by Carl Safina
Consequently, most of civilization remains uninformed about the two great realities of our existence: all life is family, and the world is finite. That is why we keep making choices that threaten our own financial economy, the economy of nature, and the economy of time—otherwise known as the future of the world. What I’m saying, basically, is that in very consequential ways, our modes of conduct are so out of sync with reality that they’re essentially irrational.
* * *
Return to the dream. I hope humanity survives and civilization develops. Just as we look back on the Dark Ages and shudder, people will look back at our time as dirty, crowded, superstitious, dangerous, and primitive. To get onward, we’d need to replace the no-accounting, throwaway, boomeranging, soot-powered economy with a clean, renewable, no-waste, recycling economy. We thank the thinkers and martyrs who gave their lives for Reason, that we might step into a few rays of sunshine. If our children, and most of our nonhuman co-voyagers, can get through the troubles of our time, there will be a brighter day. We can describe and measure what is needed, and show it in graphs and tables. The information is there. We don’t lack information. We lack a new ethical relationship—and the new inspiration that is waiting.
Health, peace, humanity, creativity, life’s grand and thriving journey, its epic enterprise, the miracles that float us, shimmering; these constitute the realm of the sacred. In this realm, the market analyst and the head of state find themselves beneath and behind the child, whose world and adventure it will be. And if, in an attempt to explain how simple it is to arrive at this realization, we must provide some translation harkening back to the primitive clutch of market economics, we can say that things have no price and but two values, right and wrong.
The values, called ethics, acted on as morals, answer the age-old question, “How ought we live?” No small matter, indeed. We are not just consumers but citizens, not just citizens but members of a living family, miracles of evolution, manifestations of the awesome mystery of creation, singularly able to perceive and consider the universe, our place in it, and our role. Our goal as human beings can be to elevate what is uniquely human; to see that meaning lies in relationships, that satisfaction comes from serving, that the creature who alone can consider and affect the future must alone maintain it; that science and all ethical, moral, and religious traditions that have come this far have converged in agreement: the place is ours to use but not ours to lose. All such traditions say we serve one another, the creation, and our children.
Why don’t we? Can we? When will we?
* * *
If we could wipe the slate and say, “In the twenty-first century, here’s what we know; now let’s construct philosophies, faiths, and economics based on the way the world works,” they would look very different from the anachronisms to which we keep ourselves yoked and saddled.
A member of a preliterate tribe might stumble on a book and see it useful only to start a fire. In our use of the world, we are just beginning to learn the first ABC’s while rifling through the encyclopedia of life and muttering, “What good is it?”
We are just awakening to the fundamentals of who and what we are, insights denied to humanity until Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Leopold, Hardin and his “Tragedy of the Commons,” and a handful of other towering, courageous minds. From a few great pearls of insight, pried from the wisdom of centuries, we know at last that the universe does not revolve around us, that we are citizens in a living community where our membership implies stewardship, and that—contrary to Adam Smith’s invisible-hand nonsense—those in pursuit of self bring suffering to many.
To this we add a new insight under the sun: just our usual way of doing business can harm the world. By driving the processes of land and atmosphere, by throttling the flow of rivers, by turning nearly half the sunshine to our own purposes, by changing the very chemistry of the air and the seas, by all these things, we have made Earth ours. We are no longer voyagers. We are proprietors. We have put our name on time itself, changed the marquee, and declared, in lights: THE ANTHROPOCENE ERA, STARRING HOMO SAPIENS. The world belongs to us, the wise ones, we declare. The claim is nothing new; philosophers and the writers of Scripture began making much the same claim millennia ago. But it’s no longer just rhetoric; there’s a lot at stake now. Will we be pirates or captains, slumlords or godparents of time? Will we burn the furniture for heat or be good tenants? That remains to be seen. But so far, the odds seem against our getting back our security deposit.
DECEMBER
With all this winter coming on, there’s time for one final fishing excursion. Word is out: herring are in. Finally. This is no time for fair-weather friends, so Pete and I leave the harbor well-bundled and adequately gloved. Our objective is to get enough herring to fill a shelf’s worth of pickling jars.
We go just a few hundred yards outside the harbor jetties, to where the bottom, sloping from about thirty to sixty feet, gives fish a cold shoulder to school up against. I hunt the sonar and, yup—look at all those green dots. Our weighted rigs each bear six tiny, shiny lures. We drop them to the bottom and jiggle the rod tip.
In under a minute I feel a couple of taps; then one gets hooked and I feel it wiggling. I wait. I feel another hit, and the rod dips a little more. When the trembling line pulls the rod a bit more heavily, I begin gingerly reeling up.
Two ten-inch herring and a mackerel come up into the air, and all three go down into a bucket. The mackerel is a sweet, fusiform miniature cousin of a tuna, brightly silver-sided, its blue back marked with wavy black lines. The herrings’ pearlescent bellies grade to iridescent backs that, as you slowly change the angle of the light, gleam with luminous hues of blue, green, and lavender.
Herring scales give that pearl shimmer to things like nail polish and lipstick, leading one Web commentator to report, “Global herring production is threatened by overfishing, raising the specter of a world full of nonshimmering lips.” That’s how deep some see the stakes. But here is a person who connects, my friend John, who was for twenty years a commercial lobsterman (in the late 1990s the lobsters in his area died, apparently stressed by warming water, putting him and dozens of others out of business): “I used to get totes full of fresh herring for bait at this time of year. They looked so beautiful it would make me dizzy.” That’s how he felt about his bait. And that’s why we’ve been friends since we met at age fourteen.
Pursuing the southbound herring, Northern Gannets have returned in force. Over a big school they gather by the hundreds on six-foot wing spans, until their white bodies form a dense cloud of birds. When the fish rise into range, the gannets begin streaking into the sea behind that water-splitting warhead bill, sending geysers of spray.
More herring come into our bucket. It’s fun to catch these little fish. They’re easy and—for now at least—they’re abundant. They’re low on the food chain, so they’re pretty low in toxic chemicals, and they’re high in healthy Omega-3’s and all that. Good brain food. The herring include not only Atlantics but also a few Bluebacks and one Hickory Shad. They’ve been feeding on baby squid as long as my thumbtip. Catching them several at a time makes me feel rich. We take about sixty fish. This population had been heavily depleted in the past and recovered, and though they are again targeted by enormous boats in New England, they remain sufficiently numerous that for now I think it’d be okay even if we’d taken twice as many. We’ll pickle these guys in wine vinegar, allspice, and bay leaves, and their luscious fillets will serve proudly on holiday tables alongside our smoked Bluefish, helping keep us fed through winter.
Pete and I decide to bring our bucket of fish to the tide rips and ring the doorbell on whatever bass have hung around for this last session. We select two herring for bait. The bass are here but, with the water down to 51 degrees Fahrenheit, they’re slow on the take—and sluggish. In two passes, we find two fish that have lost the dash and surge of even a few weeks ago. One fish has, stuck in its belly, a small stainless-steel hook with a few inch
es of line trailing; it’s been here since the October blitz when the surface schools were so thick, fish often got snagged. With these two final bass for the table, I turn the bow homeward. It’s good to see there’re still plenty of fish here. This late into the year, and this late into the story of life on the planet, it is still possible to catch, in one tide, enough to feed a family all through the winter.
No sooner do I tie up to the dock than my friend Bob rings my cell phone. He’d been hunting fish in the surf all day, checking spots along forty miles of beach. Nothing. But on the dunes just a couple of miles from my house, he saw a Snowy Owl. “A female, very nicely barred; and probably the biggest Snowy Owl I’ve ever seen.”
* * *
With a real frost in the air and a mad-dog bite to the wind, winter is no longer just a concept. A new moon has the tide kicked way up. Waves acting like winners at a poker table greedily pull piles of beach into their lap. On the south side, waterfront home owners are finding the water much closer. Many have lost up to a staggering twenty feet of land this autumn, and in places, sloping dunes that once led gently toward the beach have become ten-foot-high bluffs. Swept-away beach stairs and walkways have gotten hurled back at the crumbled dunes up and down the beach. And it’s not even officially winter yet; such has been the strange tantrum of a mostly warm autumn.
* * *
A clear, crisp night with the Milky Way spilled across the sky. Looking up at stars overhead, or when drifting on dark waters, I often feel connected to something larger, infinite. Mystery beyond knowing. The word is “spiritual.”
I don’t mean the realm of disembodied conscious entities—angels, gods, and demons, or the spirits in trees and brooks—that many believe exist. I mean the mystery in and about us, that wondrous result of whatever it is that we are, this thing inside humanity that moves. This is spirit as much as anything I believe exists. It is not outer, not other. It is our unique amalgam of animal, culture, and yearning. It’s the strange creative synergy between emotion and intellect. It’s the—let’s say it—the magic of common human genius. If it was simply neurons firing, we’d be subservient to squid, who posess the largest nerve cells but arguably less spirit than we. It is as hard to pin down as any imagined angel, but when Abraham Lincoln called upon “the better angels of our nature,” he alluded both to the loftiness and the intangibility of this—the human spirit.
And the horror and darkness we’re capable of—they’re also part of the human spirit. Atrocities have also connected people to something that feels larger, like nationalism, race, and religion. Good impulses and bad are two sides of the imperfectly minted coin of human nature. Compassion is what keeps the coin toss loaded toward “heads.”
* * *
For us to be straining the cables of our planet’s life-support systems despite clear warnings may constitute mere foolishness. But the unborn, who did not choose this path, will arrive saddled with all conceivable consequences. The poor likewise did not choose it, nor the other living creatures that, like us, strive to live and raise their young, yet find their world besieged. “Justice” means to render what is deserved. And because we’ve created a situation that is not merely unsustainable but unjust, it becomes a moral matter. To have these things revealed and then choose to revert to blindness is, dare I say, sin and sacrilege.
The grandiose language of Scripture makes apt metaphor for the true grandeur of life, for the towering magnificence we can sense whenever our usual numbness abates. But scriptural metaphor notwithstanding, I am secular. The suffering of innocents and the faithful is simply too inconsistent with God as advertised. I sense that we’re very much on our own, with no one watching over us, no cosmic righteousness to check our folly, no just reward postmortem, solely responsible for our content and the consequences.
I believe in the universal power of the golden rule. “Do unto others,” indeed. Some see “sin” as contravening religious teachings. I see sin as contravening ethical teachings. Some see “sacred” as worthy of religious veneration. I see as sacred all that is worthy of reverence, all that is deep and true.
The sacred does not require the divine. If God exists, he doesn’t need to hear it from us. The sacred are the values we hold highest. Let’s seek to fulfill the ideal, to satisfy the idea. If we guide and ground our actions in these values, the pang subsides, and something nourishing to the human essence—to our soul, in that sense—fills its place.
If a mere book can be considered holy, can we fail to consider as sacred all of creation? If there is a God, then all things natural are miraculous. If there’s no God, then all things natural are miraculous. That’s quite a coincidence, and ought to give people holding different beliefs a lot to talk about. People who see the world as God’s and people who sense an accident of cosmic chemistry can both perceive the sacred. Let’s not be afraid to say, to explain—and, if necessary, to rage—that we hold the uniqueness of this Earth sacred, that the whole living enterprise is sacred. And that what depletes the living enterprise always proves to be, even in purely practical terms, a mistake.
* * *
Technology has carried people beyond our planet. But what can keep us here on Earth? Science, technology, and the right values each provide only part of what we need. Science without ethics is blind, and ethics without science is prone to errors.
I’d always thought science was amoral because it’s committed to finding and accepting the truth, whatever the answer turns out to be. What I never realized—a religious person actually pointed this out to me recently—is that science’s commitment to truth makes it a fundamentally moral endeavor. Businesspeople may succeed by sacrificing some truth while pursuing profits. Lawyers may succeed by ignoring aspects of justice in defense of clients. Economics isn’t concerned with either truth or justice. Religion thinks it has the truth and can’t walk its dogma too far from the curb. Science accepts only evidence that can be repeated, witnessed by skeptics, and shared. This doesn’t mean science is “true,” necessarily. There always remains the possibility that new findings might sweep away older beliefs. That doesn’t mean science is weak. Rather, that’s its strength. It means scientists grow better as scientists the more devoted they are to finding the truth, and the more open to recognizing it. Of course, some scientists (and some atheists) are dogmatic and act more like fundamentalists. Some religious people constantly seek better understanding, acting more, in their open curiosity, like scientists. Because it’s humanity’s best truth-seeking endeavor, science is completely compatible with freedom. It is completely at home in a free-speech democracy. It cannot progress under repression, dictatorship, or religiously dominated political systems. Things that embrace truth support science because science deepens the pool of known truth. Things that repress truth are threatened by science. It’s that simple. It’s that powerful.
The relationship between science and religion is important because about 85 percent of the world’s people belong to, and largely take their values from, a religion. If the immense power of science can be harnessed to values, if values can be powered by facts, civilization might avert the pain upon which it’s poised.
It’s not that I see science and faith as natural allies. It’s that I don’t see them as natural enemies. Many scientists share a sense of wonder and a moral imperative so profound that their sense of purpose and their emotional experience widely overlap those of religious people, and might, in their devotion and consistency, be called religious in the broad sense. Some scientists have traditional religious faith, just as some people of faith have scientific curiosity. More to the point, regardless of whether the world originated through chemistry or divine providence, the same present confronts us all. We all breathe, drink, and rely on animals, plants, and the march of seasons for our survival. Cosmic origins and afterlife destinies aside, in this world, life is what we have and what we are. With so much at risk, all we can afford is to put differences aside. If we sink the ark everyone on it goes down, regardless of what they
believed.
And so paths converge: what serves the continuity of life is sacred. And what serves the future serves us, too. In a world of accelerating changes, these thoughts often accompany me to many a faraway place, and back to Lazy Point.
* * *
This morning, all is calm, all is bright. On the bay, my favorite saltwater ducks—“our” Long-tailed Ducks—are back in force, beautifully painted in their crisp sepia tones, bills pink in the gold of morning. Their calls ring clearly across hundreds of yards of sounding surface. Ah—oh-da-leep. Those calls, so imbued with a sense of being home in winter, help cinch the circle of the year, tying the end of last winter to the start of this, completing a cycle of the ducks, one of the dozens of circles that make a Lazy Point year.
In the mirror that is the bay, a first: the water is so calm that when a duck dives I can track its progress by its rising bubbles, as though it is using scuba gear. I would have thought they held their breath, but perhaps they exhale so they can expend less effort diving. Or is air getting squeezed from their feathers?
The big waves of yesterday’s great blow have taken away much. The south side beach is reduced to a shockingly slender ribbon. One person’s planked walkway now extends about ten feet from the lip of the new bluff, ending in midair. Another section of that same walkway fell to the sweeping sea.
But yesterday’s big waves have also given a little in return, and Kenzie and I are here in the morning’s angled light to accept their modest gift. For about a hundred yards of beach, right where I’d been catching fish six weeks ago, the sea has yielded dozens of big Surf Clams. I test the shells first with my foot because such shells are usually empty by the time they’re cast ashore. These are full. I bend to heft one. Yes, it’s not just filled with sand; it’s an intact clam, slightly agape. Finally, I tap it, and in the cold it sluggishly closes its fortress gates—it’s alive. I go to get a sack and return. I leave dozens of the smaller clams for the gulls, who, just down the beach, sit looking bored, so fat are they. And in a few minutes I have easily ten pounds of clams to tote home—nice! In the season that welcomes hot chowders I walk off the beach again feeling rich, again looking forward to savoring the connection between sea and table.