by Carl Safina
* * *
In my town, the Sou’wester Bookstore is no more, Rudy the druggist and his wife are holding on by their fingernails, and the youngish couple who’ve bought the hardware store are clearly worried. These are true men and women in the best sense of the word “business.” They are enterprising threads in the fabric of our community, not just commuters who drive away in the morning and appear only behind their lawn mower and their trash cans. When I enter a local store and the bell above the door rings, I know I will be welcomed by name and the shopkeeper and I will trade something valuable.
That’s why for their sakes and mine, I do my shopping on this side of the tracks when I can. This gets increasingly difficult as the mall-and-chain drags real businesses and real people to exhaustion. By so dreadfully shrinking opportunities for people to go into business for themselves, the chains keep people acting as their stockboys and salesgirls well beyond the time they should have taken their place as adults in our communities. The middle-aged workers in the big-box stores seem like elderly teenagers, deprived of authority, creativity, responsibility, and pride. Mostly, they’re nice people with a desire to be helpful. What could they have accomplished if given a chance? They may never understand who they are; they’ll certainly never know who they might have been. Open on holidays, the chains undermine their employees’ time for family. (Why anyone is actually shopping for TVs and washing machines on Thanksgiving is a question so large its answer eludes the wide, wide net of even my own cynicism.) Thus the chain stores threaten family more than any same-sex marriage, threaten Sunday more than Darwin ever could. Seeing my island in chains has driven me to the fringes, made me a castaway on my own native shores, a refugee inside my homeland. And for that I thank them. In that banal way, they helped me understand, at least, who I am not.
Though the shopping mall has largely driven Main Street out of business by usurping its commercial intercourse, it rejects Main Street’s civic discourse. A friend reports that in his nearby megamall, people handing out anti-war leaflets were arrested. Free speech has no place on “private property”; it could distract those in the consumer caste from their main task and sole worth. Just keep that lite jazz playin’. A generation or so ago—one tends to forget—these same people were citizens in a democracy.
Is the end point of biological and cultural evolution really the isolation and anonymity of crowded noncommunities where the only place for youths to gather is a shopping mall filled with chain stores, where the people behind the counter are incapable of giving a knowing smile of recognition and we couldn’t pick the owner out of a police lineup—because there is no owner?
Watch kids pacing enclosed shopping malls like veal calves, unable to get anywhere on their own, confined within rows of retail where they are force-fed like ducks gavaged for foie gras. And like ducklings that comically and pathetically follow the humans who’ve raised them, they seem not to know who and what they are. Searching for identity in a world purged of community and place, they bond to brands, confusing freedom to consume with freedom, and thinking satisfaction comes in bulk. More choice than ever brings ever more conformity. Our unifying purpose: to purchase. The cost: our freedom to imagine and to originate.
That might not seem like much to lose when there’s so much stuff to get. But while we were shopping, corporations tiptoed in and hijacked our country. In much of the world, when people try to make government officials respond, they run up against a problem: government officials are corrupted by bribes. In the United States, on the other hand, bribes are called campaign contributions. It’s not corruption because it’s legal. But it’s corruption. We can’t really have free and fair elections. Money has radically reordered our country’s priorities from the original idea of America.
If the social contract is that people voluntarily relinquish some libertarian liberties so that a citizen-run government can serve public interests, well, America has been largely turned inside out. We sold the truths that seemed self-evident. Government now largely serves corporate interests. This is government exactly backward. It’s government of and buy the people. Those in government who say they “hate government” often seem to do their utmost to bend government into serving large corporations. They know where their bread is buttered—and who is really paying attention—so they abuse the trust they’ve been hired to keep. Between 1975 and 2005: corporate political-action-committee spending exploded fifteenfold, from about $15 million to $222 million. The number of multinational corporations ballooned from 7,000 to 65,000. About 35,000 lobbyists currently stalk the halls of Congress. They trudge back to their caves carrying big game: subsidies, tax dodges, low- or no-interest loans, dirt-cheap mining access, free access to ocean fish populations, forest giveaways, relaxed oversight of oil drilling, and laws limiting liability for oil spilled—the list must be 35,000 items long.
Meanwhile, remember, public-interest groups are forbidden by law from either making campaign contributions or spending significant time lobbying. If you don’t represent a special interest trying to make money, you can’t participate in democracy. If you’re a not-for-profit organization representing a little of the public’s interest—as government itself is supposed to do, anyway—you can’t free-speak to your elected officials. This coup d’état is basically why government fundamentally fails to guide the economy toward the public good. It’s basically why we’ve had such poor “leaders.” In the United States, at least, government is supposed to be the system that immunizes the public interest from virulent personal greed. But, wow, how it’s failed us. Because we let it.
In many important ways, it shows. The United States ranks behind more than forty countries in its citizens’ life expectancy, behind twenty-eight in infant survival. The United States ranks 33rd out of 34 Western countries in the proportion of its populace who accept evolution (only Turkey ranks lower).
When the most powerful country in history so systematically fails the causes of community, equity, environment, social justice, and education, the public must sit up in its coffin, and lo, the politicians and corporate managers will be very afraid, and shrink back. Each revolution is inevitable—as is the one coming.
But when? In numerous revolts peoples have freed themselves from monarchs and despots, oppressors and dictators—only to find themselves repossessed by the new pharaoh. Deeply anti-democratic, highly corrupting forces have been at work against the ideal of America for a long time. “I consider the class of artificers [manufacturers] as the panders of vice and the instruments by which the liberties of a country are generally overturned,” wrote Thomas Jefferson to John Jay in 1785. Walt Whitman, in the 1860s, admonished,
Resist much, obey little …
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.
In 1961, that great hippie Republican, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, warned,
We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.… The power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Eisenhower’s was probably the most honest and important speech delivered by any modern head of state. What the president feared, we live.
The 1960s counterculture attempted what we need now more than ever: a spirited culture of refusal, a counterlife. Compared to the days of rage of my youth—civil rights marchers facing police dogs, anti-war protesters facing riot gear and clubs—we seem as complacent as cattle. When people loosen their own grip on power, they will be relieved of the privilege.
As a patriot who loves this land and its ideal (if not the hard-heartedness of too many Americans), I take cheer. Although multinational corporations have made us believe that we are their slaves, in fact we are their masters. They, like all self-proclaimed masters, fear their subjects. They spend fortunes advertising to us because they’ll die pretty quickly if we disconnect their feeding tubes, or simply igno
re them. They know we’ll destroy them if we wake up. And many of them are worried. Two-thirds of Americans want to see big corporations have smaller influence. Nearly 40 percent of Americans—a minority, but still—see big business as “the biggest threat to the future of this country.”
The revolution is as simple as this: Don’t buy the products by which they drain you and feed themselves. Listen to people trying to warn you, but don’t vote for anyone trying to scare you. Resist! Do the unadvertised and the unauthorized. Comb someone’s hair. Plant seeds. Reread. Practice safe sex until you get it right. Go to a museum, aquarium, or zoo. Be .org- and be commercial-free. Photograph someone you love with no clothes on. Not them—you. Walk a brisk mile to nowhere and back. Mark a child’s height on a freshly painted wall. Climb into bed with the Arts or Science section of an actual newspaper and get a little newsprint on your fingers. Eat salad. Clean your old binoculars. Hoard your money until you get enough to make a difference to charity. Go to formal dinners in great-looking thrift-store clothing and brag about how much you paid. React badly to every ad and every exhortation about what you need, as though they are lying, as though they just came up from behind in the dark and said, “Give me your wallet.” Scream when they come to rob you. You’ll never go wrong. You won’t miss anything worthwhile. The country needs your lack of cooperation.
People without plumbing or electricity wrote the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Those documents stand among history’s most magnificent achievements. You’d think that with toilets, fluorescent lights, fast cars, cold food, hot showers, jet planes, computers, antibiotics, cable news, and the Web, we might be smarter than people of the 1700s. Doesn’t seem to work that way. The material world and the realm of the human spirit exist on different planes. “Stuff” doesn’t seem to make people smarter or better. Rather, the contrary. We are not the products of four billion years of evolution just so we can have a cluttered garage.
Anyway, there’s not enough stuff for so many people. As I mentioned, by midcentury we’d need another copy of Planet Earth to meet demand.
* * *
Where did fall go? Mid-November, and still no need to light the woodstove. Nearing Thanksgiving, nighttime temperatures back up into the low sixties still coax evening song from crickets that in years past would by now have been killed by a hard frost or buried under the first snowfall. Many trees still bear green. It used to be that fishing now would mean gloves and knit hats; an early-morning trip on the boat would start with a bucket of seawater on the deck to wash away the slippery frost. I admit, I enjoy the warmth. But usually, the run-up to Thanksgiving sees dense schools of big fish mobbing the Point and the beaches. Now the schools of just a week ago have vanished, replaced with a trickle of unseasonably small fish, and I wonder why they left early with the air so warm. Maybe the water’s too warm for herring to come down from the north, and without that infusion of late-season food the big fish here felt pressed to move on? Maybe the herring are late because the giant trawling boats in the Gulf of Maine are into them again? I don’t know.
Meanwhile, winter’s scoters continue pouring down from the north in flocks of several hundred birds. I walk the beach watching lines of them flying single file over the ocean, undulating like the waves, more like express trains than sea ducks. Sanderlings are back too, in winter’s numbers, a couple hundred running the south side sand, looking so at home they betray no hint that they’ve come thousands of miles and millions of years to be with us.
* * *
Last night, I dreamt that I went to a place surrounded by tall-grown fields with scruffy hedgerows and soft edges, a landscape like corduroy and cotton, like English countryside, comfortable as old slippers. My destination there was a very large barn, like a big enclosed warehouse shed. I was “coming home,” though I’d never seen the place. In the dream I was headed into the big barn because that’s where some musicians, including me, had their instruments stored. I was pleasantly surprised that my editor, a man who has somehow managed to fit several lifetimes of spirit and wisdom into a mere eight decades, was staying in the barn. On a whim, Jack and I decided it would be fun to take a bulldozer and dig a big round hole, about as wide as an Olympic-sized pool is long, and maybe ten feet deep. Savoring an air of shared mischief, we got busy at one sandy end of the floorless warehouse. In Genesis, God never puts particular thought into creating the ocean; it’s there upon creation of “the heaven and the earth.” But in my dream we took some trouble to create ours. We decided to fill our fresh-dug basin with freshwater. Into it we placed two pond turtles. As we were enjoying watching the turtles swimming, I noticed other animals appearing in the water. Scallops, like swimming castanets—they puzzled me because this was freshwater. It didn’t seem to matter to them; the scallops were happy as clams. A soft-shelled turtle—where had it come from? Out of nowhere, people began gathering, pointing into the water, marveling, happy. The atmosphere grew festive. One of the musicians rattled a piece of sheet metal like thunder, and everyone broke into applause and laughter. I dove into the water. It was refreshing and delicious in all ways possible. When real dawn came through my bedroom window, I awoke naturally. For just a few moments I lay in bed savoring a feeling of extraordinary well-being, trying to hold it a little longer before it ebbed in the light of day. As I lay there I realized my dream, so odd at first recollection, was of this planet and its life-giving complement of water, in which we may take purest delight.
* * *
Kenzie’s anxious for her walk. But while the day’s still early I call my mother to wish her a happy birthday. Even though its her birthday, she wonders how it is she’s got a son so old. I get this every year. As always, turnabout is fair play on that remark.
The year, too, is finally giving up its youth, slowly, reluctantly, equivocally. Mockingbirds stand silenced by a low-angled sun and—at last—the chill of frost. They guard the introduced bittersweet and Multiflora Rose that let them live where winter formerly would have starved them. A recent gale finally stripped the leaves, and naked trunks stand shivering in bare woodlands as forest-floor autumnal gold ages to hibernal brown. The Ospreys’ nests, now just stacks of sticks while their owners have gone to the tropics, provide an occasional lookout perch for our resident Red-tailed Hawks, who spend the winter unburdening the marsh of voles.
Late autumn now melds toward winter. The last cormorants straggle raggedly south in short-jotted phrases, a distinct style change from the lengthy, expansive script of the large flocks of earlier weeks. They’re concluding their year’s story not with any dramatic finale or surprise ending but with a drawn-out dribble. More and different ducks are cutting swift silhouettes across the bay. Great Blue Herons—a few—are back, stalking the tawny marshes, while along the marsh borders flit just-arrived juncos and White-throated Sparrows and more Red-breasted Nuthatches.
Loons that had drained away northward in May are now returning in force to our waters. Dark silhouettes—the slender Red-throateds and the sturdy Commons—dot the air above the bay and float along every stretch of surf. They’re mostly silent but occasionally one remembers the haunting tremolo of love from longer days. I try to imagine passing night upon bobbing night in the cold surf, in calm and storm, but imagination fails me. And as though being a loon in winter isn’t a hard enough life, dozens of loons—having come from a wide northern breeding region and concentrated along our shores—will drown in local fishermen’s gill nets. That problem continues until the autumn migration of fish along the beaches ceases and the nets get stored. Kenzie and I and a few beach walkers will find some of their sleek loon corpses, discarded and washed up.
* * *
We make our lives in a world not of our making. We feel in a world that does not feel. Yet it’s become a world in which our presence is felt.
What attitude might confront such a world? An attitude of curiosity, for the complex world? An attitude of admiration, for the beautiful world? An attitude of gratitude, for the improbable world? Of
respect, for the elder world? Of awe, for the mystery? Of concern, for consequences? If these attitudes guide action, we may not always be certain which choice is right, but we may travel a path that is wise.
Early people, including writers of Scripture, saw in nature an awesome power that demanded respect or took retribution. The operating systems people invented to organize themselves into the defensive circle called civilization originated when we were tribes in the wilderness. Since then, of course, our knowledge-acquisition skills have exploded. Science and medicine change at the rate of discovery; look how far they’ve come at such an accelerating pace. You’d think our religious, moral, and economic institutions would limber up in the face of so much that’s new. But they remain dogmatic, remarkably stuck. Some are just old; others, ancient. Maybe we should have noticed that their “use by” date expired centuries ago.
So, we’re navigating a changing world with concepts that aren’t up to the task, concepts that lack—or reject—modern comprehension of the world.
Yet maybe we need just a little more time to catch up. After all, only in the last few decades have we understood anything, really, about how the world actually works. Only since the late 1800s—and mostly since the 1900s—have we understood that all living things are related by ancestry and that sunlight powers life; that things like carbon, water, nitrogen, and nutrients flow in cycles through living systems; and a little of why plants and animals live where they do. We’ve learned that we can eliminate the most abundant herds and birds, and the fishes of even the deepest haunts; take groundwater out faster than it goes in; change the composition of the atmosphere and the chemistry of the ocean. Svante Arrhenius’s 1906 claim that human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide could intensify the greenhouse effect and warm the planet—which he believed would be beneficial—was widely dismissed until about 1960 (and not widely accepted until after the new millennium). Starting just in the mid-twentieth century, we’ve created chemicals and plastics and nuclear material that will affect living things for centuries.