Bowermaster’s Adventures: Baptism by waves

by Jon Bowermaster on

I hadn’t thought much about baptism since the last time I watched “The Godfather” until I saw a photo a couple weeks ago of 29 Marines (the Ohio-based 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment) on the verge of setting off for Afghanistan being given full rites in the Pacific Ocean near Camp Pendleton.

Which made me wonder exactly how many people use the ocean for baptism … and where did the notion of being plunged underwater to affirm ones Christian beliefs come from anyway?

Marines interviewed said they believed the rite would help them “perform our job the way we need to in a very challenging environment” and bring them home safely. Initially I thought their Sunday morning full-submersions — administered by the battalion’s chaplain and part of Operation Sword of the Spirit, a program meant to prepare the battalion for duty in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand province — was unusual. (Other Marines weren’t not so pleased by the very public baptisms, suggesting that the images gave the Taliban spin-masters too-easy p.r. photos suggesting that the U.S. truly is engaged in some kind of Holy War.)

But the almighty Google proved that baptism by waves is still common. Apparently many times a week somewhere along the edge of the country – from Ocean Grove and Pacific Palisades in California to the sand beaches of Florida and New Jersey – Christians, both adults and children, walk voluntarily into the sea to have their beliefs affirmed.
Typical mass-baptism announcements are abundant and include the Where (Pier Ave and the Strand, Hermosa Beach); the Date (July 11, 2010); the Time (3 p.m.), the Features (kids, open to all, volunteer) and Dress Code (ladies, wear dark t-shirt and shorts over your swim suit; guys, please wear a t-shirt and swim trunks).

Just a few weeks ago the fifth-annual Bridgefest in Old Bridge, NJ, kicked off with a free surfing clinic and closed with an appearance by an American Idol contestant (Mandisa?!?), but centered on a “massive ocean baptism with hundreds dedicating their lives to Christ.”

The practice is popular enough that it now has its own celebratory pop tune, (“The full immersion ocean water baptism by sea, Welcomin’ the people who are new to the family, People singin’ praises as they watch from the harbor wall …”).

And advice columns like this from Mrzboopie, counseling an 18-year-old wondering if she should go ahead and just do it. Yes, affirmed Mrzboopie: “The assistant pastor who was with me said a prayer and then I held my nose as he quickly dunked me under the water, then it was all done and everyone was clapping and praising God and all that.”

Ocean baptisms are hardly limited to the U.S. of A.; a recent photo of 700 Mozambiquans – among the poorest people on the planet — lined up in pairs to have their sins cleansed, dressed in tattered blue jean shorts and colorful dresses.
Early interpretations of the New Testament suggest a “water-rite for the purpose of purification, washing and cleansing of vessels or of the body” is a good thing. Despite its popularity there is still debate among Christians as to where the practice originated and about some of its hows and whys.

For example, must you be fully immersed for it to take, or will a partial submersion do? Will a simple sprinkling of water on the head (known as aspersion) suffice? Or must it be affusion (pouring water over the head)?

Baptists, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Latter-day Sainters all belief total immersion is the only way to go, “just as Jesus Christ was baptized … a person’s whole body should be put under the water momentarily.”

Just where Jesus stood on the whole ablution thing is still a matter of debate among Biblical scholars. That he was baptized (in the River Jordan, by John the Baptist) is not contended. But his take on the necessity of baptism sparks debate; apparently Jesus himself never baptized anyone.

Water plays an important role in other religions, too. Sikhs are known to drink water from an iron bowl for forgiveness. Muslims are encouraged to wash before prayer. But the Quakers have disavowed the practice of baptism, encouraging followers to find redemption inside, not from outside sources.

As for those Marines heading off for Afghanistan, any extra talisman is probably a good thing. Forty-six Marines and two Navy corpsmen of the same battalion were killed in Iraq, 14 on a single day.

Bowermaster’s Adventures: Fish Stocks

by Jon Bowermaster on

For the past few weeks savvy investors have been able to put their money where there mouths are by investing in the world’s first investment fund devoted strictly to fish.

Amundi Japan (which manages a $35 billion fund) hopes to raise at least $500 million in investment dollars on the back of a booming global appetite for fish. Its pitch is straightforward: As demand for fish grows, the richer those who engage in the industry of fishing become. That includes fishing boat and engine makers, processing plants, chains of seafood and sushi restaurants and, especially, aquaculture or fish farms.

Twinned with the fact that the most-populous countries on the planet – China, India and Brazil – are still growing and growing slightly wealthier, thus more desirous of healthy eating, and it’s looking bad for the planet’s dwindling fish stocks.

That’s not to say there’s not money to be made off fish and all if its ancillary businesses; Amundi’s managers are predicting investors will double their money within six years, as demand continues to grow.

Researchers at Amundi, a merger formed by French-based Credit Agricole and Societe-Generale’s asset management businesses, suggest global seafood consumption will grow from 110 million tons today to more than 132 million tons by 2030. Its public mutual fund has been available since August 20 and is already growing.

The downside, of course, is that as demand for fish goes up the supply goes down. Contrary to some popular opinion, fish are not an infinite resource. Such cynics (realists?) as the World Wildlife Fund predict that at the current rate of taking the world’s bluefin tuna stocks, for example, could expire by 2012 and that all the fish we currently know will be gone by 2050, replaced by fish we currently refuse to take because they are hard to catch or have no taste or jellyfish, the cockroach of the sea.

Critics compare the investment opportunity to offering a rainforest depletion fund or a real estate development project in the middle of a panda refuge.

The so-called “themed investment” fund is the product of investment bankers watching the headlines. “There’s a reasonably good correlation between per capital GDP growth and consumption of fish in emerging markets, which are growing fast with huge populations, so we thought this could be an interesting investment story,” Amundi’s chief investment officer Masato Degawa told the Wall Street Journal.

Statistics bear him out: According to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, global fish consumption per person has increased to more than 35 pounds a year in 2007 from 23 pounds in 1980. During the same period total production of fish around the globe increased from 72 million to 140 million tons. In China, for example, the average consumption of fish per person increased by nearly five pounds to 58 pounds per person between 2001 and 2007.

The world’s leaders in per-capita-fish-consumption are all in Asia: Despite its rapacious seafood appetite, Japan ranks fourth in the world, with each Japanese eating more than his/her bodyweight in fish, about 155 pounds a year.

The planet’s highest rate is in the Maldives, where each person eats 336 pounds a year! But don’t let those numbers confuse: Japan is still the world’s leader in fish eating. It’s 127 million people eat more than 20 billion pounds of seafood each year, while in the Maldives, its 1,200 islands boasting just 335,000 people, takes just 112 million pounds.

What about the bluefin tuna, which everyone but the Japanese seems to think, is endangered. Tuna fishers and processors are viable investments according to Amundi. “We are not the police,” said Degawa

Some of the news reports of the unique fund as reported in business journals around the globe caution that there may be one potential “sticking point” to the investment: Overfishing.

Hopefully the fund’s salesmen will caution potential investors that if there are no more fish in the sea there won’t be much need for fishing boats, fishing rods or even seafood markets. To that end, Amundi predicts that the bulk of its fish fund investments will be in fish farming, a booming industry, since levels of caught fish have evened off since 1990.

From the Shores of Louisiana — Protesting to lift the drilling ban

by Jon Bowermaster on

Lafayette, Louisiana — Last month’s Rally for the Economy in Lafayette, Louisiana, went largely unnoticed outside the state, though 11,000 vociferous oil workers, their supporters and the elected political elite of the state showed up and shouted to the rooftop about their concerns over the continuing moratorium on deepwater oil drilling.

The Cajundome next to the campus of Louisiana University was packed with those who see the greatest crime created yet by the BP mess is the federal moratorium which its opponents say has already cost thousands of jobs and taken tens of millions of dollars out of the local economy.

The overarching sentiment at the event, sponsored by the state’s gas and oil lobbying group, was that, yes, the environmental mess may be bad … but the economic hit to the oil industry caused by the moratorium is far worse. The first 3,000 attendees got free t-shirts, others wore their own emblazoned with oil company logos or slogans like “Drill Baby Drill” and “No Moratorium.”

Twin themes emerged as more than a dozen politicians took to the stage. “You’re playing politics with our livelihood!” and “The moratorium is an attack on a way of life!” were the rallying cries, messages that were rowdily applauded here in the heart of Lafayette Parish, where 40 percent of all jobs are tied to oil and gas.

A majority in the crowd — many angry and frightened about the future, many of them unemployed — blame President Obama. Whenever the President’s name came up, it was followed by a chorus of boos (not too surprising in a state where John McCain captured 60 percent of the vote).

The folks at the Cajundome regard the BP accident as a fluke, a one-of-a-kind incident. Their most cited critique of the moratorium is that if an airplane falls out of the sky accidentally, the federal government doesn’t step in and shut down the entire airline industry.

One pastor was quoted saying simply: “The greatest risk to our economy is the moratorium. Our greatest obstacle to our recovery is man-made.”

It’s true that it’s not only the fishermen whose jobs are at great risk. With 33 deepwater rigs (and their $165 million in wages) frozen by the moratorium the concerns of the Cajundome crowd were legitimate. Many of those frozen rigs and jobs have already moved on to other sites in Brazil, Africa and Venezuela. In Louisiana, where one out of four jobs is tied to the oil industry – some 320,000 in all, creating a $70 billion a year business – BP has set up a $100 million fund for unemployed oil workers that may yet prove insufficient.

The three-hour rally was ready-made theater for local politicians, including Governor Bobby Jindal, who led cheers of “Lift the Ban, Lift the Ban, Lift the Ban” and joined in the Obama-bashing by suggesting, “Our people don’t want a BP check or an unemployment check. We want to go back to work.”

Outside the Cajundome protestors with signs supporting more careful drilling, concerns for the environment, the wildlife and the fisheries were kept to the fringes, behind police tape. This was a day for the oil industry workers to have their complaints heard.

From the Shores of Louisiana — Turtle rescue!

by Jon Bowermaster on

Along the beaches of the Florida panhandle and Alabama there is a massive rescue effort underway involving butter knives and forks, tricked-out Styrofoam coolers and specially-rigged FedEx trucks.

The job is to scoop 70,000 mostly loggerhead sea turtle eggs out of the sand (very carefully, using kitchen utensils among other tools) before the hatchlings can swim out into the Gulf where they will either suffocate or be poisoned when they start floating with the current and munching on oil-soaked seaweed.

It is an unusual example of across-the-board cooperation among the federal government (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) and local environmentalists, who are usually loudly against any such intervention. No matter the threat, relocating turtles nests is rarely done. Here it’s being regarded as essential.

Early this morning I talked with J. Nichols, a research associate with the California Academy of Sciences who was just leaving the dock in Grand Isle for a day observing the impact of the oil gusher on local wildlife. His Grupo Tortuga has for years been dedicated to restoring Pacific Ocean sea turtles. His response to the unorthodox rescue plan? “I wouldn’t want to put any turtle into that oil if there’s another option.”

The turtle rescue echoes a theme I heard in voiced across the Gulf as the gushing continued – 2.5 million gallons a day, or roughly 200 million gallons – like those defending the unorthodox building of berms and dikes to try and stem the oil tide, that doing something is better than doing nothing, even if the efforts may seem Quixotic.

%Gallery-98231%Carl Safina is the president of the Blue Ocean Institute. Among his many books on ocean wildlife he’s written “Voyage of the Turtle.” Regarding the nest relocating he says, “For the hatchlings it’s a tiny sliver of a gain. It helps draw attention and that’s good.” He adds that of course it is already too late for the juveniles and adults already aswim in the Gulf.

One reason sea turtles lay so many eggs – about 100 per nest – is because the chance of surviving is so low. The probability that a sea turtle hatchling will survive ranges from one in 1,000 to one in 10,000. Even in the best of times tracking them is tricky, including statistics like how many eggs are laid, how many turtles are successfully hatched and how many survive the first month.

The process of trying to save the 700 nests is painstaking: 1,500 Styrofoam coolers have been turned into surrogate nests, each holding just half a nest. Once the coolers are filled with sand and the eggs carefully laid inside they are loaded into specially padded FedEx 18-wheelers and driven to the NASA-controlled Kennedy Space Center where an air-conditioned warehouse has been readied. Within seven to eight weeks the eggs should hatch and the tiny turtles will be carted to the eastern side of Florida to be released into the Atlantic.

Everyone involved has fingers, toes, etc., firmly crossed.

Like most wildlife in the Gulf, sea turtles have not fared very well. To-date a little more than 600 have been found washed ashore or floating injured near the site of the gushing oil well, 447 dead and 116 with visible oil on them. Others have been accidentally burned to death in some of the “controlled” fires aimed at reducing oil gathered on the sea’s surface.

BP is concerned about those numbers because ultimately it will have to pay damages for every dead creature counted, just as it will have to pay a penalty for each gallon spilled.

From the Shores of Louisiana: Dredging

by Jon Bowermaster on

Chandeleur Islands, Louisiana — The French-born helicopter pilot zooming low over the Gulf is focused on two things: Whether he can find more fuel in Venice and whether or not the brown streaking we’re seeing north of the Chandeleur Islands is oil or just the transition of muddy Mississippi River water mixing with salt water.

It’s his first day flying out of Plaquemines Parish and, with maps piled on his lap, he admits to being a bit confused by both the landscape zipping past below at 100 mph – over solitary oil rigs, marsh and sand islands and a half-dozen shrimp boats trailing skimmers — and just how deeply the oil has penetrated up the mouth of the Mississippi.

From five hundred feet above sea level, with a mid-afternoon sun streaking in the window, it is admittedly hard to distinguish oil from muddy water. But when veteran Gulf photographer Gerald Herbert, riding shotgun, points worriedly below, it’s clear we are seeing a new stain heading inland, which we estimate to be about 12 miles long.

Everywhere you look in this area where Gulf waters meet fresh water, looking west towards the town of Grand Isle and the entry to Barataria Bay, you see oil.

My goal though is the Chandeleur Islands, about 50 miles off the coast. I want to parallel the length of the small island chain to see just how much oil has surrounded its 50-mile length. The Chandeleurs are the only bits of land standing between the still-gushing oil and landfall and for the past decade, thanks to storms and erosion, have been disappearing at a rate of about 300 feet a year. Now, thanks to the BP spill, the long-ignored islands have become a kind of secondary ground zero in the fight between locals and the federal government over how best to slow the spread of oil.

%Gallery-98231%It’s not a great leap to think that if energy had been put into building the islands up over the years to act as better barriers against big storms they’d also be better prepared to act as blockades to all this oil.

Governor Bobby Jindal, Plaquemines Parish president Billy Nunsegger and several other top Louisiana politicos have sent cranes to the islands – which are federally protected wildlife habitats – and not the kind that swoop and soar but the kind that trench and roar.

The federal government has already stopped the plan a couple times, concerned that any hasty digging, sucking and relocating of sand has the potential to do far more harm than good; the locals, led by an increasingly vociferous governor, argue that doing something – anything!! — Is better than doing nothing.

The local’s plan, to be paid for initially with state funds since neither the fed nor BP is backing it, is to suck sand off the bottom of the Gulf and pile it at the ends of the islands, extending their blocking ability. But the Interior Department, as well as several Louisiana environmentalists, contends the work is being done at overly sensitive sections of the island and that building up one end of the island will only weaken the spot where the sand is being taken.

My instinct as we fly over the islands at 2,000 feet – we’ve had to climb since this is federally protected air space – is that with evidence of oil having arrived yesterday on Lake Ponchatrain in New Orleans (80 miles up the Mississippi River) it seems that the oil has already evaded the barrier islands. Louisiana government statistics suggest that 337 miles of its coastline are now oil-inflicted. Maybe the hundreds of millions Louisiana is attempting to spend to try and block the oil could be better spent on coordinating its clean up.

But Bobby Jindal and team seem to be in a building frenzy; the fed has yesterday stymied another effort to build rock jetties or dikes in the shallow ocean in front of Grand Isle; 75 barges piled high with boulders sit parked on the Mississippi River, waiting the outcome of another squabble. The concern regarding the dike building is what will happen to them once the spill dissipates. If it ever does.