The principle debate was whether lobsters were nomads or settlers.
The Nomadists saw them migrating with the seasons to appropriate places, for food and reproduction. They fed on what they chanced upon.
The Holeists saw the availability of a territory, with an appropriate safe lair, as main goal of a lobster. When established there, they would venture out to feed when they were hungry.
Because that was the crux of it. A hungry lobster is a customer.
There was even one fisherman would believed that lobsters travelled around clinging to the underside of icebergs.
He never really made it clear how that worked in Cardigan Bay.
That didn’t matter; the intention was to understand the movements of lobsters so as to catch them, which he did. Very successfully.
He had a working reality.
That’s what marks some people out. They don’t take current versions of things verbatim.
They work on the fringes of current information.
These quite often happen to be the nearest to the Nature of this world; for Civilization is, by definition, urbo-centric.
Farmers have always laughed quietly at the experts who came to advise them.
I used to see new marine biology students plotting species in the same, trampled group of pools on Castle Rocks every year, while my living as a winkle-picker took me to a twenty-mile territory of wild and diverse rock habitats that I got to know as intimately as if they were my back garden. Which in my need to understand them, they were.
Is it worrying how wide the gulf is between people in working, and those in data-based, virtual realities.
Parcels of the planet’s surface are identified, with all the best intentions, as having special status, and become prescribed zones.
All too often, they deteriorate even faster, lacking any close human relationships: any concerned, local attention.
People enter them as policemen or plunderers.
I think that indulging in guilt about what we have done to the Planet threatens to perpetuate our estrangement from it, and some acts in the name of conservation smell to me of guilt and blame.
Let’s remind ourselves that this is a loving, and abundant place to live.
That we can acknowledge its generosity by not taking more than we need.
And that others can, and will, do the same.
A new working reality.
