Robert Kirby
CHANNELVISION
How refreshing to watch a television documentary that leaves you with a feeling of hope; in this case that the excesses of human craving can be met without permanent loss to the natural world.
Sea horses have long been under siege and their numbers have become dangerously low. In this wise these fragile creatures share a perilous destiny with quite a number of other species. Rarities like rhino horns, abalone, shark fins, whales, dolphins, rare beetles, chameleons and many others are highly desired by the gentle folk of the Far East. If not used to inspire drooping male genitalia, they are firm favourites on menus from Beijing to Tokyo.
China alone consumes several million sea horses every year. Apart from their use as specifics against male impotency, they are blended in traditional medicines what terrible pillage is wreaked under the convenient excuse of “tradition”. Here the result is that the world population of sea horses is under a real threat of extinction. One would have hoped that, given the need for Chinese dwang stiffeners and that nation’s proclivity for ripping off intellectual property, a generic Viagra would long since have been available on Eastern streets this could take a lot of strain off nature.
Amanda Vincent, an American scientist working out of Oxford University, is dedicated to saving the sea horse. How she has gone about this was the subject of The Secret Life of Sea Horses, broadcast by BBC World in the new QED series. The first part of the programme showed some extraordinary film of sea horses they mate for life, always occupy the same little area of sea grass and feminists will love this it is the male who takes the female’s eggs into himself, gets pregnant and gives birth.
Then it was to the Phillippine islands, where villagers harvest what few sea horses they can now find. Where one diver used to catch 50 in a night’s work, he now gets 15 if he’s very lucky. What he’s paid for these is laughable.
With the help of an Indonesian biologist, Vincent made practical suggestions as to how the stocks could be amplified and replenished. In the face of deep local suspicion she managed to persuade the mayor of one small village that a part of the reef where the villagers fished should be set aside as a sea-horse reserve, somewhere to allow stocks to replenish. The results were positive; the numbers of sea horses started to multiply. The next step was to introduce the idea of sea-horse farming, again a success for pragmatism. And that’s where this happy story ended, with the idea being copied by other communities along the islands and the hope that bad old ways won’t be readopted. Amanda Vincent and her like are radiant beacons in a fog of grey bureaucrats sitting around in Convention on International Trade and Endangered Species conferences emitting profound policy statements.
Another BBC World series has been Future War, a three-part examination of how military conflict will be managed in the century ahead. The proposition of the title is realistic: the possibility of no wars at all is still too far off for consideration. The first programme was essentally a retrospective, taking a look at recent “smart bomb” campaigns in Kosovo and Iraq. The second was about the so-called “warrior cult” and was a thinly disguised promo for the United States marine corps, complete with a series of crew-cut colonels reiterating the weary old Hollywood-style themes about converting mindless macho youth into mindless macho soldiers.
It took until the third programme of this somewhat uneven and padded-out series to get down to what had been promised. It sought to explain that war, too, is becoming politically correct. A truly surprising element has been introduced to the conduct of war, in the shape of the Jags (judicial advocate-generals). These are military lawyers who now decide what targets may be hit and how hard, so that a set of dainty “rules of engagement” is not violated. Not one target in the recent Nato campaign in Kosovo was hit without the prior approval of these martial jurists.
I suppose it was inevitable that lawyers would get in on the act. The smell of all that military boodle was more than they could resist. The shysters have taken another hill and soldiers in the field now carry around little green instruction cards telling them whom they may kill and whom they may only tackle rugby-style and arrest.
I imagine it’s a goose step in the right direction.