by Carl Safina
As early as 1672, one New England observer wrote of vast numbers of the pigeons but noted, “of late they are much diminished, the English taking them with nets.” Yet even in 1878 one last great nesting colony settled in on an area in Michigan forty miles long and three to ten miles wide, “where a tremendous slaughter took place.” Both the slaughter and settlers’ felling of the forests that fed and bred the birds took their toll. (Yet, true to our uniquely human capacity for denial, people wondered how the birds had “disappeared”; some writers seriously speculated that they all somehow drowned in the ocean or the Great Lakes—or migrated to Australia.) The last Passenger Pigeon, named Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914. She was the final ambassador of her species, but the phenomenon that her species had been had already vanished from Earth.
The conservationist and writer Aldo Leopold lamented in 1949: “Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind.… We grieve because no living man will see again the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds, sweeping a path for spring across the March skies, chasing the defeated winter from all the woods and prairies.” We grieve for a marvel squandered.
Many regions have their stories, from the shattered turtles and extinguished monk seals of the Caribbean, to swarms of salmon that formerly streamed into the Northwest’s former forests and up the once-mighty Columbia, to the vast sea-thundering herds of giant tunas I saw, to—.
But okay; let’s not get overwound. We can live well without them, so this reasonable question often arises: Does losing them “matter”?
Hell yes, it matters. Don’t let anyone suggest it doesn’t matter because people can live without them. People can—and most do—live perfectly well without computers, refrigerators, the Winter Olympics, plumbing, libraries, concert halls, museums, and ibuprofen. Whether things are worthwhile for survival or whether they help make survival worthwhile are two quite different things. Whether we “need” them, is a dull and uninteresting question. Need? We never needed to lose our living endowment, our inheritance. Less recklessness by people in the past would have maintained them all, in rich abundance. People in the future will probably level the same charges at us.
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Charles Darwin, always insightful, recognized that “the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to the men of all nations and races … our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused until they are extended to all sentient beings.”
Aldo Leopold marked this wider perimeter of kinship with his softly stated revolution, which he called “the land ethic.” In his own words (published posthumously in A Sand County Almanac in 1949), “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals.” But here is the revolution: “A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.” In all the history of philosophy and ethical thought, no one had ever quite come out and said we are part of the world. Imagine.
Leopold said the problem stems from treating land as mere property. His analogy is slavery: people were once held as property; now land is held as property.
The right of private property is central to Western philosophy and Western political traditions and laws. It is also central to many environmental problems. John Locke, writing in the 1600s, believed that land was originally owned by God and that when a man “mixes his labor” with land, he comes to own it.
But what if the labor harms the land? Land stays, after all, and men pass. Does a man really own a thousand-year-old tree because he has just cut it down, or is he a thief who has severed history and taken a little of the future? Locke believed ownership is justified as long as it doesn’t violate the liberty of others to also get “as much and as good.” This is possible only as long as there are thousand-year-old trees enough for all, land enough for all—still imaginable in Locke’s sparsely populated time. Times change.
To Bacon’s assertion that “the world is made for man,” Leopold answered, “Granting that the earth is for man—there is still a question: what man? Did not the cliff dwellers who tilled and irrigated these our valleys think that they were the pinnacle of creation—that these valleys were made for them? Undoubtedly, and then the Pueblos? Yes. And then the Spaniards? Not only thought so, but said so. And now we Americans? Ours beyond a doubt!” He seemed to be saying that only by saving the world from us can we save it for us.
Leopold wrote, “All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.” For him, our community went far beyond people, beyond even wildlife and plants, into the very soil and water and life-supporting systems, all part of our community.
That resonates with me because I know the feeling. And I especially feel it here at Lazy Point.
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Each time people like Copernicus, Darwin, and Leopold widened the circle—moving us further from the center of the universe, the center of time, the apex of creation—we got a better, more realistic view of who we are. I find the improved understanding immensely satisfying. Others paid heavily, like Bruno (burned to death by the Catholic church) and Galileo (banned by same for saying that Earth moves). It’s said that freedom doesn’t come free. Neither does the ability to think.
Expanded views make us more civilized. But being civilized gets us only so far. In the twentieth century’s wars, civilized people killed about 150 million civilized people. And this century hasn’t gotten off to a smooth start. Just as we went from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists to civilized societies, now we must take the next great leap: from merely civilized to humanized.
The geometry of human progress is an expanding circle of compassion. Every advance in thinking has shown that our relationships extend further than we thought. Every hideous perversion has emphasized differences. Humanized people seek, more than anything else, peace. Tolerance strengthens peace. But as the world becomes more crowded, global tolerance remains elusive, perhaps partly because we feel forced to hold our ground.
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Two decades after Aldo Leopold died, Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968) showed that it is not enough to be a plain citizen; we must each be actively committed to the common good—and that’s a taller order. Hardin used the metaphor of common grazing land to show how “each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.… The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers.” Hardin pointed out that limits to individual “freedoms” are not limits to freedom; they are public defenses against those individuals’ social pathologies and excesses that limit most other people’s freedoms. Freedom to wave your arm stops at my nose.
The tragedy of the commons is one symptom of the main problem: that customs became institutionalized habits while humanity still didn’t have a clue about the forces that drive the world. And old habits—and ignorance—die hard.
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Before the U.S. Congress passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act of the early 1970s, polluting public air and water was not considered ethically wrong. (This is partly a lingering symptom of the classic philosophers’ having had no way to know, and little reason to ponder, how connected and fully networked the living world is.) Before these laws, only individuals who could prove they were harmed could seek compensation, and only after the fact. No one could sue a company or the government on behalf of safeguarding public health or interests. Animals and plants—even large populations and whole species—were largely out of luck. The modern burst of environmental laws better recognized the public’s interests—and fund
amentally shifted the burden of proof from an individual who was harmed to those causing harm.
Acting like new philosophies brought on by new realities, these laws altered the moral landscape. Especially the Endangered Species Act. In all the preceding march of time, nothing in nature or the human mind had accorded species anything like a right to exist. That was a major advance. But the Endangered Species Act steps in only after harm is done and a species is in trouble. It sets a floor—mere existence—and not a standard. It’s not the Abundant Species Act or the Healthy Habitat Act. In contrast, the Clean Water Act sets a standard, not a floor. It requires that we maintain all waters in “swimmable and fishable” condition. The act aspires to healthy, viable waters capable of supporting wildlife and people. It aims high. It has vision. It lets people engage earlier. As a result, many waters in the United States now flow greatly improved.
At least the U.S. has its Endangered Species Act; the vast majority of countries know no such laws, and the few that do usually lack the means to enforce them. No one can appeal to the World Court to save Mountain Gorillas or Bluefin Tuna. And global wildlife and fisheries treaties are loose nets full of loopholes big enough to let whales fall through.
Special though they are, these laws have critics—like some ranchers asserting that “property rights” should let them do anything they want to their land (recall Aldo Leopold’s slavery analogy) and fishers demanding access to everywhere all the time. (Numerous “freedom to fish” bills continually swim around Congress, though scientists keep showing that some ocean areas should become reserves.) These people want to reassert exactly those “rights”—to harm public assets for personal gain—that compelled the public to defend itself in the first place. Such people assert, basically, that if we, the public, wish to defend ourselves from them, we should pay them for losing the opportunity to destroy something they did not create.
One can fully own a manufactured thing—a toaster, say, or a pair of shoes. But in what reasonable sense can one fully “own” and have “rights” to do whatever we want to land, water, air, and forests, which are among the most valuable assets in humanity’s basic endowments? To say, in the march of eons, that we own these things into which we suddenly, fleetingly appear and from which we will soon vanish is like a newborn laying claim to the maternity ward, or a candle asserting ownership of the cake; we might as well declare that, having been handed a ticket to ride, we’ve bought the train. Let’s be serious.
And let’s be clear. No one speaks of limiting “freedom” for the sake of our environment, our health, or our children’s future. When the many protect themselves from the greed or tyranny of a few, freedom increases. “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not kill” are not attacks on individual “freedoms.”
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On a Friday in the final week of March, the air is suddenly so warm that I leave my jacket behind at the front door. The sun is up earlier; so am I. It’s cool enough to see my breath, but after a light predawn rain, steamy water vapor is rising off the road in the sun shafts of morning.
Salamanders and frogs are not the only animals who’d been hibernating. A groggy-looking chipmunk is sitting on a log. In the woods, spring has touched the chickadees; they’ve dissolved their safety-in-numbers foraging flocks of winter and reassorted themselves back on territorial real estate. And no more chick-a-dee (“Where’s everybody?”). From these respective turfs they’re singing their thin, sweet two-note descending dee-dee breeding song (“I’m here”).
Out on the Sound, several hundred Bufflehead ducks pepper the water’s surface. Such numbers mean they are massed and on the move. I’m seeing not only the most but pretty much the last of them this year. Meanwhile, the first ragged lines of cormorants are rowing northeast overhead, cleaving a sky path up the coast.
But the most unexpected thing in the sky is a fish—in the grip of a circling Osprey. For the female who has just arrived, our male hovers high, calling, then dives through the air and rises again, performing an aerial dance reenacting the art of catching food, the fish his stage prop, turning sky into theater, proving his worth as a provider. Like her, I, too, admire his chocolate back and creamy undersides, the stiff beats of his strong wings, and his fishing prowess.
When I was in my early teens, I knew these birds only by the huge stick nests they left behind. Virtually all the Ospreys in our region had died. Stricken by pesticides that made their eggshells thin and brittle, they’d gone nearly extinct throughout the East. The ghost nests haunted me. I could not believe we’d lost—and I had just missed seeing—a creature who could build such a structure. I felt cursed with having been born too late for the things I love.
When several local bird lovers sued the government in the late 1960s to stop the wholesale spraying of DDT and other pesticides that were causing the birds’ eggs to fail, they had no idea they’d win. In the process they largely invented the modern environmental movement, with its focus on law, courts, and large species whose fortunes signal the health of whole habitats.
I saw my first Osprey when I was fifteen, and despite being compulsively addicted to shorelines, I didn’t see my second one for six years. Now there are four active nests within a mile of Lazy Point. These decades later, the Ospreys’ recovery is a big change for the better. They’re a lesson in healing and in the power of acting over cursing. I enjoy them much more now that they’re common than when a glimpse of one was so rare I’d worry it might be my last.
Overhead, the big hawk’s tightly clutched fish looks like a sleek slab of chrome, not brown-and-white and oval like a flounder. It’s likely an Atlantic Menhaden, Hickory Shad, or Alewife. In former times, arriving Ospreys mainly made their living catching Winter Flounders, but now that winter isn’t what it was, Winter Flounders aren’t what they once were. A professor tells me that our water’s getting too warm for them to breed successfully, and that this fish, once superabundant, seems poised for departure from our region.
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When I was young, March simply meant: flounders. By the third month the meager sun could warm the shallow water just enough to tune a Winter Flounder’s mind to a worm on the mud. But we paid our dues with red hands and cold noses; no March days ever seemed more raw than those when, aged fifteen or so, we’d ridden our bicycles ten miles to the drawbridge to ambush a few flounders on the creek’s ebbing tide.
When April came we felt—sitting on the sunny dock in Oyster Bay, with yellow daffodils and greening lawns on the far shore—that we’d earned the warmth. By then spring’s flounders were in full swing.
We’d gently lift, lift our sunken bait until we’d lured a flounder’s attention, then wait, wait until that nibble became a tug. Effort, perseverance, patience, success. A good lesson and a good meal.
I saw my first flounder as a small child of perhaps five. I was entranced by the utter outer weirdness of a fish that lay on the bottom on one white side that faced down, had one mottled camouflaged side that faced up—and had both eyes on one side of its head. A flounder would look at Picasso’s cubist figures and say, “Couldn’t he come up with anything original?”
Flounders (and other flatfishes, like halibut and soles) hatch into normally swimming juveniles, like other fishes. After a short while, the fish stops swimming upright. It settles to the bottom, like a fluttering flag that’s been lowered and spread on the ground. Most fish lying on their side are dying, but for flounders it’s normal. The side that’s down loses its pigment and becomes essentially the pearly “belly,” though it’s actually one whole side. Then, true weirdness: one eye migrates around the head until half its face—the down side—is eyeless, while the up side—the Picasso side—has two eyes. Imagine that you lay down on your side on your mattress and when you woke you had actually become the mattress, with both your eyes where one ear was, looking at the ceiling. That’s a flounder’s life.
When I was in my teens, you could catch flounders in spring from every dock, bridge, or pier and many a stretch
of shore. Once, in unusually clear water, I watched my bait fall to the bottom, only to see what seemed like the entire seafloor suddenly move toward it. The bottom seemed tiled with baby flounders. No one ever heard of coming back from flounder fishing empty-handed. The question was never “Did you catch?”; it was always “How many?” “How big?” and “Do we have a lemon and enough butter?”
One of our favorite spots for hefty “snowshoe” flounders was the blackened planks of an erstwhile waterfront restaurant’s outdoor deck—burned for the insurance money, people whispered. The charred planks jutted out over a channel. We weren’t allowed there, of course—too dangerous. It certainly proved a dangerous place for flounders, because we were there often.
If you had a boat and could position in the best passes to intercept migrating fish at the height of spring, you caught hundreds. It was called “flounder pounding,” and it took its toll. In those days no one ever did anything to attract flounders. They just came to you. Now people throw cracked mussels and chopped clams or stir the bottom in an attempt to pull a few flatfish toward their hooks. But catches, like the fish themselves, are thin. Few people even try.
We may make from our acquaintance with the flounder more than just dinner and the usual lesson of fishing excess and diminishment. Its worst foe in our region is not the sizzling pan but power plant and tailpipe; warming water has robbed our region’s Winter Flounders of the temperatures in which they thrive.
What would be gross disfigurement for most any other animal is normal for a flounder, and we don’t judge flounders the less for it. We appreciate the flounder in its context. Flounders teach a wider range in which to sense the beautiful. Granting that latitude to people is called tolerance. Flounders can see from only one side of their head, but they take in the whole view. Too often we see only half the view. For some reason, we are fascinated by the unusual in nature but insist on conformity among people.
