by Carl Safina
* * *
Until the last few years, many problems appeared to be simply a matter of people taking too much out. Rising population continues adding tension to the planet’s life supports, and now the problems also include people putting too much in. Pollution has long been an issue, but carbon dioxide is a global matter.
Climate change seems to enter every equation. Who’d have thought that the same clear, natural, nontoxic gas we exhale would turn out to be history’s most threatening pollutant? This is partly a symptom of how little we’ve understood the world. And our dearth of ways to deal with such enormous problems is a symptom of the relationship we’ve decided to have with the world. When it would have mattered, no one ever said, “Thou shalt not pollute.” Now that it’s an issue, our wisdom traditions, and our economic system, lack adequate moral language to address it and the ethical consensus to deal with it. And because we’re not really in control of the vehicle we’re driving, the world is entering a truly new time.
FAREWELL, WHOLE NEW TIME
The grapevine reports that to the springtime beach has come a remarkable castaway: a dead whale. To find it, I just drive into the next town, go to the beach, and look up and down the surf line. About a mile away I see what looks like a black-hulled trawler wrecked on the beach.
In the sea such a creature is impressive. But one gets mainly glimpses: the top of a head, a rolling back. Up close, as I walk alongside its massive contours, it seems surreally revealed, as though here to herald some message, some annunciation, an oracle.
This is a Fin Whale. The world’s second-largest animal, Fin Whales can reach about ninety feet and an estimated eighty tons, and can live up to about a century. This one is about sixty feet long. (The closely related Blue Whale, reaching a little over one hundred feet, is the most massive animal known to have ever lived. Hunted to near extinction, it’s barely hanging on in the Antarctic, recovering strongly in the eastern Pacific, and remains elsewhere very rare.)
The whale’s hulk lies on its port side, marooned past the last high-tide line. The waning moon and weakening tides will leave it there for quite a while. But I know the people here won’t allow this. The nearby homes are too expensive to share the beach with such a wonder; it will draw onlookers and hoi polloi such as myself. And the stench will become unpleasant. Full decomposition would likely take us through the summer. Bikinis and decaying blubber—not the image this place is marketing. Bad for business.
So I’m sure the fire department and the police will soon intervene: rope off the site; place someone officious to prevent people from doing something stupid to themselves or, maybe worse, the carcass; allow biologists to open a cavernous portal and explore, measure, assess, perhaps reveal; and eventually bury it.
But not yet. For now it lies in state with a certain fitting dignity. I circumambulate the corpse freely, unaccosted and unopposed. Under the wide sky and with the backdrop and sound track of the immense sea whence it has just come, it is both in and out of its element, natural and unnatural.
Its tar-black skin is calico-patched with pink sand abrasions from the surf swells that pushed it aground. The huge pleats of its distendable throat, looking like the lapstrake hull of a wooden vessel, run halfway down its body. Its mouth bites a bulldozer’s wedge of beach sandwich. In life, this Jonah-gulping throat ballooned like a pelican’s pouch, engulfing a swimming pool of water, fishes, and krill. Then its unspeakable tongue would strain water through the mouth-rimming brush of baleen, concentrating entrapped hordes into a satisfying swallow.
Living Fin Whales don’t lift their tail flukes above water, yet here the tail lies in full view. Reddened with the bruise of burst blood vessels, these flukes span about twice my body length. One fluke has furrowed a gouge in the sand like the rudder of a ship run aground. On the landward side, sand has built up against it; on the seaward, the swirl of receding waves has dug a little hollow. The tailstock connects the hull-like body with the massive blades of its propelling tail. That stock seems as sturdy as a tree trunk, but the linkage bears the sleekness of motion, attenuating to a wedge above and a wedge below, like a double-edged splitting maul for shattering water as the whale swims. Or swam.
The whale’s blowholes are slammed shut like deck hatches. Its left pectoral fin lies embedded in the sand; its right—about as long as I am tall—dangles high and dry. The sun throws a lifelike highlight onto its open eye. That rather tiny-looking eye is about the size of the circle you can make with your thumb and forefinger.
Blood and fluid ooze from a wound near the base of its pectoral fin, as though the percolating corpse is just another leaking tanker. Formerly, whales were the world’s wells, civilization’s chief source of oil, and we pumped the sea nearly dry of them. Now many wish to pump it dry of petroleum, incurring deeper risks at deeper depths (and not just in the Gulf of Mexico). We appear to have learned little of whales and nothing of oil. Japan, Norway, and Iceland cannot get beyond their blood thirst, nor we our oil addiction. The average Yank uses twice as much fossil fuel as the average Brit. Compared to 1970, we in the United States use half again as much energy, have increased our paved-road miles by half again, upped our vehicle miles driven by more than 175 percent, and increased the size of our new homes by half again. In 2007 the United States was burning over twenty million barrels of oil a day, about the same as the industrial behemoths Japan, Germany, Russia, China, and India—combined. God bless us indeed.
I notice that the whale’s also got a bruise across its back and a gash near its eye, possibly from its battering grounding.
Whales die. All things die. But when a whale biologist arrives, she examines the oozing bruise and pronounces trauma; a ship has done this.
This makes it a death less easily accepted. We stand here in our encounter with an ancient being simply because the ancient being has encountered us first, and tragically.
Indeed, the entire world has encountered us. Geologists place time on Earth into great bins and drawers called eons, eras, epochs, and so forth. These mark times when the planet changed its marquee. Each time the theater of life has opened the curtain on a new act (such as the first appearance of cells, the first multicelled organisms, the first animals with shells) and each time it has brought down the house with mass extinctions, catastrophic meteors, and cycles of ice ages, it has left a playbill in the rocks. All these ages later, geologists have named and labeled the boundaries of these internested bins and boxes of time. They name the last ice ages as the Pleistocene epoch. They call the time after them, starting roughly 12,000 years ago, the Holocene, meaning “whole new time.” It includes all of civilization. And “whole new time” may be an understatement.
* * *
This scene is so full of contrasts that one feels some immense transition arriving on the sea breeze. Here lies this great and awesome beast, this time-traveling messenger of travail. Several Shinnecock Indians from the nearby reservation arrive and begin singing and chanting. In earlier times, Indians pursued passing whales. Now they grieve their passing. Soon come a phalanx of schoolchildren, being herded over the dune to gawk and horse around, and a couple of dogs, which begin barking at the enormous corpse. From the beachfront mansions, to the metallic gleam and the glint off windshields of arriving cars, to the kids let loose from school, minute by minute, more and more people flood the shore. I stand regarding the whale, listening to the surf and watching the dune grass shudder. And before long, people so dominate the scene that their overwhelming numbers transform the enormous creature that has convened us from monument to amusement.
In just this way a funny thing has happened on the way to the future. In the year 2000 Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen suggested that the Holocene epoch is finished. Human domination has so changed the world as to constitute a new epoch: the new time of humans—the Anthropocene. The suggestion surprised many. Geologists are debating. Can it be so?
Has the time really come when people are the dominant force on the planetary surface? While people
argue over the idea of the Anthropocene, to this whale it might have seemed obvious.
* * *
The sky over the ocean is laden with migrants. Cormorants that started appearing in small groups a couple of weeks ago now come in many black ragged lines headed north and east. By the hundreds, they scribble themselves across the morning.
While Kenzie and I walk down the beach from the whale, scoters are continually moving above the horizon. Each scarflike skein carries dozens of birds, wings blurred with the effort of flight as the flocks slither east like sky snakes. They’ve spent winter not just off our lighthouse at the Point, but in various locales from Canada down past Hatteras, and similarly on the West Coast of the continent, too. As they’ve been doing every morning for weeks, they’re still passing at a rate of several hundred per hour. What uncountable legions of them must still populate the winter coasts and summer tundra.
Half a dozen net-dragging trawlers are giving early-arriving fish and squid a working over. The fish spent the winter in deep water, where the trawlers have been on them, far over the horizon, about sixty miles offshore. Now they’re here. Through binoculars I see dozens of gannets diving on—herring? mackerel? No; the gannets are cratering the water behind the boats as the fishermen shovel much of their catch—fish that are too small, damaged, the wrong species—overboard. The abundant waste seems at least a boon to birds.
But in the pretzel-textured logic of the post-Holocene, even the conclusion that food nourishes no longer necessarily holds. The easy junk food from the trawlers—unlike human junk food—has only half the calories of the gannets’ normal wild food. A study of Cape Gannets who’d acquired the trash-diving habit off southern Africa found that discarded bottom fish pack only half the nutrition of the anchovies and sardines the gannets normally catch. That’s not a problem for the adults. But chicks need high-calorie food. Result: due to abundant food from fishing boats, gannet chicks are starving to death. This helps explain the precipitous halving of the Cape Gannet population in recent decades. Further, gannets with chicks tried to eat better. They made twice as many hunting dives, and stayed underwater twice as long, as did nonbreeding adults. They just couldn’t find enough real food to keep their chicks alive. That’s because Cape Gannets are joined on their fishing grounds by people, and people, true to form, are taking vast quantities of the sardines and anchovies in the region.
This story is more widespread than I’d thought. Scientists have linked breeding collapses of various seabirds to fisheries targeting their prey in northern Europe. And the study’s authors note that nothing’s preventing the same thing from happening to our Northern Gannets, too. I’ve seen the gargantuan herring trawlers that rake the very same New England waters where gannets, whales, other seabirds, and tuna need those herring.
In a world of starving people, people still discard food. In a time dominated by people, seabirds starve by eating the fish people throw away. Waste like this, the inequity of haves and have-nots, overpopulation, and a world more tightly networked than it first appears, all conspire to keep many poor—people and seabirds alike.
* * *
We’ve seen that civilization chose for itself a distant, dismissive relationship with the world. This happened early on, before people understood that the world is round, let alone how it works. It’s as though humanity had an adolescent need to project an independent identity before it really knew enough to think things through. But to be fair, a lot of that became ingrained when the world really was in many ways a threatening, scary place, especially to desert tribes and their scribes.
We’ve also seen that industrialization’s side effects started to worry a few people much later. Some of those thinkers established a countercurrent that reconsidered our estrangement from the world. And I’ve noted that human progress has depended on enlarging the circle of compassion. Recognizing the value of wider compassion seems inescapable when you think about it—at least it did when Darwin and Einstein and Schweitzer thought about it. But that view doesn’t yet dominate—though we dominate.
In all the long train of ages, inanimate nature and life have shaped each other. I love this coast because it’s “real,” but what does that mean nowadays? Can we distinguish real from artificial in the human-dominated Anthropocene world? The migrations, the weather—when we look closely, all bear our thumbprint. In my youth I was sometimes told to pay attention to the “real world,” that place of tedium tallied in digits and zeros, where strings of zeros are pursued and prized. The mass delusion of that “real world” is the fervent belief that the ledger books capture the value and the consequences of our transactions. Yet that collective illusion is real enough to do some very concrete things—at least until real reality catches up.
If people are using the world’s forests, fishes, soils, freshwater, and other resources something like 25 percent faster than the world can replace them, it means, basically, that the world would be broke if we weren’t borrowing so heavily from the future. People call it “leveraging,” but a new word for delusion doesn’t cure the illness.
In his prescient 1848 essay “The Art of Living,” John Stuart Mill foreshadowed much about what counts as progress—and what really is progress:
There is room in the world, no doubt … for a great increase in population.… I confess I see very little reason for desiring it.
If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which … the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or happier population, I sincerely hope … they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.
… A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living, and much more likelihood of its being improved.…
All the mechanical inventions yet made have … enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes.
By around 1800, when the world had about one billion people, the Reverend Thomas Malthus had become alarmed at the implications of population growth. Though water remained plentiful, vast tropical and temperate forests still stood as strangers to the saw, and the oceans shimmered with fishes that had never met a strand of twine, Malthus divined trouble brewing.
Growing at just 1 percent annually, a population doubles in seventy years. The United States already has twice as many people as when I was born; Tokyo’s greater metropolitan area—35 million—now has more people than all of Canada. During the twentieth century, the world population quadrupled; it’s now approaching 7 billion. By 2050, we’ll add to that more than the total human population of 1950.
How many people can this world support? It depends on how they live. If everyone gets 800 kilograms (1,760 pounds) of grains annually, like Americans, then the world can carry 2.5 billion people. Problem: we passed that number in 1950. The world could support 10 billion people living like Indians. Problem: most Indians want to live more like Americans. (It would be interesting to see a seventy-year-old American standing next to all the food—and everything else—that person had consumed in their entire life.)
Of course, before we eat our dinner, we need a refrigerator to store our food. In 1980, China produced 50,000 refrigerators; in 2004, it manufactured 30 million. We need to put the refrigerator in a house, and houses use wood. The forests of Indonesia, Burma, the Russian Far East, and Papua New Guinea will be largely gone by around 2025, and with them their birds, bugs, and Orangutans.
To buy the food, we drive to the store. The Chinese would also like to drive to the store. To have as many cars per person as the United States does, China will need 30 percent more cars than exist worldwide today. Driving them would burn 98 million barrels of oil a day (the world now produces 85 mill
ion barrels). If this can’t work for China, it can’t work for India—it can’t work.
We need a new, nonburning energy economy, a way of reducing population, and a way of replacing the delusion of infinite growth. That’s what we need.
* * *
The road to Lazy Point runs past two Osprey nests I like to check. One’s on a platform atop a utility pole near an old fish factory. In former times, that factory shipped so many fish there’s still a set of railroad tracks leading to the old buildings. Like somebody running with scissors, those fishermen fell on hard times of their own making. They largely emptied the Sound of the fish they processed, and starved to death from their own success. Loser takes all. It’s ironic that you can starve by taking too much, but overshoot equals crash—the familiar formula.
Today there’s another kind of shoot here. Right at the base of the pole, directly under the immense nest, a fashion model is posing for a photographer while two other people earn their fees by standing with arms folded, scowling importantly.
Frightened out of their nest, the birds are nearby, calling. Early in the season like this, a prolonged disturbance might cause them to lose confidence in their site’s security and abandon it. I pull over next to their van, ask who is in charge, get importantly scowled at, and explain that they are right under a nest and that they are scaring these two huge birds that are zooming back and forth and calling nervously overhead. The fashionistas look up, startled. I’m as surprised that anyone could miss the two giant hawks with six-foot wingspans yelling at them from fifty feet directly overhead. The crew is actually very nice about it, explaining that they didn’t know. They lose no time moving over to a nearby dune—nicer backdrop anyway, in my unprofessional opinion, with the yellow beach heather blooming—and as the birds settle back in, we all wish each other a nice day.
