Beyond Oil: Nature and Adaptation
Editor's note: Any hope that the Deepwater Horizon would mark a turning point in the fight for a climate bill quickly evaporated. But the spill still offers us a "teachable moment" on many critical issues. In a series of essays in our magazine and online, some of the nation's leading environmental writers and thinkers reflect on our two national disaster areas: the one in the Gulf and the other in Congress. Today, an author and naturalist who once followed an osprey's 7,000-mile migration looks for lessons in the birds of the Gulf.
In July I spent three weeks roaming along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, taking field notes on both birds and people and trying to make some greater sense of what I had seen. Birds were a constant part of my journey, and this was important. Not just because they remind me of the beautiful in the midst of the oil, but because they broaden my thinking.
In southernmost Louisiana, I spent one early morning watching a roseate spoonbill, an anomalous patch of bruised pink in a green cypress. I also saw opportunistic laughing gulls tail the commuter-like line of the Vessels of Opportunity, the Orwellian name for the cleanup boats; and listened to osprey cries mix with the backward beeping of dumptrucks that had been sent to clean a tar-balled beach; and took a break from watching tireless veterinarians clean a young gull with a Q-tip to go over and sit next to six recently arrived and oiled pelicans that huddled together in their plywood-box prison, the swords of their bills pulled into their chests, their black eyes blank with fear.
It is hard to watch birds for very long without thinking about energy, and about how all species, from the sedate great blue herons and the ospreys that fish in athletic bursts (but also rest plenty, in the manner of most larger birds) to the relatively frenetic terns, do their own species-wide math of input and output. Energy, as you can imagine, has occupied my thoughts as I wonder if we, as a species, can possibly become more heron-like and less like terns, birds that employ the math of more, fated to feed continuously to fuel the flights that they must make if they are to feed.
It would be easy enough to shrug and say, "Hey, we’re terns, what can we do?" Except for the fact of that singular human trait that some, like the evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould, have claimed defines us: our adaptability. The fact that we can change over a lifetime, not just over evolutionary eons. I don’t want to get hokey here and say that in the face of the spill something is being asked of us. But maybe something is being asked of us. And maybe this time around we’ll dignify what is being asked with an answer.
I, for one, would like to answer that question in the voice of a naturalist. We have plenty of journalists, politicians, preachers, alarmists, dogmatists, and blamers commenting on the Gulf right now, but I would argue that what we need is more naturalists, or at least more people who have started to think like naturalists. A naturalist’s practice is to notice how one thing connects to another, how a certain bird lands on a certain sand flat to eat a certain crustacean to fatten up for a leg of its migratory flight, and if this tragedy is about anything it is about connections.
By this definition, my waiter at the Applebee’s in Columbia, South Carolina, where I stopped on the way down, was an amateur naturalist when he described how the oil we use is connected to the oil floating up on the beaches, and how our consumption is connected to the ugly results. So was another waiter, this one a 19-year-old named Miranda from the battered fishing village of Bayou La Batre, Alabama, who served me a roast beef (no seafood, thanks) po’ boy and explained why she wasn’t one of those rushing madly for BP’s money: "The solution is temporary, but the problem is permanent."
Of course I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture and claim that everyone’s synapses are suddenly crackling with these connections. In fact, being down here is a kind of antidote for rosiness, as you watch the desperate scramble for BP money and the tossing aside of ethical behavior that people justify in the name of emergency. But if this spill really is a pivotal moment in our environmental consciousness -- and there are those who think that this is the silver lining in the black oil -- then it will be because some of us have begun to get it through our thick heads that the world really is as threaded together as a spider’s web.
I choose to believe that this is a larger turning point. It has taken a long time to understand that our wild national orgy just might be over, and there is no better evidence of that than the soiled beaches I’ve been walking on and the terns I have seen dive, coming up with tiny glimmers of minnows that may or may not be poisoning them. There is great uncertainty swirling around down here, but one thing is certain: if the food the terns are eating is toxic, they will not have the luxury of our species, that of fast adaptation. They, unlike us, have no other way of being.
Tomorrow: Craig Canine on technology and risk.
