Today I took a magical journey around the coast of Massachusetts, from Manchester by the Sea, through Gloucester and on to Rockport. The weather was perfect, because it is no longer summertime, the roads and towns were not crowded and I was under no pressure to be any particular place by a specific time. The views of the Atlantic and the various bays and beaches along the way were breathtaking and my camera was never idle for long. In Manchester, I admired the old buildings and particularly the main church in the town and spent longer than perhaps I should in a wonderful bookstore called “Manchester by the Book”. The selection of new and used books was incredible but I steeled my self against buying any of the dozen or so I should have liked to buy! The town had a warm, welcoming feel to it that I liked very much. It was with a little reluctance I moved on to Gloucester, although that was the town I had most wanted to visit ever since seeing the movie “The Perfect Storm.”
The Fisherman’s Memorial is a very simple but impressive monument on the sea front before reaching the Town Centre. It records the names of the thousands of fishermen from Gloucester who have perished at sea since the town was formed in the seventeenth century. It was lunch time by then and I enjoyed a most delicious Crab Roll at one of the many cafés nearby. I have never tasted such sweet crab meat. My next stop was the fishing port, the ‘raison d’etre’ for Goucester’s existence. After being moved by the simplicity of the Memorial and the huge numbers who have given their lives in fishing, I was appalled to see how much the port had shrunk and the number of fishing boats laid up or for sale. I was soon to be left in little doubt about the reason, for on the wall of a Fishing Shed were placards spelling out the dramatic impact over-fishing has had. Factory ships from countries such as Russia and Japan were singled out as the chief villains of the piece but the domestic fishermen were not spared either. Factory ships using marine ‘vacuum cleaners’ sucked up all marine life in their greedy maws, leaving no stock to renew the species but domestic fishermen began using smaller and smaller mesh in their nets, which also prevented smaller, younger fish from escaping and renewing stocks. Between the two the tonnage of fish landed not just in Gloucester but all over the world, shrank alarmingly during a mere 20 or 30 years.
How can humanity be so stupid? Due to greed and total lack of concern for the future, we have made nearly all Atlantic fish species so scarce and therefore expensive, that fish, a very important item in human diets, is now absent from many families’ tables. If the reason had been that the growth in population had been such that we had to have more and more fish to feed them, it might have been more understandable but that is not the case. Much of the fish caught by factory ships for instance, was turned into agricultural fertilizer! As if we did not have enough other sources of fertilizer without imperilling the livelihoods of thousands of brave men and their families and removing a nourishing foodstuff from many household menus! Amongst no other species would you find such stupidity and the reason is undoubtedly the complete absence of concern about our own and future generations’ long term well-being caused by the growth in materialism and the compulsion to make more and more money, no matter the effect upon others.
There is a long overdue need to re-assess our moral, scientific and economic mores. The pernicious doctrine of materialism, supported as it is by so many in the scientific disciplines, is eating away at our ability to live on earth, let alone enjoy this life. I feel the one ray of hope is that Particle Physicists will sooner, rather than later, prove the existence of non-physical dimensions with the dramatic repositioning that will bring about in scientific assumptions.
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