Sea turtles

My friend Jessie Saclo is teaching a kindergarten class at Cebu International School. His students are doing war with the baddies of the world and doing art on behalf of sea turtles.

They have been making posters and writing letters to make us look closer at what is going on in the West Philippine Sea, also known as the South China Sea, a spot of contested sea between the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and China. Refer to Facebook to get a view of the artworks.

The child’s view is just as valid as the politician’s, the economist’s, the fisherman’s, the soldier’s and the environmentalist’s. Not anyone of them can give the complete picture. This is a complex issue that distorts with every act of simplification. And since it is the nature of humans to simplify in order to make sense of anything at all, then it goes to follow that the problem can not ever be completely thought through. So it might as well be that we take the child’s view.

Sea turtles are endangered. They are wonderful creatures. People should stop eating them the same way they should stop using the body parts of endangered animals. Notwithstanding, there is a lot of money being made doing these. The same money can be made some other way.

Everybody knows that. There must be a limit to greed. Let’s just hope that will be the ultimate lesson young kids will take with them as they grow up.

Older people know it is not as simple as that, of course. Killing turtles is only some country’s investment in the future. This sea is the collective fishing ground of the whole Pacific Rim countries. For more than two decades now, these countries have been fishing these seas way over what coastal resource managers call the Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY). MSY is the amount of fish that can be taken from the sea without endangering the sustainability of fish populations.

Two decades is a long time of overfishing. All fishes, not just sea turtles, will be harder to catch from hereon.

But trust science to develop new technologies for finding and catching fish much more efficiently than ever before. We will be catching more fish. We will be catching them even before they are old enough to have babies and replenish their population. The fish will be getting less in number. The current fishing areas will become valuable territory. They will become contested ground.

But it is not just fish which is the problem. There is also the oil. The West Philippine Sea is important ground for offshore drilling operations. As oil becomes more scarce and expensive, the West Philippine Sea will become valuable enough for some countries to go to war over. They are starting to do so already in the case of China and Vietnam.

In the meantime, we in the Philippines will now have to reassess what risks and sacrifices we are willing to make to protect ourselves here. The sea turtles are a good starting point for thinking about this. It is a good starting point because sea turtles make us think about what an organism must do to survive the challenges and pressures exerted upon it.

The sea turtle is us. We are wise and graceful creatures of the sea who do not occupy the top of the food chain. We have only a shell to defend us from bigger predators. Given the current predators that hunt in the West Philippine Sea, this shell is for all intents and purposes an obsolete device, hardly enough to defend us from sharks and Chinese fishermen.

And so we fall at the mercy of those who are bigger and more powerful. It is simplistic even to think and then resolve that we Filipinos and our children will never go to war over fish and oil, not even for poor sea turtles. But there are other forces out there that would go to war for us over this allegedly on our behalf. So in the end, even that is not our decision to make.

But we do have art. And we can write. These are all we have. And now, we will find out if they are worth anything at all.