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

by Carl Safina

  But fancy evasions like “externalized costs” and “discounted futures” aside, we’ve almost always done it this way. Since the first human chipped the first stone tool, we’ve always kept what we liked and discarded what we didn’t want. This was fine when our garbage was made up of stones and bones. But we are still using the same million-year-old system even though our leave-behinds are no longer stone shards. Now they’re cancer-causing chemicals, eternal plastics sold for onetime use, empty oceans, stumps of thousand-year-old trees, melting polar ice, and mortgage defaults.

  When we keep what we like and discard what we don’t, we’re privatizing gain and socializing pain. We make others pay for our mistakes. Now corporations demand, “Save my assets, buy my garbage.” If they screw up—they still get paid. If you don’t buy—you pay anyway. Here’s what they learn (it’s pretty different from what we learn): “If your failure and mismanagement are so colossal that your bankruptcy threatens the whole economy, we’ll duck the fallout and you’ll get the bailout.” Fail. Bail. Repeat. We know what will happen as we create an expectation that destructive behavior gets rewarded. Don’t we?

  The failure of markets to realistically price the destruction of living systems and the fuels we use to run civilization makes it economically attractive to risk the entire planet. We’ve created markets unconscious of the single rock-hard truth of economics: the economy, as Timothy Wirth points out, is a wholly owned subsidiary of nature. On top of that, what is called “the market” is not really a free and honest market but actually a system that’s been rigged to let certain individuals and corporations benefit by pulling strands out of the social and ecological fabric.

  I don’t think economists understand the choices our economic system is steering us into. Since we’re running a deficit, eating into our principal, and liquidating our assets, economics should try to catch up to what we’ve learned about the workings of the world in the last couple of centuries, because the economy itself will be forced to comply, whether economists understand what’s happening or not.

  We’re all wired into networks we have never understood: the shared air and water, our seas, and all the rest of nature. And now we all participate in a handy system that simply says we don’t have to pay it back. Forests standing tall, we take. Air flowing pure, we taint. Water running clear, we tint. Oceans filled with fish, we strain. To food, land, and water we add chemicals, such that the very milk of mothers is a toxic asset that cannot be suckled unto our babes without worry. Our markets make us think we’re “disposing” costs into the bigger, wider world—and now we find a finite world shrink-wrapping itself around the human venture.

  When market economists and hard-nosed “pragmatists” speak of “the way the real world works,” they almost never have a clue what they’re talking about. The way we do business lags far behind, remains ignorant of modern and ongoing findings on how we are changing the present and the future, remains numb to how our changes affect others, ignores the depth and quality of human experience.

  Markets alone won’t get us all the way to being human, because marketers compete with us for control of the most meaningful and beautiful elements of life: our beliefs, values, dreams, and affections. Think about it. Though the human is a social, empathetic, altruistic creature, marketing disfigures human nature by trying to focus all our attention on desire. The barrage of shock-and-awe advertising works incessantly to transform thinking, evaluating beings into mere wanters, called “consumers.” Community, relationships, the tone of work and family life, causes like peace or poverty or the environment, or just being happy being helpful—all lie unserved and largely abandoned by market economics. Those real things are hard for marketers to sell. They can’t sell us simple satisfaction, so they market dissatisfaction. So we may get what marketers can sell and ignore what the soul needs.

  Market economics falls on the wrong side of the moral divide in issues like slavery and equality because markets ask, “How much can I get?” while a human being must discern how to serve. Distinguishing good from bad and right from wrong are not profit-based decisions. But many economists view humans simply as consumers in a market, rather than moral agents. Religions—to their credit—do not make this mistake; they don’t place ethics below profits. They seem to recognize that a person’s human worth is different from their market price, and that people cannot just be put to whatever financial purpose they might promote. The generality may be simplistic, but the difference is enormous. It involves no less than whether humans exist in a business context or business will exist in a human context.

  Yet, like a blind traffic controller, our medieval market accounting posts green lights at every intersection. If one country spends, say, 80 percent of its budget on police, the military, and prisons and another country spends the same 80 percent on education, parks, and arts, current economic measures cannot distinguish between these two countries. Their “gross national product” is identical. When coal is strip-mined, the value of the coal increases the “gross national product,” but the loss of land and the resulting air pollution are not deducted (they’re “external”), and when the pollution makes people sick, the cost of their medical care increases the GNP. The Exxon Valdez oil spill increased the GNP. As did the Gulf of Mexico blowout. The GNP can’t differentiate between a balanced checking account and a reckless spending spree. (The gross national product’s inventor, Simon Kuznets, understood this, writing to Congress in 1934, “The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.”) But because we use GNP as a measure of economic “health,” a country could exhaust its minerals, fell its forests, erode its soils, pollute its waters, extinguish its wildlife, empty its seas, and gasp for air—and its measured economy would look “robust” till the chaotic end. That is a gross product indeed.

  In looking at how archaic and insensate our economy is, how ignorant of scientific understanding, and how full of distortions applied to rig and game the system, it’s easy to see that price, value, and cost are three very different things. (And if cheap prices trump everything—think of toxic toys from China, for instance—then the lowest common denominator wins, and it’s a race to the bottom.)

  Thus, the “invisible hand” of the market pleasures itself by working with its eyes closed. It’s an unsavory business that, in the end, cannot bear fruit. That knock on the door is from our externalized, exhausted lands, waters, air, our very bodies. Never has the word “external” been used to describe something so intimately internal.

  Having received great gifts from the ages and the ancestors, we act as though we are a wall against which time suddenly stops.

  * * *

  Earlier in the week it was as humid, muggy, and summery as anything in autumn could be. I left the bedroom door wide open all night so I could listen to the crickets’ shimmering singing, still going strong this late into Indian summer. Solidly into October, short-sleeve warmth remained.

  Following a night of rain, an intense blast from the north has dropped the air temperature by twenty degrees, to 44 degrees Fahrenheit this morning. A few of yesterday’s crickets continue calling, softly, fading like sunlight in the grass as the air of autumn cools. A sharp drop in ocean temperature—from the low 70s of summer to 57 degrees—kicks migrating fish into high gear. Catches of husky blackfish and big autumn porgies appear on the marina’s cleaning tables. I untie the boat and leave the harbor to take autumn’s pulse.

  Bird flocks—Laughing Gulls, mostly—are working along every rip and shoal. Under most of them, a few stiff-tailed False Albacore streak through the surface. Badly named, oddly inedible, and generally enigmatic, the little tuna that dares not speak its name comes from no-one-knows-where. But from somewhere, it’s here on schedule. Lucky for them, their unpalatable flesh has saved them much grief from fishermen. I’m seeing packs of them from the nearest shoal outside the harbor eastward to beyond the Point, an impressive six miles of nearly continuous activity.

  Just off the
lighthouse, thousands of gulls are hovering and dipping over rough patches of bronze-hued water. Anchovies. This year’s extraordinary productivity is what’s kept the immense numbers of gulls piling in since September. And despite the incalculable toll extracted by birds and larger fish, compounded daily, anchovy schools continue to pour though and remain astonishingly thick.

  I move the boat in among the gulls. Because the water here is shallow, I have to be mindful of the surf and the boulders. So I don’t get too close to shore, and I point the boat’s bow seaward while I bob in the swell and the sweeping current. Suddenly, as though drawn to the surface in a vast net, a couple of acres of Striped Bass rise from under the anchovies. Packed shoulder to shoulder, the attacking Stripers shred their prey’s tight defensive school like an egg slicer. Anchovies spraying into the air are beset by predators everywhere. The gulls go crazy—dipping and slurping little wagging anchovies—and as they concentrate wing tip to wing tip their calls merge into one loud sheet of sound. The surface froths as slapping bass tails also raise a roar, a white noise like applause at the opera. And when the Stripers conclude their assault and swim down, the tide carries thousands upon thousands of glittering anchovy scales.

  “One hardly dares estimate their numbers,” someone once wrote of the bygone shorebirds that formerly smoked these flyways. Let it be recorded that as recently as this very moment, I hardly dare estimate the numbers of bass, of gulls—. The anchovies, impossible to speculate.

  More bass rise, several churning schools. Frustrated fishermen are repeatedly casting amid bass so stuffed they ignore the phony lures. I am not too interested in catching these fish. The bass are smallish, with many under ten pounds and below the legal size. I’d rather just take in the spectacle, the vitality and abundance, the deep reassurance. And the resilience: Striped Bass were once down for the count, so depleted by overfishing that there was talk of putting them on the endangered species list. Fishing was shut down for a while, and for a further decade remained tightly restricted. And now—well, just look at them. If we decided to, perhaps we could get the whole ocean back; maybe the whole world.

  Bluefish schools are also massing up here in a feeding marathon that occupies most of the daylight hours, especially when the tides are moving. Like the anchovies and everything else, they too crowd in because the long, jutting east-west coast slows southbound movement like a traffic barricade. And because tidal currents collide with this shoreline, high-volume, high-velocity, nutrient-packed flows keep the food chain well provisioned and the prey dense. Southbound fish and the seabirds of autumn pause here for weeks, stoking, stoking.

  That autumn fat they put on makes the Bluefish as delicious as they ever get. With thoughts of Thanksgiving, winter, and the holidays, I’d like a few of these fish for the smoker. So I move off to a long tide rip. Despite seeing swirling fish, I can’t buy a strike. It’s unlike them to be fussy. But a short while later the tide quickens and the birds become concentrated. I drift into another dense, screaming flock—and find the fish both eager and big. A new wave of Blues has come along the underwater ridge and shifted into feeding mode. These are seven to ten pounds and they pull so strong and sustained that they bend the rod for minutes on end. I get them alongside and grab the leader and swing them mightily into the waiting box.

  Many regurgitate as they near the boat, their hard-won meals drifting away in the tide. One comes aboard with its belly bulging almost hideously, the contours of successful hunting. It’s a brutal thing, this food chain. I am not without pity, nor without conflict. I take half a dozen; that’s plenty. I leave them going at it.

  * * *

  On the drive home I turn down a sandy road to the beach just to see what’s happening and because the adrenaline has me addicted to the energies of the season. Several people are coming off the sand here, carrying Bluefish they caught in the surf. But one man is holding something else: a big lure hooked deeply into his hand. He is dripping blood onto the pavement. He says it’s not hurting yet, and his friend comes and wraps it in a rag and makes a few calls to find a medical clinic where he might get attention—no small task at sundown on a Sunday, miles from town. Over the ocean, the curtain goes down on more frenzied birds silhouetted by the sinking sun.

  * * *

  Gale warning. The wind came up early, intensified all day, and moaned all night. It blew away the memory of summer and dropped a chill upon us. It pinned the boats inside the harbor. It carried fall’s first gannets, which swept over the spume-streaked ocean while almost all other seabirds seemed to vanish.

  Summer’s terns—long gone. The final few Ospreys of the year (I’ve seen two this week) are not our own. They lack intimate familiarity with our shoreline. Traveling only a straight, hurried track down the coast with a nippy breeze shoving, they quickly pass. Oystercatchers are going out with a bang; an astonishing twenty-seven of them at the Cut, along with a smattering of turnstones, are likely the last I’ll see of each of these. The turnstones, busily probing the wet sand, are in their winter drabs now. Their chocolate-backed plumage contrasts utterly with their northbound costume as the harlequins of springtime.

  Morning lights the first sizable lines of arriving scoters, moving along the ocean’s lumpy horizon. A Marsh Hawk, tilting in the gusts, plows slow furrows in the air just a few feet over autumn-ambered grass. Half a dozen egrets are patiently working one end of the salt pond. Their immaculate whiteness, which for months had made them seem like perfectly set vases of lilies on the emerald tablecloths of summer, looks misplaced in the chill-rusted marsh.

  Kenzie’s gait is jaunty and invigorated. Even children can tell you, by the ripening pumpkins brightening in the fields and cramming the roadside stands, that it’s finally fully fall.

  On the south side, flocks of cormorants—which I’d thought nearly gone—are again writing lines across our skies. That’s how a blast of cold air can loosen what’s still stuck to the north. Their unending black scrawl, like a Dickens novel in longhand script, has now had its climax and must eventually resolve to an ending. These new generations of “sea crows” have no idea that their kind, too, was once laid low by DDT—but just look at them. Like those fishes and other birds that returned from death’s door because people decided to change a few things, and like those others that simply remain strong despite it all, endurance belongs to them, and to all the living.

  To my considerable surprise a Monarch butterfly comes fluttering along the dunes, beating its way toward Mexico. “You’re late, Your Majesty,” I’m thinking. “Your legions, your court and kin passed weeks ago; they’re already hundreds of miles to the south. Some must by now have their wings folded restfully, their passports already stamped ‘Mexico.’ ” Suddenly, the overdue Monarch simply collapses in midair and, still bright as a flame, falls at my feet, groping weakly in the sand, its epic wings now seeming a monstrous burden. Tragedy in minature. Icarus as insect. But the difference is only a matter of scale. Like a butterfly in a whirlwind, our lives feel the gusts of changing seasons, and eventually must also merge into the dunes of time.

  * * *

  The sun sinks farther south each day. We’ve watched the seasons and the weather change. We’ve seen some of the perils. Yet we also see the resilience of living things, not just around Lazy Point. We’re about to leave Lazy Point again, to follow sundown halfway around the world. I’ll miss the rhythm of the changing seasons, the migrants, and the intensifying energies of shortening days. One can travel quite enough right here, I think. But I want to continue exploring the odd fact that resilience belongs to the living; people are at the same time the most resilient and the most fragile of all.

  TRAVELS SOLAR:

  RAINBOW’S END—PALAU

  Parrotfish, damselfish, butterfly fishes in branching coral—and I’m not even in the water. I’m still standing on a concrete dock in Koror, the biggest town in Palau, the Pacific island nation five hundred miles east of the Philippines whose slogan is “Rainbow’s End.”

&n
bsp; In the 1990s this place seemed like paradise, wild and beautiful to extremes. So when I got a chance to come back—I hesitated. “It is the better part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness,” Aldo Leopold warned, “for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it. To return not only spoils a trip, but tarnishes a memory.” Good advice. But so far I’m not disappointed. As then, I’m watching rainbow-hued fishes darting among corals, even while I’m merely loading scuba tanks into a boat still tied to the wharf.

  That doesn’t mean Palau hasn’t changed. After I was last here, ocean temperatures across the Pacific got hotter than ever recorded. Corals from the Indian Ocean to French Polynesia “bleached” white as their internal food-producing algae abandoned ship. In Palau, 95 percent of the corals died.

  “The wind stopped. Everything stopped,” remembers Noah Idechong, a robust Palauan fisherman and conservationist named by Time magazine as one of its “Heroes for the Planet”—and now Speaker of Palau’s House of Delegates. “The water got so hot, it was actually uncomfortable to swim in. Even the oldest fishermen had never seen such a time. You can’t imagine how sad it was, seeing all our reefs dying.”

  I’ve come back to see the reefs recovering.

  * * *

  Bob Steneck and Susie Arnold—with whom I traveled in Belize and Bonaire—and I are joined by Peter Mumby, of the University of Exeter in England, and Rob van Woesik, now at the Florida Institute of Technology. In the realm of reef research, these folks make a world-class team.

  We shove off, cross the channel, and are soon zooming among Palau’s famed Rock Islands. As Earth’s Pacific Plate slides under the Philippine Plate, the massive remains of drowned reefs unimaginably old have been wedged upward, forming this fabled maze of truly spectacular islands. Thick vines dangle from vertical limestone cliffs rising hundreds of feet. Cinched at the waterline, some of the islands look whimsically designed and ready to topple. The water around each islet reflects jungled slopes. Emerald, azure, turquoise, jade—.