by Carl Safina
At the nest closest to my house, the salt-pond nest, I notice that two Ospreys now look comfortable where a few days ago up to five had appeared in contention for possession. Because there seemed to be a question of ownership, I fear our familiar male of quite a few years has not returned. He liked to spend the night perched across the road from the pond. But he hasn’t been there. Old habits probably die harder than do old birds, so I’m presuming he’s gone.
One male goes; another takes his place. Food availability and the number of nest sites dictate the Ospreys’ population’s limits. The same is true for people. But Ospreys can’t make more fish for themselves. People, we’re different. In the latter half of the twentieth century, humanity’s food production tripled, thanks to new high-yield grain varieties, artificial pesticides and fertilizer (40 to 60 percent of the nitrogen in the human body now originates in a factory), and—pumped water.
The Green Revolution was accomplished largely by doubling the amount of irrigated land. Hundreds of millions of wells now reach into the earth like straws in a thick drink on a hot day. But as with many things, we’re taking more water than we’re getting.
Because much food production relies on pumping groundwater faster than it recharges, the world has blown a big food bubble. The Green Revolution turned India—where millions once died in famines—into a food exporter. But now in parts of India, water tables are dropping more than half an inch a day. Many wells are depleted, and irrigated farmland has shrunk.
India recently stopped sending rice to Bangladesh; then India began importing rice from Australia. (But Australia’s droughts dropped its rice exports 90 percent.) An Indian water official said ominously, “When the balloon bursts, untold anarchy will be the lot of rural India.”
Many wells mine deep “fossil” water, vast reserves of locked-away liquid that, like oil, can be pumped dry. Where China grows half its wheat and a third of its corn, the water table drops ten feet each year. In the United States, the water has dropped more than one hundred feet under Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.
In many countries, women walk an average of four to five miles just for household water. By 2025, as many as two-thirds of all people will live in places suffering a scarcity of clean water. Health experts expect lack of clean water to cause more cholera, dysentery, hepatitis, and infant mortality.
Who will have water? A ton of grain represents a thousand tons of water, and grain imports become proxy for rain. The poorest countries will, of course, lose the bidding for food. We may have a hard time feeling their pain, so for us, the Hausa people of West Africa have a saying: “The stone in water does not comprehend how parched is the hill.”
* * *
Engineered to end hunger, the Green Revolution failed because most of the world allowed the increased food to grow more hungry people. China, partly because of its one-child policy, has eased more hunger, faster, than anyplace ever has. Meanwhile, India’s population growth largely erased its food-production increases. Now a record 1 billion people suffer malnutrition; 10 million more do so each year. A recent U.N. report titled The State of Food Insecurity came with a press release saying, “For millions of people, eating the minimum amount of food to live an active and healthy life is a distant dream.”
Dividers: Over 2.5 billion people live on less than two dollars per day. Nearly 1 billion people get less than 80 percent of the U.N.-recommended caloric intake; they are, technically, starving. Undernourished women annually bear 20 million underweight infants, and more than half of Indian newborns would be in intensive care if born in California. Some 1.5 billion people are overweight.
So there are two kinds of people in the world: those who want more and those who need more. And those who need more want more. One-quarter of the world’s people consume more than three-quarters of the world’s goods. That’s not fair. But as I’ve already mentioned, to give everyone an American level of material living, we’d need two and a half Earths. That’s not possible.
Because forests, oceans, croplands, and water supplies are all being depleted by the number of people we have now, a grim logic appears irrefutable: as we add people, either everyone will get poorer on average, or the poor will get much poorer. Or the population will be adjusted in the usual way: with shortages, bullets, and bombs.
Land, water, population growth—violence. When Rwanda’s population tripled, between 1950 and the early 1990s, it became Africa’s most densely populated country. Farmland and food—and tempers—grew short. In the ethnic rampage that killed 800,000 in ten days, whole families were hacked to death lest there be survivors to claim the family farm plot. Sudan’s Darfur genocide was also ignited by disputes over farmland, exacerbated by drought. Sudan’s population, about 10 million in 1950, is projected to hit 70 million by 2050. If it does, Sudan will likely fight a newly doubled 120 million Egyptians for Nile water—unless Ethiopia, whose population will have more than doubled to over 80 million, tries diverting the 85 percent of the Nile headwaters it controls.
Poor people don’t want to stay poor. But there’s a misconception that it’s somehow “unfair” to poor people or, worse, racist, to let them in on the main secret of wealthy, educated, and successful people: smaller families mean larger lives.
The thing that brings fertility down fastest happens to be the same thing that brings down poverty: educating girls. Turns out, illiterate women bear three times as many children as literate women, and their children tend to stay poor. Meanwhile, each year of schooling raises a woman’s earning power 10 to 20 percent. And when people are a little better off, they desire fewer children.
Good news: things are getting worse at a slower rate; the rate of population increase is easing. More than forty countries now have populations that are stable or slowly declining, including Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan. At present trends, the world population will likely peak around midcentury (at between 8 and 11 billion). By then, something like fifty countries will likely already have fewer people than today. People can live crowded and in fear, but real human beings will always need soil, water, food, wood, air, beauty, freedom from oppression, freedom of expression, room for compassion, the company of creatures, and a future.
* * *
When the ship Titanic set out to cross the ocean, its proprietors believed it indestructible. So they did not equip it with enough lifeboats for all the people on board. History is sometimes destiny. Believing ourselves too clever to sink our enterprise, we’re on another voyage where the lifeboat room is limited. And we’re discovering that there are more passengers than the mother ship was built to handle. No known island exists, no opposite shore, no passing ships to call for rescue. Just us. Just us, and the wish—perhaps too late—that we had steered a more careful course while the band gaily played.
As we bravely enter the Anthropocene and the uncertainties of a world with us at the helm, it’s worth reconsidering Thoreau’s declaration “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Wild places produced the living world and its inhabitants in abundance and resilience. On the other hand, for most of human history, natural things stood poised to recycle us at any moment. Weather, beasts, famine, enemies. We can live more safely and better by enjoying those elements that have come under control, including agriculture and medicine. I wouldn’t recommend a “return to nature.” I like books and science. I like music. I am willing to abandon the concept of Natural. Nature is moot, anyway, because we’ve so thoroughly changed the world. I’m willing to abandon it—for any approach that works better.
As oceans get depleted, water tables drop, sea levels rise, and forests fall, you begin to realize that the drawdown of nature is just one side of a coin on which hundreds of millions of people face a world wherein dignity—always so elusive throughout history—now drains away with the freshwater; hope flies away like birds that no longer return. If, to paraphrase Aldo Leopold’s dictum, “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty” of the living community, then
we’ve passed “right” traveling in the opposite lane. If our values change, we might use science and technology to save us. If our failed values persist, science and technology will only press our accelerator.
* * *
It seems our world-changing capabilities are just too new. For hundreds of thousands of precivilized years, and then through all the time philosophers, theologians, and economists were crafting our contract with the world, nature always seemed to be the one dishing out those famines, diseases, sharp-fanged beasts, and killer weather. Only in the twentieth century did nuclear weapons signal a clear power shift between people and fate and create the first widespread wonder about whether the world would one morning wake into a day with no tomorrow. In all the prior crystal-ball gazing and the straining to see the future, the one thing everyone assumed was that there would be a future. And now we’re realizing one additional thing that was never wholly possible: we might ruin the world even in an era of peace. Before, no one expected we could change the weather, dissolve the world’s corals, alter the chemistry of oceans and our bodies—. These things represent a radical new relationship with the world, but we haven’t revised our contract.
So the matter requires a moral answer. But it’s no longer the old philosophers’ question of “who has moral agency.” The question now is: How can we survive? Our values will have to catch up to our understanding of the world and its workings.
The appalling dislocation caused by the 1930s Great Plains Dust Bowl made it evident that conservation, economy, and community can intermesh on scales large enough to rattle nations. In 1944, while planning the founding of what would become the United Nations, President Franklin D. Roosevelt—still deep in fighting World War II—asked his secretary of state to begin preparations for a world meeting on conservation, writing:
In our meetings with other nations I have a feeling that too little attention is being paid to the subject of the conservation and use of natural resources.
I am surprised that the world knows so little about itself.
Conservation is a basis of permanent peace.
It occurs to me, therefore, that even before the United Nations meet … it might do much good to hold a meeting in the United States of all of the united and associated nations.…
I repeat again that I am more and more convinced that Conservation is a basis of permanent peace.…
I think the time is ripe.
How we think of problems determines where we look for the solutions. If we think the problem is that we are running out of oil, we will look for more oil. If the problem is that we waste too much, or need clean energy, we’ll look for different solutions.
FDR died before the meeting was held, and its conservation agenda was abandoned. Roads not taken.
APRIL
Where did spring go? A local birder reported a Yellow Warbler on April 8—eleven days earlier than the previous earliest state record. But on April 9, a morning snow squall brings spring to a halt. Early blossoms bow their heads under snowy crowns. The early egrets’ stark white finery is suddenly camouflage. And now the mud-brown geese stand out like raisins in sugar. In measured tones they conference about the state of nature. Snow flurries continue into late morning. But calendar-smart crows read the sun, and know better than to be fooled by weather. Flurries be damned; they continue breaking twigs and making nests. Wise is the crow who works through the snow.
Flurries turn to April showers, and by late in the day all snow is memory.
Winter’s visitors continue departing as spring residents arrive. The last Harp Seals departed toward the northern ice a month ago. A young Gray Seal, its coat like mottled charcoal, comes out into the sparkling sun, gripping the sand with its nails. It’s the last seal I’ll see this spring. Wading birds are trading places. Great Blue Herons who’ve survived winter gather across the marshes in small flocks of up to about half a dozen. Dressed in bright new plumage, they’ll soon leave. New waders are arriving. The salt-marsh meadows hold several Great Egrets, and a Little Blue Heron stalks the salt pond’s shore. Glossy Ibis should be here soon.
Not all is pageantry. A pile of mallard feathers lies at the edge of the reeds. Life ends. Other birds will use some of this down to line their nests. Life continues.
Over the ocean, a heavy flight of gannets—their spring peak—is under way across a broad front. Each time I lift my binoculars to an “empty” section of ocean horizon and hold still, at least one gannet appears in my sights within five seconds. When small groups of them pass close, just outside the surf, they gleam with the immaculate luster of spring: body feathers dazzling white, jet black wingtips shiny, and heads airbrushed peach. This glowing vitality is their reward for withstanding winter at sea.
* * *
It’s been one of those nights when gusts charge across the open water like Mongol hordes and the gale howls like wolves pounding down the door. During big storms like this, even the water in my toilet starts pulsing. By dawn we had eight inches of rain. Mid-April can still hurl fierce weather.
The wind is throwing a tantrum that has trees down and airports closed all the way to Maine. Two smaller storms have apparently combined forces: one coming across the northern United States and one coming up the coast from Florida. Our tide clock indicates incoming when I grab my binoculars and venture across the road with Kenzie to assess the tempest.
My neighbor’s picnic table has found its inner driftwood and is floating on its side a hundred yards from shore, rapidly sailing toward the open Sound as though eloping with the storm.
The beach looks rearranged. Most alarmingly, what had been the gently sloping path to the Sound shore now ends in a two-foot drop. Waves have simply gobbled a wedge of sand as though lifting a beach-long slice of cake. I’m startled to see an exposed pile of boulders I hadn’t even known lay buried here.
The old-timers tell stories of storms that ate chunks of our neighborhood, washing away houses and the sand they’d stood on. Of one storm in the ’50s, a neighbor recalls, “I had a flounder in my living room. I guess I’d left a window open.”
Our road’s end shatters to fragments at the high-tide line, its blacktop crumbling as water nibbles landward over time. In one place, stumps of old cedars remain where barnacles now cover the rocks at low tide. They’re remnants of long-forgotten freshwater wetlands, inundated by the sea’s uprising, now battered by ocean surf.
The struggle with coastal storms is mainly about water that gets uppity. And the main reason houses fall to the tide and waters swallow wetlands is that the sea level is creeping up. If the sea level were falling, people who’d bought waterfront homes would have to keep extending their path to the beach. Instead, the surf grabs walkways and wooden stairs and hurls them down the shore. Like a toddler getting better at walking, it reaches for things it couldn’t have before.
Several big insurance companies have stopped writing new home-insurance policies here. They’ve considered the science about storms intensified by warming ocean waters, analyzed how future storm surges may inundate homes, calculated property values, tallied recent payouts—and gotten scared. Or rather, smart. Smart enough to pull away from tidewater. Because my home’s a hundred paces from the present high-tide line, I find this unsettling.
The last time our planet was completely free of polar ice, about forty million years ago (following high greenhouse-gas concentrations resulting from the intense volcanic activity of the times), the sea level was about two hundred feet higher than it is today. It’s taking a lot less than that to scare my neighbors. Three neighbors on the seaward side of my road recently sold their cottages. Seeing the beach incised so deeply must surely have been on their minds.
Because the only road to our houses borders a wide marsh, exceptionally high tides can actually trap us. And in this morning’s nasty weather, the marsh is gone. What had been marsh looks like open bay. The tide has annexed the road, and bay water is streaming across the pavement. In the swarming puddles I need to get through, the
saltwater is deep enough to resist my car, which throws a boatlike wake as I move forward. I’ll pay for this in the price of new brakes in a few weeks, when the mechanic asks, “Were you driving through saltwater or anything like that?”
Who else pays for the rising sea level? If you live miles inland, you likely don’t drive through saltwater, you know that the sea won’t flood your neighborhood, and you’re probably not very concerned about the answer to that question. But the joke’s on you, because the answer is: you pay. You pay to pump eroded sand back onto beaches from here to Florida. And—thank you very much—you pay most of my flood insurance. Yes, while many private insurers are too smart to write a policy on my vulnerable little beach house, you pay for my taxpayer-subsidized federal flood insurance. I appreciate it, but I wish you’d stop. Your hard-earned dollars help wealthy people build seashore McMansions where they otherwise wouldn’t build, because the cost—or unavailability—of private insurance would make such risky self-aggrandizement prohibitive. Only consider the politics. People lean on their coastal congressional representatives, the congressional reps demand pork-fed subsidies, and deals are made. As a friend of mine likes to say, “Poor people have capitalism; the rich have socialism.” And I have flood insurance. But I’d rather see the program axed. It’s selfish for grown-ups who decide to live in high-risk, flood-prone areas to spread their own risks to everyone else. Those of us who would take our chances could still take our chances—and you wouldn’t have to be involved.
But even if environmentalists succeed in eliminating the federal flood insurance subsidy, we’ll all pay for the rise in the sea level eventually, because we’re all netted by an increasingly globalized economy with increasingly shared risks. I suppose that’s fair enough, because we all help cause the sea-level rise. If we shirk the responsibility, we simply shift the cost to someone, somewhere, someday—but what goes around usually comes back around.