"The striped bass has been the noble creature that has led all our fights in the Hudson, and so far he remains undefeated." (Bob Boyle, in Striper Wars, p.99)
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| Striped Bass (Wikimedia Commons) |
Back when I wrote my dissertation (on the history of the relationship between ecological science and environmentalism; it eventually appeared as Ecologists and Environmental Politics), I was intrigued to discover the story of the striped bass. This fish played a big part in a controversy about the Indian Point nuclear power station on the Hudson River, upriver from New York. The controversy's eventual resolution relied, in part, on studies of the project's impact on the local striped bass populations. The episode illustrated, among other things, how ecosystem ecology had become by the 1970s surprisingly irrelevant to environmental decision-making.
So it was fun to come across the striped bass once again while tracking down the story of the Westway highway, proposed in the 1970s for the west side of Manhattan, and cancelled in the 1980s (as described in my last post). Pivotal events included a federal judge's decisions in 1982 and 1985. Using various sources, including Striper Wars: An American Fish Story, I learned how, just as with that nuclear station up the river, the case turned on the highway's potential impacts on the striped bass. Some biologists had argued that Manhattan's Hudson River shoreline, including its old piers, was important habitat for the fish. Highway advocates urged the opposite: that the Hudson River was an ecological wasteland, and that burying the piers under the Westway would have only a minor impact on the striped bass (it was also suggested they really preferred to hang out across the river, in New Jersey). Mayor Ed Koch offered to "build the [striped bass] a motel in Poughkeepsie where they c[ould] breed to heart's content" (quoted in William Buzbee, Fighting Westway). But the judge disagreed, ruling that this impact was unacceptable � and further, that the US Army Corps of Engineers had failed to conduct an honest environmental impact assessment.
This sort of outcome is common in environmental controversies: the manipulation of scientific evidence to support the preferences of powerful interests. It was also an episode in which one species played a leading role in a dispute that was really about very different issues (as I discussed in that previous post). This occurs often enough: sometimes with a relatively common species like the striped bass, more often with endangered species, on terrain defined by the Endangered Species Act. (Peter Alagona's superb book, After the Grizzly: Endangered Species and the Politics of Place in California, tells the story of several such controversies, involving the California Condor, the San Joaquin, the Mojave Desert Tortoise, and other species.)
For environmentalists, endangered species are often useful: they provide a symbol to rally around, and a foundation for legal arguments, especially in the United States. But we shouldn't lose track of how profoundly strange this is: that a single animal or fish should carry the entire burden of complex decisions about development and the environment. Sometimes the outcomes are as environmentalists would hope (the Endangered Species Act has been a powerful weapon). But it's worth wondering whether this is the most rational way of making decisions that have consequences far beyond the wellbeing of a single species.
I don't want to put too much theoretical weight on an innocent fish, but consider how in the debate over New York's Westway project the striped bass provided the contact point (in Science and Technology Studies terms, the boundary object) between two distinct ways of making decisions in the city, as embodied in the positions for or against the project. Much of the debate about the project turned on whether it was simply a vehicle for powerful but unelected interests. And when the judge ruled against the Westway project, and in favor of the striped bass, this species served as a surrogate for a deeper debate about democracy and citizenship in the city.
So I nominate the striped bass -- that "noble creature," as Bob Boyle described it -- as the first citizen (fish division) of New York City. This honor is in recognition of its role in stopping the Westway Project, and thereby reshaping Manhattan's west side. Congratulations to our finny friend. But it's worth wondering whether it's fair to bestow such a status (and responsibility) on a fish that just wanted to get on with spawning.
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