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

  “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 history 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, chances 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 roughly 40 percent of the life that the land produces; we take a similar proportion of what the coastal seas produce. For one midsized creature that collectively weighs just half a percent of the animal mass on Earth, that is a staggering proportion. It redefines “dominion.” We dominate.

  Maybe it’s time to redefine our goals. If the human population 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 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 further. Synthetic fertilizers have doubled the global nitrogen flow to living systems, washing down rivers and, since the 1970s, 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 zooplankton are feeling their world shifting. As are many people, who don’t always know why.

  I hope that someday, preferably this week, the enormity 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 Europe, South Asia, China—. Then again, it does. Still, if not for Sisyphus’s efforts, the stone would merely stay at the bottom 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. And I also hope we will find our way toward quelling the storm 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-1800s have we started 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 1800s, Western people had essentially no concept of Earth’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 paleontologist Richard Owen coined the term “dinosaur.” No whiff of early humanity was known until odd skulls were found in Belgium in 1829; and not until 1857 did Johann Carl Fuhlrott and Hermann Schaaffhausen announce that bones found in Germany’s Neanderthal Valley were different from those of typical humans—and perhaps the remains of a very old human race. Darwin was an adult before scientists began debating a controversial new idea: that germs cause disease and that physicians should keep their instruments clean. In 1850s London, John Snow tried to combat cholera without the knowledge that bacteria caused it. In Darwin’s lifetime scientists 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 formed 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 speculation bubble and crash. And not a lot has changed. Virtually every business still uses the double-entry bookkeeping and accounting adopted in thirteenth-century Venice, first written down in the 1400s 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 where that’s gotten us recently.

  So our daily dealings are still heavily influenced by ideas 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.

  Our economic, religious, and ethical institutions ride antique notions too narrow to freight what we’ve learned about how life works on our sparkle dot of diamond dust in space. These institutions resist change; to last this long, they had to. Bu
t they lack mechanisms for incorporating 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. The 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 respond 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 technologies, 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 shortcoming, this is likely it.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, when thinking about this feels like walking in a world of wounds, the vitality of birds can be a partial antidote. This morning Kenzie and I decide to grant ourselves a treat and go to the lighthouse. We’re looking for Razorbills and King Eiders on a fine Sunday morning.

  The sea is still calm when we get to the Point—no whitecaps, no swells—but a light ruffling breeze is up, and the tide is streaming a broad current of water seaward. The southerly sun nicely side-lights the view eastward. And to the south, it shimmers the water and silhouettes the birds.

  Of ducks, numbers reward us. Numbers uncountable. I scan with binoculars and see many floating scoters—Black, White-winged, and the endearingly skunk-headed Surf Scoter—and lots of Common Eiders. To the eye the scoters differ mainly in the amount and location of white patches on black bodies, though the differences go deeper. The scoters largely breed in the interior of Canada, mostly the western half, and into Alaska. They’re long-distance migrants. Their summer grounds are so locked in ice in winter that, by comparison, our stinging-cold winter ocean is warm enough for them. The eiders, renowned for down, nest on the coldest coasts and up along the Arctic Ocean and Greenland. They’re still going to need that down, because for all the short days and long nights and frigid storms of our local winter, they all live utterly exposed. Hard to imagine. Hunters consider these sea ducks too tough for the table. Well, look how tough they have to be to live out here. Free-range doesn’t get much freer than this.

  The floating clumps of ducks are called “rafts,” and the rafts are nearly continuous for a couple of miles. I look at the edge of the flock and count about a hundred birds. Using this mental template, I apply it ten times to estimate a thousand. With this thousand-duck estimator I census the flocks and come up with a rather hefty approximation: twenty thousand sea ducks. The sheer abundance of ducks is both astonishing yet expected here at this season. It’s really quite something that these numbers still gather here, and that the sea supports them. It makes me wonder if this place could ever have harbored more birds.

  It’s possible. Early on, Europeans in the New World could scarcely believe their own eyes. In the 1620s, one Nicolas Denys wrote, “So great an abundance of Wild Geese, Ducks, and Brant is seen that it is not believable, and they all make so great a noise at night that one has trouble to sleep.” He said, “All my people are so surfeited with game … they wish no more.… Our dogs lie beside this meat so much are they satiated with it.”

  In 1841, John James Audubon, in his epic work The Birds of America, said of the Black Scoter, “They congregate in vast multitudes.” I don’t know how many are in a multitude, but this morning’s twenty thousand ducks is still a fair number.

  Of the eider, Audubon says,

  This remarkable Duck must ever be looked upon with great interest by the student of nature. The depressed form of its body, the singular shape of its bill, the beautiful colouring of its plumage, the value of its down as an article of commerce, and the nature of its haunts, render it a very remarkable species.… The down of a nest rarely exceeds an ounce in weight, although, from its great elasticity, it is so bulky as to fill a hat.… The eggers of Labrador usually collect it in considerable quantity, but at the same time make such havoc among the birds, that at no very distant period the traffic must cease.

  In 1917, in a different book similarly titled Birds of America, Edward Howe Forbush further commented about eiders,

  In Iceland, Norway, and some other parts of Europe the down is considered so valuable that the birds are conserved, tended, and protected, so that they become almost as tame as domesticated fowls. Nesting places are made for them in the turf or among the stones.… In some places the nests are so numerous that it is impossible to step among them without endangering the sitting birds. Some birds become so tame while on the nest as to allow the inhabitants to stroke their feathers.… The down and eggs taken are not sufficient to interfere with the breeding of the birds, and both the birds and the inhabitants prosper in the partnership.

  We do it differently in America. The coast of Labrador formerly was a great breeding ground of the Eider Duck … [but] eggers, fishermen, and settlers have destroyed both birds and eggs [they actually killed birds for down], until the vast Eider nurseries of the Labrador coast are little more than a memory.

  As sport, sea-duck gunning has a wasteful tradition going back a century or so. Forbush commented that scoters are “not very appetizing … abominable.… [But] large numbers are killed merely for sport, and either left to lie where they fall or to drift away on the tide.… On some mornings … it sounds like a regular battle.” The Bufflehead was called “a very common and well-known bird” in 1870, but by 1917, Forbush noted that “its great weakness is a fondness for decoys.… [Though] the flesh is usually not of a very good quality … its diminution on the Atlantic sea-board has been deplorably rapid.”

  I guess that helps answer my question about whether there were formerly more ducks.

  We stand upon the flat boulders armoring the slope below the lighthouse, with green swells crashing the rocks before us. A Herring Gull gliding overhead is as beautiful as any idea perfected. Their abundance tends to render them invisible; it’s to everyday miracles that we’re most blind. With the scope I’m picking carefully through hundreds of birds, looking for those Razorbills and those Kings. There are, let’s see: a couple of loons and a few gulls, some mergansers. A few grebes with light cheeks, so Horned Grebes. A couple of flying gannets skim the distance, bodies gleaming white and wingtips velvet black. No Razorbills and no Kings. Not yet.

  The ebbing tide is sweeping the birds to our right, southward. When it pushes them past the submerged hills where they’ve been swimming down for mussels, snails, and such, they’re in water a little too deep, about sixty feet. Somehow they know; they rise and fly a half mile or so uptide to reposition themselves for another drift over their feeding spots. This creates a conveyor belt of birds drifting right and birds flying left. In my binoculars, the flying birds seem to swarm across the sea surface, while just under them, thousands more ducks bob and dive. Ever mindful of their social status, many males are displaying, vocalizing, and chasing each other.

  * * *

  The best spots for winter ducks and summer fish here are the same, for the very same reason. Strong tides keep the region bathed in nutrients and plankton. Where broad bouldery hills and seafloor ridges rise to within thirty to fifty feet of the surface from water twice as deep, they squeeze the flow, concentrating the nourishment. Mussels get a banquet. The mussel-crusted hills provide food and—for fish—hiding places and ambush positions. Great schools of small fish coming to the plankton soup kitchen also get squeezed into closer quarters. Bigger fish come to hunt, and they, too, concentrate. When fishing here, we do exactly the same as the ducks, letting the tide take our boat over these submerged hills and then, when we’re past them, going back upcurrent to do the drift again.

  Makes sense, but I’ve often w
ondered: How can this place feed thousands of ducks day in and out, all the months of winter? My friends Chris and Augie are expert breath-hold spear fishermen, and they know the sea bottom like no one does. Chris says everyone thinks mussels set only on rocks and boulders, but he’s also seen them set by the millions on bare sand flats in thirty to forty feet of water around those hills where the ducks focus. Augie says you can land on open bottom in places where the mussels are piled so thick and stacked so deep, they’re springy; you can compress them with your hand. I knew there were mussels in the fishing spots because we snag them sometimes, but I never knew they grew like that. Coincidently, just a day or two after we were talking about this, my neighbor J.P. came to my house with his hands cupped around some seaweed called Irish Moss. He said it was washed up all along the beach—miles of it—and he wanted to show me the density at which baby mussels can set. At least a thousand very tiny mussels had settled on just his handful of washed-up seaweed. Well, I was duly impressed. The ducks are impressed enough to come a thousand miles for them.

  * * *

  In winter it’s often blustery here. But today, with little wind, calmer water, and warmer air than usual, my eyes aren’t tearing, and even without gloves my fingers aren’t cold. Although I scan carefully through a couple thousand ducks that bob close enough for a good look in the telescope, I see none of the spectacular King Eiders. And none of the sleek black Razorbills.

  The rarer birds are here in spirit, one might say. As with many things, looking for birds entails three increasing levels of skill: recognizing what you’re looking at, knowing what you’re seeking, and knowing where to find it. Want to see Harlequin Ducks? Go to one particular bouldery stretch of surf a few miles west of here. They’re there most winters.