The September 2, 2010 edition of Stars and Stripes, the official newspaper of the United States Armed Forces, carried one of the strangest true stories I have ever read, written by Travis J. Tritten, from the Sasebo Naval Base in Japan.
I'm an avid fan of history, all periods and places. So, I have at least a passing familiarity with World War II history in the Pacific. In World War II, the Japanese captured and occupied the island of Guam, along with many other islands in that part of the Pacific. Prior to the fighting on Guam to end the Japanese occupation, the island was subjected to a tremendous naval bombardment. For nearly two weeks before the land battle, the navy shelled the island; nearly every building was destroyed. To give you an idea of how intense the jungle warfare was in World War II, before this story, I thought the account - which I remember from the time - of WWII Japanese Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi finally surrendering in 1972, all those years after the war was over for everyone else, was the strangest military story that could come out of Guam.
Fast forward from July, 1944 to September 2010. Guam has not only rebuilt, it is an unincorporated organized territory of the United States, with a representative to Congress (who cannot vote - currently, a Democrat); they cannot vote in Presidential elections, and they have no electoral votes either. The biggest single segment of their economy is the tourist industry, ironically mostly Japanese. The second largest component of the economy is the U.S. military, which takes up almost a third of the island of Guam.
The military population will grow even more between 2010 and 2015, when U.S. forces leave Japan, moving to Guam.
With that background, imagine my surprise at finding there was another more recent military bombardment of Guam, by our navy, reported widely..........a bombardment of dead rodents instead of shells, rodents 'weaponized' with acetaminophen as deadly ammo. The invaders this time have been nocturnal arboreal venomous snakes, instead of soldiers.
The snakes are believed to have arrived on Guam as part of the World War II military invasion by the U. S., they are believed to have been 'stowaways', an accidental arrival.
The aspects of this story which most interested me is in conversations, the people with whom I have spoken pointed to this as an example of bad military spending, turning what is essentially a 'novelty' story into ideological discussions. There are aspects of that ideology that seem to be both a mirror and a magnifying glass illuminating larger issues, and similar discussions on the entire spectrum of political discourse.
There are multiple reasons that this is an appropriate example of military spending. The first - it was military transport or related transport which brought this invasive, massively destructive species to Guam. It is an appropriate expenditure, because the problem has a military-related cause. The rationale is, you break it you buy it, or in this case try to fix it, and in this case the 'you' is the military, the 'you' is 'us'. Only about half the people with whom I raised this topic understood the causal connection to the military. This has paralleled the lack of fact based, knowledge driven discourse in the other discussions.
Beyond that, on a more pragmatic basis, becaue the U.S. military operations cover roughly one third of the entire island; this directly affects the military. These snakes are on all areas of the island, including the military parts. As the single largest entity on the island, dispersed throughout the island of Guam. It is appropriate for the military to address their part of the problem geographically, and it is impossible to do that effectively, without addressing the island as a whole, instead of a patchwork of parts. Snakes do not recognize property lines or boundaries; therefore no solution which is dependent on boundaries will be effective, not effective as a solution, and not cost-effective. No one I've spoken with about this story, this project, has been knowledgeable about the proportion or distribution of the U.S. military relative to the rest of Guam. Again, see the preceding paragraph about ideological criticism over fact-driven discussion of the merits of this unusual government action.
More than these factors, the snake problem has devastated Guam. Guam's single largest industry is tourism (predominantly Japanese tourism as it happens). The extermination of nearly ALL of the native birds on this island by the snakes has a direct effect on the island ecology and environment as it relates to tourism. While not a sudden catastrophic event, like a flood or an earthquake, this is a very real disaster for the people of Guam. Our military has always provided assistance where it can in response to disasters, especially ones to which it contributed. Yet another aspect of this experiment in snake control where conversation has turned to ideological criticism of the government without a factual basis for it is that this is NOT primarily a military intervention. The military has been cooperating - appropriately - with other agencies that have taken the lead in searching for solutions, notably our Ag Department and the EPA. There has been a low profile but focused effort to try a lot of other more conventional solutons first. But this is another one of those pertinent pieces of information which has been consistently lacking in discussions with scathing ideological criticism of government spending. The unusual solution gets attention; all of the other, earlier efforts over decades are ignored. It is absolutely important to evaluating the apprpriateness of government expenditures, government policy decisions to know that larger context of solutions before making ideology-driven criticism. But it doesn't happen.
Equally on point in the expenditure of government funds on this problem is the factoid that the solution for the problem on Guam is expected to have FAR wider applications to other problems back in the U.S. It is a problem which has been approached as an opportunity to test a new solution to a more widespread problem that is similarly dramatically altering eco-systems in the United States with other invasive species. An example would be the python population in places like Florida, a population which has expanded in a similarly dramatic fashion from escaped or released exotic pet Pythons not native to our country. Guam is uniquely suited for this experiment, to try to duplicate it would be MORE costly. This was another fact missing-in-action, AWOL from ideological criticism of government spending.
A few people with whom I have discussed this story knew at least a little bit about the Python problem; but not one knew very much about how the Guam event could translate into other solutions for OTHER parts of the United States (or other parts of the world). Sadly, no one with whom I had a conversation about the dead mice/acetaminophen/tree snake story was conversant with the relationship Guam had as part of the United States. Nor was anyone aware that for example a soldier from Guam serving in Afghanistan recently died in Afghanistan from a roadside bomb, this past September. Guam was some place exotic, foreign, not us, not U.S., not 'our responsibility', not directly important to United States tax-paying citizens. This misinformation, this lack of knowledge about a very important fact in a discussion, basic geography as well as tax policy relating to criticism of current government spending, alarms and saddens me. We cannot afford to have this kind of ignorance-driven thinking as we approach the 2010 elections.
Guam had no native snakes, and on the island, the snakes had no natural predators. The U.S. Ag Department actually had to train dogs to keep the snakes, which experienced a population explosion, from sneaking back on board transport off Guam, in repetion of the original accidental introduction. The numerous snakes have destroyed the bird species on Guam, a textbook example of bio-invasion. The fear is that snakes might do the same thing to other islands, including Hawaii. On the other hand, some of the other invasive species ARE kept in check by the brown tree snake, which can reach up to 10 feet long. Little garter sakes, they're not. The potential for the snakes on Guam to similarly expand to other islands, where it could do similar devastating damage to the flora and fauna, both direct damage and indirect damage, at tremendous cost, is very real. Yet not one of the people -not ONE - was aware that the snake population problem in Guam could directly impact other parts of the United States, when ideological driven criticism arose in discussion.
The news about using dead mice laced with acetaminophen received a lot of press, ranging from cable news, CNN to Fox News, the Stars and Stripes military media, to National Public Radio. According to Guam's Pacific Daily News, the media I (and many bloggers) got the details wrong.
No one yelled 'geronimo' as the dead frozen mice are heaved out of a helicopter. They are not 'mice bombs', there are no tiny parachutes or wings harnessed to the rodent carcasses. The Guampdn.com news site answered one of my questions. I wondered if these snakes would eat dead prey, especially chilled dead prey, that might smell like chemicals. Apparently, the snakes are voracious, not at all picky. One of my siblings was an amateur herpetologist, keeping pet snakes, and keeping mice to feed them, so I'm reasonably familiar with the process. (Also crickets, tarantulas, and a couple of hooded rats. I'm somewhat atypical from the classic female stereotype; I'm not bothered by spiders, rodents, or reptiles. I rather like them, just not in eco-destroying quantities.) I can only imagine, given the little cardboard 'flippers' that were attached to the dead mice, what the outlines of the snakes look like after they eat the dead mice. Because, when a snake eats a rodent, any kind of rodent, you can often see the bulge as the mice progresses down the snake's digestive tract. But then I also wonder what it will be like to have these dead snakes falling out of the Guam forest canopy as they die. It could make taking a walk on Guam a lot more interesting, and hazardous, especially if the venomous snake is only dying and not all-the-way dead.
Someone had the unenviable job of gluing bits cardboard to the feet and legs of nearly 300 dead mice, and attaching small transmitters. I haven't been able to confirm the green party-type streamer on the back end of the mouse that was reported. The thought occurred to me to wonder just how a person would include gluing bits of cardboard to dead mice on their CV or resume.
But apart from those admittedly humorous aspects to this 'novelty' story, I really hope that discussions can be a springboard for a more informed examination of the issues of government. I hope, with all my heart, that this story can become a springboard for understanding how bad it is to criticize government without understanding the issues, the challenges, and the factual basis for the decisions which are made. If decisions do not seem to make sense initially, then it is important to do a bit of fact-finding. In the case of the Guam tree snakes, it took me less than ten minutes. The answer, the CORRECT answer, is not, emphatically NOT to make the claim we have seen from Tea Partiers like Sarah Palin, and a legion of others, that all we need are simplistic 'common sense' solutions.
What we need is an electorate that makes use of the unprecedented opportunity to gather facts that is at our fingertips. What we need is an electorate sufficiently educated in geography to understand where Guam is, and that it IS part of the United States, and why it is strategically important to us. What we need is not over-simplified, ignorant criticism, but informed thought which is capable of understanding more complex solutions as they apply to complex problems in our decisions about government spending. Otherwise ignorance, in the guise of 'common sense solutions' will be so devastatingly bad, so destructive and costly, that we will be in more trouble as a nation and as individuals than we are now. This is an example where the tree snakes in Guam are a sort of biblical metaphor, the serpents in the garden. The temptation is for our electorate being too lazy to research fact, the temptation is to be ideological not factual in our political discourse and voting. The devil is in the facts, and in the details. Perhaps the greatest irony is that the very same people who refer metaphorically to plagues of locusts and other events as having 'biblical proportions' or as being 'old testament' in devestation don't see the modern parallels to those references.
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