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

by Carl Safina

  There were plenty of other birds. They underlined the Peregrine’s near absence. And I had plenty of company from friends. Behind a ten-foot-high, invisibly fine nylon net, I kept a pigeon tethered to a cord leading into the blind where we sat, hiding with a nice view up the beach. When we saw a hawk, I pulled the string, causing the pigeon to flutter like an injured easy meal, and the raptor—if hungry—would streak into the net and get pocketed. I’d dash and retrieve the bird. If it was large, I’d offer my toe as a talon pincushion while I folded its wings and got a grasp around its legs. While waiting for Godot we caught American Kestrels, Merlins, Northern Harriers, Sharp-shinned and Cooper’s Hawks—all full of wild-eyed defiance and the urgent intensity of migration.

  Every few days, a Peregrine would appear, usually much higher than any of the other raptors, and I could sometimes spot one through my binoculars before I saw it naked-eye, like a dot moving against the sky. Even at that distance, if I pulled the pigeon string, the moving dot usually stopped and began slowly getting wider. By the time such a bird arrived it was often streaking fast enough to blow a hole right through my net. (When that happened, the startled falcon would shoot skyward, swoop back, and usually get captured on its next pass.)

  My dreams were often filled with fast-approaching birds, and I’d frequently wake several times in the middle of the night, too excited to sleep, hoping it was time for work. At the first gray hint of dawn I’d spring out of bed. It was never lost on me that friends took days off from their jobs (occasionally weeks) to come to “work” with me. High-pressure northwest fronts could bring a great wave of migrants. Once, before noon we’d released seventy-five hawks and counted passing hundreds—though not a single Peregrine.

  I sat on their migration path for a month each fall, for a decade, and I did indeed monitor the Peregrines’ return. By the end, we might see two dozen Peregrines—and have half of them come in for a leg band—before folding up the net for the day. It was a decade of terrific improvement. And nowadays, there are far more. In those days I missed a lot of great fall tuna fishing because I guessed the tuna would last and the falcons vanish. I guessed wrong; the tuna got demolished during the same span of time the Peregrines recovered.

  Since some of the worst chemicals were banned, the hawks that were rarest when I was a kid—Peregrine Falcons, Ospreys, and Cooper’s Hawks—have become among our most abundant. Those most abundant then—Kestrels and Sharp-shinned Hawks—are now far rarer, and no one really knows why, though it might have to do with the resurgence of larger raptors, or abandoned farms either reverting to thick woodland or converting to suburbs over a large region.

  But autumn is still autumn, and numerous birds still come. Many other birds—not just hawks—cut south over the ocean across the gigantic coastal indentation called the New York Bight. Some that do, never make landfall.

  I recently went thirty miles offshore with a shark researcher to try catching a Shortfin Mako or a Thresher Shark to tag with a satellite transmitter. While we waited for a rod to bend, I noticed a Yellow-shafted Flicker circling as though exhausted, perhaps disoriented. Flickers are not strong fliers, and I can only imagine what that woodpecker thought of a world that had turned into a circular blue wheel of moving water and haze. I also saw a Peregrine, looking almost at home. I know what a Peregrine thinks when it sees a bird flying in exhausted loops over the ocean. The flicker left us, headed toward a distant vessel. Over the radio, someone on that boat reported seeing a Peregrine snatch a smaller circling bird, and eat it while flying.

  We never got a mako or Thresher on which to place a satellite tag. We caught six Blue Sharks, including one brute over ten feet long and about 350 pounds. Just as we were about to release it after a thirty-minute struggle, it straightened a very heavy new hook. How can a cartilage-jawed animal exert so much power? One of the sharks was wearing a hook from a previous capture. Another had the skin behind its head grown around a piece of protruding cord, as though it had long ago swum through a loop of the stuff. We cut the cord and pulled it out of the animal.

  A squall blew up while we were fishing, and under drenching rain I noticed another bird, a songbird, circling the boat, looking for a place to land. The rain was so heavy I could not even clearly see the bird. I glanced out over the ocean, with its endless whitecaps and veils of rain, and thought that there must be thousands and thousands of birds out there getting slammed by this unexpected front, their promising tailwind turned into a deadly headwind full of pelting water. Looking at the ocean with them in mind, it seemed a lonely and terrible planet.

  Later, on the way homeward, I saw yet another Peregrine, following us.

  * * *

  The return of Peregrines. The decline of sharks. Who’d have thought people would bring about either of those trends? Maybe we’ll live to see sharks recover. Right now, that seems as improbable as seeing all these falcons. Hope is the ability to see how things could be better. The world of human affairs has long been a shadowy place, but always backlit by the light of hope. Each person can add hope to the world. A resigned person subtracts hope. The more people strive, the more change becomes likely. Far better, then, that good people do the striving. Otherwise, as Yeats despaired in “The Second Coming,”

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  Are full of passionate intensity.

  Surely some revelation is at hand.

  The revelation is this: don’t wait for some revelation. We make our own luck. It is by far preferable that the best people have conviction, and the worst get convicted.

  As we click through the turnstiles and starting gates of catastrophes unimagined just a few years ago—the likelihood that hundreds of millions of people will be displaced, that the seas will dissolve their own coral reefs; fresh water scarcity, ocean depletion, flooding cities, gushing oil, and agricultural shortage—we can begin to see that it’s no longer just about saving Polar Bears or the last wild places. What’s gone around has come around. Problems of “the environment” are crucial matters of practical justice, peace, and morality. This is the second coming.

  I used to think conservation was about saving falcons and sea turtles and tuna and forests. I thought that educating girls was a different cause. But the thing is, people matter to nature, and nature—it turns out—matters to people. Because educating girls simultaneously breaks poverty and reduces family size, it matters to people and nature. It’s conservation and compassion combined. We can’t heal the world without healing humanity, and we can’t heal humanity without healing the natural world. But reducing poverty, hunger, child and childbirth mortality, controlling diseases, and ensuring education “cannot be achieved,” the United Nations has finally observed, “as long as most ecosystem services are being degraded.” The U.N.’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment notes in economic-sounding terms what has long been apparent to naturalists: “In effect the benefits reaped … have been achieved by running down natural capital assets. We are depleting assets at the expense of our children.… In many cases, it is literally a matter of living on borrowed time.” And for those who still don’t comprehend, the report adds, “The ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.” A blunter rephrasing: We are ruining the world for our children.

  Hidden within those despairing phrases is the hope I see: when we can no longer run or sweep it under the rug, we’ll have to look reality in the face. And the faces staring back at us will be our kids’. Nothing to date has awakened humanity to the realization that if we stay on the path we’re taking, we’ll end up where we’re heading. If we don’t get it, it will get us—then we’ll get it. But a
few alarm clocks are starting to buzz. We now have the chance to prove that we’re as clever as we think.

  We could just say that people in the future are on their own and they, too, will have to figure it out. But then we come bumping up against God, who, it turns out, is interested in the future. Or, at least, Scripture’s scribes considered future children among the highest forms of goodness: “A good person bequeaths to their children’s children,” says Proverbs 13:22. The Book of Deuteronomy (20:19–20) and the Koran teach that even in times of war, it is prohibited to destroy fruit trees. Our own disputes must not translate into our children’s poverty. A teaching ascribed to Muhammad says that upon death, three types of good deeds continue: a charitable fund, knowledge left for others’ benefit, and a righteous child. Something like four hundred times in the Bible, God makes promises extending through generations, or speaks of covenants lasting into eternity. Religious people understand God as eternal, so to discount the future is to deny and cheapen God’s eternal presence, a sin against both God and the generations to come. Confucianism claims that the prime goal of society is the elevation of the next generation. The future has higher value than the present because the future is bigger than the present, with more lives at stake. So do we owe anything to people of the future? Don’t take my word for it.

  * * *

  One of the reasons that saving and leaving things for coming generations—that idea of “intergenerational equity”—is so rare in practice is that many people basically embraced the notion that—in so few words—greedy is godly.

  In one of Western civilization’s most influential one-line mythologies, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776) gave us the mightily convenient idea that an individual who “intends only his own gain,” is “led by an invisible hand to promote … the society.” This is not a fine point. Smith didn’t say, “An individual who pursues only the public good is led by an invisible hand into a richly satisfying life.” (Which, by the way, usually seems true.) There’s a big difference.

  I don’t know about you, but I find the whole idea of trusting invisible hands a little creepy. I’d tell children, “If you can’t see what someone’s hands are doing, turn on the light and leave the room.” In the early seventeenth century John Donne had at least the decency to ask permission and tell us what he was up to:

  License my roving hands, and let them go,

  Behind, before, above, between, below.

  O my America! my new-found-land …

  How blest am I in this discovering thee!

  To enter in these bonds, is to be free;

  Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.

  You know where you stand with Donne. But much colossally misplaced trust in “the market” stems from Adam Smith’s busily invisible hand. Being “led by an invisible hand” evokes images of divine guidance, implying that God wants us to be rich, and he will use our pursuit of self-interest to serve the greater good. That interpretation aside, I perceive three problems with Smith’s theory that those seeking “only [their] own gain” are “led to promote” the public interest. One, it’s obviously bullshit. Two, its basic instruction is: Don’t bother caring; magic will do the caring for you. In practice, since no magic applies to greed, people seeking only their own gain are a risk to themselves and a danger to society. Three, markets apply only lip service while the hand does whatever makes it feel best; there are no real rules, as we’ll see.

  Economic activities incur costs and confer benefits. If we cut a forest, that is a cost. If we pollute a river, that’s a cost. The logger should pay for replacing the forest; the polluter, for cleaning up the pollution. If we take today what might have been taken in the future, that is a cost. We should pay the repairs before returning to future people what we’ve borrowed and used. All trade incurs these costs of business. Here the invisible hand becomes sleight of hand. Market prices almost never include these costs. Economists have simply declared that these costs—these fundamental, inherent, continual costs—lie “external” to market accounting. We trade what we manufacture, but because we don’t trade the pollution or deforestation or other “externalities,” we avert our gaze to keep prices low. Any budgetary system that does not factor in costs has a high chance of coming out in the black—but only on paper. The invisible hand of the market sticks the public—here, now, abroad, and in the future (“Behind, before, above, between, below”)—for those costs.

  But I’m just an ecologist, so for a second opinion, let me introduce the constitutional scholar and law professor Joel Bakan, who tells us, “All the bad things that happen to people and the environment as a result of corporations’ relentless and legally compelled pursuit of self-interest are … neatly categorized by economists as externalities.” His definition of externality is: “literally, other people’s problems.” The economist Milton Friedman’s slightly more technical definition: “An externality is the effect of a transaction on a third party who has not consented.” Bakan adds, “The corporation’s built-in compulsion to externalize its costs is at the root of many of the world’s social and environmental ills. That makes the corporation a profoundly dangerous institution.”

  Enron went bankrupt because it left costs off the books and got caught. Hiding costs is always attractive. That’s why companies and economies get seduced into it. It’s also what makes whole economies collapse. We have Earthron.

  Many capitalists profess a faith based in markets. Many also claim to oppose socialism, but that’s nonsense too, because the system they’ve created lets them continually privatize profits and socialize costs. And they are often quite comfortable interfering with markets. They tend to love (and make their lobbyists work like hell to get) subsidies, which are, by definition, market-distorting applications of money. And they applaud bailouts, which come like the deus ex machina of Greek tragedy, gods lowered from cranes to solve insolvable (and, in their case, insolvent) plot weaknesses. Want a war or to bail out criminally negligent banks? There’s money. If corporations can profit, the market gets sidelined for the duration of a taxpayer-funded miracle. Repair Social Security or potholes, extend health care or boost schools? Sorry, we’re broke. On matters in which the whole country would benefit—getting more money for those schools, for instance—well, public interest not-for-profit groups are generally prohibited from lobbying, and they certainly can’t grease Congress’s members. I’m not categorically against any subsidy or bailout. But let’s be honest: as far as faith in markets, many capitalists act like those people who say one thing in church, then do another. Many are.

  The suggestion that a polluter must pay to pollute or a fisher must pay to catch fish from the public’s waters is an attempt to price things more realistically so the market can work better. Of course, polluters and fishers balk. Why should they pay? They can make us pay.

  Energy pricing is perhaps the worst. Consider the familiar: gasoline. The reality-checked costs of gasoline include: taxpayer subsidies and tax loopholes enjoyed by oil companies (they reap windfalls, then you pay them); military, diplomatic, and blood costs of protecting access to oil; health-care costs related to lung diseases caused by air pollution; administration and oversight of air pollution controls and regulations; and some of the costs of global warming. And most of oil’s environmental calamities. Not one of these appears at the pump. These real costs would add roughly $12 per gallon (estimates vary depending on different assumptions). The price on the pump is meaningless. It reflects only the collusion of producers to fix prices low enough to keep us hooked. We do pay the other costs—in income taxes. (But rather than taxing people for working, wouldn’t it make more sense to let people pay at the pump, so our choices matter? At-the-pump gasoline taxes in the United States are one-tenth what they are in Europe; that’s one of the reasons Americans burn so much more gasoline, and one of the reasons Europeans get around much more easily on public transportation.) When people say that safe, clean, renewable energy “would cost too much,” they don’t realize
that dirty energy looks cheap because the pricing doesn’t reflect its costs—which we pay anyway. That’s why global energy prices have been called “market failure on the greatest scale the world has ever seen.”

  Mainstream economists not only externalize costs but actually discount the future. Each year of the future is “worth less” than the previous year. The future quickly becomes worthless. Well, how convenient—since considering the future would put a crimp in our plans to lay waste to it. Really, what gets called “economics” is a game of make-up-the-rules-that-suit-you. When making important decisions the Iroquois famously considered seven generations. No economists there. To see how discounting the future has deeply infiltrated the Western mind, consider the scorn with which many folks dismiss predictions that environmental problems like groundwater depletion or sea level rise will become really serious sometime in the next century: “I’ll be dead; why should I care?” Tomahawks notwithstanding, even the savage Iroquois understood: we need to be better than that.

  Discounting would be fine if our own comfort didn’t affect future people. While we are enjoying the party on our luxury liner, we are unaware that our food, our fine wine, and our white tablecloths are being provided by slaves belowdecks. The party is our way of celebrating ourselves. Those captives include the next few generations. When we discount the future, we’re simply saying we don’t want to care about people who will be stuck with the options we are currently shrinking. In “externalizing” the costs, we “externalize” anything and anyone not strongly positioned to complain about the very internalized pain they will feel.