nuclear reactors,  yet has been surprisingly little recognized.

Fifty-three years ago the California jazz great Lu Waters (1911-1989) retired from performing,  became a geology professor at Sonoma State University,   and in 1962 became alarmed over Pacific Gas & Electric Company plans to build a nuclear reactor on Bodega Head,  on the ocean side of Bodega Bay.

Waters’ concerns were twofold.  First,  he had mapped ancient tsunami activity in the area,  and had discovered gigantic stones which had been thrown on top of the seaside cliffs by the waves. Waters knew that a seaside reactor anywhere near there would be vulnerable to earthquakes and tsunamis triggered by seismic activity along the San Andreas Fault.  This was the concern that eventually stopped that particular nuclear development;  but Waters also warned that pumping sea water into cooling towers and discharging warm water would destroy the aquatic wildlife of the region.  Small fish and plankton would be sucked in through the screens meant to keep debris out of the cooling systems.   Large fish,  marine mammals,  and birds would lose their food sources.

Though the latter concern has not been completely ignored, it has rated low among environmental objections to nuclear energy development,  in part because similar occurs in cooling fossil fuel-burning generating stations,  while hardly anyone has paid attention to the differing magnitudes of harm done by the different types of plant.

Energy Matters blogger Roger Witherspoon,  who formerly made tiger conservation grants for Exxon,  recently re-examined the impacts on wildlife of nuclear and fossil fuel cooling sytems. Witherspoon found that “The most destructive power plant in New York State,”  according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation, “is the coal and oil Northport Power Station in Suffolk County,  along the north shore of Long Island Sound.  That plant alone sucks more than 9.5 billion mature fish into its system annually.”

But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission found an impact on young fish that is magnitudes greater,  Witherspoon continued,  in an “environmental assessment of the twin Indian Point nuclear plants in Buchanan,  New York,  30 miles north of Manhattan in the heart of the Hudson River tidal estuary.  In determining that the overall impact on essential fish habitat is ‘small to moderate,'”  Witherspoon wrote,  “the agency noted approvingly that new screens installed in front of the 40-foot-wide intake pipes in 1984 had reduced the destruction of baby fish between 1984 and 1991 by 187 billion per year,”  from nearly 500 billion per year,  “to its present rate of just 300 billion.”

This not only causes enormous suffering to fish,  but would be illegal for conservation reasons,  if done by an individual.  “In most states,”  noted Witherspoon,   “if you catch undersized fish you would be fined.  But the Office of Management & Budget only sees value in the end product [of energy production] and the Environmental Protection Agency has applied this  rationale when examining the thermal impact of cooling systems.”

Noted for filing lawsuits against factory pig and poultry farms under the 1972 Clean Water Act,  the environmental organization Riverkeeper,  headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,   invoked the Clean Water Act in a recent federal lawsuit against “once through” cooling systems.   Riverkeeper lost on April 1,  2010,  when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to order the EPA to require Indian Point to use a closed cooling system,  which would not kill fish.  But the EPA in November 2010 settled further Riverkeeper litigation by agreeing to introduce new regulation of “once through” cooling by the end of March 2011.

At this writing,  publication of the new regulations has already been delayed once,  and may be delayed indefinitely,  or scrapped,  as result of the anti-EPA and anti-regulatory attitude of the Republican-dominated House of Representatives.

What if we talk about cruelty?

What if animal advocates were to decide that needlessly killing a trillion fish per year by methods every bit as grotesque as those of Marco Evaristti is an animal rights and welfare concern?

In legal terms,  the U.S. and indeed most of the world is still far from ready to accept the idea that a person may be convicted of cruelty to a fish–though fatal neglect of fish has occasionally been successfully prosecuted.  But what may be legally prosecuted tends to follow years and even decades behind general public recognition that a particular practice is unnecessarily cruel to animals.

In political terms,  there may be value in promoting recognition that there are cruelty issues in our societal choices of energy generating systems–and in our choices about how much energy we use in the first place.  Concern that a particular method of generating electricity kills fish,  frogs,  birds,  and muskrats or sea otters is unlikely at this time to have the greatest influence when political choices are made;  but where other considerations may be seen as having comparable weight,  concern about which choice might cause the most harm to animals could tip the balance.

Animal advocacy organizations have in recent times been reluctant to raise cruelty to fish,  crustaceans,  cephalopods,  and other invertebrate marine life as a humane issue–but this was not always the case.   Specific concern about cruelty to fish and crustaceans was from 1952 until 1977 included in the proposed United Nations “Charter of Rights for Animals” promoted by the Dutch-based World Federation for the Protection of Animals.  This language was lost only after the World Federation and two other organizations were merged to form the present World Society for the Protection of Animals,  which debuted in 1981 and  now promotes a revised version of the charter as the “Universal Declaration on Animal Welfare.”

ANIMAL PEOPLE and SHARK have each urged attention to the suffering of fish since each debuted in 1992.  People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society have each in recent years waged sporadic campaigns against cruelty to fish,  more or less “testing the waters.”

An encouraging hint of a “sea change” in public attitudes on behalf of fish,  reported in the March 2011 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE, was the favorable public and media response to a recent Mercy for Animals undercover investigation of live skinning at a Texas catfish farm,  and subsequent unsuccessful effort to prosecute the proprietor for cruelty.

Emboldened by growing success in opposition to cruelty to factory farmed animals,  after decades of despairing that the public could be brought to care about species slaughtered for food by the multi-millions and billions,  the animal advocacy cause may be close to rediscovering cruelty to fish.

But despite the magnitude of fish suffering caused by energy plant cooling systems,  fish are scarcely the only animals who are harmed by energy production.  Though fish are by far the most numerous victims,  the case for raising animal suffering as an aspect of the energy debate does not rest on harm to fish alone.

Neither does raising concern about animal suffering as an aspect of the energy debate require politicians to become any more enlightened about fish suffering in specific and animal issues in general than they already are.  Politicans merely must be brought to recognize that the considerable numbers of voters who care about animals perceive cruelty as a dimension of energy issues.

Politicians still like to be photographed in the act of fishing,  especially while proclaiming interest in maintaining a healthy environment.  This may not change soon.  Few of those politicians,  however,  might like to be perceived as someone who would switch on Evaristti’s blender.

—Veteran journalist Merritt Clifton serves as Editor in Chief of ANIMAL PEOPLE, the world’s leading independent publication on animal issues.

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