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

by Carl Safina

  These older krill can store enough energy in summer to survive a winter without food. But young krill require a winter food supply, or most won’t survive the season. They get their winter food by grazing single-celled algae off the underside of sea ice. Where there’s no ice—there’s no winter food.

  Two years ago, the krill averaged 35 to 40 millimeters (about an inch and a half). Last year they were mostly 42 to 45 millimeters. This year they’re two-inchers, 45 to over 50 millimeters. Wayne explains, “We are seeing just the survivors of the krill born in the last good ice year.”

  “They’re growing up and maturing,” Sue adds. “But there’s almost no younger krill coming in behind them. In recent, relatively iceless winters, there are almost no young krill surviving.”

  “In the 1980s,” Wayne continues, “on our way down here in a heavy ice year, we would hit ice two hundred miles north of these islands. In years when we had to push through heavy ice to get here, Adélie numbers were way up compared to the year before. Younger birds had abundant food, and more of them returned to breed. You need at least one heavy ice year every few years to replenish at least one strong generation of krill.” The more frequent the years of heavy winter sea ice, the more krill. “But recent years, with little ice,” Wayne says. “It’s really knocked the krill down.”

  * * *

  The winter air of the Antarctic Peninsula is warming several times faster than the global average. When mean air temperature in the winter months (between May and September) was about 27 degrees Fahrenheit (−3°C) or colder, extensive pack ice formed. Warmer than that, it didn’t. Satellite photos show that until the early 1970s, this region had extensive ice four out of every five years. In 1979, ice lasted about three months longer than it did in 2009.

  “Air temperatures here,” Wayne says, “have risen about ten degrees Fahrenheit in the last forty years.” Starting a few years ago, daily high temperatures in winter began averaging above freezing. “As it’s gotten warmer,” Wayne continues, “it’s been, like, two good years of ice, three years of almost no ice, two good years of ice, three, four, five years of almost no ice.”

  “Krill can live up to around seven years,” Sue says, “so it took a while for them to really crash.” Eventually, almost no ice means no krill.

  That starves penguins. Chinstraps and Adélies’ numbers are both down by more than half in this region since the 1970s.

  “The drop in penguin numbers coincided with very dramatic krill declines,” Sue explains. “Fewer young penguins are surviving their first years.” In earlier years of their studies, about 40 percent of young Chinstraps and Adélies survived long enough to return and breed. Recently, it’s been 10 percent.

  “After whales were reduced by ninety percent,” adds Wayne, “people in the fishing industry were saying, ‘There’s enough krill out here to double the total output of the world’s fisheries.’ Well, things have certainly changed.”

  * * *

  Things have always changed. Twenty-five million years ago, over a hundred species of penguins—including one six feet tall—drilled through the ocean. Now a dozen and a half species remain. That wasn’t our fault. But we can reasonably ask if rushing some of the remaining penguins off the stage is something we want on humanity’s résumé. Two-thirds of the world’s penguin species are declining sharply. Northern Rockhopper Penguins have dropped 90 percent since the 1950s, a loss of a couple million birds, equivalent to losing one hundred birds daily for the last half century. African Penguins have declined from about 150,000 pairs around 1960 to 25,000 pairs today. Magellanic Penguins are declining 1 percent per year. Even the magnificent Emperors are down as much as half in the last fifty years, with extinction in this century a possibility.

  * * *

  I’d like to think that the bottom of the world is far enough from tailpipes and smokestacks that the animals can live unbothered by us. But I know better. And tonight’s radio call with Palmer Station brings news from a Russian oceanographic ship: an iceberg estimated at a staggering 170 miles long and 25 miles wide—nearly the size of Connecticut—is breaking free from the mainland and will soon be adrift.

  JANUARY

  Pop.

  Pop pop.

  Pop pop pop.

  Weekend gunners keep a constant banter ringing in from various bearings. During extended stretches of time they allow scarcely a silent minute.

  As ducks come slipping gracefully to settle among their companions for the safety in numbers, the guns explode. The lovely ducks’ bones shatter, and they stumble, crumble, and tumble, splashing wounded among the deceiving decoys. In the reeds are people having fun with this.

  But, okay; I used to hunt rabbits with trained hawks. Some of my friends hunt. I understand that some duck hunters support conservation groups because they want more ducks, duck hunting, and the marshes and all that goes with them. And fishing is just hunting in the water. So it’s not that I oppose hunting. (Admittedly, fishing doesn’t send all nearby fish fleeing. It doesn’t disturb the peace of people in bed on a Sunday morning. You can release a fish you don’t want. But still, I’m not categorically against hunting.)

  When a cease-fire ensues at midday, I walk to the Cut. A couple hundred yards distant on the opposite shore, three hunters—two fat middle-aged men and a younger guy, all dressed in camo—are gathering up decoys and rolling up their fancy store-bought blind. One of the fat guys is standing with two fistfuls of our Long-tails, dangling by their feet, limp necks swaying. He walks into the dunes and flings the ducks into the grass. The younger guy picks up a few more birds, and he, too, throws them into the grass. Then they leave.

  If they killed the ducks and ate them, I wouldn’t object. But for all the years I’ve lived here, slob hunters have left ducks (and plastic shotgun cartridges) scattered on the beach. I have a neighbor—nice guy otherwise—who says his annual donation to a conservation group makes up for his wasting ducks he doesn’t like to eat but likes to shoot anyway.

  No gloss will adhere to that mind-set. Turning our wildlife into garbage invalidates any feeble justification. Every ethical tradition, each religion, has long deplored wastefulness. Who still fails to see the sin?

  These guys are phonies. They’re playacting—like Elvis impersonators or Civil War reenactors—only they’re spilling real blood. These hunters act out a ritual that once had meaning but has been hollowed out by changing times and their own hollow heads. Now it’s just meaningless and mean.

  Innocents have always to fear. Not just death, not just predation, not just being kicked a rung up the food chain; but also people who inflict pain simply because they can. Waste is one symptom of a world with a death wish.

  * * *

  Weeks later, when I notice a nice flock of Goldeneyes and Long-tails in good light and walk toward the Cut for a better look, they flee in panic. I hate to see them interrupt their feeding and waste valuable energy, but I think, “Good for them”; trust is a killer.

  * * *

  As a species evolving, we entrain a frightening combination of animal passion and unique mind. From atom to opera, malice to medicine, we are by far the most magnificent, menacing creature of all time. On Earth, at least. Jeopardies to nature are a matter of great concern, but civilization itself seems even more vulnerable. Consider: our economic accounting is illusory, our cultural balances tenuous, our ideals elusive, our achievements fragile, our anger too real.

  Human awareness stands on the threshold of something we’ve never really considered before: our place in time. The “tragedy of the commons” exists beyond the mere breadth of the grazing meadows; it’s a tragedy across time, too. We can take our neighbor’s grass—or our children’s. This capacity to heap up not just riches but time itself now characterizes the human venture. We occupy more than our fair share of space, and more still: we occupy a bigger-than-life chunk of time. By toxin and carbon, by chainsaw and fishing net, by appetite and sheer force of numbers, we survive by being way overleveraged on loans
from generations yet to come, loans for which we the borrowers—not the lenders—dictate the terms. The downside exposure is so enormous, it threatens not just the civilization bubble we’ve created but Life, incorporated. The future, indeed, isn’t what it used to be.

  * * *

  When the wind holds its breath, calm days in winter can feel soft and soothing. This one feels worth a walk at the lighthouse.

  In astonishing swarms, sea ducks are, once again, stringing dark necklaces across the gray horizon and peppering the coastal view. They’re mostly scoters—all three species—and Common Eiders. Gathering over mussel-crusted ridges and boulder bottoms, as usual, they throng the near-shore ocean in flocks totaling tens of thousands. An e-mailed birders’ alert says, “The huge scoter and eider flock was estimated to contain 10,000 White-winged Scoters, 7,000 Surf Scoters, 2,000 Black Scoters and 5,000 Common Eiders.”

  Swept along in the tide, diving to feed, then flying back to where they started, they work the place as vigorously as ever. They’re most concentrated about half a mile from shore, but they’re all over. Those actually in the surf pour themselves into the curling faces of big breaking waves to avoid getting tumbled. They are obvious yet mysterious, and their numbers provide deep comfort, especially in the short daylight of winter.

  Several loons, grebes, and Red-breasted Mergansers also swim the surf. Winter’s gulls are likewise arriving. I see the common Bonaparte’s, and scan for the rarer Glaucous, Iceland, Lesser Black-backed, and Black-headed Gulls.

  The birds know somehow where they’ve been and where they’re going. When the stable weather changes, they move, and will move again. For twelve thousand years or so, humanity has lived in a period of very stable climate. That stability has been the climate envelope for all of civilization so far. Now we are committed to leaving that stable period for points unknown. It’s humanity’s most hazardous journey yet. And unlike the journeys of these birds, unlike even our voyage to the moon and back, this time we don’t know where we are going. We’ve been running like a wheel out of round, and the wobble, barely detectable at the Sermon on the Mount, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the publication of On the Origin of Species, now threatens to rattle the world hard enough to shake hundreds of millions of people from their homes, their histories, and their futures.

  * * *

  Currents roil the surface. The duck flocks’ epicenter is a place that people in fishing boats call the Elbow. Not far away, over a long seafloor ridge in about forty feet of water, the tide creates a long line of rough water called Pollock Rip. I’ve never heard of a Pollock coming out of there in all the years I’ve known the place, though older captains have told me they used to catch a lot of big Pollock until the early 1970s.

  Formerly the season’s influx included winter’s fish as well as fowl: “King Cod” and his court—Pollock, Haddock, and the like, all so depleted now that their tattered remnants scarcely wave a flag of surrender. The bulk of them return as oral history: “Yesterday we got a few but, boy—we ran for three hours. When I was a kid, we never went more than a couple of miles. We’d catch them right outside the inlet. You never had to look for good bottom. You never had to chum. You just cut the engine and drifted.” Thanks for the fillets, Bob, and the memories.

  Stories make a mighty coarse net for capturing memories. Most eventually get away. Older people may bemoan the poverty of codless winters and places named for creatures that no longer come. Or the asphalting of wild lands they were young in. Or the closing in of room to roam—and room to breathe. For young people, this new poverty is simply normal. A cooped chicken doesn’t realize that its ancestors were wild birds. Most young people don’t know what isn’t there, don’t sense their inheritance plucked from them. They don’t even think about it; bullhorns and billboards call their attentions elsewhere.

  And where would they turn, anyway, for a sense of how it’s supposed to be? We can consult classical philosophy and religion for advice on how to behave toward each other, but not for how we should behave toward the changing world. Economists can tell us how to value currency, but not how to value the only known life. Or even our own life. These institutions were never equipped to consider that the world changes, much less that we are changing it.

  I hope that one day our time will be remembered as wasteful, impoverished, and primitive. And after that, I hope that the memory of our violent times and anti-Reason ideologies and dirty engines will be forgotten, too, or at least seem as distant as the Black Plague and the Inquisition.

  Nature keeps trying. This winter, far offshore, there’s a surprising influx of cod. In fishing communities this has produced both a rush to catch them and political turmoil over whether to protect them. We know that life’s resilience makes recovery possible. We see it when and where it’s allowed to happen. Maybe we’ll get through this after all. Maybe, in so many necessary ways, we’ll get through this.

  A lot that should be here is missing. And some things that were missing are back. Ospreys. Peregrine Falcons. The Stripers we love to catch and love to eat. That we can regain what we have abused not only matters, it instructs. It inspires. When I was a kid, seeing a seal swimming in these waters was rare and remarkable. After centuries of persecution, in 1972 the Marine Mammal Protection Act made killing seals illegal in the United States. Now when walking our winter beach, it’s not unusual to see a seal watching from just beyond the surf. One morning, when the bay froze, I sat up in bed and saw several seals hauled out along the ice’s edge. Seeing seals without getting out of bed was a new experience. It seemed fitting to literally wake up to renewed abundance; it’s my recurring dream.

  But it’s no small matter to go from letting birds and bass and seals recover to taking the giant steps required to rechill the poles, regrow forests, refill the seas with fish, save the tropics’ reefs, stabilize the ocean’s chemistry, secure agriculture, quench the fire, tame growth, recognize the finite possibilities, lighten up, and calm down.

  The world is changing because we’re changing it. And that makes me understand, at least, what kind of person I’d like to be. A person can seek ways, whether big or small, to heal the world. That, to me, is spirituality and one’s “soul.” Not some disembodied eternal wishfulness but a way of being that, most days, I can work on. Life is like walking with a flashlight on a dark night. You can’t see your destination, but each step illuminates the next few steps, and, taking one after another, you can get where you need to go. Only now, we’ll need to quicken our pace if we are to avoid major upheaval in this century. It’s up to us not just as individuals but as citizens of nations and of the world.

  * * *

  Kenzie lopes ahead toward the Cut. I throw a pebble into the Sound. My mind sees the ripples spreading from where a first small pebble of realization strikes until those ripples touch all shores. And in the circles rippling outward I see a kind of geometry of compassion. Many lives are spent right where each of us first splashes in, inside the first circle. Most religions tread mainly within the perimeter of the second circle, which widens enough to encompass humanity. If we get to ride in the widest expanding circle, we call our name and hear it echo across the span of deep time, and all Life answers, through the whole dance of birth and death and birth traveling out of the past and blurring into the far future. That rippling, ever-widening circle—that’s where we need to be.

  Albert Einstein said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” Our inventiveness must serve, not enslave. Air, water, land, and skies: healing is possible. Great new innovators are plotting a course that could let factories mimic the efficiency of biological systems, cycling essentially without waste, generating renewable flows rather than liquidating nature, creating products, buildings, even cities that enter the life process itself. We can harness energy without setting fire to the world. The moral must guide the technical. Better we be t
hreads that strengthen the fabric, rather than that we pull the rug from those who will come next. The mere existence of the human mind enhances the universe; our human presence should not diminish it. And if we alone, of all creatures, can best think ahead—then we should.

  * * *

  The music becomes new when the rhythm changes. We may yet hear a different drummer. We must understand three things formerly unknown: that Life is a fully networked community; that because expanding knowledge suggests remaining ignorance, we ought to act with humility, reverence, and caution; and that the story we write with our lives affects those living near and far, and not just now but in the near and distant futures.

  The moral must guide the technical—but whose morals? We have the benefit of some hard work by others. “Love your enemies,” said Jesus. Honor the stranger. We have been formed into tribes and nations, the Koran says, that we may come to know each other. Our responsibility to heal the world is central to Judaism. Compassion is what brings Jews, Christians, and Muslims to what they call God; it’s what the Buddha says will bring you to Nirvana. Confucius propounded the golden rule five centuries before Christ. The ability to feel along with another is the minimum standard of religiosity, “because in compassion,” says the former nun and author Karen Armstrong, “we dethrone ourselves from the center of our world.” In science, much the same. Remember, we’ve got Copernicus’s deduction—truly astounding when you fathom how counterintuitive—that the sun and the universe do not revolve around us; Darwin’s perception of the totality of our relatedness; and Aldo Leopold’s insight that our true community is not just people but the community of Life and all that supports it. Jesus, Copernicus, Darwin, Leopold—and the other giants. One central theme: one widening circle. This is the story of all we have learned. Simple, right?

  Yet we’ve fought bitterly each step of the way toward saying, simply, that all men are created equal; and not just white men; and not just men. The struggle for democracy, the emancipation movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the environmental movement collectively give the modern world a glimpse at what an end to humanity’s brute stage would look like. No group of individuals who have ever demanded their freedom and their human dignity—slaves, ethnic minorities, persecuted religious sects, women, gay people—has been shown by history to have been on the wrong side. Every oppressing or bigoted group has. Each time we’ve expanded the circle, the test of time has proven it absolutely the right thing.