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

by Carl Safina

  As I walk out from his neighborhood, I notice that seawater is coming uphill in the drainage ditches. A few days ago, this would have surprised me.

  * * *

  From “Rainbow’s End” to somewhere over the date line, fourteen time zones to home.

  One of the densely inhabited islands just a few feet above sea level is Manhattan, where I’m having fantasies of the coming good news: Wall Street, underwater. But right now I’m headed toward the United Nations.

  On a recent Friday, over fifty member states of the United Nations called on the U.N. Security Council to act on the “pernicious security implications of climate change for human beings worldwide.” Palau’s U.N. ambassador said frustratedly, “There is as great a threat from climate change as any bomb, poison, or terrorist.” He added, “This is the first time in history that U.N. member states are faced with extinction—and the Security Council has been silent.”

  The Maldives has a population of 380,000 people; it averages a little over three feet above sea level. Its government is looking at property in Australia, should the whole country need to escape from itself. Kiribati is likewise in the market for land to which to relocate its country. Also in the news: dozens of families from the Solomon Islands are being permanently evacuated to Papua New Guinea as flooding turns several islands to wet rags.

  A Financial Times article titled “Mass Relocation Planned as Seas Rise” reports that in Indonesia, “experts and the government fear that about 2,000 islands across the country will sink by 2040.” In what sounds like comedy, Indonesia’s maritime minister “asked the regional governments to keep an eye on the islands.” But he also called it “the disaster that would affect the whole world.”

  Marlene Moses, whose business card identifies her as “U.N. Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Permanent Representative of the Republic of Nauru,” is a large Polynesian whom you could imagine as a stone statue. But in conversation she’s animated, articulate, and warm. Her whole tiny country has 14,000 people, but when you consider what it would take to relocate just 14,000, you begin to realize the enormity of the issue. During a hallway discussion about how sea level rise threatens her tiny island nation, she and her colleagues vow to defy the rising tide.

  “We’ll stay. There’s no option,” Moses insists. “No option. If we leave, Nauru would not exist as a nation.”

  Masao Nakayama, U.N. ambassador from the Federated States of Micronesia, adds, “We don’t want to abandon our ancestors. That’s a strong feeling. How can we just leave our ancestral place? It’s unimaginable that climate change would cause a people to suffer extinction. It’s very hard just to—”

  “They use the word ‘relocate’ so easily,” Moses says scornfully. “Relocate—for what? To become climate-change refugees?”

  But Afelee Pita, the U.N. ambassador from Tuvalu (population 13,000), realizes that sands are running through the hourglass. Frustration is evident in his voice too, as he says, “Time and tide cannot wait for us to complete all these dialogues. At high tide, even with no wind now, water will just come onto the land. It’s contaminating our wells and gardens.”

  Moses adds, “In Nauru now, we’ve had to move graves before they got washed away. In the olden days, each family had drinking wells; it was fresh water. Now it’s not for drinking. Not anymore.” She shakes her head. “It’s pretty hard for our people to understand that these changes are being caused by, you know, industrialized countries so, so, so far away.”

  Nakayama adds, “Fish are a big source of meat for us. And we have traditional ways of conserving fisheries. But now our traditional ways may no longer work. If the fish are leaving because it’s too warm for them, if the corals die because it’s too acidic—how are we supposed to conserve?”

  When I ask if it’s true that New Zealand has offered asylum, Moses rolls her eyes and scoffs, “Oh, please. No. It’s not an option. Why should we lose our identity”—she jabs a finger into the wall—“because of deeds committed by industrialized countries? It’s a justice question, a security question, a human rights question—. Our whole country is just one island. If we sink, it’s farewell to me.”

  I hit the streets of the Big Apple, thinking that Moses is wrong. It’s not about her, or her people. Maybe she’d get further with her argument if she reframed it. The guy from Indonesia in that news article was closer to putting his finger on it when he said—what did he call it?—“the disaster that would affect the whole world”? When millions of people living along the continental coasts start moving to higher ground, they’ll crowd right on top of poor, already crowded people already clinging to wafer-thin margins of life. One estimate of those at risk from rising sea level: over 70 million in China, nearly 30 million in Bangladesh, 12 million in Egypt, another 20 million in India, and over 30 million others elsewhere.

  Australia’s Defense Ministry warns that although Australia should ease suffering caused by global warming, if conflict erupts the country should use its military “to deal with any threats.” The National Defense University, an educational institute overseen by the U.S. military in Washington, D.C., explored the potential impact of a destructive flood in Bangladesh that would send hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into neighboring India. In real life, India is already racing to build a 2,100-mile-long fence. “It gets real complicated real quickly,” said deputy assistant secretary of defense Amanda J. Dory, while helping the Pentagon try to incorporate climate change into its national security planning. And the ensuing unrest will likely rise and widen, like the sea itself. It will cost us time and treasure and probably blood.

  So ask not for whom the bell tolls. Recovering coral reefs threatened by warming and acidification and increasing human appetites, the rising waters and drowning lands—. Those warning gongs are for us all.

  NOVEMBER

  It’s been a restless night; even Kenzie was up at one A.M., barking loudly at something. She’s not much of a watchdog, and when I went outside to check, I encountered only silence, infinity, and the Milky Way, beauty-marked by a meteor. Peaceful images to take to bed, but I couldn’t get back to sleep.

  So, though I’d intended to check the beach early, at first light I’m awake but too tired to rouse. I wait half an hour, then soldier forth. That is to say, the south side beach is pretty light by the time I walk onto the sand. As I crest the dune, my first glimpse of the surf brings the sight not only of hundreds of gulls hovering over the breakers—good sign—but, to my surprise, dozens of foot-long adult Atlantic Menhaden, a.k.a. bunkers, flipping around on the wet beach. Something just drove them ashore. And I just missed a spectacular attack.

  I make a couple of casts as the birds break up, and I curse my laziness for having missed the last half hour. Down the beach at the westward point, the air above the surf is thick with gulls. The point to my east holds a smaller flock, but it’s closer. I walk briskly east into the gray morning behind my trotting Kenzie. Just ahead, a big sandbar extends from the main beach and then runs parallel to shore, creating a knee-deep trough about ten yards wide between the bar and the beach. The waves are breaking on that outer bar, and what’s left of them rolls across the shallow trough and laps the beach. A quarter mile away, where the long sandbar ends, is the mouth of the trough; that’s where the gulls are hovering and dipping.

  A big Bluefish glides over the sand in the trough’s green water. It looks trapped in that shallow, narrow chute, and I’m not expecting it to be thinking about food. But I lob a short cast, and as my big green lure begins wiggling back to me, a swirl rises behind it. I lose sight of it in the sea foam, but my line tightens and what comes thrashing to the surface is not the Blue but the sandy-beige back of a Striped Bass. It slides from the suds pearl-bellied and gleaming. I reach down with the pliers to free the hook, and pause to admire in this fine, soft light its suddenly light-green back, the iridescent violet on the shoulder and cheeks, its bold stripes drawn with alternating dots of dark chocolate and pale blue, and each scale
etched just enough to suggest an almost imperceptibly fine fishnet veil.

  As several bunkers come shooting along the shore in water that barely covers their backs, a Bluefish zooms in with its tail knifed out, ending one of the bunkers in a haze of blood. Half of another bunker bobs to the surface, and immediately vanishes under a frothy splash. So, it turns out the bunkers are trapped in the trough—and the bass and Blues crowded into here are very much on the hunt.

  My bass is short of legal length, so I let the next wave reclaim it. I release several Bluefish, because my smoker is full of Bluefish fillets and working at this very moment. They’re beautiful, though, fat and shining, and bearing the purpled flanks of the biggest kind of blues. Kenzie is increasingly excited over the magic of my conjuring ashore such big flopping creatures.

  As predators rip along the curl of the lapping water, bunkers huddle in shallows so skinny that the next wave pushes a few of them high and dry.

  With the sun climbing I decide to turn homeward from the morning’s savage beauty. I whistle Kenzie back toward where we’ve come from, and she trots along, tail held high. Just past where the bar joins the beach, dozens of newly driven bunkers lie on sand amid gulls too gorged to care. Maybe there are bigger bass out in front of all these windrowed fish? The hypothesis becomes an excuse to unfurl one last cast before turning my back on the scene. Hardly has the lure splashed in when a fish grabs it and yanks my rod down hard while running seaward. It comes up frothing the surface, and when I see its wide broom of tail, I know I’ve got my keeper Striper. I head home anticipating a breakfast of warm Bluefish straight from the smoker and a good day of work ahead, feeling this morning’s espresso of adrenaline more pleasantly than any caffeine.

  * * *

  A morning like this makes me feel happy. And I don’t mind knowing that the feeling will be temporary. Happiness, like everything else in this rhythmic realm, comes and goes in waves, and it’s good to savor it when the wave rises and, when the wave recedes, understand that another wave will come. Sometimes you ride the wave; sometimes you ride out the trough. A wave’s height is measured by its depth, anyway.

  My father, a schoolteacher who suffered from real depression, used to say, “Those who know they have enough are rich.” I’m not sure he believed it. But I did. When I was young my friends and I would sit around with a fish on the grill and a beer in hand—very low-budget—and joke, “I wonder what the poor people are doing.” A dry roof, a cold fridge, a hot shower, wheels, and climbing into any boat—even when the roof wasn’t mine, nor the fridge, nor the shower, nor the boat—that’s always felt like like incredible riches. I’m not knocking money, but it’s got its limitations. It can make many things easier, but it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll choose the right things and ask the right questions, and a lot of people with money remain (or become) unhappy. Anyway, I’ve seen what real poverty looks like. So my middle-class life and my connection with the sea have always seemed amazing luck. I’ve never thought that having more stuff would solve all my problems or make me happier—and that’s proven true.

  Apparently, it’s true for many. In the 1970s, Eric Fromm observed that the economic system’s continuous push for increasing consumption (what many young people back then denounced as “materialism”) sowed the seeds of alienation and passivity. Ivan Illich attacked the “ideas”—ideologies, really—that increasing affluence equals progress, and that commodities are “needs.” Tibor Scitovsky was alarmed by consumerism’s addictiveness—and its failure to satisfy.

  To their insights, we can now add a little hindsight. Here we go: As real (adjusted) income in the United States more than doubled from the 1950s to about 2000, the fraction of Americans describing themselves as “very happy” stayed remarkably flat, at around one-third of the population. Though the United Kingdom’s per-person gross domestic product nearly doubled between about 1970 and 2000, the Brits’ sense of satisfaction didn’t change. In Japan between about 1960 and 1990 the gross product rose by a factor of six—but people’s sense of satisfaction didn’t change there, either. Take-home: People in developed countries express a dramatic disconnect between the growth of the economy and their satisfaction.

  While the gross national product measures “how much,” another index asks, “How good?” This other index, called the Genuine Progress Indicator, measures growth and costs. In other words, it’s not just counting; it’s actual accounting. It looks at productivity, at spending, puts a value on housework, subtracts the costs of law enforcement, the costs of pollution control, and the costs for depleting natural assets. The Genuine Progress Indicator also shows that while growth keeps growing, past a certain point, well-being stalls. On a graph starting in the year 1950, for the United States, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom, in each case the progress indicator rises along with gross national product for a while. Then, in the 1960s, the lines depart from each other as people’s sense of well-being begins to flatten while growth keeps growing.

  In my personal map of life and time, I felt that the world reached some kind of peak in the mid-1970s. But of course I would; I was traveling the country on my first true adventures, seeing vista upon new vista, experiencing the exhilaration of wilderness, playing in rock bands, and enjoying college’s rarefied intellectual pretentions and genuine coed dorms. And falling in love. I also thought the gains in civil rights, women’s rights, environmental legislation, and some very good music (I said some) were all riding simultaneous peaks that, for a few too brief years, seemed universally uplifting. After all, it was the Age of Aquarius.

  And apparently, something was happening. According to the Genuine Progress Indicator’s evaluation, people’s sense of well-being peaked in these years: United States, mid-1970s; United Kingdom, early ’70s; Germany, late ’70s; Netherlands, late ’70s; Austria, early ’70s; Sweden, late ’70s. I find the timing interesting. While America’s gross product continued surging upward like an unmanned drone, human satisfaction got grounded. The gross national product really is too gross to detect what’s going on. What we count as progress includes some things that hinder real progress.

  The data show what everyone claims to know: money doesn’t buy happiness. But neither does poverty. And oppressive governments make people truly unhappy. Yet once a poor country achieves a per-person gross national product of merely $14,000, further growth doesn’t improve people’s sense of well-being. (Per-person GNP in the United States is about $44,000.) The point is not the dollar value. It’s that once basic needs are met, happiness stays flat, even as the whole society gets “wealthier.” (I put that in quotes because real wealth is something society can pass along. If we destroy the Northwest’s forests or New England’s cod, or coral reefs, some people might get rich, but we have not created wealth; we’ve created poverty.)

  Interestingly, while growth in average wealth doesn’t necessarily create happier people, people who are wealthier relative to their neighbors tend to be happier. In the naked city, the person with a hat is debonair. If you and your neighbor live in mud huts and your neighbor has one cow and you have two, you feel rich and happy. If your neighbor has a very big house and a new car and you have a big house and your car is six years old, well—. I first saw wireless Internet in the home of a billionaire. About a year later, people still working on their first million had it, and soon it became common among college students subsisting on coffee with sugar. How’s a billionaire to stay happy?

  America is a world power of expanding wealth and shrinking spirit, enlarged houses and broken homes, engorged executive pay and low worker morale, increased individualism and diminished civility, obesity and what Robert Lane calls “a kind of famine of warm interpersonal relations.” We slave for prosperity but shirk purpose, cherish individual freedom but long for inclusion and meaning.

  Simply put, more is better up to a point; after that, more is worse. When you’re hungry, eating is good for you; when you’re overweight, it isn’t—but you want to ea
t more. The continuing appetite for more stuff, after emotional well-being stops increasing, is a psychic disease of the developed world. You can be right on track until you pass your destination; then—without changing course—you’re headed in exactly the wrong direction. What makes people happy: working on relationships. So maybe one stepping stone on the path to happiness has the word “Enough” engraved into it.

  * * *

  This morning I was pulling poison ivy. It looked like I was up against the withering prospect of pulling more than a hundred individual plants. But I found that if I dug my gloved finger to the root and gently tugged, I could trace it through other roots and stems in my neglected garden, then fairly easily zip out whole tracts of the stuff. Without pulling a single individual plant, tugging up the root dislodged all the ones I could see and a lot that I hadn’t seen in the tangle of vegetation. When I was a teen I yearned to travel America to see “how other people live.” Now, basically, you can see how they live from wherever you happen to be. The same advertising, the same chain stores, and the same TV, radio, and print conglomerates have largely replaced America with the same repeating road-stop strip mall, from sea to signing sea. Everyone’s head throbs with the same songs, and young people “relate to” the same handful of company logos and media characters. Corporate “news” reports on how the actual people who play fictional characters are faring in their reproduction and rehab. As I was freeing my American garden from toxic infestation, my mind drifted to the image of chain stores along a highway, each strip mall a sprig of leaves, connected by an unseen cable of root. I imagined that I was driving cross-country on a big interstate highway, pulling up chain stores as I went along, helping free up a land strangling in a rash of sameness.