Lately I’ve been giving a lot of talks and radio interviews, and I’ve noticed a particular slant to some of the questions I’ve been getting. Because I write about nature, and because I have recently written about the BP oil spill, the questions from both interviewers and audience come around, ultimately, to two things: the question of “hope” and the question of “What should I do?”
On the one hand this isn’t that odd, given the topic, but on the other it has to be the only sort of writing, this side of the self-help section, that leads so directly to questions of personal behavior and mood. Imagine, for instance, a reader of a book of short stories looking for guidance on how they should lead their life. Of course we do this with all literature, but in a subtle, slower fashion, never searching for bullet lists or consumer guidelines in War and Peace.
What is frustrating, and what I believe often keeps so-called environmental or nature writing from ascending into actual literature, is our insistence on a far too logical (and simplistic) connection between nature, the degradation of nature, and the human emotion of hopefulness. We become propagandists, and not only that, careful propagandists, eager to inspire our reader’s righteous indignation but wary not to upset their fragile sense of remnant optimism.
I am hardly against hope (I leave that to Derrick Jensen over at Orion), but I do think that it gets too big a billing, and too much lip service, and sometimes serves to whitewash the more complex set of emotions we experience when walking through, or reading about, the natural world.
And yet … and yet … I will now contradict myself. The BP oil spill is far from a cheery story, and when the interviewer or audience members ask their invariable question about hope, I have a ready answer. I describe a day six months after the spill, a good day out on the water after so many bad days. On that day I headed out from Bayou La Batre, Alabama, in a boat with Jeff DiQuatrro of the Nature Conservancy and Bethany Kraft, then with the Alabama Coastal Foundation. As we flew across the waters below Mobile Bay, Bethany explained that their organizations’ goal was to eventually place one hundred miles of artificial oyster reef out along the Gulf, and that the project we were going to see was the first step, and template, for that goal.
We pulled up to the backside of a small island where an egret hunted in the beach grass. Jeff pointed down at the first reef, a creative combination of human and oyster ingenuity. Oysters can produce over a hundred million eggs, but the larvae need something to attach to, and that is where these reefs come into play. Half of the Gulf oyster beds have been lost in the last few years, but these are still the most productive oyster grounds left in the world. The forces working against the oysters include increased salinity in the bay, drought, the predatory oyster drill that -- as its name suggests -- drills down into the shells, and, now, oil. The reefs are an attempt to stack the cards back in the oysters’ favor.
What exactly are these oyster reefs good for?
Quite a lot is the answer. Most obviously they are good for oysters but that, it turns out, is just the beginning. They also, in no particular order, provide a habitat for fish and hundreds of other creatures, filter and clean the water (each oyster filtering up to 20 gallons of day), battle erosion on the local islands, help grow seagrass, provide an alternative to groins and walls, and protect the mainland from hurricanes and oil.
Oh, and they also grow fast.
“Once the reefs are placed in the water,” Jeff said, “the growth is almost immediate. Young oysters cling to them. You can see the sediment being trapped right away. Which takes sediment out of the water and leads to the growth of seagrass. Which in turn anchors the island. After a while the marsh grass will migrate out and join the reef, and in ten years we can put another line of oysters in. All the while you have growing islands and harvestable oysters again.”
Then there is the fact that the building of the reefs employs local workers and that this gives the residents of Bayou La Batre a new way to work out on the sea. During my travels I heard vague mutterings about how local fishermen need to “transition from fishing to something else.” But here the vague became concrete. The effort to protect the shore becomes a new way to employ those who live by it.
“This is just a mile of reef,” Bethany says. “Imagine a hundred miles.”
So there’s a dollop of hope for you. The hope that now that BP has been found officially culpable, the money the company will be paying can go toward projects like the this one, projects that can be used to bolster the shore in ways not so obviously connected to oil.
But while I was there to see the reefs, I was equally interested in what we saw next, during a detour on the way back to the landing. Jeff had a treat in store for us. We pulled up to Cat Island -- really just a sandbar with a few humps of beach grass -- and hundreds of birds took flight. It was joyous enough to see the brown pelicans and cormorants lift off, but then came the real delight. Giant birds -- white and radiant -- flew beside the other smaller species, dwarfing them. I had never seen birds like these before, but right away I knew what they were. Knew they lived in the West and migrated down here, as they did each winter, through the Rocky Mountains. With nine-foot wingspans they lifted off like bulky angels, their white wings marked with vivid black outlining streaks. As they flew off in front of the boat, I yelled back to the others. White pelicans!
Earlier I had questioned the wisdom of spending the day looking at some oyster reefs. Now I was thankful I came along. Traveling through the land of tarballs, your mind can grow dark. But here at last was something to have faith in. First the oysters, cause for a practical sort of faith. I believed in the reefs and I believed in the people, like Jeff and Bethany, who were doing that sort of work. Use nature as your ally, work with it instead of imposing on it, and the results might surprise you.
But it’s not that simple. While I believe in what they are doing, that belief is too rational to really call “faith.” It’s not the same as what I felt when I first saw the white pelicans. What I felt when I saw the birds, those great white radiant birds, was what I can only vaguely call “world love.” While I believe in the pessimistic eco-story of my tribe, at the same time I still believe in this, a greater, wilder story. That story has nothing to do with words or the future or how we will or won’t act. It is an irrational story, an ineffable one. It is about the birds themselves. It is the birds themselves. White. Radiant. Flying.
I am not a religious man. But as I watched one white pelican veer away from the rest, my body filled with something that I have no words for. I don’t have an organized system of belief. But I do have faith in that single white bird.
What is faith if not belief without reason? That is what I have in nature, even at this late date in its destruction and demise. I understand that we are at the end of nature, that it is dead and outdated, and that I’m kind of old fashioned for believing. But still. To say it is as close as one can get to going to church has become cliché, but being out there with those birds did offer me at least some of the pleasures and consolations of religion. It offered me a place outside of myself, a place to consider things beyond me, a place of wonder and awe. It is where religions were born. Couldn’t the first primitive imaginings of angels been sparked by the sight of white pelicans?
Portions of this post were adapted from The Tarball Chronicles. On Wednesday, the author will be appearing at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta for a free lecture and book signing.
Image: shell game/Flickr
