Between Islands

8/24/23 – Thoughts before a small journey

how a ship becomes an island / author photo

Hello everyone:

Just a short note this week, as I’m heading out on a canoe trip on the coast here in Maine.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

As I noted above, I’m busily preparing for a canoe trip and will be away next week. I’m in the throes of that uniquely weird and human behavior in which we rush around to settle a million details so that we can relax somewhere else. Why not just relax here? There are lots of Anthropocene answers to that question, but for now I’ll just say that the somewhere else is beautiful, quiet, and full of joys, and so the rushing around is well worth it.

Even better, that somewhere else is in my back yard. The islands in the bay here are plentiful, gorgeous, and dotted with campsites and trails. An Antarctic friend, his wife, my niece, and I will paddle out of a harbor that’s only a mile from my house, and after half an hour on the water we’ll have options for lounging on a beach, setting up camp on the shore, walking the quietest of trails among spruce, moss, and ferns, sitting on granite ledges and watching the sea, or combing the tideline mindlessly looking at shells, rocks, rockweed, sea glass, and plastic debris.

And that’s how we’ll spend our days. It’s a life that quiets the soul and ignores the inbox.

One of the joys that I derive from these trips is the reminder of what life is: The beauty and complexity of the living world, the nested realities of an “individual” in a species in a community in a habitat, surrounded and overlapped by an endless array of other nested living realities. All are linked, and much of their complex reality requires a lifetime of observation to begin to comprehend. Which means most of us, myself included, are left in a state of ignorance that, if we’re paying attention, we call curiosity, delight, and awe.

Islands are too often used as metaphors for isolation, when really they’re reminders that we are each awash in the sea of life that embraces us all.

isolated or connected? / author photo

And traveling across water between quiet islands provides the gift of perspective on the troubled world we’ve built and are working to untrouble. Like looking down from a mountaintop, or like standing in Antarctica and looking back north at the warm world, a simple camping trip on the bay here provides the clarity that some distance can bring. The world is never far away, as the lobster boats with rumbling diesel engines and the trash bags we’ll fill with plastic debris will testify, but it feels like we’re on the outside looking in, wondering how best to solve the wicked problems that await us.

Which brings me to a question that’s been on my mind lately: What does it mean to be an environmentalist at this moment in history? On one hand, it means what it’s meant for the last several decades: To protect the community of life, and our place within it, from the worst habits of this constructed modern world, by insisting on better policy rooted in deeper compassion for animals, plants, ecosystems, and landscapes.

But increasingly the public face of environmentalism has been subsumed within the necessary task of eliminating the fossil fuel infrastructure that’s powered the 20^th and 21^st century juggernaut of human growth. Reducing emissions is front page news, but slowing the extinction crisis is often relegated to long-form magazine articles (or Substack posts) for small audiences.

The concern I have is that we’re being told (or sold) a story in which we (and our children and grandchildren) can live the same lives we’ve been living but with a different energy source. In this story, all we have to do is rally the world to flip the switch from coal to solar, from oil to wind, and all will be well. But it’s not nearly enough.

Much of the optimistic talk at the highest levels of sensible environmental policy is of a “green” low-carbon economy that will generate millions of jobs, generate trillions of dollars in green investments, and increase GDP growth while phasing out fossil fuels. But that’s just a description of shifting civilization’s energy portfolio, which is only a fragment of the larger plan we need to clean up our act. Jobs, investments, and GDP are economic confections that have been spun up to profit from the transformation and disruption of the natural world.

Human economies, black as oil or green as moss, are a form of human theater. Or rather, economies are what’s playing on the stage. The planet is the theater, and there are no exits.

The reality is that the goal for all of us seeking a healthier world – call us “environmentalists” for lack of a better word – should be to shift the planet back toward a self-regulating stability like the one that nurtured our species for the last million years. The past century or two of lunatic resource use and excessive population growth, particularly in the wealthiest nations, has led to this moment in which that stability is visibly departing.

I should be clear about what I mean by “stability.” Life on Earth has always included turbulence within its stability. Floods and drought, tornados and monsoons, typhoons and hurricanes, microbial blooms and pandemics, vast forest fires and ice ages have been part of the scene in the million years since we dropped out of the trees and began looking for our car keys and phones. Looking farther back on the more-than-human time scale, mass extinctions have come and gone.

But our modern use and abuse of the land, sea, and climate have weakened and impoverished ecology across the globe at a scale and speed unprecedented in much of Earth history. I’m always a bit stunned when someone is unsure whether people could affect the Earth’s atmosphere, given that we see our profound impact on planetary-scale systems everywhere else. Witness, for example, the siphoning up of deep-sea fisheries, the spread of invasive species to every island and continent, the agricultural deforestation and desertification of tropical regions, the spread of microplastics from Pole to Pole, and even – it boggles me to say this – the commandeering of natural selection by our widespread use of pesticides, antibiotics, plant breeding, animal husbandry, and genetic manipulation.

Look around with clear eyes and you see that the scale of our disruption is visible everywhere. But it’s hard to see what has been normalized, even if it’s as obvious as the nose on your face. I began writing the Field Guide in large part because I wanted to provide a lens onto this world we’ve made from the soul of the world we’ve unmade.

As for the atmosphere, it’s only paper thin. Eight billion people are pumping out emissions from the burning of tens of millions of years of stored carbon-based fuel into the troposphere, which is only the lower 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) of the atmosphere. That’s the distance from Wall Street to Harlem, or from my house to the nearest supermarket.

It’s also about the distance we’ll paddle during our first day on the water. I’m pretty sure I won’t be thinking about the troposphere and our emissions that day, but that tension behind the question – What does it mean to be an environmentalist now? – is itself in the atmosphere, pushing us to see the greater crisis behind the climate crisis.

I’ll have the diesel engines and Styrofoam fragments, the mainland shorelines dotted with the second and third homes of the wealthy, their jets overhead, and our own presence (with plastic canoes, propane stove, nylon tents, and much more) as reminders. They’re reminders too that the forested communities on islands and the ocean communities around them are both enmeshed with the human community and its economic theater: lobster traps in the wrack, methane in the air, campsites in the spruce forest.

The good news is that we’re never so far apart from the natural world that we can’t help it by changing how we live. That trash on the shoreline, for example? For all the talk of mid-ocean garbage patches, it turns out that beach and shoreline clean-ups “may be one of the most effective ways of dealing with ocean plastics and microplastics,” because recent research has found that most ocean plastics are found within 100 miles of the shore. Three quarters of plastic trash entering the sea from land spends at least five years on or near the coast, often washing on and off the shore while being broken up into small particles in the process.

I’m looking forward to the days of travel between islands, and the nights of looking up at a very dark sky, with meteors and satellites competing for our attention. If the clouds clear on Wednesday evening we’ll have a blue supermoon to celebrate my niece’s birthday. I’m also looking forward to picking up some trash. I suppose all of this together – the joy, the awe, the trash, the woven realities – is what it means to be an environmentalist now. At least I think so. Maybe I’ll have a better idea when I get back.

life is awash in life / author photo

the path ahead / author photo

Thanks for sticking with me.

In other Anthropocene news:

For my Maine readers, the latest Research and Management Report from the Maine Inland Fish and Wildlife Department. It’s 182 pages, and stretches beyond my particular interest level, but if you’d like to see the kind of work being done, and decisions being made, by the state’s biologists, it’s fascinating stuff. And it’s quite readable and interesting. Alternatively, you can download sections of the report at the IFW site if you want to focus on, say, habitat conservation or conservation strategies for endangered species, non-game species, or for reptiles/amphibians/invertebrates. If nothing else, you can see how ready the department will be if the federal RAWA (Recovering American’s Wildlife Act) legislation ever passes and funnels millions of dollars to the state every year for conservation work.

From the Times, an inspiring story of an Austrian biologist who has helped bring a population of ibises back from the brink. He raised new generations of northern bald ibises and guided them along their ancient migration route across the Alps. The population then began to migrate on their own. Now, though, a warming climate delays the ibises’ departure for a month, which makes the crossing of the Alps impossible. So he and his assistants are now guiding them on an entirely new migration route around the Alps in his ultralight aircraft.

From Hakai, an excellent short article outlines the history of fish meal as a classic tale of the Global North creating an unhealthy market that disrupts and impoverishes life in the South. This process continues today, but instead of harvesting Peruvian fish to make fish meal for European cows, fish from West Africa, South America and elsewhere are being harvested to feed farmed fish in the U.S., China, Turkey, and others. It’s another example of the lunatic shuffling of protein around the globe for the benefit of the haves over the have-nots.

From Al Jazeera, the triumph of rationality in Ecuador as 60% of voters chose to ban oil drilling in Yasuni National Park, part of the Amazon rainforest. The country stands to lose billions as a result, but the voters were clear in their support for life, the forest, and the future.

From Grist, the plastic industry is working diligently to make the idea of a circular economy meaningless. A recent conference by the industry celebrating “circularity” efforts was a showcase for the industry’s intent to confuse a bit of plastic recycling with the much grander – and necessary – notion that environmentalists and ecologists have been talking about for a long time: the extraction of new resources should be reduced to zero, or as close to it as possible, as all materials used and produced by civilization become reusable or recyclable for other uses. This is a fancy way of saying that we should act like the rest of nature, where waste does not exist.

Also from Grist, the chaos in ocean systems that accompany the increasingly frequent marine heat waves.

Apropos of nothing, if you need a galactic perspective on life, here’s a three-year-old study from The Astrophysical Journal estimating that there are perhaps 36 “communicating civilizations” in the galaxy keeping us company. For the sake of the communities of life they inhabit, let’s hope they’re better at tending their gardens than we are.