Eccentric Flower:199808/elevators and fisheries

seventeen august ninety eight two p m

elevators and fisheries

Wet today. Will spare you the standard rant about uselessness of umbrellas.

I work in a four-story building. Elevators have a floor that they tend to sit at when they're not actually being used. It is a continual mystery to me why the resting floor of the elevator in this building is 3. You'd think the first floor would be correct. Yes, the third floor gets the most traffic, but people generally want to ride the elevator up TO it.

Then again, I may be making a mistake by assuming there was forethought behind this.

The elevator is one of the world's slowest anyway; I have routinely beaten someone from 1 to 3 by using the stairs. And I don't run.

In other, non-vertical news, this morning's Globe had an article with the amazing ecological revelation that drag fishing (where the net scrapes across the bottom, sweeping up everything in its path) destroys the sponges and critters that live on the ocean floor. Duh. I get really unhappy every time I read an article about the ecological damage the fishermen are doing - not that they're worse than certain kinds of loggers and miners, but because they're more pigheaded about it.

It seems to me like the loggers have an attitude like tobacco companies - Yeah, we know we're doing a lot of damage, but we'll never admit to it in public. The fishermen are more oblivious, as in - But there are still plenty of fish! Look! We're not hurting anything!

In fairness - when the fishermen get squeezed it's still a personal issue in this country; fishing has not been completely absorbed by the conglomerates the way other industries have. When you tell the fishermen that they can't fish Georges Bank for the foreseeable future, you're not hurting Gorton's or the men in the really big boats who work for The Company; you're mostly hurting the little guy who goes out in a little boat every morning before dawn breaks.

There are also issues with other countries cheating - it hurts to be told you can't fish in certain waters and then watch as the Japanese fish there anyway.

Nonetheless, someone has to lose. I'd rather eat bland fish-farm fish for the rest of my life than destroy what parts of the ocean we haven't already poured trash into.

Thus endeth our Tree-Hugging Interlude.

previous
next
this month

© columbine