The fishing industry's use and abuses of the ocean and its effect on the dolphin population is an important environmental issue for many reasons, as well as being an interesting and compelling debate on the moral side of things. As a philosophy minor with more than a passing interest in this subject, while trying to avoid 'slactivist' truisms, I can't help but look at the moral as well as scientific implications of accidentally killing an organism that is evolutionarily advanced enough to understand variations of meaning in human word order (a foreign language of a foreign species, to put that in a little perspective. I had a hard enough time wrapping my mind around that in German classes). As evidenced through training and dolphin shows that most Americans are at least familiar with they have a huge capacity to learn, and as evidenced by classroom discussions, they have a huge mental facility that surpasses humans though according to the professor 'what they do with that is not known'. But it exists. This means they think, and therefore 'are' and are therefore moral beings. Some would argue in environmental philosophy that the ability to feel pain is the only prerequisite for being taken into moral consideration, and obviously the dolphin falls into this category as well.
Humanity has a pointed tendency to glean what they want from a natural resource and leave the rest in ruins and basically be pretty comfortable with those actions. Human perception of dolphins is an example of that. New-Age swamis purport that gazing into dolphin eyes is an enlightening thing to do, and they do this essentially I think in the spirit of making sixteen-hundred dollars off of tourists seeking some kind of spiritual fulfillment (Broad). Or a nice time. But either way, humans seems to get a lot of enjoyment out of playing with dolphins, slapping dolphin pictures up on their walls, peering at them in aquariums and feeling good about themselves when they buy 'dolphin-safe' tuna. The argument here isn't that this dolphin issue should be the biggest thing on people's minds. People don't wake up in the morning worried about dolphin populations strangling in nets. This is hardly surprising. People generally don't awaken to recurring thoughts about third-world babies dying awful deaths either. A certain amount of awfulness, just like a certain amount of exploitation seems par for the course in society. I choose to read into the correlation between these two conditions.
Most dolphins have an array of scars along their bodies whose origins can be reasonably traced back to tangles with boats and fishing equipment. I don't criticize people for not being more active about injustices like that just yet, because we seem to have the same attitude towards people of lower social ranks. Basically anything remote from our immediate situation is deemed 'less human' or more precisely simply 'less important'. I've worked in factories where exhaust valves were pointed directly at lines of assembly workers, amusingly enough right over the cake we were packing up for consumption. That can't be good for anyone but I wasn't terribly concerned, I don't even like cake. It's this attitude of the unimportance of the remote that I find repugnant, and contributes to occurrences like the dolphin injury and slaughter.
How do I propose the governement remedy this? As ridiculous as it sounds, I think a general education about things that don't concern us and we don't have to pay for but that is still relatively interesting is the answer. Isn't this what we already have in high schools institutions of public learning? Not really. Society hasn't set us up with educational facilities available to the vast public that seem very interesting. Public school becomes a remote experience that one puts away once the work is done (or before that) in favor of sidling up to that Xbox or television. Mainstream life is so incredibly tedious that we must be constantly distracted from it. There's a million dollar enterprise I myself participate in where I get to pretend I'm a big scary barbarian (or Sith Lord, or necromancer or an angelic distributor of justice depending on the game) from a medieval locale instead of a petite twenty-something from rural Maine. I read copiously yet for the most part can't get my mind around our oceanography text. Because as Louis C.K. during a PTA conference famously stated, “Because school sucks. Right?” implying in an episode of Louie that that's just a part of life we've all got to deal with.
What we see in private schools (think boarding schools for the older students and Montessori or Waldorf schools for the little ones) that a lower percentage of the population is able to attend obviously because of monetary or transportation issues are situations where school seems like a fun world of discovery and one actually feels like a scholar learning rote items so that they may discover things previously undiscovered instead of feeling like they are constantly reinventing the wheel throughout their lives. They are immersion experiences where one feels they are truly accomplishing something for its own sake or for real goals they came up with not just society's expectations, not just to get an abstract piece of paper. This is how we get people to care about things like dolphins dying because our over abundant population needs to feast on cheap cans of tuna, and third world babies die because we can't be bothered or we need cheap coffee or diamond engagement rings. We need for people to feel connected and truly involved in their own lives, making real decisions. We need for young people to have a macro view of the world that goes beyond long reaching effects of capitalism and selfishness, we need a macro view that is simpler than that: the world is bigger than what we are doing that day. The issues and effects of science is bigger than memorizing information from a text book. Money and time are made up. In my field of English I've found understanding the nuances between heartbreak and joy, rage and blasphemy, love and absence are more important than the MLA handbook. On the issue of dolphins, creatures whether they're man-eaters (Broad) or embodiments of the third eye, or simply playful fun creatures that no sane individual would want to bring any harm to, their pain is more important than convenience at the grocery store. We need education in order to make people see that simple truth. Rich people, poor people, no matter what country, few people far in between that I've met and discussed these matters with seem to see that we have responsibilities more important than good grades, Facebook statuses or having a driver's license. And I am no different, I have all three. I just notice these things.
Works Cited
Broad, William J. "An Article on Dolphin Aggression."
New Jersey Fishing. The New York Times, n.d. Web. 6 Dec 2010.
"DOLPHINS." Earth Trust. Hawaii's Marine Wildlife, n.d.
Web. 6 Dec 2010.
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