Sea Turtles and Democracy

1. The Green Sea Turtles

The highlight of our recent trip to Costa Rica, (December, 2016), was a visit to Tortuguero State Park, situated on the Caribbean coast of the country.  “Tortuguero” literally means “turtle catcher”; the term refers to the days when hired locals would turn over the giant turtles onto their backs, where they helplessly remained until Spaniards came and killed them.  

An adult sea turtle weighs up to 1500 lbs; an average adult yields 75 lbs of meat. They're called green sea turtles because their flesh is green, due to the color of the vegetation they eat.  Their eggs were a  delicacy once, and in some places of the world, they probably –and mostly illegally—still are. Once in danger of extinction, sea turtles, thanks to the work of dedicated conservationists, are a protected species in most countries where they are present.  With continued vigilance, sea turtles will still be around to delight future generations of their very distant relatives, us.

Wise Costa Rican politicians (there were many horribly unwise ones as well in the history of this small Central American nation) have designated thirty percent of the country's land mass as national parks, a percentage that ranks among the highest in the world.  (An amazing fact: this land, the size of the U.S. state of West Virginia, is a very tiny fraction of the total land mass of the world; nevertheless it contains 5% of the world’s biological diversity).

Although Tortuguero is only 86 kilometers from our starting point, San José, the capital, it took us, counting breaks for breakfast and lunch, just about the whole day to get there.  There are no highways in Costa Rica; there isn’t even a direct route to the park: the  main roads zigzag across the country and thus make only slow progress in either the northern or southern direction.  In addition, about half of the route from San José to Tortuguero has to be covered by boat.

The beautiful, pristine beaches of Tortuguero State Park constitute  an important area in the life cycle of green sea turtles.  Every month, female sea turtles return to the same place where they were born—how they manage to do this is a mystery, at least to me.  Once on land, they dig a hole in the sand in which they lay about 120 eggs.  (August is the peak month of their nesting in Tortuguero; we didn’t see any adult turtles during our December visit.)  The eggs hatch two months later.

The local population of humans has learned that they can  make more money from tourism than they would from slaughtering sea turtles or from robbing their nests of its eggs.  Our guide works with a young man who takes tourists to nesting sites.  He knows knows where the ones with mature eggs lie.  He does this for ten dollars per head, which we—at least most of us—willingly paid.  (You know what he’d be doing if he couldn't make a profit in an ecological way.)  

After we agreed to hire him, he poured water over a nesting site; this simple procedure causes mature eggs to hatch.  By the time we got to the beach, scores of little critters were scurrying toward the ocean, a few hundred meters beyond the site of their birth.

Life isn’t easy for sea turtles. Only about one per brood makes it to adulthood.   While we watched them—it is not easy to hurry towards water when one’s means of locomotion is a pair of tiny flippers—vultures circled overhead.  None of them swooped down to snatch them—they, of course, feared more than hunger the most vicious predator of all, human beings.  With much effort,  the baby turtles eventually reached the sea.  We saw some being whacked back to shore by waves; none of these setbacks was permanent, however.  Every one reached the ocean, then quickly disappeared into it.  This is a photo I took of one, about halfway in its struggle to come to the end of dry sand: 

Their trials don’t end once they reach the liquid environment in which all life on Earth began.  Crabs and fish await them.  I hope the one in the photo is still alive!

As many of you know, we now live in the epoch called The Anthopocene Age, in which human beings, for the first time in natural history, are able to significantly alter the environment.    In this age of mass extinction, which began around 1950, turtles still must face the most vicious predator of all.  Human beings kill them in various ways, mostly indirectly now.  Some of these amazing reptiles get trapped in fishing nets; others become sick from  pollution. There is, for instance, a swirling mess the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean; the mess consists entirely of garbage.  Plastic does not degrade.  Many sea turtles, mistaking balls of plastic for jelly fish, die a slow death after swallowing  a meal of shimmering, diaphanous, unnatural junk.

All human beings, of course, are not vicious predators.  The majority of nesting areas throughout the world are now protected sites.  Many natural scientists continue to dedicate their lives to studying these sublime creatures, with the goal that they thrive, or at least don’t become extinct.  They are apparently succeeding.

(If I had my way, I would let natural predators have their way as well. I believe vultures should be vultures, crabs should be crabs and fish should be fish. When humans act like vultures, crabs, or fish, however, that is another matter.)

Back in the United States, I am filled with joy whenever these magnificent creatures swim about freely in the oceans of my mind.  (There is garbage there also, but I’m doing my best to remove it.  I wish everyone worked as hard to remove outer pollution as well.)

2.  An American Nightmare

I am a poet, images and music are my business.  It’s thus not surprising that I wrote many haiku in Costa Rica, even though I hardly ever write haiku.  The images of all the live wonders I saw there—sea otters, a rare chestnut-bellied heron, jacaras, caimans, iguanas, etc., seemed to me to be almost demanding to be captured and preserved in haiku.  To each his own: while my fellow tourists took pictures, I wrote poems—fourteen of them, in fact, during the course of our stay.  One of them, as you may have surmised, has baby sea turtles as its subject:

Birds of prey above;

Hatchlings scurry toward the sea—

Crabs and fish ahead.

Life is precious as it is precarious.  The best human institutions can become extinct as well, a horrifying thought. The fragility of existence, especially of human existence, more than now and then weighs heavily on my mind.

One night, after our return, I had a nightmare.  I saw a giant sea turtle, which, in my dream, represented American democracy.  I have always thought, although it lumbered clumsily toward its goal and got stuck sometimes, that our giant democracy was invincible. Yes, it could be injured and had many scars from wounds of the past, which were mostly self-inflicted--It was, however, far too big and strong to be killed.  Suddenly, the huge turtle behind my closed lids transformed into a newborn, faced with a gauntlet of creatures ready to devour it. For the first time in my life, I realized that democracy in my country was in serious danger, threatened by a demagogic vulture, corporate crabs and a sea full of ignorant fish.

As I woke up, this haiku came to mind:

Democracy must

Struggle toward equality—

Vultures overhead.

It’s a bad haiku, but, unfortunately for all of us, it is also distressingly true.