by Carl Safina
The tide is sweeping us along at almost three knots, like a brisk walk. I’m feeling my sinker hitting those rocks and mussels. Matt remains unsure of what to make of these taps and tugs. I tell him that if he’s unsure, he should react as though it’s a fish; lift the rod. Each time he lifts, his fishing rod stays straight.
It gets a little shallower, then a little deeper. Reel up a bit as it shallows; let out a little line as it deepens. Keep your bait near the bottom.
No fish.
Now the GPS shows the boat going over a spot on the chart marked “rocks.” The surface responds with roils and boils in the current. Turbulence is good; eddies hold fish.
No fish.
Usually when I get past these rocks, I reel up and go back for another drift. But I’ve gotten a hot tip to stay on this drift after the rocks. So I do. I notice another boat downtide of us, doing the same thing. This is a chute between two sunken hills. On the sounder screen, though, I don’t see any boulders or ridges where a fish might hide, just a few seafloor sand waves. I’m not expecting anything to happen here. For just that reason, I’m thinking, “Pay attention.”
A minute later I feel a couple of light bumps that seem distinctly alive. I dip the rod tip, the line tightens, and when I lift, a heavy weight comes on and the rod bows to a respected opponent. A couple of deep throbs as the fish shakes its head; then the line goes slack. I reel in a bare hook.
Matt suddenly says, “Okay, here we go,” and I turn to see his rod bounce sharply as he comes tight on a bucking fish. The rod arcs way down and his line zips off the reel into the dark current. The fish goes, goes, goes—deep and away—on a series of unusually long runs that deplete much of the line. And at the end of those runs, the fish is still hooked.
Matt is not practiced at getting the line back, but I don’t care how long it takes him and I don’t rush him. The hook stays in and the line and knots are holding. Those runs have tired the fish, and now Matt starts putting some line on the reel between shorter runs. Savoring the connection and each surge and pulse, Matt seems in heaven.
A few minutes later, looking into the black water, he says hopefully, “I think the fish must be near the boat.” I check his depleted reel and tell him he’s got a long way to go.
I’m not monitoring my watch, but I’ve never seen a Striped Bass on the line so long. Something like twenty minutes passes. It’s a combination of the big fish’s strength and Matt taking it slow even though he’s so excited. “Just keep the line coming,” I say. When Matt stops to rest his tired reeling hand on the side of the boat, I tell him he can stay at it slow and steady—but stay at it. Gain a little. Then gain a little more. The main thing is to keep ratcheting closer.
“This fish—” he says breathlessly. “It’s almost—overwhelming.” After various rounds of chemo and radiation over the last couple of years, Matt’s stamina is compromised. Yet stacked against all the not-knowing, the bone-marrow transplant he faces in a couple of weeks, and the concerns for his wife and young son that have shadowed him for months, this whole evening is acquiring a sense of the transcendent. It seems that in the moment the only thing on his mind is the unseen fish somewhere in the dark, flowing water. Matt knows what he’s up against in a way most of us don’t. Still, the idea that his life is more at risk and his time more precious is only partly true. One thing you can learn from a serious illness is who your friends are. But we all have swords dangling over our heads and limited time. We’re all terminal cases, and our stories all have plot twists and surprise endings. What Matt doesn’t know at the moment is that, in a highly unlikely recovery, he will survive this illness; but through no one’s fault, his marriage will not.
A long while after it had already seemed like a long while, I see by the line’s angle that the fish is indeed, finally, close. I reach for the net. The fish looms into view in the shadowy water, swimming in an arc under the surface, then angling down and out of sight again on another run. This whole tug-of-war, with all its life-and-death implications in fact and metaphor, is starting to seem epic.
When Matt again conjures up the fish, she rolls a few feet down and her white belly shows. When she breaks the surface, my net engulfs her head and almost half her body, but the hook or something is hanging up. The fish begins sliding backward, so, fearing we’ll lose her, I lean over the side, wrestling a little to prevent her from falling out, and shift the balance of her bulk inside the net.
I grab the net’s hoop to avoid breaking its handle, and we haul the fish over the side. She thuds to the deck so exhausted she barely moves. The beautiful fish is indeed big. About forty-four inches long, about thirty-five pounds—and about fifteen years old.
For a moment, no one says a word. Matt is flabbergasted by the creature he’s just caught. I switch on the deck light so he can run his hands over the fish’s flanks and admire her pearly belly and the green back and the dashed-line stripes and the purple cast along her flanks.
The possibility of release occurs to me. The large fish are all females, and the bigger they are, the more valuable as breeders because every time they add a little growth they can lay a lot more eggs. Our legal limit would be four of these fish; that’s excessive. But Matt’s already talking about cooking techniques. I don’t know what the rest of the night might bring, so—bird in hand—I put the fish in the ice and add a bucket of seawater. The fish sinks into the slurry, thrashes once, and goes still, chilled to final sleep.
That was our first drift. My GPS says we’re nearly two-thirds of a mile from where I started the drift. My ideal for the evening had been a calm ocean, memorable sunset, starry sky, and big fish. It’s turned out to be a high-quality evening. So that’s it, rather simply; quality is the nearness of the actual to the ideal.
We’re done. Catching another fish tonight would dilute perfection. I congratulate Matt on a fish of uncommon quality, start the engine, and turn the wheel toward home.
* * *
In the night kitchen with some Coltrane playing, I slice a few steaks from the thick forward end of the fish’s translucent fillets, dip them in olive oil, top with black sesames and basil, bake them a few quick minutes, and broil a browning onto them while their centers still blush pink. Well after midnight we clink glasses, the fish becomes us, and we close the evening.
* * *
If quality is the nearness of the real to the ideal, then we can consider not just the quality of our own time; we can also evaluate our relationship with the world. Early philosophers thought that if they could simply get human interactions right, they would have answered the primary question. But when Socrates said, “We are discussing no small matter, but how we ought to live,” he had no idea what a hugely not-small matter he’d begun to tug on. Considering all we’ve talked about—what life is; how philosophers erected a firewall between us and nature; the physical impossibility of infinite material growth; the need for a new concept of development; and how we’ve become a new force of nature, changing the world at scales and rates previously reserved for geological processes—the quality of humanity’s relationship with the world can certainly be improved.
Quality is perhaps most easily judged in familiar terrain. But for broader perspective, you need distance. The warm nights and warm waters around Lazy Point are my idea of summer. Yet I’m leaving those familiar qualities for a different kind of summer, in a different world where neither land nor sea ever quite break the icy grip of winter. Even that world, however, is changing.
TRAVELS POLAR: SVALBARD
How would a biblical literalist count seven days and nights here? One day in Svalbard lasts four months, and the sun never sets; one night lasts four months, and the sun never rises. The other four months consist mainly of either long days with short nights or long nights with short days. Here the equinoxes—the two days annually with twelve hours each of daylight and darkness—really mean something. But what does “a day” mean here, and how many are there in a year?
The islands collectively calle
d Svalbard rise from the sea so far north they seem to lie beyond human thought. The latitude is nearly 80° north, far beyond the Arctic Circle. Almost everywhere else in the world this far north, you’d be in the Arctic Ocean. Mainland Norway’s northernmost tip is about five hundred miles south of us.
Many people have never heard of these islands; few would want to come. For those who have and who do, it’s neither easy nor hospitable. The annual average temperature is 25° Fahrenheit (−4°C); the record low: −51° Fahrenheit (−46.3°C). Some 60 percent of the land is covered by glaciers and ice sheets; 27 percent is simply bare; less than 10 percent is vegetated. The nearest tree—or even shrub—is hundreds of miles behind us, on the European continent. Although Inuit people elsewhere learned to master sea ice and long crossings of the Arctic Ocean, no aboriginal people ever got this far.
But now I’ve come to the spare and elemental top of the world, into the music of vast silences and the heave and subsidence of a cold, dark sea. I hope to see creatures living to a different rhythm, a rhythm not of our time—though that pace, too, is changing. Partly, I came to this place beyond humanity to see where we’re all headed.
* * *
Though it’s mid-July, snow flurries greet my arrival. The bubble of civilization extends here, but barely. The two thousand residents live off coal mining. The main town, Longyearbyen, is named after the person who developed the mining, although with those four months of uninterrupted night, and temperatures dozens of degrees below zero, it must seem a “long year” indeed. The people here rely entirely on food imported from lands a thousand or more miles south. But that’s not the only connection between local coal and distant places. Coal combustion is helping change the climate.
Cary Fowler is a curly-haired man who’s come to this land without farming to save the future of agriculture. “It’s a foregone conclusion that climate change will affect agriculture,” Fowler is telling me. “The open question is: Will agriculture adapt?”
Adapting a plant variety to a new region—or a new climate—isn’t easy or quick. Temperature limits the natural ranges of many species of plants and animals. To understand how profound this limitation is, think of it this way: at the edge of a species’ range, each individual and each generation have the opportunity to expand just beyond the confines of their species’ normal range. The rewards would certainly be great: more territory, less competition, more market share. Yet many species apparently cannot adapt to temperature regimes and climate conditions different from those to which they’re already adapted. At the very least, such adaptation is not simple or certain. Just ask any dinosaur.
* * *
Through what looks a bit like a concrete-reinforced cellar door in a frozen mountain, we enter a nearly four-hundred-foot-long tunnel dug through solid rock. The tunnel connects a series of cavernous storage rooms maintained at 0° Fahrenheit (−18°C), and the whole space resembles a big multichambered cave. This is the Doomsday Vault, the world’s cold-storage site for agriculture, a safety-deposit box for seeds. More formally it’s called the Global Seed Vault, established in 2008 by the Global Crop Diversity Trust; its location was chosen for its insulation from conflict, floods, and fires. And the area deep beneath this mountain is expected to stay frozen for a long time, even under projected warming. Warming is why we’re in so cold a place.
“Crop diversity is the biological foundation of future agriculture,” Fowler asserts.
Agriculture is, and is not, very diversified. Out of about 300,000 named plant species, we get 90 percent of our food from 103 species, and we get 70 percent from just 3: wheat, corn, and rice. But between 200,000 and 400,000 varieties of rice exist in the world. Some grow on land, some under several feet of water. The roughly 60,000 kinds of beans include some that resist heat, others that resist bugs.
Collecting the world’s seeds is a new work in progress. The vault currently holds over 300,000 samples, each with about 500 seeds, so 150 million seeds. It has sufficient capacity to store 4.5 million samples, 2.25 billion seeds. The seeds themselves—nondescript, methodically bagged, labeled, and racked—are a visual anticlimax. They’re the least dramatic thing about the whole enterprise.
“Twenty years from now,” Fowler says, “the climate in some countries won’t be anything like it is now.” He shows me a graph that plots growing-season temperatures in India for the past century and temperatures projected by the end of this century. During the growing season, the experienced and projected temperatures do not overlap. It won’t just be on the warmer side of average; there’ll be an entirely new range of temperatures. Concludes Fowler: “Agriculture has never seen the kind of climate that is coming.”
That throws food forecasts into question. Economists project a 1 to 2 percent increase in corn production in South Africa. “That’s because,” Fowler explains, “they simply assume the increasing yields of the past will continue. They’re looking in the rearview mirror.” Corn needs rain. Forecasts for coming years predict worsening African droughts. And if a corn stalk’s silk dries out, you get no corn.
“If you look ahead, and factor in climate,” Fowler says, “you’d predict a thirty percent decline in corn in South Africa. That’s total yield, not per person.” You’d have to take the 30 percent lower total yield and divide that by the number of people expected due to population growth to really see how much less food per person is likely.
Corn’s not the only concern. About half the world’s population eats a bowl of rice every day. Rice pollination success is nearly 100 percent at roughly 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35°C). Rather stunningly, for every added 1 degree Celsius rise in nighttime temperature, rice yields drop 10 percent. At night temperatures of about 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40°C), pollination fails almost entirely. Similarly, for each 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature, corn and wheat yields decline about 5 percent. The National Academy of Sciences says, “Temperature increases due to global warming will make it increasingly difficult to feed Earth’s growing population.”
“Is agriculture ready?” Fowler asks. “No. We’ve actually been losing seed diversity. It’s as if, as we’re facing a growing threat—we’re dismantling our defenses.
“And where,” Fowler continues, “will farmers get the drought- and heat-tolerant crop varieties they’ll need? Not from inside their own countries; they’ll have to get them from somewhere else.” Somewhere else is this vault. Water requirements, light sensitivity, heat sensitivity, disease and insect resistance—all must be tuned, then fine-tuned. Even with genetic engineering, it takes about seven years to develop a new crop variety. This vault preserves those tunable traits from around the globe. Coded into seeds, these traits can be shipped anywhere to speed development of new varieties.
This vault is the sole global response to the crisis of shrinking crop varieties in a world with a changing climate. “We will need this seed bank,” Fowler opines, “as long as we will need agriculture. This,” he adds, waving at the spaces waiting to be filled with seed samples, “is a common heritage of humanity, a basic public good. Quite simply,” he concludes, “there is no possibility of feeding ourselves without it.”
* * *
Critical as the vault is, it will store only agricultural seeds, not wild plant types. Not domestic animal breeds. And not, of course, the diversity of wild animals. To do the job right, Noah would need a bigger boat.
In that spirit, I board the Endeavor. Lindblad Expeditions has taken the ship off its eco-tour schedule explicitly to facilitate a more penetrating Arctic climate prognosis. Aboard are Julian Dowdeswell, a rather jovial ice expert who directs the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge and has done lots of fieldwork in this region; climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf, who is a professor of oceanography at Potsdam University and an Arctic climate expert; and the good-natured, though at times intense Swedish naturalist Stefan Lundgren.
Hardly have we left the harbor when it becomes plain that we are slipping beyond the peopled planet, beyond t
he hospitable and humanly habitable. The sky is leaden. The mountainous landscape appears raw and forbidding, its bare rock like draped bolts of dark cloth, caked with snow.
But even this far north, seabirds thrive. Thick-billed murres and Little Auks (called Dovekies in North America), both abundant, look like flying penguins. Barnacle Geese gather in sparse flocks along the stark shoreline. Piratical Arctic Skuas chase Black-legged Kittiwakes until they drop their food. Stocky Northern Fulmars orbit us in hope of scraps. A train of Common Eiders is caboosed by one Long-tailed Duck. I see a few light-on-the-wing Arctic Terns; they’ll spend the winter up to twelve thousand miles south, in the Antarctic. Along the shore floats a Red-throated Loon, its blush-feathered throat striking compared to the paler winter plumage they wear when visiting my home shores. Atlantic Puffins, the bright-billed comic relief of northern seas, fly in small groups. Those bills also add a bright splash of color in this place of grays and subdued hues.
The waterbirds all endure a long migration to get up here, but the most arduous trip must be for Svalbard’s only land bird, the large sparrow called the Snow Bunting, for whom the five-hundred-mile-plus ocean crossing must be arduous beyond human reckoning.
Here at the outer limits of their summer ranges, these birds seem familiar; I know them from home. Even Ruddy Turnstones sometimes get this far. From their North American populations, these species all send delegates to waters near my beach house. The murres, auks, skuas, fulmars, the terns, the loons, the eiders and Long-tailed Ducks, of course, even the bunting—I’ve seen them all around Lazy Point. That’s how small the world is and how big their lives are. Now, far from my own shores, they make me feel unexpectedly at home. Otherwise, this would seem utterly like the planet’s cold shoulder.