The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

by Carl Safina

  So part of what’s on my mind is mere sea level, but that connects to energy, economics, and how we value things. The wind has these topics swirling around in my neighborhood and in my head.

  As I feared, our salt-pond Ospreys are missing in action, gone from their nest and nowhere in view. This kind of weather can make them abandon the whole season’s breeding.

  At the nest near the old fish factory, though, the Ospreys are home. They’ve weathered fashion models and they’re weathering this storm. The male is kiting in the wind over their bowl of big sticks. I’m amazed that the whole nest hasn’t blown away. The female is hunkered down, head barely visible, probably already on eggs. Lucky for her, the nest is in the lee of trees and high dunes that are weakening the blast of the tempest.

  * * *

  I don’t mind the weather so much. But it happens to be a day I’ve never liked: Earth Day. It seems pathetic to mark just one day for, well, the whole world. It’s as if for most people, the planet is somehow out of context. (And in an awful irony, Earth Day 2010 saw the beginning of the Gulf of Mexico oil eruption.)

  Earth Day originated as a response to pollution. But more important than marking the day is when and where that response was possible. Environmental movements arose not in the most polluted places on Earth but in the most democratic. The growth of environmental activity elsewhere often paralleled the overthrow of authoritarian and military regimes and the rise of democracies. When Václav Havel became president of a newly democratic Czechoslovakia in 1989, he lamented to the Czech people, “We have laid waste to our soil and the rivers and the forests that our forefathers bequeathed to us, and we have the worst environment in the whole of Europe today.” The previous repressive regime’s suppression of citizen groups, the press, universities, and other potential sources of objection allowed it to pollute with impunity while people stood powerless. Nature is most abused where human rights are most abused. A country serves justice, or it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, it poisons air, water, and soul alike. When it does, the environment becomes a key toward unlocking justice—but free people must hold those keys.

  Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy—these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one’s special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion.

  * * *

  The main point of a democracy—protecting the best interests of the many, and the rights of the minority, from the greed and bullying of a few—is accomplished by having “the many” run the government. The social contract is that people voluntarily give some authority to a citizen-run government that serves social order and the public interest. That was the idea.

  But greed has grown into a parasitic infestation of the body politic that bleeds us weak. Just look at the multinational corporations’ lobbying, the resulting flow of taxpayer subsidies, and the failure of government oversight.

  Political institutions can’t correct the economic forces—or even stop feeding corporations with public money—because they’ve been captured by them. Each year, globally, governments shell out $700 billion in subsidies that help pay people to overpump groundwater, overcut forests, overfish oceans, and overuse fuel. The world taxes itself to pay for its own destruction.

  Modern corporations were essentially illegal at the founding of the United States. (The colonists had had enough of British corporations.) In the new country, corporations could form, raise public capital, and share profits with stockholders only for specified activities that benefited the public, such as constructing roads or canals. Corporate licenses were temporary. Corporations were forbidden from attempting to influence elections, lawmaking, public policy, or civic life. Imagine.

  But from the beginning, corporate-minded men chafed for power, prompting Thomas Jefferson to write in 1816, “I hope we shall … crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

  For the first century after the American Revolution, legislators maintained control of the corporate chartering process. Then they essentially lost it as a series of court decisions established corporate “rights” and corporate “personhood.” These have been catastrophic for democracy, with planetary implications.

  We didn’t need the U.S. Supreme Court to tell us that corporations have the same rights of “free speech” as real persons. Of course they do—they are much freer, in fact, than normal humans, since they can buy airtime and advertising, dose candidates with fairy dust, and mobilize paid persuaders in quantities out of the orbit of the budget of any real real person. Corporations have free speech. Normal humans, not so much.

  Our problems are not the inevitable price of progress. They are the eventual cost of stupidity, ideology, superstition, greed—the list is short. The problems spawned are vast. They’re intractable, but not because we lack know-how. They’re intractable because we can’t find the sense that informs the will.

  That avuncular Trojan horse of greed, Ronald Reagan, largely abrogated the social contract because—as far as I can tell—he and his ilk didn’t like paying taxes or being “regulated.” Well, who does? But who doesn’t want roads, police, education, fire protection, and jobs; who doesn’t see Europe’s often-superior health care, job training, child care—and its citizens’ generally higher level of satisfaction with their lives and their government; who besides our enemies doesn’t want America to be a great, strong, cohesive nation; and who besides the greediest doesn’t realize that being great means we all pitch in? Anyone looking for a country with low taxes; no funds wasted on social programs; no government regulation of business, health, worker safety, or the environment; and no gun control might consider moving to Somalia. Anyway, Reagan said that if rich people were allowed to keep more of their money, it would “trickle down” to po’ folk. A slogan that sounds like you’re waiting for something to leak down someone’s leg should raise a red flag. But, in practice, not just money “trickled down”; greed did. The 1980s saw the democratization of greed. Reagan and his neo-conmen replaced the ethic of “one for all and all for one” with “all for me,” immortalized by the movie Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko, who says, “Greed is good. Greed is right. Greed works.” Those lines were based on a real-life commencement speech at the University of California–Berkeley’s School of Business Administration, where Ivan Boesky (who later did a prison stint for massive insider trading) told the 1986 graduates, “Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” Applause. Because everyone wanted to feel good about themselves (and get a piece of the booty), a generation embraced greed. Bill Clinton likewise got seduced by deregulation’s easy feel-good, not to mention the unmentionable administrations that bookended his. The only problem was, the regulations they deregulated had been built up over a century for a very good reason: the public needs to defend itself against greedy excess. All in all, deregulation dealt a devastating blow to the social contract and the idea that we’re all in America together, with both feet. The divisive partisanship, the screaming head media freak show, and the fiscal recklessness that followed were an inevitable result of the lost discipline and the lost sense of common cause. And by the time everyone realized their pockets had been fleeced, the fleecers had fled, beyond law, beyond regulation—beyond national borders. But not everyone lost out; you glimpse a winning ticket, for example, every time you read the words “Made in China.”

  * * *

  Across the marsh, a Cooper’s Hawk perches briefly in an elder, its manic hyperawareness evident in its swiveling gaze. Built for short, high-acceleration sprints and turn-on-a-dime maneuvering, it specializes in snatching flying birds in close cover. In a flash it pour
s itself into the cloaking vegetation, toward its next explosive ambush.

  I can’t resist seeing what the storm’s doing on the ocean side, so I’m going to stop the car for a quick look. Just getting the car door open is a little difficult in this wind. Beating my way into the blast, I glance down the beach. Where beach had been, it’s all raging surf laying siege, hurling driftwood against the dunes. Usually, ocean and land maintain more civility, but right now everything is whiteness and spume and the full-force teeth of the gale. The ocean is spitting sea foam that blows across the road in pillows.

  Over the last couple of weeks I’d been concerned that during my walks with Kenzie we might be disturbing the Piping Plovers who’d arrived to set up their territories. Now those territories are inundated with pounding surf. I wonder if any birds can be finding much food in this weather.

  But these onshore winds must be carrying millions of migrant birds up the coast, birds whose northbound trek had, until now, taken them only as far as the West Indies or Mexico or the U.S. South.

  As I drive away from the beach, a streaking Cooper’s Hawk blurs across the road clenching a blackbird. Not everything has had trouble catching food today.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, getting back briefly to the other storm: the one in which corporations inundate democracy—. Corporate globalization has been called “the most fundamental redesign of social, economic, and political arrangements since the Industrial Revolution.” Corporations have swept real economic and political power away from governments. Of the hundred wealthiest countries and corporations listed together, more than half are corporations. ExxonMobil is richer than 180 countries—and there are only about 195 countries. Without the responsibilities or costs of nationhood, corporations can innovate and produce at unprecedented speed and scale. Yet they can also undertake acts of enormous environmental destruction and report a profit.

  The behavior of corporations arises from their wide freedom of action and their limited liability for harms caused. Further, shareholders “own” and profit by the corporation, but “limited liability” means shareholders can lose no more than the money invested; they aren’t held responsible for anything the corporation does. If they were, stockholders might know what companies they “own” and why. They might demand corporate responsibility. They might invest more carefully. But because they’re not, they don’t.

  Further, if a corporation can make a larger profit by wrecking a community, the law says it must. Perhaps the most famous case in corporate law was decided in the Supreme Court of Michigan in 1919 when Henry Ford got sued by the Dodge brothers. (Yes, those Dodge brothers.) Ford wanted to plow profits back into the company and its employees. “My ambition is to employ still more men,” the New York Times quoted Ford as saying, “to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes. To do this we are putting the greatest share of our profits back in the business.” The judges posed a short question: What is a corporation for? The judges answered themselves by saying corporations are “primarily for the profit of the stockholders.” Not for the benefit of employees or community. Corporate managers—regardless of personal scruples or desire to “do good”—are forced to always put profits first.

  The profit-maximization imperative creates continuous pressure to dump waste in the public commons and to shift the resulting costs to the public through subsidies, tax-funded pollution cleanups, and such. Where dumping waste is illegal, corporations may be fined for violations. Such fines often become “a cost of doing business,” while shareholders know that corporations never get sent to jail, and that some are “too big (to be allowed) to fail.” To the extent that governmental regulations get annoying, corporate appetites engulf those too, backing and basically installing cooperative elected officials, then coercing the removal of regulatory “barriers” (formerly: “public protections”).

  However, we can envision how a more public-minded government might deal with risk-prone corporations. In World War II, the U.S. government seized control of certain German companies inside the United States. Obviously, it wouldn’t do to have German chemical plants on American soil while we were engulfed in war with Germany. The companies were not destroyed, just controlled by the government for a while; some still exist. When U.S. automakers got into serious trouble and went into bankruptcy in 2009, the federal government stepped in to control management for a while. These weren’t punitive moves exactly, but one can imagine ways in which corporations acting as bad citizens might have to do some time with, say, their stocks frozen—no trading, maybe—while a government of the people does a little potty training with the executives.

  In real life as we know it, the profit-maximization imperative means that any company seeking to act responsibly incurs a competitive disadvantage. The implications are generally a cascade of catastrophes, because, essentially, all the money in the world is thus under pressure to act irresponsibly. Any other impulse must buck that tide.

  * * *

  The corporations’ central tenet of faith, their object of worship, their grail and their gruel: growth. Growth fueled by continually unearthing new resources and cheaper labor. Growth fed by raising and fattening new consumers. Growth had historically resulted from technical progress and growing population. It became a central pursuit of government policy mainly after World War II.

  But Planet Earth cannot grow. Not any faster than it accumulates stardust, anyway. If the economy “grows” while resources like water, forests, and fish are being depleted, it’s not growth, its just blowing more bubbles. Yet because our economic system shows unconditional love for growth, it doesn’t ring alarm bells over bubbles. But count on this: the bigger the bubble, the worse the burst.

  The first corporate century, the twentieth, was a period of explosive growth. Despite as many as 150 million human beings killed in warfare between 1900 and Y2K, the world population quadrupled. Energy use increased sixteen-fold. The fish catch—which peaked in the late 1980s—increased thirty-five-fold. The sheer amount of stuff used annually flies in flocks of zeros that defy comprehension: 275,000,000 tons of meat, 370,000,000 tons of paper products, et cetera. Incredibly, of all the earthly materials that human hands have ever transformed, fully half of that material transformation has occurred since World War II.

  “It is impossible for the world economy to grow its way out of poverty and environmental degradation,” writes the resource-minded economist Herman Daly, because the economy is a “subsystem of the earth ecosystem, which is finite, non-growing, and materially closed.”

  And economists think the solution to our problems is more growth? We’ve been terribly misled. But more development—that’s a different proposition. “Grow” means to increase in size by adding. “Develop” means to realize potentials, to make better. Growth is greater flow of material and energy from the natural environment through the economy or system. Growth is quantity; development, quality.

  Because the world is pretty much fully tapped, growth now threatens development. In a postgrowth world, we’d measure things like community and satisfaction. We’d replace the feverish tail chase of the material with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those come from development, not from growth. Let’s not confuse the two.

  * * *

  At first light after a mild rain has stopped, the spring’s first real dawn chorus of birds wakes me so cheerfully and agreeably that I lie in the soft flannel sheets, listening to the cooing doves of the world, too soothed to move. I soak in the swooping, drooping wolf whistles of cardinals. I listen to raucous jays. White-throated Sparrows—molted into whiter throats and flashy yellow eyebrows that anticipate breeding in the motherland—repeat their rousing anthem to where they’re headed: Oh, Canada-Canada-Canada. A couple of newly arrived Chipping Sparrows are calling from the sandy-footed pines. And a song I can’t identify turns out to be from a Carolina Wren that has composed an original tune—a feat rare among wre
ns.

  I emerge; it’s cool, about fifty degrees, but the breeze is breathing from the south. In the yellow slants of early light, Kenzie and I address the Sound shore, six legs between the two of us. The air, suddenly holding its breath, produces a no-wind situation that rests the bay to mirror calmness. But the storm has left upon the ocean a heave so massive I can hear the south side surf rumbling from a couple of miles away.

  It happens to be the first really golden morning we’ve had in a while, and warming quickly. From the tropics, delivered well ahead of their normal dates in the storm’s fierce rage of air, will today and in the next few days appear Eastern Kingbirds, Scarlet Tanagers, Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, Indigo Buntings, Barn Swallows, and others. Almost incredibly, at least four Sooty Terns will be seen or found dead by birders on Long Island, and in Rhode Island and Connecticut, some of them blown well inland. Only once before has a Sooty Tern been seen in our region in springtime, and that was in late May—never in April. Its nearest breeding site is south of Florida. Its multiple appearances here bear further testimony to the strength and consequences of this storm and to the role of luck and timing—and occasional chaos—in the destiny of lives. No doubt many other wonders will arrive, and perhaps perish, exhausted and unseen.

  * * *

  I’ve been talking rather disparagingly about growth and population. I should say that growth was good, to a point. Now, if the point of growth is to give each person more, then at this stage, less means more for each. Shrinking our population by half gives each person double. Shrinking to one-fourth (the population the world had in 1900) would mean each person would have—on average, potentially—four times the freshwater, food, lumber, and so forth. Places like India and the American Plains that are running a groundwater deficit would use it at one-fourth the rate. Some places might replenish.