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NY Times Sunday Book Review January 14, 2011 Delicate Planet By DOMINIQUE BROWNING THE VIEW FROM LAZY POINT A Natural Year in an Unnatural World By Carl Safina Illustrated. 401 pp. A John Macrae Book / Henry Holt & Company. $32. This has been a dismal year for the health of our planet. Evidence of human-caused catastrophe mounts daily with grim reports from sea, sky and land: disappearing species, the collapse of fisheries, deforestation, the shrinking ozone layer, higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide, oceanic dead zones, warming temperatures, extreme weather, rising sea levels, depleted aquifers, melting glaciers, thawing permafrost. We have already crossed into an unimaginable new epoch, but we seem unable to unite behind efforts to change, or even slow, our disastrous course. Why are we in such denial? Carl Safina’s ambitious new book, “The View >From Lazy Point,” is a series of field reports entwined with a loving meditation on the interconnectedness of nature and humanity. The story he tells is “partly about a kind of heartbreak for a world that remains so vitally unaware of how imperiled it is.” But it’s also about how, despite the gloomy reports, “the world still sings.” Safina’s account of “a natural year in an unnatural world” can be harrowing, but its impassioned, informed urgency is also filled with hope, joy and love. It’s possible only to hint here at the ground Safina explores in his travels, and his spiritual journeys are even more wide-ranging. He begins at home, in a small house barely clinging to the dunes of Long Island near Montauk Point. “It’s a good spot,” he writes, “in which to wake up” — a wonderful way to judge a place. Safina’s blood pulses to the fluid rhythms of coastal life. He’s a fisherman as well as a naturalist, attuned to the ocean’s “great caldron of vitality,” and he and his dog make a habit of walking the beach every morning to see what’s turned up on the tides. With him we see the herring gulls, terns and ospreys wheeling through the air, the fish thrashing in the shallows. Lazy Point is the place Safina leaves behind when he travels to far-flung locations around the globe. Yet everywhere he goes, he reminds us how close to home we always are, how the consequences of our actions affect places — and creatures — most of us will never see. He cites dozens of examples. The scales of herring, which are in decline because of overfishing, give lipstick and nail polish their pearly shimmer. Pesticides, metals and estrogens in human wastewater disrupt the development of amphibians, which are among the most vulnerable vertebrates on the planet. Toxic chemical flame retardants from furniture, carpet pads and foam cushions turn up in the flesh of polar bears — and the breast milk of American mothers. The excess carbon dioxide we’re pumping into the air is absorbed by the vast oceans, whose increasing acid levels are destroying crucial organisms in its food chain. Safina visits the Caribbean island of Bonaire, off the coast of Venezuela, because it’s meant to be the best place in the region to see healthy coral reefs — which “may be the most beautiful natural system on Earth” — yet even there he reports a decline in the parrotfish that scrape the coral clean of suffocating seaweed. More encouragingly, in Alaska, where salmon are thriving, Safina explores nature’s resilience, citing what “may be the world’s best example of managing valuable wildlife to the benefit of regional jobs and prosperity.” And in Svalbard, an archipelago halfway between Norway and the North Pole, Safina looks in on the Noah’s Ark of plants, the Global Seed Vault, where over 300,000 samples are stored in hope of preserving agricultural diversity in the face of severe climate change. Sadly, none of this is exactly news. Almost every place Safina visits, from Alaska to Antarctica, has figured in other books. Fine journalists like Joseph J. Romm (“Straight Up”), Elizabeth Kolbert (“Field Notes From a Catastrophe”), Bill McKibben (“Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet”), Fen Montaigne (“Fraser’s Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica”), Alanna Mitchell (“Seasick: Ocean Change and the Extinction of Life on Earth”) have sent up warning flares from far poles, deep seas and our own backyards. But from year to year the picture becomes clearer, the research more finely detailed, the news more dire. And that news bears repeating because it’s of the utmost urgency — and because we haven’t listened very carefully, much less responded. Safina’s prose is graceful and engaging, always on the alert for enhancing detail, whether it’s pointing out the trash strewn in the yards of a frigid Arctic town or the whale bones (“like felled trunks”) blanketing a beach in Antarctica or the finer points of using an outhouse at a polar research station “while your underwear fills with snow.” Only Safina could bring me to tears over the fate of the ugly horseshoe crab, used for bait to catch whelk and eels, when he describes a confrontation with some fishermen bent on slaughtering crabs when they leave their eggs above the high-tide line. It’s in everyone’s interest to take pity on these creatures. A protein carefully harvested from their blood (with the crabs then returned to the water) is used, he reminds us, to screen “nearly every batch of injectable and intravenous drugs.” We are indeed interconnected, no matter how far apart on the evolutionary scale we appear to be. “The View From Lazy Point” is far more than a travelogue of the endangered natural world. And this is where Safina’s book soars, adding his voice to a small chorus that includes the poet Mary Oliver and the environmentalist David W. Orr. From the very beginning, Safina asks us to reconsider the importance of that perennial question: “What is the meaning of life?” Which, he believes, is the wrong question to be asking because “it makes you look in the wrong places.” The right question is, “Where is the meaning in life.” And the place to look is “between.” In other words, we should look for the ways that all living creatures and all habitats are connected, look for what happens “between” them. “Relationships,” he insists, “are the music life makes. Context creates meaning.” Safina returns again and again to this consideration of interconnectedness, and to the need for each person to cultivate a more considerate life: “To advance compassion and yet survive in a world of appetites — that is our challenge.” He calls for reverence and caution, and a humbling awareness that future generations must live with the consequences of the decisions we make today. “Ecology, family, community, religion — these words all grope toward the same need: connection, belonging, purpose.” I had to — and wanted to — read “The View From Lazy Point” very slowly, allowing myself to digest its wealth of information, to revel in the beauty of Safina’s writing and to absorb fully the implications of his musings. “Just as we went from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists to civilized societies,” he writes, “now we must take the next great leap: from merely civilized to humanized.” Safina’s readers may also find things to argue about here, especially when it comes to his commentary on the “too narrow” and “antique notions” that underpin our economic, religious and ethical institutions and his insistence that “corporations inundate democracy.” But what a pleasure it is to be asked to stop rushing about and take time to think, to grapple with fundamental questions, and to find such an enlightening, provocative companion for walking and talking — and reading. We can ask no more from those who warn about dark days ahead than that they also awaken us to the miracle of everyday life as they try to illuminate a better path forward. Dominique Browning, the author of “Slow Love,” blogs at SlowLoveLife.com. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
