Last week, as the world was gathering to hear what George Bush had to say about war with Iraq, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., rose up in the Senate to note that the commander in chief had already gone to war against the environment.
She mentioned incursions against clean air and clean water, all announced in after-hours, Friday night releases which proclaimed that in pursuit of cleaner air and water, present standards had to be rolled back, while trees had to be chopped down to save forests. Most important, she pointed out a new and unforgivable target of the president's assault on the world of nature, the dolphin. He may rue the day. He is messing with one of the most undeniably delightful of God's creations, one loved by humans since the time of the Greeks. He might as well declare open season on golden retrievers.
President Bush has put dolphins in harm's way from Mexican fishermen, and he better expect to hear from the schoolchildren of America. Fourteen years ago, they were aroused to action when Boxer, then a House member, wrote a bill with Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., and Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., to save dolphins from the fishermen's nets that were a death trap for hundreds of thousands of them.
Their teachers, who may also have been fans of TV's "Flipper," encouraged them, and environmental groups provided postcards of protest. The little lobbyists flooded the White House and Congress with mercy pleas for the dolphins. The small scribes carried a big stick, a boycott: a law protecting dolphins or no tuna sandwiches in their lunch boxes.
Congress gave way and passed a law permitting canners who pledged not to use nets in waters frequented by dolphins to put a "dolphin-safe" label on tuna fish cans.
For some reason -as mysterious as those perfect wedge formations of flying geese- some tuna like to swim under dolphins. Fishermen went to violent lengths to scare off the dolphins, using helicopters, speedboats and explosives to get at their prey. Dolphins reacted badly. They had heart attacks, they drowned. Mothers were separated from their calves, and the babies were eaten by sharks.
Since Miller-Boxer passed, dolphin deaths have declined dramatically, from about 100,000 a year to 10,000, although some scientists think they are under-reported.
Now President Bush again wants to repair what is not broken. He has changed the rules. Under pressure from Mexico, whose fishermen have been shut out of U.S. markets because of their anti-dolphin practices, the U.S. Commerce Department, despite disputed findings by scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, loosened the rules so that Mexican fishermen will be eligible for the "dolphin-safe" labels. They just have to say they didn't kill dolphins to get their catch. U.S. tuna companies, such as Star-Kist and Bumblebee, which had made their peace in 1990 with the environmentalists, complain that the label now has lost all its meaning.
A California environmental group called Earth Island Institute has filed suit calling for a stay on the issuance of the new labels. "It's a huge affront," says Dave Phillips of the institute. Rep. Miller says, "This is a fight we should not have to fight again."
In the curious lexicon of Bush environmental philosophy, dolphins are not discriminated against. Bush has no more compassion for the elephant, the mascot of his party. For trade's sake, at a recent U.N. convention, the United States voted against a 13-year-old ban on trade in elephant ivory, delivering them to murderous poachers.
The dolphins' fate is once again in the hands of American schoolchildren. We must look to grades one through six to instruct their president in the basic lesson of reverence for "all creatures great and small."
Source: U.S. Press