Taking responsibility for shit

It’s interesting, the questions people ask on finding out you’re a marine biologist. Recently I’ve noticed a theme: what people (in the UK anyway) want to know is what do I think about all the sewage going into the sea? Now I’m as prone as anyone to taking the ‘actually it’s a bit more complicated than you may have heard’ stance on many issues, but here I am pretty happy to stick with a simple ‘yep, it’s pretty bad isn’t it?’ 

Of course, it is a bit more complicated than this - for instance, my local river, the Don, is far cleaner now than it was 50 years ago when it was “…grossly polluted and fishless throughout almost its entire catchment”. And for a few weeks back in the late 1990s I worked on a campaign to try to stop South West Water from polluting the coast around Portsmouth with raw sewage. So none of this is new, but, due no doubt to recent coverage of the low performance and high profits of the privatised water companies, this is certainly an issue that has ‘cut through’.

However. The other morning in a taxi to the station to catch an early train, when my driver raised this, what he was specifically disgusted about was ‘nappies and condoms and sanitary towels on the beaches’. Now I’m not about to leap to the defence of the water companies, but - those kinds of things should be nowhere near the sewage system. They should be going in the bin, not down the loo. And if they are flushed away, that’s on us. Time to take some responsibility.

[Naturally I didn’t actually say any of this to the cabbie. He was quite a forceful personality, it was 6.30am, and I’m English - I settled for an ambiguous tut.]

I have a similar feeling when I see headlines like this one in The Guardian yesterday: “Survey finds that 60 firms are responsible for half of world’s plastic pollution”. I mean yes, these firms are producing the plastic. But we’re consuming it. To be fair - the article itself does touch on this tension between individual and corporate responsibility. But even if these multinationals follow through on their pledges to switch to recycled plastic or bioplastics or some other material - all of these have environmental impacts, sometimes really significant ones. Ultimately: as long as we keep buying shit, they’ll keep selling it.

Treating the symptoms or the cause of a crisis

Imagine. You are walking along the coast and encounter a stranded dolphin. Every instinct is to try to alleviate this stress, to get the animal back out to sea.

But imagine this scene is replicated all along the beach, in fact over thousands of kilometres of coastline: countless dolphins in distress. And imagine you know exactly why this is happening: let’s say it’s directly attributable to the activities of some colossal multinational offshore industry interfering with their sonar.

So maybe getting the dolphins back to sea is not a great idea. Maybe they need to be temporarily taken into captivity.

A major effort to build a dolphinarium ensues. Maybe it’s part-funded by the multinational company. Maybe it’s widely publicised in the global media. A new home providing temporary respite for three, four, even five dolphins.

Perhaps everyone agrees that the only way the dolphins have a long-term future is for the multinational to transition to less damaging activities - the technology already exists, all that’s needed is some political will.

Those behind the dolphinarium argue powerfully that it is a necessary short-term emergency response, keeping some dolphins healthy while the larger issues are addressed. Others argue equally powerfully that it is at best a drop in the ocean, at worst ineffective greenwashing, that can never match the scale of the disaster.

This thought experiment was prompted by an atypically enlightening twitterx discussion I encountered yesterday about our response to the ongoing coral bleaching crisis, and in particular whether small-scale efforts such as reef restoration have any positive role to play. Is anything other than rapid decarbonisation of the global economy mere dolphinarium building? (You can jump into the discussion here and work forwards and back).

Honestly, I don’t know. But it’s hard to stand by and watch local catastrophes unfold, even if their causes are global. I mean, most of us would still try to save the dolphin, wouldn’t we?

Header image © Danny Copeland https://www.dannyunderwater.com/: bleached coral in New Caledonia in 2016