Whales, Nuclear ‘Wessels’ and Ocean Clean-Up

WHALES, NUCLEAR WESSELS AND OCEAN CLEAN-UP
ALAMEDA—Chequered History or Check-Mate?

Alameda—where they keep the Nuclear Wessels, according to Pavel Chekov, in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, 1986

With a flourish of ceremonial shovels, construction began last week on the site of the (closed) U.S. Naval Air Station, on what will become Alameda’s first major market-rate multi-family development in four decades. Alameda Point sits on the North shore of San Francisco Bay, with strategic connections to Oakland, the Sacramento River and the Bay Area.

Manila Bay whale sculpture made entirely from plastic beach waste in Philippines, image courtesy Greenpeace

It will be familiar to vintage Star Trek fans for its connection with whales, nuclear generators and Space. Alameda has tolerated empty lot syndrome since the ‘nineties—vast spaces where appropriate development could enhance the former NAS site, but records of clean-up procedures are causing concern. The Navy contractor’s method of landfill and dumping radio-active soil and ground liquids has been questioned.

Developers for the project assure that testing and re-certification will continue, as old naval buildings and pavement are torn up to make room for the new 70-acre development, known as Site A: it will include 800 residential units, up to 600,000 square feet of commercial space and a ferry terminal that will connect to San Francisco—plus parks and open space.

According to U.S. Navy’s Environmental Coordinator for the Alameda cleanup, Cecily Sabedra:

“Tetra Tech was the contractor who performed environmental investigation and cleanup tasks throughout the former NAS Alameda, including Site A. The Navy’s internal-review safeguards and the regulatory-review process indicate Alameda data are accurate and the work completed to date at Alameda is protective of human health. Quality assurance and quality control measures, including field oversight and data review by Navy personnel and regulatory agencies, have been and continue to be in place at Alameda to verify data are representative of site conditions.”

From Cold War Seaplane Landing to Wildlife Reserve

Old Alameda Naval Air base runways for U.S. fleet flight deck and seaplane landings, now rare bird lagoon

Tetra Tech was deeply involved at another portion of the 2,800-acre Alameda Naval Air Station property, Site 2, which is deemed a toxic Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The station was an active military installation for fleet aviation activities from the 1930s to the 1990s. Former jet runways, and anchorage for Cold War sea planes and Navy submersibles can still be seen.

In Tetra Tech’s 200-page remedial action work plan, submitted to the Navy and other U.S. government agencies in 2013, Site 2 contained radium-226 and other radioactive materials. In the 1940s, workers coated instruments such as dials using a radio-luminescent paint containing the isotope. Rags and paint brushes were then discarded at the site.

Over a period of sixty years, the land had been a dumping ground for other materials like asbestos, pesticides, sandblasting grit, medical waste and tear gas agents. In ‘cleaning’ the area, Tetra Tech bulldozed in a multi-layer soil mix, to cover the old landfill.

Wilderness will Find a Way—Wildlife Move Back In

Osprey landing on rusty light-stand nest to feed young, in former Seaplane Lagoon

Site 2—owned by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs—will remain closed for the ‘foreseeable future’.

Since becoming redundant in the 1990s, Mother Nature has stepped in to reclaim such wasteland: now home to several endangered species of birds. Harbor seals have moved back into the lagoon and this is third year a pair of ospreys have nested on the old light stand at the entrance to Seaplane Lagoon.

After an impasse was reached in 2004 between the U.S. Navy and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (aka Fish & Game) for creation of a national wildlife refuge, the property was offered to the Department of Veterans Affairs (V.A.). The V.A. plans to build an outpatient clinic and columbarium on 112 acres of its land, but the other 511 acres of V.A. land will remain undeveloped. The undeveloped area is where egrets and endangered California Least Terns come to nest early April to mid-August each year.

Wild Mountain Lion Migrate Across 101

Baby cougar faces future from her den in Thousand Oaks, Santa Monica mountains

Megalopolis concerns are with a family of cougar kittens in Thousand Oaks, CA.—being monitored/tagged by National Parks Service researchers—where as grown wildcats they will have to cross Highway 101 to find new breeding grounds—the nearest wild forest being several hundred miles to the north. Cougar have had to adapt to urban sprawl before. Most famous is Parks’ Service favorite, “P-22” who crossed several freeways in Santa Monica, headed south into Los Angeles and took up residence in downtown Griffith Park.

He’s still there. What a Cool Cat.

San Francisco’s former military HQ, the Presidio, with its unparalleled view of the Golden Gate Bridge, has become a model for native plant species and habitat restoration since 1994. That year, the U.S. military machine turned its back on war and handed the land over to the National Parks Service. It subsequently created the Presidio Trust which now oversees 80% of the park. Here endangered and indigenous plant life is being nurtured back to profusion by Parks’ botanists, with a little nightly help from vole, gopher, racoon, fox and coyote. The bears left a long time ago—ages before it was a military stronghold.

Chernobyl nuclear hazard sign after April 26, 1986 explosion blanketed Europe in radio-active fog for a week

Encouragingly, wildlife in Chernobyl, a former 50,000-population density town in Ukraine within a 1,000-sq.mile forest (4300km2 Chernobyl Exclusion Zone) are moving through the irradiated landscape in droves, and showing little sign of becoming mutants. European research teams have been tracking population growth of wolves, bear, mountain lion and multiple migrating birds for over a decade, and proclaim so far no adverse genetic change.

Crop Circles Echo a Nuclear Warning

Nuclear warning by crop circle? Latest to appear in Wiltshire field near Stonehenge, drone shot courtesy Nick Bull

Even our crop circling Alien friends seem concerned for our welfare. The latest—July 8th, 2018—depicting a nuclear device—appeared overnight in unharvested wheat in Coneybury Hill, near Stonehenge, Wiltshire. Whereas Salisbury farmers were formerly stressed over public trespass and crop trampling, they now tolerate drone fly-overs and crop circle photography has taken an upswing.

There are positive aspects to our human concern for proliferating the planet with our own waste. As we become aware of our past destructive habits, like dumping plastic in the ocean—the city of New York only stopped dumping municipal waste by barge into the Atlantic in 1992—we discover alternative methods of clean-up.

Within the last five years Woods Hole, Massachusetts marine microbiologists have recorded a reduction in marine plastic waste in world oceans.

They are convinced it is being eaten.

Leave it to the Micro-Plankton
NOAA has recorded a massive 90% drop in ocean pollution statistics worldwide since 2011, declaring there is no Pacific garbage patch.

Marine bacteriologists are convinced, however, that, as plastic degrades through sunlight and the wave action of salt water into the tiniest fragments, this plastic confetti becomes the preferred diet of micro-organisms who attach to such clustered ‘reefs’ of food, extracting toxins in their digestion.

Casualty on Huntington Beach—at least he pecked his way through the bag

”Plastic-eating bacteria help explain why the amount of debris in the ocean has levelled off, despite continued pollution. But researchers don’t yet know whether their digestion produces harmless by-products, or whether it might introduce toxins into the food chain.”
Tracy Mincer, Marine Microbiologist Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

If NOAA’s “missing 90%” of microscopic plastic fragments in the oceans is being eaten—mostly by bacteria and other microbes—these little microscopic helpers will continue to eat the plastic. If we can reduce the amount of plastic going into the oceans, via our beaches, they may eventually eat it all up.

Wouldn’t that be a world initiative worth achieving?

Seattle and Starbucks have banned the use of plastic utensils and cups; and Hawai’i has agreed to ban all commercial sunscreens as of January 2021, to help slow coral reef decay.

If we continue with responsible water cleanup worldwide—as some humanitarian philanthropists are currently showing the way—we ‘oldies’ may emerge from the “Plastic Age” unscathed, sooner than our grandchildren predict.

Then we, the guilty, messy generation, can turn the tables on our former selves and become our own success story.
©2018 Siderealview

Like the Buffalo, Heading into the Wind

Last of the harvest

Equinox is approaching; light shines for fewer hours; the Earth’s northern hemisphere cools. A hinge on the doorway of the seasons swings to a close.
Time reaches the halfway point between solstice and solstice; it pauses, giving all of us equal hours of day and night at once, at one. There is still hope. Then the door closes.

There is definitely a feeling of closure around right now. In turbulent times we resort to gathering in of faculties, pulling in the feelers after a tentative burst of faith and hope that the world would change overnight. Did we believe that by our being blasted with Cosmic Rays, messages from ET, a flurry of spiritual internet (and out-of-planet) communication, that we might find a quick fix, a rescue remedy to reach the Promised Land? After the pinnacles of 09/09/09, three eclipses, admonitions to prepare for a Life Change, a Planetary Shift, Shift of the Ages, there now seems a finality to each day, a touch of chill descends at night. The summer of 2009 gently pulls down its curtain and allows us to retreat from the elements, to enter our caves for the winter.

Many cultures of ancient tradition take this time to go inward spiritually. Eastern philosophies turn from waning light without and focus on the light within. Autumn lecture tours by gurus and autumnal spiritual retreats abound. Others in the West find solace in working to consolidate one’s own projects, to take stock and assimilate knowledge, insight, light gained over summer.
For a writer this should be a glorious time: more access to internet and computer hours to satisfy even a librarian.

This writer is a gardener though and the gardener in her demurs. Doesn’t want to let go of the light; the feeling of summer still warm on the skin is seductive, there is a longing for a reprise, a need made more poignant by the last rays of the sun, the gathering of swallows.

Not all of us, however, may like grasshoppers flee the wintertime. Change is often a call to the human urge to move on. We need to heed the call.

Fall was traditionally – and in some places still is – a time of migration. Food supplies dry up with shortening days, earth has given her all: the wise move on. Swallows, songbirds, geese are the last in Europe to leave, while their fellow residents still gather in the harvest: human farmers barley and wheat, animal residents nuts and berries. In the Pacific NW mammals of the old regime are urged by primeval instinct to move to winter grounds. Wolf, elk, bear, caribou, mountain lion and moose all have to find more food, shelter, winter quarters.

Farther south there used to be buffalo.

Heading into the Wind

Now with little territory of their own, bison (political correctness of terminolgy goes with manipulation of animals) have nowhere to move. They are herded like other domestic beasts, subject to humanity. We are now trying to do the same with wolves.

The Wolf, unlike the Buffalo, is fighting back. There is a current initiative to overturn Washington’s recent shortsighted alteration to the Endangered Species Act.

They say our only way forward as a Race is to follow our inner urge to move with the times. That we should trust our guidance by our Higher (inner, wiser) Self to bring us out of the mess we’ve gotten ourselves and our planet into. The Earth is, after all, reaching out to show us how to do it.

At autumnal equinox, the beauty of light, growth in its final stature (before the fall) and abundance of fruit, prolific increase in bird and vegetable kingdoms, all give us hope to nurture us through the winter, to protect us from wilds of weather and wind. As well as gathering in the harvest, we are being asked to ‘gather into the fold’, to foster in ourselves a spirit of endurance.

Mountain lion, cougar or Kelly's Cat, wild cat is a survivor

In all older traditions there was one totem animal that embodied endurance. Russia had Bear; Norway, Sweden, Finland have Reindeer; Central Europe (used to) have the Wolf; North Africa and the Middle East the Camel; Central Africa the Cat; both Americas had the Eagle. But in addition to Native American’s respect for Eagle, his admiration went out to Buffalo.

When all of surrounding humankind is packing up tipi, provisions, families and goods to find winter hunting grounds, following migrant animals was a way of life. It more often than not included hardship and trek over difficult terrain to get there. Death, survival and jubilation on arrival were common in both man and animal. Native American wisdom says that animal teaches Man how to live.

When all else failed, the buffalo headed out from sunny summer plains and through what seems like insuperable odds, braved wind, hail and snow to reach better ground.

We are being asked to do the same. Human nature has the power of endurance, the intellect and spirit to survive and ensure survival. Along with our fellow earth residents, we have an obligation to care for both summer plains and winter feeding grounds. Without our care, they won’t be there next fall.

Buffalo hooves are not made for concrete

We as a species are being asked to hold firm to what we believe. That we should show gratitude for the gift we have been given of this unique planet. That heaven-on-earth is as we make it. Nature will help, but we have to want to cooperate, not bully her into it.

We as a species are being asked to become custodians again: to care for our home like responsible animals; not trash it like hyenas and wild dogs: This is no longer simply wise; it is a necessity. Like the animal kingdom, we are being asked to look after our territory for ourselves, for our children, our families, our piece of the planet, and in combination with others, the planet as a whole.

This project we are taking on will not be easy. But we have been genetically engineered to overcome our past and endure its consequences. The journey will have its pitfalls. We may not arrive as we started out. But we will get there. If we do it together.

In order to get there, though, to make sure we reach our goal, by immersing ourselves in transition from medieval to superstellar species we, like the Buffalo, may have to head into the Wind.