Why planet earth is in the balance of calamity, peril, distruction. It's all near.

April 26, 6:11 PMHartford Conservative ExaminerJohn Talleos

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   The medium of television can be powerful enough to convince some people of anything at all.   A food show could have someone sample strange foods from odd body parts of animals most people wouldn't think of eating to demonstrate different cuisines.  Now take the same concept but  use it to show that planet earth is on the edge of destruction.  Can this be possible?

 The CNN show Planet In Peril: Battle Lines featured fisherman from Taiwan who catch shark.  Apparently shark fin soup is popular in the Orient and since there is a growing middle class more people are eating it.  The program had actress Lisa Ling as a reporter, an activist and a camera crew. They filmed a loading dock, processing plant and a restaurant with middle class orientals eating the soup itself all to demonstrate the trail of the shark fin market.  Duriing all this the camera crews were harassed by managers and workers putting their hands or hats to the camera lens as though there was something illicit going on.  Lisa Ling asked the activist about "raising awareness" when it comes to killing sharks and how this awful practice could some day end.  The activist says the goal is not to stop it but make it a little less popular.   The question here is can anyone say that fishing for shark is any more dangerous to the planet then fishing for tuna?   Would it make CNN feel better if the whole shark were eaten and not just the fins?   Tuna fish is something we can relate to, so it's not a big deal.  But once someone starts eating shark fins, hey lets "raise awareness".  

 The next segment had Anderson Cooper in a boat in South African waters where tourist go out to sea in underwater cages to observe sharks up close.  To lure the sharks to the boats the tour guides throw chum in the water which Cooper explains makes the sharks associate eating with humans, or at least he says "some people" say this.   Therefore, the reasoning goes, sharks will attack humans on South African beaches.  After showing sharks up close and Cooper underwater with thumbs up to the camera he later speaks to a  marine biologist who tells him that chumming for shark observation has no relationship to shark attacks.  Did Anderson Cooper just travel all that way only to find there's no harm to either sharks nor humans not to mention a "planet" in "peril" in the practice of chumming?    Cooper could have simply called the marine biologist on the phone in Atlanta and not increased his foolish  "carbon footprint" on travel. 

  Just to demonstrate the absurdity of the show's premise.  Fishing for shark is wrong.  So is feeding shark chum (at least for a short time)  But what is chum lure?   The fish that make up chum are so indispensable that its striped of its name for the indignity of chum.  The mystery fish more then likely has a one syllable name like perk or pike and it's probably gray with an ugly face.  It's a fish that's boring compared to the "Great White Shark".  Is it any more wrong to kill shark for shark fin soup then it is to use chum so Cooper could have a swell time observing sharks up close?   Just what sort of math are they using to save the planet here?

  Just an aside, while we're on the subject of picking winners and losers in fish lets suppose tuna were a little bigger and had smiles on their faces while Dolphins were smaller and had faces like blow fish.  We probably would be eating dolf that is tunaphin safe.