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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Fishermen have always called it Georges Bank. The origin of its name is obscure, possibly tracing to one of the British kings of colonial times. But its status is clear: it is one of the richest fishing grounds in the world. Located in a West Virginia-sized patch of the Atlantic continental shelf, it harbors a cornucopia of yellowtail, cod and haddock, lobsters and scallops, swordfish and squid-some 200 species in all. Supporting a $1 billion a year fishing industry, it provides 17% of America's saltwater catch, 14% of the world...
...courtroom arguments in favor of drilling, no one knows how much oil can really be tapped from the shoals of Georges Bank. But even oil industry experts admit that the yield from the tracts to be auctioned will probably be far less than from Alaska's Prudhoe Bay or the Gulf of Mexico. Best guess: 123 million Barrels over the 20-year lease period. Brought up in a single haul, that would provide the U.S. with only about one week's supply of oil. If not oil, then natural gas could be drawn from Georges Bank...
...potential havoc of an oil spill on Georges Bank is considerably greater than at other drilling sites. Attorney Douglas Foy of the Conservation Law Foundation in Boston predicted in court that at least one major spill would occur over 20 years. Worse yet, warned Foy, would be the almost continuous discharges from day-to-day operations. Adds Biologist Howard Sanders of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: "There is a very real danger to Georges Bank fish from low-level chronic pollution...
...poses a considerable risk to a rare and important ecosystem with a resource that, unlike oil, is renewable. Twelve thousand years ago, Georges Bank was dry land at the end of a glacier. It is still as shallow as nine feet in parts, and 300 feet at its deepest; one fisherman's tale has it that a ship's crew was able to play baseball on a shoal after a storm. The Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current converge at the site and circulate a hearty brew of nutrients on which plankton thrive and proliferate. Fish in turn...
...Habit of Being by Flannery O'Connor (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1979). Letters of one of America's finest writers, who died in 1964, at age 39; the text is firm about Roman Catholicism, refreshingly short on self-pity about the disease that crippled her-and characteristically precise of mind and heart...