Joe Roman > Quotes

“It may be underfunded and at times mismanaged, but the [Endangered Species] Act is an unprecedented attempt to delegate human-caused extinction to the chapters of history we would rather not revisit: the Slave Trade, the Indian Removal Policy, the subjection of women, child labor, segregation. The Endangered Species Act is a zero-tolerance law: no new extinctions. It keeps eyes on the ground with legal backing-the gun may be in the holster most of the time, but its available if necessary to keep species from disappearing. I discovered in my travels that a law protecting all animals and plants, all of nature, might be as revolutionary-and as American-as the Declaration of Independence.”
― Joe Roman, Listed: Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act

“One of the great joys of science has to be turning a thought that surfaced one night over a few beers into a full-blown project.”
― Joe Roman

“When one photographer edged too close to the wolves, tirelessly dogging McIntyre for the best place to perch his bazooka-size lens I could see daggers in the eyes of the vvolunteers. But McIntyre was welcoming. Some individuals, her told me, could move freely about the valley; others were ruthlessly punished, chased off, or worse. He was talking about wolves.”
― Joe Roman

“... to undertake a gargantuan task: calculate the value of all the services provided by all the ecosystems, from the forest to the floodplains to the open ocean, across the world... they came up with a number- $33 trillion a year- a headline-grabbing figure that was almost twice the global gross national product.”
― Joe Roman, Listed: Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act

“Things got so bad that Georgia lawmakers introduced legislation to move the state border north- to seize land that had been in Tennessee since 1818- all to capture a river. The governor turned to Plan B: a miracle. "O, Father, we acknowledge our wastefulness," Sonny Perdue prayed on the steps of the Georgia state capitol in front of a crowd of about a hundred people.”
― Joe Roman

“... the taxonomic division of animals in a lost Chinese encyclopedia...
(a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those that are drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.”
― Joe Roman

“Eating dinner with conservation biologists was like walking through a minefield of ethical decisions: grasslands have been overgrazed by steer raised for beef, and all cattle emit greenhouse gases though enteric fermentation; the poop from industrially raised chickens poisons the Chesapeake; the Amazon has been slashed and burned for soy--and don't even mention seafood. To this bunch of herpetologists, the sin of ordering shrimp lay in the bycatch--young fish, and especially sea turtles, caught in the nets and discarded, dead or dying.”
― Joe Roman, Listed: Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act

“But having biologists outside the Beltway remained a problem for the adminisration. "They found they couldn't control us," Williams said... "That sort of thing just drove them up the wall. They were so used to saying 'do this,' and we'll just go away and do it. Never ask questions. The biologists had good connections with the press and national environmental group. "So eventually they said, 'Okay we're going to send you guys out to the hinterlands.'" The Regan administration began to dismantle the Endangered Species Office in D.C. Biologists have been working from regional offices ever since.”
― Joe Roman, Listed: Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act

“Hey, it could be worse," Hammond said of their efforts to protect the woodpecker. "It could be a butterfly." Butterflies were easy, I said. I would soon go to see a couple of clam species that the governor of Georgia had accused of endangering the lives of his state's children. Matteson laughed, "Woodpeckers are pretty, but mussels?" And so it goes.”
― Joe Roman

“That many biologists were bound to get themselves into trouble sooner or later. If you've ever been to an Ichs and Herps meeting, you know it was going to be the herpetologists who got there first.”
― Joe Roman, Listed: Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act

“ويتطلب السم ثلاثة أيام ليقتل الحوت، وينتظر الصيادون انجراف جثته نحو الشاطئ وهم يأملون أنهم لن يخسروا طريدتهم للبحر، أو الأسوأ من ذلك؛ أن يخسروها لجيرانهم.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“In the Caribbean, humpback cow-calf pairs were the prey of choice for traditional and modern whalers. In the search for right whales, the whale biologist E. A. Wilson noted in 1907: ‘the hunt began with the destruction of the calf, because it was known that the mother would then become easy prey, as she would not leave the bay without her suckling’. This type of whaling was perhaps ‘the most complete and rapid method of exterminating an animal that has ever been adopted’.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“والحيتان الصغيرة كثيرة الفضول أيضا، وليس أمرا مستغربا لحوت يافع أن يقترب من سفينة الأبحاث وينظر إلى ملاحيها، قبل أن تستدعيه الأم ليرجع.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“The greenhands, by necessity, were taught the ropes at sea. The captain distributed them among the boats, so as not to slow its progress when they inevitably caught a crab with their oars, breaking the rhythm of the boat. From the stern, the mate called out ‘Break your backs!’ as each took an oar. It was best to be quick, for the ‘iron-fisted and iron-hearted officers’ often ‘beat their information in with anything that came to hand’.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“وبعد أن يتم تجهيز الحربون، يقوم الصيادون بإصابة الحيتان قرب أعضائها التناسلية، لأنها تؤلم كثيرا.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“So what drew them to whaling? Some might have been lured by what Baudelaire called the ‘profound and mysterious charm that arises from looking at a ship’; others, as Elizabeth Hardwick noted in her biography of Melville, ‘have come sulking away, address unknown, from howling creditors, accusing wives, alert policemen, beggary on shore’. Many greenhands were from farming families, some awaiting their inheritance, others, as younger sons, unlikely to come into anything. Runaway slaves were not uncommon aboard Yankee whalers: Nantucket’s Quaker population helped to secure berths for those in danger of being recaptured by bounty hunters.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“The rhythms of humpbacks are similar to those of human music. Their songs last longer than our ballads but are shorter than most symphonies. Do they have an attention span like our own? Do they use similar techniques, repeating refrains that form rhymes, to remember songs? Payne and colleagues suggest that this is so. Our evolutionary path has been separated from whales for 60 million years. Perhaps we are latecomers to music, not the inventors of song.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“إن الانتقال من الاستخدام لغرض البقاء على الحياة إلى الاستخدام التجاري للحيتان، كان يعني أن الصيادين والمستهلكين كانوا غالبا على غير صلة بالأنظمة البيئية لمناطق صيد الحيتان. وعلى عكس شعب الإنويت الذي كان لديه طقوس محكمة واعتماد كبير على بقاء الأنواع، فإن رغبة صيادي الحيتان بالربح لم يكن لديها مثل هذا الدافع. وقدَّر المؤرخ الإسباني أليكس أغويلر أن شعب الباسك اصطاد حوالي 40000 من الحيتان الصائبة من المحيط الأطلسي بين عامي 1530 و1610، وبحسب مؤرخ صيد الحيتان ريتشارد إيللز فإن شعب الباسك كان طليعة ما سيصبح في النهاية حربا معلنة على الحيتان.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“يمكن أن يجد حوتٌ ما نفسَه في المياه الضحلة، إما بسبب أنه تائه أو مريض أو جريح أو ربما لأنه عجوز فقط، إذ تكون معرفته بمفهوم الجذب نحو الشاطئ هي الأخيرة أيضا.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“Yet if a young bowhead made it to adulthood, it could easily outlive the whaler who had tried to kill it as a calf – and then bury his son and his grandson as well.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“The economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill reluctantly acknowledged that whales could be considered mammals from a zoological perspective, but he insisted that they were fish for commercial purposes.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“A whale, disoriented, sick or wounded, perhaps just old, can find itself in shallow waters. Its first understanding of the burden of gravity ashore is also its last.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“In 1960 an independent committee of scientists was appointed to investigate whale stocks. The Committee of Three, Douglas Chapman of the US , K. Radway Allen of New Zealand and the British biologist Sidney Holt representing the UN , analysed whale populations in the Southern Hemisphere, and their findings were tragic. There were fewer than 1,000 blue whales left in the world. Humpback populations were so low that scientists suggested that it would probably take 80 years of protection to restore their numbers. Yet the killing continued: in the whaling season of 1960–61, two Soviet factory ships removed almost 13,000 humpbacks from the waters south of Australia and New Zealand. Two-hundred-and-fifty blues were killed during the whaling season of 1962–3.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“ومع ذلك فإن استطاع حوت شاب الوصول إلى مرحلة البلوغ، فيمكنه ببساطة أن يعيش أكثر من الصياد الذي حاول قتله وهو شاب، ثم سيدفن ابنه وحفيده كذلك.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“Although the Old Bering Sea cultures generally did not bother with burials, Thule whalers were interred in whalebone graves: whale mandibles and scapulae were used to frame the corpse, perhaps to protect the whaler on his journey after death, a funereal swallow motif.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“يصبح المجتمع غنيًا فجأة بعد قتل الحوت.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“After his ship had struck a right whale, Enoch Cloud wrote: she quickly ‘slued’ around, raised her enormous head out of the water, fixed her eyes on the boat, and then bellowing commenced, slowly, ‘sterning off!’ It was the most terrible sight I ever witnessed . . . It is painful to witness the death of the smallest of God’s created beings, much more one in which life is so vigorously maintained as the Whale! And when I saw this, the largest and most terrible of all created animals bleeding, quivering, dying a victim to the cunning of man, my feelings were indeed peculiar!

Whalers may not have expressed much sympathy with their quarry, but the death of a mother with calf could break even the toughest façade: ‘That’s when you feel it’, said one whaler, ‘when we killed the mother the milk made the ocean white all around us’.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“According to Herman Melville, the quest for oil and bone resulted in open battle. Nantucket whalers ‘in all seasons and all oceans declared everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood; most monstrous and most mountainous!’.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“Farley Mowat recorded the words of a Newfoundland fisherman, Arthur Pink: They was t’ousands of the big whales on the coast them times. So long as they was on the fishing grounds along of we, I never was afeared of anything; no, nor never felt lonely neither. But after times, when the whales was all done to death, I’d be on the Penguin grounds with nothing livin’ to be seen and I’d get a feeling in me belly, like the world was empty. Yiss, me son, I missed them whales when they was gone. ’Tis strange. Some folks says as whales is only fish. No, bye! They’s too smart for fish.”
― Joe Roman, Whale

“وفي أوروبا الشمالية، لم يكن اختيار لحم الحوت مقصوراً على الحيتان الجانحة، فحيتان المينك التي يصل طولها إلى 9 أمتار تُصطاد هناك منذ القديم بسبب زياراتها إلى الخلجان والشواطئ، حيث كان القرويون يقومون بنصب أفخاخ لحيتان المينك باستخدام شباك صيد الأسماك التي كانوا يعلقونها عبر المضايق البحرية في النرويج، ثم يطلقون عليها السهام المتصلة بعوامات خشبية، وكان رأس "الدودسبيلير" -أو ما يعرف بسهم الموت- مغطى بمصل يُفضل أخذه من لحم حوت ميت محروق أو بعض أنواع اللحوم الأخرى المتعفنة، مما يسبب تعفن الدم في الحوت الصغير. وخلال 36 ساعة ستكون البكتيريا قد أضعفت الحوت بما يكفي لقتله بسهولة باستخدام الحربون، ويبقى لحم الحوت قابلاً للأكل باستثناء المناطق المحيطة بالجروح.”
― Joe Roman, Whale