The last tuna nigiri on Earth

I call it a "Republican moment," one of those surreal and disturbing thoughts that sneaks into my soul every now and then like an unwelcome but insistent visitor, a nasty little thought made of equal parts greed and unchecked entitlement, all overlaced with a sort of willful ignorance that entirely blocks out that dangerous beast of burden known as "conscience."

The moment came as I was reading the horrifying and deeply sad piece in the NYT Magazine about the plight of the wild bluefin tuna, the world's most overexploited game fish, a top ocean predator and a totem animal like few others, an undeniably magnificent creature that is rapidly nearing extinction due to gluttonous overfishing and unchecked international greed.

It's a harrowing, heartbreaking tale spanning generations, cultures and clashing beliefs of how we treat the earth. There are fascinating subtexts, politics, food history (the article is part of a larger book on the subject, Paul Greenberg's "Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food"). But the grand upshot was simple enough: We are quickly destroying the last of humanity's great food stocks, a truly marvelous, powerful and even mystical creature unlike any other. And very soon, there will be no turning back.

The facts are brutal. Simply put, we are gorging our way to the bluefin's oblivion. Stocks in the Gulf of Mexico are now considered to be in full collapse with maybe 9,000 total fish left, all suddenly made far more dire and irreversible by the BP spill, which is destroying millions of fish eggs right at the start of spawning season.

The Atlantic stocks are faring little better, as international fishing boats race to cash in before it's too late. Japan -- by far the largest consumer (but certainly not the only one) -- is taking 80 percent of the catch, caring almost not a whit, citing dubious claims of "tradition" and a cultural need for its rapaciousness. Most depressing, with the exception of Greenpeace and a handful of other groups, few people seem to care about the fate of the bluefin.

Perhaps they should. These astonishing, warm-blooded creatures represent, as the story points out, more than just the last wild food stock in the ocean -- a staggering enough idea all by itself considering the extent of our dependency on the ocean as an essential food. Bluefin are not like salmon or shrimp. They cannot be easily farmed. They cannot be replaced. They are a huge and hugely wild creature, more powerful than we even fully understand.

Destroy them, and we destroy more than just another everyday, "disposable" species. Their destruction will be a profound marker, a signifier of something far larger and more ominous. Like the honeybees, like the drowning polar bears, like the fresh water crisis, the end of tuna will be of those epic fails we look back upon in a few years and say, "There. Right there. That was one of the signs." We don't get many more.

My Republican moment came as I was nearing the end of the piece, feeling sickened and increasingly depressed, to the point where a sense of abject fatalism finally struck, a sense of just giving up, that wickedly painful moment where the heart has to step away from the scene before it implodes, and the survivalist/capitalist mind takes over and just powers through the nightmare, greedily gabbing on to whatever bits of gristle it can suckle.

This ugly voice said: Fine. If we're about to run out, if this is the last gasp of this splendid creature, if there's really nothing I can do about it anymore, well, to hell with it. I'd better get to my fave sushi joint quick and order a big batch of spice tuna rolls before it's too late.

I mean, might as well, right? Isn't this what humans do best? Isn't this the Republican way, applicable to everything from SUVs to guns, cigarettes to global warming, to mutter something along the lines of: "Really, who f-ing cares if it's the last tuna on earth? Who cares about words like sacred, ethics, reverence? The fish tastes good! It's ours to gobble up as much as we like! Top of the food chain, baby! And if we run out? Oh well. Just the way it goes. On to the next thing."

Reminds me of the famous quote, "Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains." Translation: After awhile, after a few decades of being pummeled by all the horrors and the heartbreaks, the wars and abuses and man's inhumanity to man (and planet too), well, the heart just gives up. Enough. Basta. Idealism fails, hope crumbles, jadedness wins.

And then something far worse happens. The ego takes over completely, analyzes all the grim data it helped create, and says, "You know what? Screw it. All these bleak facts spell out one irrefutable commandment: Go get yours, before it's too late."

Is this not, moreover, what God supposedly wants for us? Has this not been the fundamentalist Christian, Rapture-drunk mindset since Jerry Falwell was knee-high to Satan's towel boy, that the earth was "given" to us by some ridiculously permissive mega-ego deity, along with full authorization to freely burn the joint to the ground as we see fit?

The feeling passed. I'm happy to report that, for the most part, such moments of bitter heartlessness are few and far between, and they tend to come and go like a creepy 24-hour rash, leaving me relatively unscarred. But like most liberals I know, I also work, every single day, to keep those vile demons at bay. After all, that sort of ugly fatalism is hugely addictive, the greediness delicious, the entitlement grossly tempting.

I practice remembering that it is, as ever, a question of how you wish you tread the planet, with what sort of integrity, conscience, lightness of step. It's about where you draw your boundaries, the kind of reverence you inject into your daily comings and goings, what you do when faced with exactly this kind of bleak and tragic scenario. It is, as always, your choice.

After all, if you lose that undercurrent of divine reverence, you lose the point of all life. Even if it's the final bite of bluefin, even if you watch in horror as the polar bears starve to death, even as you hear of nations murdering each other over dusty strips of dirt and pathetic definitions of God, you must, without fail, hold that sense of wonder and awe, nurture it at every turn. Because once that's gone, we're doomed for certain.

Mark Morford's new book, 'The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism,' is now available at daringspectacle.com, Amazon, BN.com, and beyond.

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