Ghostnets in Australia
The artist Bonita Ely has sent me a link to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Nov 11, 2008 program on lost drift nets, ghostnets in the Gulf of Carpinteria in Northern Australia. As is happening globally, the lost & discarded gear of foreign, mostly southeast Asian, particularly Thai, fishing fleets has wadded up in enormous balls. The largest found so far: 6 kilometres, weighing 6 tons and 6 metres deep.
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2008/s2415642.htm
The ghostnets kill mostly turtles, but also lots of birds, endangered fish as well as being threats to local small fishing boats manned by indigenous people.
It's hard (painful, wearying) for me to comment on these nets. For twenty years, ghostnets has been the moniker for the core of all my work: Ghost Nets, the project. I can still rage at their existence, despair at the short sightedness of people who use them and extrapolate about the implications for all the habits and routines of thinking and behavior that permits this horror and is reflected in so many other aspects of social and cultural norms. They have been outlawed in many places but ocean currents wash them up from illegal or simply unregulated boats to be deposited wherever the tides take them. I can still be sadly reminded of how apt the metaphor is.
What I can say that's positive, is that there are cadres of volunteers trying to clean them up. Gary Luchi of the Carpenteria Ghostnets Program wants to initiate educational programs in the countries of origin for these deadly nets and invite volunteers to come help clean them up. One day walking the beaches and seeing dead animals entwined in the monofilament wires may speak louder than anything else.
