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

by Carl Safina

  “To have an outbreak, you need a loaded gun and a trigger,” Burg explains. The gun is having mature trees, and the place was loaded, with trees several hundred years old. “Two warm summers in a row, where the temperature averages over fifty degrees Fahrenheit—that pulls the trigger.”

  In the past, warm periods were soon followed by cool periods that knocked the beetles back. But now warmth has prevailed for more than two decades. In Alaska alone, beetles are destroying spruces over vast swaths totaling perhaps three million acres. In the rest of the United States and Canada, the beetles are destroying tens of millions of forest acres. And while these bugs are hitting trees, in other parts of the world warming temperatures have aided the spread of insects and ticks vectoring malaria, Lyme disease, dengue fever, and other human diseases.

  “This is the worst infestation around here; everything’s been hit.” Burg gives an appraising glance and comments, “They ate all the large spruce trees. The surrounding forests used to have trees one hundred and twenty-five feet tall, this big around.” His arms indicate four-foot diameters. The average diameter now is six to eight inches.

  Burg and his wife inhabited a log cabin in the forest. “It was just terrible to see those beautiful trees dying,” he recalls. A dead standing forest is an extreme fire danger. So he felt compelled to cut and haul hundreds of trees. The adjacent landowner clear-cut 160 acres. “Cutting down all those old trees,” he confides, “was an emotional shock.”

  * * *

  From a small plane we gaze upon the remnants of a recent fire that burned fifty-five thousand acres and one hundred cabins. Below us stretch the spiky spindles of charred trees, then whole mountainsides of trees so recently killed they stand with their dried, highly flammable needles still attached. All these trees that had been soaking up carbon dioxide are now carbon emitters as they decompose or burn. This blaze started with an ill-tended campfire. It burned for weeks through beetle-ravaged lands. Then landowners logged heavily to suppress danger of further fires.

  After the logging came roads, subdivisions, cabins, and an infestation of real-estate agents advertising “emerging view” properties. It had been wildlife habitat, some of it classified as wilderness.

  * * *

  Fire is advancing. Ice is shrinking. Portage Glacier is missing.

  The famous frozen landmark has retreated around the corner. It’s no longer visible from the visitor center. (If you want to see it, there’s a tour boat.) The ranger who “interprets” for visitors says Portage Glacier is withdrawing at only twenty feet a year, so it ranks among the neighborhood’s more stable glaciers. She reassures us that the weather’s normally cooler.

  That’s another way of saying that it’s abnormally warm. Rosy spins notwithstanding, in the 1980s the U.S. government predicted that the glacier would shrink out of view by 2020. Instead, it disappeared round the bend in under a decade. (Reality is outpacing predictions because most scientists are conservative.)

  Undercurrents: Many cities were situated to take advantage of—so they now depend on—meltwater from glaciers and snowpack. But about 90 percent of the world’s glaciers are shrinking. As South America’s glaciers and snowpack shrivel, La Paz, Bogotá, Santiago—to where might these cities move? The summer weep of Himalayan glaciers feeds river water to 1.3 billion people, including 40 percent of the people from India to south China. Some 70 percent of the Ganges River’s water comes from Gangotri Glacier, which will likely disappear in a few decades, making the sacred Ganges an intermittent, seasonal river for the nearly half billion people dependent on it. Glaciers also feed the Indus, Brahmaputra, and Mekong Rivers. Glaciers that feed both China’s Yellow River (whose basin is home to 150 million people) and its Yangtze River (whose 370 million people rely heavily on river-irrigated rice) are shrinking at 7 percent annually.

  Although Chinese spokespeople often downplay environmental problems. Chinese Academy of Sciences representative Yao Tandong had this assessment: “The full-scale glacier shrinkage in the plateau regions will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe.” With river flows already dropping, one Nepali farmer ventured, “Maybe God is unkind, and sends less water in the river.”

  Refugees displaced by environmental problems (drought, deforestation, sea level rise) now equal the number displaced by things like political oppression, religious persecution, and ethnic troubles: about 25 million a year. Predicted droughts and coastal flooding would displace around 200 million people.

  If climate changes really do create hundreds of millions of refugees, how will people avoid widening havoc? Lord Nicholas Stern, the former chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank, has expressed concern that failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions could bring “an extended world war.”

  Life will go on; it’s not the end of the world. But we’re running high-stakes risks because, as I’ve mentioned, we’re fundamentally messing with the stability that’s prevailed during everything we call civilization.

  * * *

  Before Kenai Fjords National Park existed as such, a glacier occupied this now-forested valley and the road I’m on. Signs along the road follow the glacier’s tracks. A sign at a glacier-deposited gravel pile marks the year 1815. Between 1815 and 1899, the glacier receded a short distance. Since then, the lengthening distance between signs demonstrates the glacier’s increasingly hurried withdrawal.

  Up in the mountains to my left the Harding Ice Field—thirty miles long, twenty miles wide, and something like three thousand feet thick—has thinned about seventy feet since 1950. Over thirty-two glaciers flow from it. Most are shrinking. McCarty Glacier receded fifteen miles between 1909 and 2004. Northwestern Glacier lost about nine.

  Pursuing on foot now, I follow Exit Glacier past 1917, past 1951. Here, where just a few decades ago a high, grinding tongue of ice licked away the very rock, today the wind shivers a hint of autumn into a young alder forest. Walking uphill gains me commanding views of the slopes and sun-silvered braided streams running from the still-unseen glacier. At the 1995 moraine, a photograph taken then shows the glacier protruding gigantically into the frame, just a few yards from where I’m standing. I see the same rock formations that frame the photographed glacier, but no ice.

  A few minutes later, I’m where the ice was in 2000. Then I’m at a rope placed here in 2004. “We put this here so visitors could stand safely behind this rope and simply reach out and touch the ice,” explains the woman in the Smokey Bear uniform.

  Really? A few seasons ago, this trail we’re on was under tons of ice? Hundreds of yards up the valley, the now-visible ice is backed up like a treed bear. That image remains as I trudge uphill against the cool breath I finally feel the ice casting downvalley.

  With candor every bit as refreshing as this breeze, the ranger says that 100 million people live within three feet of the present sea level, and that the scientific consensus is that the sea level will likely rise as much as three feet in this century. That would pretty much be the end of New Orleans and major chunks of a lot of other coastal towns and cities, she notes. No one expects the sea to stop rising at the end of this century, either. The ranger also says that sea level and other aspects of warming affect 90 percent of the more than 200 Native Alaskan villages. She adds that the Natives fear that the federal government will move them to Fairbanks, turning them into refugees. I know, I tell her, and we begin talking about what I saw and heard in Shishmaref.

  At last, we meet our glacier face-to-face. Its blue ice, sculpted into deep creases and fins, stands dusted with the silt it has ground from the surrounding valley. As I’m composing a commemorative photo, the ranger adds, “We’ve lost two hundred feet so far this year.”

  SEPTEMBER

  Tempus fugit, wrote Virgil. Time flees. Where has summer gone?

  Seeing the first group of Black Scoters bobbing nonchalantly in the south side surf with terns flying overhead is as close as one can get to spanning summer and winter in the same glance. On the beach there’
s no sign of Piping Plovers; they’re gone, like the summer lovers. I let Kenzie off the leash, and she lopes ahead.

  The early migrants include some of my neighbors, whose cottages are mere summertime playhouses. When the calendar strikes nine they scramble out of them like hermit crabs moving to bigger shells. They’re pulling their boats, wrapping them until next summer. I pity them for missing the best weather and the most energized time of the year, all coming up in the next couple of months. Summer has weeks left, but once the calendar displays the word “September,” you’d think it was Latin for “evacuate.”

  Evacuation was on the minds of some as a hurricane was slotted to pass just east of here. Turns out it weakened and veered far out to sea, so we didn’t get much weather from it. But for two days it lobbed ten-foot swells, which broke into the biggest kind of surf we see, dumping sand and seawater onto neighborhood streets. Most of us who went for a look soon fled. I’d barely gotten a glimpse when I was forced to scramble up a dune to higher ground. One older gentleman, having realized the beach was too hazardous, had turned back up the path to rejoin his family when a piston of surging water knocked him down from behind, immediately snatching his glasses and, thus, most of his eyesight. His children and grandchildren rushed to his aid, holding him by the arms as the water receded, preventing the wave from getting even more of him.

  By the next evening, the manic swells were gone and the surf went back to snoring.

  * * *

  In the bays and the Sound, this has turned out to be a really big year for small fishes. Neighbors who’ve been here for decades, like the Badkins, say they’ve never seen so many baby bunkers and big silversides. Across the near-shore surface water, you can see them flipping circlets in the rich light of late afternoon; schools so big they look like rain.

  This summer’s fish bonanza has handed the terns an extremely successful breeding season. Many, many young are on the wing. They easily equal their parents in number—and in appetite. Over twenty thousand adults breed within ten miles of here, and now they’ve come to Lazy Point with all their flying children. For the adult terns, this means no more carrying fish all the way to distant nests. But adults are still feeding young birds that must continue developing the skill it takes to seize a tiny fish in a headlong plunge. Having left their breeding islands, terns are massing mightily along our shore.

  Meanwhile, those fish swarms are beginning to move out into the Sound. And each evening this week, the dark schools have been shadowed by extraordinary tern flocks stretching more or less continuously for several miles, between Lazy Point and Cartwright Shoal. They wage intense aerial bombardment at the fluidly moving fish schools. They’re stoking up for their next big transition. The ranks of terns born and bred here must now be augmented with migrants moving down from the Maritimes and New England. Through binoculars, against the setting sun, the terns look, at times, like smoke. In recent days several Ospreys have been among them, hovering high, hunting the bigger fish lurking around the small-fish swarms.

  It’s an extremely impressive display of life at the apogee of summer, the year’s productivity mounded and piled past the angle of repose. It is a world lush with the living, a world that—despite the problems—still has what it takes to really produce.

  Cormorants continue piling into the harbor daily. They’re not going to miss out on fishing like this. Hundreds of the dark, sodden birds, swimming in line formations, continue driving herds of small fishes into panics that frenzy the attending terns. Black Terns from Canadian lakes and marshes have joined the Common, Least, and Roseate Terns. All these birds and the Bluefish and other fishes must rake off an incredible number of small fish daily, taking the profits of summer. Yet legions of the little ones still swim.

  * * *

  Again this afternoon, resting terns and their young by the thousands are gathered on various Lazy Point shores and bay bars, chattering and—.

  A sudden, silenced takeoff of many hundreds of terns prompts the thought “Look for a falcon.” Sure enough, on comes the falcon, high, the first southbound Peregrine of the year, the slow tilt toward autumn marked by this exclamation of life within its own parentheses of wings.

  The falcon requires birds to make the bird it is. And several paths can lead to making a falcon: soil into plants into seeds into birds into falcon; or plants into insects into birds into falcon; or dissolved nutrients into plankton into fish into terns into falcon. The falcon heaps all this energy as tribute to its own bright burn.

  It rises higher, higher. Someday this glowing ember called a falcon, this cloud-splitting crossbow, as startling as a pirate flag in a telescope, will be a pile of feathers and maggots in the rain. The way of all flesh. But this isn’t that day.

  Now out of sight, and now a speck in the binoculars, hiding in the heights, it determines its next taxpayer and calculates its trajectory. The falcon merely tilts its head; close parentheses, and the acceleration seems impossible. Fastest living thing. It is not that death comes so fast. It is that between the bookends of nothingness, we have this magnificent glowing life upon whose pages we can write book after book, or which we can leave blank. How many ways shall we make it count? How full or meager?

  The chosen tern, cool in the face of imminent end, sidesteps like matador before meteor. Falcon misses, tail rudder twitches, and the momentum shoots it skyward. Now bereft of the element of surprise, it flies across the bay while close above it reel a blizzard of indignant terns. It angles along the marsh, then vanishes toward the ocean.

  * * *

  In coming days these tern flocks will rise high and circle the shores, and begin shrinking as though evaporating. They’ve got the urge for going. And they’ll begin to go. This rich glimpse of death-defying life; this is the way it’s supposed to be. And most astoundingly: this is the way it is. Terns’ lives are shaped by real fish and real falcons. We shape our lives around things that aren’t there, haunted by ghosts and demons; busily at work moving pieces of paper and screenfuls of black squiggles from one desk to another. And somehow in the process—we risk all there is.

  * * *

  It has been my great good fortune to live when I could experience some of the world’s most thrilling wildlife. It has been our tragedy to see much of it ebb at our own doing. I’m not talking about little, obscure forms of life. I’m less concerned about the continued existence of tiny endangered remnants than I am about the accelerating decline of big wild populations and habitats. I know it’s heresy on a slippery slope to say this, but I don’t think conservation needs to focus on saving every nearly identical type of bird or lizard on every island. In one sense it’s more important to prevent things from becoming endangered than it is to save endangered things from extinction. The conservation of large populations of abundant species matters at least as much as the conservation of rare species. How else could we maintain enough of nature to support a bearable amount of activities like logging and commercial fishing?

  We live without what others took, and are poorer for it. But we can’t blame earlier generations for most of the damage. We ourselves are causing the global deterioration of forests, rivers, reefs, and the rest. We are the ones altering the world’s climate and the ocean’s chemistry, straining the process of life.

  There appears no assurance that in the times of our own grandchildren the world will contain viable populations of wild African Lions, Tigers, Polar Bears, Emperor Penguins, gorillas, or coral reefs and their millions of dependent species. These are the animals expectant parents paint on nursery room walls. Their implied wish: to welcome precious new life into a world endowed with the magnificence and delight and fright of companions we have traveled with since the beginning. Some people debate the “rights of the unborn” as though a human life begins at conception but we don’t need to concern ourselves with its prospects after birth. Raging over the divine sanctity of anyone else’s pregnancy is a little overwrought and a little too easy when nature itself terminates one out of four by the
sixth week. There are much bigger, much more compassionate pro-life fish to fry. Passing along a world that can allow real children to flourish, and the cavalcade of generations to unfold, and the least to live in modest dignity would be the biggest pro-life enterprise we could undertake.

  Children yet to come will be the cleanup crew to our festivities. Because we know they won’t be coming to the ballroom until we’ve all waddled off, we’ve granted ourselves permission to party like there’s no tomorrow. Our descended family is not at the table. They have no pulpit, no podium, no court of appeals. They cannot testify on their own behalf. But do they really need to be asked? There is enough to be heard in the pregnant silence of future generations. We know what their interests are and what is right. Of course, it’s not as simple as this. And yet, of course, it is. There is so much left. But there is only so much left.

  Think of the spirit behind our national parks, and envision that thinking applied to practical things like farmland, water, minerals, wildlife, an economy capable of functioning in the real world, and other things of value and necessity. The idea of explicitly saving and leaving things for coming generations is called “intergenerational equity.” There’s too little of it.

  * * *

  By mid-September the light has paled. Sunrise comes later, dusk earlier. The dawn bird chorus, so energizing in the spring and early summer, is gone. Only Blue Jays announce the day, their raucous calls ringing through the cooling mornings. No mockingbirds play minstrel to the dead of night, or issue their aubade. That’s not to say the world has fallen silent. Insects fill the air with a deep-pile trill that carpets every corner of night, colors the dusk, and tints the morning. It is time for their cadenza.

  The Virginia Creepers’ green vines of summer are reddening. The red deer of summer are browning. Beach Plums are darkening. Is it a coincidence that the heaviest set of beach plums anyone can recall and the heaviest schools of small fishes both occurred this year? The plums are also truly sweet, sweeter than I’ve ever tasted.