Man Bites Shark: Why are shark attacks on the rise? Because the balance of power between man and shark lies firmly- too firmly- with man.
August 10, 2011
As if terrorism, warfare, and diseases weren’t scary enough, the past year has offered some ominous signs of an impending shark invasion into the waters where we swim, surf, and play, as the number of sightings and unprovoked strikes on humans has ticked ever upward. The number of reported shark attacks worldwide increased 25 percent in 2010, to a total of 79, and warm-weather shark observations off the U.S. East Coast is rising, prompting beach closures last summer everywhere from Brooklyn to Cape Cod. In January of this year, a pilot flying off Palm Beach, Florida, saw literally thousands of sharks, capturing the swarm with his iPhone (and terrifying plenty of humans in the process). A month later, police reported that two great whites had killed a diver off the South Australian coast. And in June, a Cornish mackerel fisherman claimed that a 6-foot oceanic whitetip shark rammed his boat, setting off a British media frenzy. These developments seem to suggest that sharks pose a more serious threat to us now than they did before — as if they’re either expanding in numbers, or just more determined to get us
Headlines such as “Fisherman’s boat rammed by man-eating shark off coastline“ and “Mom runs for son killed in shark attack,” after all, would strike terror into the hearts of even the most confident oceangoers.
In fact, the truth is more complicated. Sharks aren’t coming after us; we’re coming to them. Humans and sharks have been able to share the Earth for millions of years without a whole lot of interaction. But the two species are coming into contact more frequently than ever because of a variety of factors, including demographics (more people can afford beach vacations and growing urbanization means more people are living closer to the ocean), as well as environmental ones (such as climate change). That’s bad news for sharks, whose populations — despite the increased sightings — are in decline. And it has also provoked an international policy fight that pits global heavyweights like the United States and Europe against Japan and China, with small island nations divided between the two sides.
At first glance, sharks — with their sharp jaws, torpedo-shaped bodies, and unusual sensing abilities — appear to be bizarre vestiges of a distant past. But they can also tell us a lot about our present and our future. Where sharks appear in big numbers, coral reefs and other marine life around them thrive because they remove weak and sick animals from the system and can keep midlevel predators in check. When they shift their migrations, scientists often detect a shift in ocean temperatures and prey populations. For researchers seeking to create a more efficient electric battery, faster vessels, or a robot that can track oil and chemical spills underwater, sharks’ sleek and extraordinarily efficient bodies offer inspiration for design. In countries where their fins end up at the dinner table, economists can generally find rising incomes. The animal humans fear most has become a global commodity, an economic indicator, and environmental harbinger of things to come.
Most importantly, humans’ interaction with sharks shows the extent to which we are plumbing the ocean’s depths. After all, they don’t venture onto our territory; we encroach on theirs. In contrast to several Pacific island societies, which developed faith traditions around sharks eons ago after encountering them at sea, Westerners arrived late in the game when it comes to dealing with these creatures. Sharks only began to permeate the public consciousness in Europe in the late 1500s, when seafaring began in earnest. The first detailed eyewitness account of a shark strike comes from the 1580 Fugger News-Letter, which chronicles a sailor falling off his ship somewhere between Portugal and India. He caught a line that his shipmates tossed him, but according to the article, “there appeared from below the surface of the sea a large monster, called Tiburon; it rushed on the man and tore him to pieces before our very eyes. That surely was a grievous death.”
It took another 336 years for average Americans to begin feeling vulnerable to sharks, since swimming in the ocean was not a popular leisure activity until the early 1900s. At the inception of the modern bathing era, a series of attacks between July 1 and 12, 1916, off the New Jersey shore killed four people and injured another. That week-and-a-half of terror had a series of ripple effects: It not only damaged tourism in the area, but cost President Woodrow Wilson votes in his home state that fall and convinced Americans that sharks presented a real and present danger.
Ever since then, simple demographics have continued to bring humans and sharks closer together. Half of Americans live within 60 miles of a coast, according to 2010 census data. Globally, according to the Save Our Seas Foundation, more than three-quarters of the population lives that near to the sea…
Omaha’s radical experiment in school integration could serve as a national model—though local resistance indicates it might be a tough sell
Tyliesha Tucker attends a well-regarded high school in Nebraska’s Bellevue school district. Last year, Tyliesha, who is 15 and “pretty hilarious” by her own description, went to her local school in the Omaha Public School District. So did her 13-year-old brother, Kevin. But then there was the incident in the bathroom with a group of girls who had been tormenting her.
Tyliesha won’t tell me exactly what happened. But her mother, Mildred, knows and remembers well the day it happened: “Tyliesha kept calling me, crying, saying, ‘Take me out of here!’” Mildred had been worried about her kids well before that. Kevin, who was in eighth grade at the time, kept getting into fights on the school bus. And Tyliesha had been complaining to her mom about bullying and gang violence for a while. The previous year, her friend had been shot right near the school. So the bathroom incident was really just the last straw.
“That was the day I decided to opt her out of that school,” says Mildred, an African American single mother who maintains the family on a small income of Social Security and state assistance. “That afternoon, I went to the Bellevue administrative building and signed them both up. I just knew I had to get them out of there.”
Against all evidence, many believe the nation has already addressed the problem of school segregation. Court-ordered busing, the best known remedy, began in the 1970s and helped ease racial segregation and raise African American academic achievement. However, because it didn’t give parents choice, busing was a political disaster, and a short-lived one. Most cities, including Omaha, abandoned or at least reduced busing after 1980, a year that marked the peak of school integration. As a result, today African American and Latino students across the country attend more-segregated schools than at any point in the past 20 years. At the same time, poverty in those schools has become more concentrated: Increasing numbers of students of color now go to schools that have a majority of low-income attendees. Children at these schools, research shows, tend to fare worse academically.
In some recent, high-profile cases, poor women have been charged with felonies for lying about their address to get their children into better, out-of-district schools. Not in Omaha. Mildred easily opted out of her local school thanks to an experiment in educational reform more far-reaching than any other in the country. Omaha and 10 nearby school districts have formed what’s called the Learning Community, a groundbreaking arrangement that links the districts financially and encourages students to enroll in a school in another district within the community if their presence helps make the school more economically diverse.
Omaha’s project is our country’s most radical experiment in socioeconomic integration. (Since a 2007 Supreme Court decision, Seattle v. the People United, limited race-based approaches to school integration, virtually all efforts have been based on income.) To be sure, as a model it is not without its problems: Bitter conflict plagued the process of creating the Learning Community, and it is also unclear how other cities might follow Omaha’s lead, since the city’s approach to school reform grew out of unusual local law. Still, because Omaha’s socioeconomic mix matches that of the country overall, because the area is small enough to make interdistrict transportation possible, and because of its sheer ambition, this Central Plains city is a perfect place to show the rest of the nation how school integration could work.
“No one has ever done what they’re doing,” says Jennifer Jellison Holme, an assistant professor of educational policy and planning at the University of Texas at Austin, who studies regional efforts to create diversity in schools. Holme thinks many leaders of the Learning Community don’t realize how pioneering they are. “They get elected and say, ‘Let’s look to other cities’ models.’ But there are no models. They’re literally doing it all for the first time in this country.”
Until five years ago, the story of the Omaha-area schools had been fairly typical of those in the rest of the country, with real-estate values largely determining the quality of public education. Omaha may be best known for Mutual of Omaha, one of five Fortune 500 companies located here; another is Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. Yet while Nebraska is a mostly white and, in spots, very wealthy state, its largest city is not. African Americans, who account for only 4.5 percent of state residents, make up almost half of Omaha Public School students. Swahili is one of the most common second languages spoken by students. The city is also home to the fifth poorest African American community in the country, and the inner core of Omaha is as violent and troubled as any urban center you might find in bigger American metropolises. During the four days I was there this spring, 12 people were shot.
Is That All There Is? Secularism and its discontents
August 10, 2011
I have a friend, an analytic philosopher and convinced atheist, who told me that she sometimes wakes in the middle of the night, anxiously turning over a series of ultimate questions: “How can it be that this world is the result of an accidental big bang? How could there be no design, no metaphysical purpose? Can it be that every life—beginning with my own, my husband’s, my child’s, and spreading outward—is cosmically irrelevant?” In the current intellectual climate, atheists are not supposed to have such thoughts. We are locked into our rival certainties—religiosity on one side, secularism on the other—and to confess to weakness on this order is like a registered Democrat wondering if she is really a Republican, or vice versa.
These are theological questions without theological answers, and, if the atheist is not supposed to entertain them, then, for slightly different reasons, neither is the religious believer. Religion assumes that they are not valid questions because it has already answered them; atheism assumes that they are not valid questions because it cannot answer them. But as one gets older, and parents and peers begin to die, and the obituaries in the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place but local letters, and one’s own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral, such moments of terror and incomprehension seem more frequent and more piercing, and, I find, as likely to arise in the middle of the day as the night. I think of these anxieties as the Virginia Woolf Question, after a passage in that most metaphysical of novels “To the Lighthouse,” when the painter Lily Briscoe is at her easel, mourning her late friend Mrs. Ramsay. Next to her sits the poet, Augustus Carmichael, and suddenly Lily imagines that she and Mr. Carmichael might stand up and demand “an explanation” of life:
For one moment she felt that if they both got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped human beings from whom nothing should be hid might speak, then, beauty would roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return. “Mrs. Ramsay!” she said aloud, “Mrs. Ramsay!” The tears ran down her face.
Why is life so short, why so inexplicable? These are the questions Lily wants answered. More precisely, these are the questions she needs to ask, ironically aware that an answer cannot be had if there is no one to demand it from. We may hope that “nothing should be hid” from us, but certain explanations can only ever be hidden. Just as Mrs. Ramsay has died, and cannot be shouted back to life, so God is dead, and cannot be reimplored into existence. And, as Terrence Malick’s oddly beautiful film “The Tree of Life” reminds us, the answers are still hidden even if we believe in God. Lily Briscoe’s “Why?” is not very different from Job’s “Why, Lord?”
I have a friend, an analytic philosopher and convinced atheist, who told me that she sometimes wakes in the middle of the night, anxiously turning over a series of ultimate questions: “How can it be that this world is the result of an accidental big bang? How could there be no design, no metaphysical purpose? Can it be that every life—beginning with my own, my husband’s, my child’s, and spreading outward—is cosmically irrelevant?” In the current intellectual climate, atheists are not supposed to have such thoughts. We are locked into our rival certainties—religiosity on one side, secularism on the other—and to confess to weakness on this order is like a registered Democrat wondering if she is really a Republican, or vice versa.
These are theological questions without theological answers, and, if the atheist is not supposed to entertain them, then, for slightly different reasons, neither is the religious believer. Religion assumes that they are not valid questions because it has already answered them; atheism assumes that they are not valid questions because it cannot answer them. But as one gets older, and parents and peers begin to die, and the obituaries in the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place but local letters, and one’s own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral, such moments of terror and incomprehension seem more frequent and more piercing, and, I find, as likely to arise in the middle of the day as the night. I think of these anxieties as the Virginia Woolf Question, after a passage in that most metaphysical of novels “To the Lighthouse,” when the painter Lily Briscoe is at her easel, mourning her late friend Mrs. Ramsay. Next to her sits the poet, Augustus Carmichael, and suddenly Lily imagines that she and Mr. Carmichael might stand up and demand “an explanation” of life:
For one moment she felt that if they both got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped human beings from whom nothing should be hid might speak, then, beauty would roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return. “Mrs. Ramsay!” she said aloud, “Mrs. Ramsay!” The tears ran down her face.
Why is life so short, why so inexplicable? These are the questions Lily wants answered. More precisely, these are the questions she needs to ask, ironically aware that an answer cannot be had if there is no one to demand it from. We may hope that “nothing should be hid” from us, but certain explanations can only ever be hidden. Just as Mrs. Ramsay has died, and cannot be shouted back to life, so God is dead, and cannot be reimplored into existence. And, as Terrence Malick’s oddly beautiful film “The Tree of Life” reminds us, the answers are still hidden even if we believe in God. Lily Briscoe’s “Why?” is not very different from Job’s “Why, Lord?”
Laurel And Hardy, 2011
August 10, 2011
This image has been posted with express written permission. This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.
“Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw the torch; be yours to hold it high”
August 10, 2011
This image has been posted with express written permission. This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.
