By Carl Safina

The

A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

From Lazy PoinT:VIEW

e’ve had no ice on The sound This winTer, and this morning portends more warmth, well above

freezing. By now, late January, the days are already noticeably longer and the light has changed. It’s a little stronger, a little brighter.

Though the beach is lovely, the air remains raw, with a damp south wind. Kenzie’s dark shape is loping along far ahead, zigzagging the beach. The tide, already low, is still ebbing. Pebbles are mounded at the upper boundary of the wave wash; above them, near the swipe of highest tides, lies a line of slipper shells. Six decades ago, my neighbor J.P. tells me – and he’s got photos – this beach was all sand, no pebbly stretches. A generation ago, the beach was windrowed with jingle shells. Kids, hippies, and young mothers (some people seemed all three at once) liked to string them into little driftwood mobiles to hang in windows and breezeways. Now slipper shells reign. It never occurred to anyone that counting shells on a beach could be science, so there’s no data on how jingles have nearly vanished. Only the neighbors speak of it; only the neighbors know.

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one’s DNA begin building a Bufflehead and another’s start assembling a seal–when cells are so similar? Each kind is an engraved invitation posted on an unlocked door that opens to a mansion bigger than human time. Step inside, and you can easily spend a lifetime.

Mysteries notwithstanding, this daily morning walk is how I take the pulse of the place, and my own. It’s a good spot in which to wake up.

The sun here comes out of the sea and returns to the sea–a trick that’s hard to pull off if you don’t live on an island or some narrow bit of land with its neck stuck out. As Earth revolves around that disk of sun, you can watch dawn and sunset migrate across the horizon a little each day.

On a coast ruled by a wandering sun and twelve moons that pull the tides like the reins on a horse, a year means some-thing. Seasonality here isn’t just a fourseason, common-time march. The rhythm of the year here beats to the pulse of a perpetual series of migrations, rivers of life along the leaning line of coast. Fishes and birds mainly, but also migrating but-terflies, dragonflies, whales, sea turtles, even tree frogs and toads and salamanders, whose migrations take them merely from woodland to wetland and back. Each kind moves to its own drum. Getting tuned into the migrants’ urgent ener-gies turns “four seasons” into a much more complex idea of what life does, what life is, of where life begins and goes.

Time has been called an arrow, but here time’s direc-tionality assumes the circularity of the sky, the ocean’s horizon-in-the-round. Circular time. This is perhaps time as an animal perceives it, each day replayed with all the major elements the same and every detail different. It’s a pinwheel in which each petal creates the one behind it, goes once around and then falls, as all petals eventually do. Time and tide. Ebb and flow. Many a metaphor starts in water. As did life itself.

A large time-blackened oyster shell, newly uncov-ered by the collusion of wind and water, speaks of when they grew wild in abundance, and big. Every walk is a product of the present and a relic of the past. And on a very recent clamshell I recognize the perfect, tiny borehole of the predatory snail that was its assassin. Three round, translu-cent pebbles catch my eye; they fit snugly across my palm-not that I need more pebbles. Then again, Isaac Newton himself said, “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Well, exactly. So I’ll grant myself the pretty stones.

The Sound reflects both the light of morning and the calls of sea ducks. I cup my ears and hear the Longtailed Ducks’ ah–oh–da–leep. Their call means it’s winter – and it means I’m home. Among the gifts of the sea is a wonderfully portable sense of place. Portable because one ocean washes all shores. Like these migrants themselves, my sense of home goes where they go.

Scanning with binoculars, I locate those elegantly stream-ered Long-tails. The morning light is falling across their pied heads, putting a gleam on their whites and setting their pink bill tips aglow. I swivel my gaze across the water, past several Common Loons in their soft-gray winter pajamas. Red-breasted Mergansers, heads war-bonneted with ragged crests, sit scattered across the Sound. On the shore across the Cut, three Harbor Seals are resting with their bodies gracefully bowed, heads and rear flippers up off the sand, air-cooling themselves.

Their beauty alone is inspiring. But what in the journey of their ancient lineage led one kind to develop a black-and-white head, another a cap of ragged plumes? How does

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similar proportion of what the coastal seas produce. For one mid-sized creature that collectively weighs just half a percent of the animal mass on Earth, that is a stagger-ing proportion. It redefines “dominion.” We dominate.

Maybe it’s time to redefine our goals. If the human popu-lation again doubles, as some project, could we commandeer 80 percent of life? More conservatively, the United Nations expects the population to grow to over nine billion people by the middle of this century. That’s two more Chinas. We’d have to expand agriculture onto new land, and that means using more water-but water supplies are shrinking. Since all growth must be based on what plants make using sunlight, continuous growth of the human enterprise for more than a few decades may not be possible. By midcentury it would take about two Planet Earths to provide enough to meet projected demand (add another half-Earth if everyone wants to live like Americans). In accounting terms, we’re running a deficit, eating into our principal, liquidating our natural capital assets. Something’s getting ready to break.

Population growth adds about seventy million people to the world each year, twice as many as live in California. Meanwhile, since 1970 populations of fishes, amphibians, mammals, reptiles, and birds have declined about 30 percent worldwide. Species are going extinct about one thousand times faster than the geologically “recent” average; the last extinction wave this severe snuffed the dinosaurs. We’re pumping freshwater faster than rain falls, catching fish faster than they spawn. Roughly 40 percent of tropical coral reefs are rapidly deteriorating; none are considered safe. Forests are shrinking by about an acre per second. Compared to

Life –Earth’s trademark enterprise – starts with plants and algae capturing energy from sunlight and using solar power to turn carbon dioxide and water into sugar. Then they use the sugar they’ve created as fuel for turning the nutrients in soil and water into cells, and for powering growth, reproduc-tion, repair and defense. Whether at sea or on land, plants and countless trillions of single-celled algae drifting in the ocean create the planet’s basic living matter. They’re the world’s“power plants.” Their exhaust gas is the oxygen that animals breathe. Basically all of life on Earth is the story of plants making and animals taking

“Follow the money” explains a lot in politics and in nature, although nature’s currency is energy. Almost all of it comes streaming to the treasury in gold bars of sunlight (some deep-sea creatures also use volcanic energy from the seafloor). The natural economy is flowing energy. World his-tory is not the story of politics, wars, ideologies, or religions. It’s the story of energy flow, beginning with a fraction of the sun’s radiance falling on a lifeless planet coated with water.

When an unusually fragile new ape began using fire to harness the energy in plants it could not eat –such as wood– to initiate digestion (by cooking), ward off predators, and provide warmth, and when it learned that by assisting the reproduction of plants and animals it could garner more food, its radical new ability to channel energy flow changed the story of life on Earth.

Animals eat plants, so, ultimately, we are all grass, pretty much. Now the astonishing thing is how much of the grass we are. Each time a plant of the land or coastal sea uses the sunlight’s energy to make a sugar molecule or add a cell, changes are about four out of ten that the cell will become food-or be eaten by an animal that will become food-for a human. In other words, we now take rough-ly 40 percent of the life that the land produces; we take a

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Europe, South Asia, China . Then again, it does. Still, if not for Sisyphus’s efforts, the stone would merely stay at the bot-tom of the hill. But that doesn’t mean he’s succeeding.

There are those for whom the dying of the world comes as unwelcome news. Many others seem less concerned. Yet maybe to have hope is to be hope. I hope life – I don’t mean day-to-day living; I mean Life, capital L; bacteria, bugs, birds, baleen whales, and ballerinas– I hope Life will find a way to hold on, keep its shape, persist, ride it out. AndI also hope we will find our way toward quelling thestorm we have become.

The question: Why are we the way we are?Around Lazy Point, driving all the goings-on are things

partly apparent – sand, water, birds, weather, mudflats, clams, fishes, pines, oaks, tides, neighbors on two legs, neighbors on four–and partly cloaked: the carbon, water, and nitrogen cycles; the atmosphere; microbes; and other barely imagined figments of invisible reality that, for almost all of human history, remained wholly unknown.

Only since the mid-1800’s have we stared learning basic things about how the world actually works. For the longest time, people didn’t even have a sense of – well, time. Until the early 1800’s, Western people had essentially no concept ofEarth’s age, or that certain formerly living things had become extinct, or that the world pre-dated humans by more than a few biblical days. The modern study of life started, one might argue, with Charles Darwin. But even during Charles Darwin’s times, science was primitive. Darwin was born in 1809. It wasn’t until 1833 that William Whewell coined the word “scientist.” It wasn’t until 1842, six years after Darwin returned from his voyage on the Beagle, that the paleontolo-gist Richard Owen coined the term “dinosaur.” No whiff of 1829; and not until 1857 did Johann Carl Fuhlrott and Hermann Schaaffhausen announce that bones found in

the day thirteen colonies on the sunrise side of a wilderness continent asserted independence as the United States, the planet’s atmosphere is quite different. Ozone: thinner. Carbon dioxide: denser by a third and concentrating fur-ther. Synthetic fertilizers have doubled the global nitrogen flow to living systems, washing down rivers and, since the

1970’s, creating hundreds of oxygen-starved seafloor “dead zones.” Americans only 5 percent of the world population–use roughly 30 percent of the world’s nonrenewable energy and minerals. The Convention on Biological diversity aims–aimed–to protect the diversity of living things, but its own assessment says, “Biodiversity is in decline at all levels and geographical scales,” a situation “likely to continue for the foreseeable future.”

Oh, well. As a new force of nature, humans are changing the world

at rates and scales previously matched mainly by geological and cosmic forces like volcanoes, ice-age cycles, and comet strikes. That’s why everything from Aardvarks to zooplank-ton are feeling their world shifting. As are many people, who don’t always know why.

I hope that someday, preferably this week, the enormi-ty of what we’re risking will dawn on us. So far it hasn’t. True, without the environmental groups, much of the world would probably resemble the most polluted parts of eastern

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Our economic, religious, and ethical institutions ride an-tique notions too narrow to freight what we’ve learned about how life works on our sparkle dot diamond dust in space. These institutions resist change; to discoveries about how life operates. So they haven’t assimilated the last century’s breakthroughs; that all life is related by lineage, by flows of energy, and by cycles of water, carbon, nitrogen, and such; that resources are finite, and creatures fragile. institutions haven’t adjusted to new realizations about how we can push the planet’s systems into dysfunction.

In important ways, they poorly correspond or re-spond to a changing world. You wouldn’t treat an illness by calling a medical doctor from the Middle Ages, but we run the modern world with only premodern comprehension. Old thinking prevails. In the main, our philosophy of living, our religions, and our economics simply don’t have a way of saying, “As we learn, so will we adjust.”

Though we’re fearless about revolutionizing technolo-gies, we cling to concepts that no longer reflect realities. We’re incredible at solving puzzles, poor at solving problems. And if the whole human enterprise has one fatal shortcom-ing, this is likely it.

Germany’s Neanderthal Valley were different from those of typical humans– and perhaps the remains of a very oldhuman race. Darwin was an adult before scientists began de-bating a controversial new idea: that germs cause disease and that physicians should keep their instruments clean. In 1850’s London, John Snow tried to combat cholera without the knowledge that bacteria caused it. In Darwin’s lifetime sci-entists were still arguing over whether life continually arose spontaneously from nonliving things; in 1860 Louis Pasteur performed a series of experiments that eventually put to rest the idea of “spontaneous generation.” (Now, ironically, many people have a hard time believing that at some point in the distant past the building blocks of life became organized into living things; but in the Middle Ages people routinely believed that flies,mice, and rats, literally form from meat, grain, and filth.)

Science has marched forward. But civilization’s values remain rooted in philosophies, religious traditions, and ethical frameworks devised many centuries ago.

Even our economic system, capitalism, is half a millennium old. The first stock exchange opened in 1602, in Amsterdam. By 1637, tulip mania had caused the first specu-lation bubble and crash. And not a lot has changed. Virtu-ally every business still uses the double-entry bookkeeping and accounting adopted in thirteenth-century Venice, first written down in the 1400’s by a friend of Leonardo Da Vinci’s, the Franciscan monk Luca Pacioli. His book Summa de Arithmetica established the concept that banks’ main assets are other people’s debts – and we know wherethat’s gotten us recently.

So our daily dealings are still heavily influenced by ide-as that were firmly set before anyone knew the world was round. In many ways, they reflect how we understood the world when we didn’t understand the world at all.

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Fonts used: Garamond (italic, bold and regular)Text Formatting: 10.8/13 , Justified with the Last line left.

Photo Credits for Cover: Dana White

Dana WhiteGraphic Design May 7th, 2012

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