Wild Life

Slaves to the Screen: A Cartoon Caution

David Gessner — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:04:26 +0000

The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature
How Cool is That?
Eco Porn Quiz: Name That Chick!

Wild Child, or, I Fathered a Wolf Girl

David Gessner — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:37:55 +0000

My daughter and I saw a bear in the woods last weekend. We hadn’t expected to see a bear; it was actually wolves we had come to see. We had driven five hours north from our coastal North Carolina home to the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, which, along with the surrounding counties, is the only place left in the world where red wolves roam wild. My daughter is eight and wolf-obsessed and is planning her coming birthday party with a wolf theme, though we have tried to dissuade her from her plan to tell the partygoers that she will be the alpha wolf for the day, and that they are all betas and subs who must obey all her commands.

The point is: she knows her animals, and so I should have reacted more quickly when she yelled “bear” as we drove down the bumpy dirt road into the refuge.

“Dad, bear,” she repeated.

I stopped that time, and there, on the edge of the woods, on the other side of a creek that ran along the road, was a black bear staring at us. We rolled down the windows, but that wasn’t enough of course, so we both, without a word, got out of the car. It was only about 40 feet away, but the water was between us, and the bear looked at us for a moment, curious, before ambling back into the woods.

The words We saw a bear were repeated, in one form or other, about a thousand times over the next two days of our trip. That night we went on the scheduled wolf howl walk with the rangers and a bunch of other kids, and, sure enough, when the rangers howled, the wolves howled back, their song more higher-pitched than you would think, like horror movie screams. The wolf howling was great, but it was a planned part of the trip. The bear, on the other hand, was unexpected. The bear was wild.

* * *

My daughter is not Mowgli. She isn’t a wild child, and she doesn’t roam the woods in a pelt with spear in hand. She spent a good deal of the trip staring down at the screen of her computer game and has already developed the sort of screen addiction that is swallowing up childhoods everywhere. But -- and I thank the great pagan entity for this "but" -- she has her moments. She has kayaked our creek in search of river otters and been swimming (illegally I’m proud to say) in the Cape Fear River and roamed nearby Masonboro Island. These moments may not be enough to stave off her eventual slavery to the great computer, but my hope is that they are settling somewhere inside her and will be remembered and returned to later in her life.

Let me add that this is not some conscious experiment on my part: let’s show the child NATURE because this book says it will make her more well-rounded. It’s simpler than that: she just comes along with me when I go places. For instance, when I walk the trails at Carolina Beach State Park, she walks with me and before long, inevitably, starts pretending she is a wolf. If she brings a friend along they make dens, one of these a particularly lovely little hollow under the roots of a live oak. This, as they say, is natural.

And I should add one more thing that is natural and has sprung naturally from this wolf obsession. My daughter writes books and draws picture about wolves, and though, like any good art, they are not overtly or obviously moral, they do tend to carry little addendums at the end with a clear message: Save the Wolves. (Kind of like this magazine.) Which is to say that my daughter, much more than I was as a kid or even am now, is an activist, not just a wolf-lover.

* * *

When we are young we naturally seek out secret places: we build forts, find shortcuts through the woods, climb trees. This is not environmentalism, but instinct. As it turns out, trying to teach kids a strictly “environmental” curriculum may backfire. As the writer and educator David Sobel points out in “Beyond Ecophobia,” children who are taught that the natural world is being destroyed, that the rain forests are being mown down, and that a boogeyman called global warming is coming, often tend to withdraw and distance themselves from nature. In fact, there’s no surer way to send them running for the TV or computer screen. “The natural world is being abused and they don’t want to have to deal with it,” Sobel writes, equating this with other types of abuse. As it turns out, a better way to involve young children, at least kids from the age of seven to 11, is exactly the way they used to involve themselves, before play became more structured and the woods off limits. Sobel writes of those formative years: “This is the time to immerse children in the stuff of the physical and natural worlds. Constructing forts, creating small imaginary words, hunting and gathering, searching for treasures, following streams and pathways, making maps, taking care of animals, gardening and shaping the earth are perfect activities during this stage.” Eventually, of course, they will learn about the death of the rain forests, but first comes a more direct, and playful, connection with the so-called environment.

In other words, it doesn’t start with prescriptions; it doesn’t start with shoulds; it doesn’t start with finger wagging. It starts with fun, it starts with building forts in our backyards, it starts with animal explorations. And, it goes without saying, it starts with pretending you are a wolf.

P.S. If you would like to read about the re-introduction of the red wolves at Alligator River, take a look at Jan DeBlieu’s book Meant to be Wild. DeBlieu is a winner of the John Burroughs award for best nature book of the year for her book Wind.

P.P.S. And for a good anthology of writing about children in nature, including my piece “Learning to Surf,” try Wild with Child.

Parts of the last two paragraphs are adapted from my recent book My Green Manifesto.

Transit Cuts, Scary Super Weeds, Better Water Use: Fracking or Fighting Fires?
Slaves to the Screen: A Cartoon Caution
Living With the Gulf Oil Disaster, Two Years Later

The Hunger Game (And How to Win It)

David Gessner — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 13:22:13 +0000

By David Gessner

With all due respect to resource depletion, global warming, and over-population, I have come to believe that the greatest environmental threat on the planet is our own minds. They are hungry little fuckers, these brains of ours. “We humans are an elsewhere,” wrote my friend Reg Saner, and boy are we ever. Walk across a college campus these days, as I do every day, and it’s a good bet you won’t make eye contact with a single one of the hundreds of students you pass. They are elsewhere, staring down into their machines, absorbed in urgent phone conversations, ears plugged and eyes glazed. “The hunger of the imagination,” Samuel Johnson called this insatiable desire for more, a desire that springs from a dissatisfaction with what is and from the hope that what comes next will fulfill us in ways it never has before.

We have turned that same insatiable hunger on our own land, swallowing, goring, fracking, drilling so that we can have more and so that we can fuel the vehicles and machines that transport us elsewhere. One of the reasons I find it hard to be too fully moralistic about this behavior is that I share it. In my own work --which is writing -- I am always hungry, wanting more and better, and I recognize in my own ambition the same never-sated animal that I see in others. Long ago, I sent a letter to a neighbor on Cape Cod who had built a monstrous trophy house. I wrote: “You’re obviously an ambitious man and in that we are alike. While your workers hammer away up on the hill, I hammer away at my keyboard. Like you, I dream of creating something big, something great, and like you, I sometimes feel that my passion for this controls me, and not me it.” So you see, I am not writing about hunger as an outsider, not Spock looking on puzzled at a world full of Kirks.

And yet that does not mean that I believe that this gets me, or us, off the hook, that we can let our inner Kirks run wild and shoot phasers in the air and make out with every Nurse Chapel they run across. The next sentences in my letter to my neighbor were these: “But we are more in control than we admit, than it’s fashionable to say these days. I don’t suggest the laughable premise that we are rational creatures, or that reason controls our lives. What I do suggest is that our imaginations can be nudged, and work best if nudged earthward.”

Let me give you a small example of what I mean, an example that, not incidentally, ties in nicely with our hunger metaphor. Like my neighbor of old, I like to build, and a year ago I built a writing shack down on the edge of my backyard near the tidal marsh. I liked the way the shack connected me to the marsh and the creek and therefore the ocean and my old coastal home in the north. And I liked, or at least claimed to like, the modesty of the place, its ramshackle look and its basic admission of impermanence, an 8-by-8-foot plywood structure with a screen door for a window, the whole place ready to be wiped out by the next hurricane. It was a perfect spot to collapse after a long day, to birdwatch and drink a beer and do nothing. Except of course for our old friend, the real serpent in the garden: the hungry mind. I soon set to colonizing the space, to building a desk, stocking it with writing pads, taping outlines of my next book to the plywood walls. What I had was nice, but I wanted more.

And then, to my own surprise, I stopped myself. It was a small miracle of restraint. I decided I didn’t want to turn the shack into another study, a mere workplace like the one I already have in the house. I ripped out the desk. I resolved that, as best I could, I would check ambition at the door when I entered the shack. I could scribble down notes, read a little, sure, but there would be no plans and no machines, at least for the short time I spent there each day. Then one day, when a friend and I were sipping beers and watching the sunset from the shack, the friend pointed up at the gap between the top of the door and the roof.

“You better screen that in soon,” he said. “Or the bugs will be terrible.”

I nodded and agreed, but I never did fix it. Consciously, not lazily. I decided this was one time I wasn’t going to give in to the constant need for “improvements.” I decided that, just this once, I didn’t need more or better.

Almost a year has passed since that conversation, and three weeks ago the world rewarded me for my decision not to improve. Two Carolina wrens, beautiful little birds that hop and strut about like field marshals as they dip and lift their cocked tails, decided to take advantage of the opening above the door. They set to building a nest right over the screen window. You can see it in this picture, resting against the stick my daughter found on one of our walks.

That would have been enough of a reward, but as it turned out, the world was just beginning to repay me. The wrens flew freely in and out to the nest, ignoring me though I was only four feet away. Then one day a couple of weeks ago I peeked into the nest and saw five eggs smaller than jelly beans. A couple of days later, I noticed that the female wren kept flying to the top of the door, but then, instead of flying to the nest as she usually did, she would fly back out, fussing in a nearby tree branch and on my roof.Something was different. I peeked into the nest and there they were: not birds exactly, but tiny living mouths. The four newborns were all maw. If Samuel Johnson had wanted a visual representation of his idea, here it was. Raw hunger.

My life feels better, more intense and elevated, having this new family around. Over the last two weeks the wrens and I have co-existed, though, feeling it was only good manners, I have spent less time in the shack, and each night I place the plywood cover over the screen window to keep the wind and rain out. When I do take a seat these days I witness the non-stop parade of feeding, performed by both the male and female, and I take notes in my journal of the type of insect or worm they have brought as an offering. The few minutes immediately after the feedings are the only time, outside of sleep, that the tiny birds stop pleading with their squeeze-toy squeaks and stop lifting their gaping mouths.

I won’t push my metaphor too hard. No doubt you get the point. Scientists might have a complex way of describing how the human brain operates, but I say it operates a whole lot like that nest full of birds. For my part, I am not ready to retire like a Zen monk to my shack. I am still hungry for things. A Pulitzer Prize would be nice, for instance, and after that maybe a Nobel. But right now I am enjoying a different sort of prize, and I can’t help but think this is a prize I’ve won by not doing something. And I’m encouraged by the fact that my mind is not in fact a nest of newborn birds, but a complex thing that can, every now and then, be controlled by something other than hunger.

It’s a small victory, I understand. But for the moment, it’s nice not to be elsewhere.

Love David Gessner's writing as much as we do? Then spend a week in northern Vermont learning from him and other great authors, including OnEarth contributor Ginger Strand, at Orion magazine's Wildbranch retreat. The application deadline is April 12.

The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature
Eco Porn Quiz: Name That Chick!
Slaves to the Screen: A Cartoon Caution

Love That Tarball Gumbo! ... Mmm, Mmmm!

David Gessner — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:11:46 +0000

By David Gessner

During the height of the BP oil spill, I wrote -- first in my blog for this magazine and then in my book -- that everywhere I looked I saw an even greater source of energy than oil: self-interest. I described not just the fearful bristling of the BP militia, but the men who had signed on to captain the Vessels of Opportunity (the fine Orwellian term used for the fleet of boats sent out to clean up the spill), and the occasional lucky “spillionaire” -- those individuals who were being paid an exorbitant amount to let their boats sit idle.

And I didn’t stop there: “The Vessels of Opportunity aren’t the only ones who see potential gain in disaster. Writers and reporters and filmmakers are washing up on shore like so many tarballs.”

It was true. I can’t speak for filmmakers, but writers, as much or more than human beings in other professions, have moments of professional envy, ambition, and competition. To pretend otherwise is silly.

I had a pang of this petty sort this week when I read an article in Outside magazine. My book about the spill was called The Tarball Chronicles, and the article I read was called "The Gumbo Chronicles" and was written by Rowan Jacobsen. The Gumball Chronicles, anyone? But while the title troubled me, I read on. If you send two decent writers down to cover the same story you would expect some overlap, and while I have not read Jacobsen’ book on the spill (Shadows on the Gulf), right off I noted plenty of common observations.

So that’s the petty part. In the spirit of a dog marking its territory, I almost put the article aside.

But I’m glad I didn’t.

And I’m glad, thrilled really, that Jacobsen and Outside are shining a spotlight on a story that almost everyone else has left in the dark. The article jibes with almost everything I saw when I returned to the Gulf last September, when tarballs still stained the beaches I had walked a year before and BP crews still cleaned as if it were the summer of 2010. Despite the cheery commercials.

Jacobsen’s piece basically follows the local Louisianan crabbers, oystermen, and shrimpers who are responsible for making gumbo gumbo, and reaches the conclusion that, despite what BP is telling us, something is very, very wrong. To boil the article down, no pun intended, here are the highlights:

Jacobsen writes: “When I was in Bayou Lafourche, in September 2011, many crabbers didn’t even bother to go out. Apparently, they hadn’t got the memo that everything in the Gulf was fine.”
He continues: “A year and a half after BP’s April 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, virtually the entire fishery was open for business, and federal and state officials were happily trumpeting the health of the Gulf’s marine life.” But then he quotes Ryan Comardelle of Bayou Lafourche: “Dey tellin’ everybody everything’s OK,” he said, in the region’s ubiquitous Cajun accent, which features a lot of dis and dat. “And it’s not. The crabs are not getting fat. A lot of dem are dying right when dey shed. The biologists say everything’s normal. Well, shit. We out here on the water almost every day of our lives. We know what changes from one day to the next. Where the little crabs? Before BP hit, they’d be all over this boat. Where dey at? We screwed.”
This is just the first of a series of observations by crabbers, shrimpers, and oysterman that paint a picture of fewer shellfish, fewer young, slimy waters, and dead animals. In short, the people on the water notice a huge difference, despite what we are being told. The observations are nicely backed up by the facts.
Jacobsen on oysters and crabs: “Louisiana harvested some seven million pounds of oysters in 2010, down from 15 million the year before. Crabs aren’t faring much better. The state’s crabbers pulled in 53 million pounds of crustaceans in 2009 and 31 million in 2010, when some areas were closed because of the spill. With the fishery reopened in 2011, everyone expected a rebound, but that didn’t happen. In the normally plentiful month of May, crab landings for the region that includes Bayou Lafourche were 460,068 pounds, down from 953,503 in May 2010 and 1,471,987 in May 2009. There were so many reports of crabs dying with mysterious infections that the state launched an investigation. Normally, when landings plummet, prices rise, but not when consumers suspect your product is contaminated. Prices had plunged from $1.42 per pound in 2009 to between 35 and 55 cents at the time of my visit.”
On shrimp: “According to Clint Guidry, president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, the white shrimp haul was down 80 percent across Louisiana in 2011.”
On dolphins: “NOAA reported some 80 abnormal dolphin deaths between January and April 2010. Since the spill, more than 450 dead dolphins have washed up on Gulf Coast beaches. Many were newborns or stillborns, leading some biologists to hypothesize that ingested oil had contributed to a wave of miscarriages. NOAA has declared the situation an 'unusual mortality event.'”

This is good/scary stuff, and it is great to see it brought to light in a prominent national venue. I am not a conspiracy guy and don’t have an ounce of Silkwood in me. But when I see what I’ve seen in the Gulf and then read all the “everything’s fine” bullshit, I get a sinking feeling about the way we are telling our national stories now.

For me, the most interesting part of Jacobsen’s piece is his wrestling with the fact that the “National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), proudly declared that ‘not one piece of tainted seafood has entered the market.’” If this is so, how can the observations of the shellfishermen be true?

Jacobsen writes:

If none of the seafood tested by NOAA showed oil contamination, how could the Gulf’s marine life be so affected? A recent paper by LSU biologist Andrew Whitehead provides a clue. Whitehead examined Gulf killifish -- minnows that live in the marshes and are an important food source for many species -- before, during, and after the oil hit. He found that even tiny amounts of oil caused genetic abnormalities and tissue damage in the fish, enough to impair their reproductive abilities. And you wouldn’t have known this simply by testing them for contamination. "Safe to eat,’” Whitehead said, summarizing the report, “'that doesn’t mean they are capable of reproducing normally.’” This problem may extend to other marine life. And many fishermen blame low yields on BP’s dispersants, though the scientific jury is still out.

Which makes sense to me. We are worried about “contaminated seafood,” and when we are told that is not, we breathe a sigh of relief. But what we may be getting instead is degraded fish and wildlife, dwindling in both numbers and health.

* * *

Who do we choose to believe? Whose stories do we choose to listen to? Those told by people who make their living out on the water, or those told by a billion-dollar company that has everything invested in convincing us that things are fine?

It seems we have clearly chosen the latter. Deepwater drilling is beginning again in the Gulf. “With new regulations,” we are assured, though everyone knows that drilling miles below the sea is an inherently risky business. The spill of 2010 was not the cause of all the Gulf’s woes, but it was the culmination. Both the people you talk to and the numbers tell a simple story: the ecosystems of the Gulf, both human and animal, are much worse off than they were before. It doesn’t say that in the commercials, but you can see it with your own eyes.

It still shocks me how little attention this story gets. It’s as if the media were hungover, embarrassed and next-day ashamed from the binge of attention it lavished on the Gulf in the early days. But the story isn’t over, just most of the national storytelling. And when someone like Joe Norcera uses his pulpit in the New York Times to trumpet how rosy things are in the Gulf, he must be exposed. Which means that when someone like Rowan Jacobsen brings these things to life, he must be thanked.

So, here goes:

Thank you, Rowan, one writer to another. Now about that name...

BP Ponys Up, Hit the Beach (While You Still Can!), Baby Cheetahs Cheat Death
The Barnstormer
Anatomy Lessons

Is Spring Springing Early? Watching the World Go Round with Henry Thoreau

David Gessner — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 14:47:28 +0000

By David Gessner

This morning a Carolina wren is sitting deep in a nest made of pine needles above the window inside the writing shack where I am typing this. A hundred feet in front of me a mute swan has built a much larger nest. Meanwhile yesterday I heard (but did not see) a painted bunting, a bird aflame with color that has come back from points south far too early.

“Phenology,” writes Jack Turner, “is the study of the mature naturalist.” And what is phenology? The discipline of watching phenomena change as the seasons turn. I remember my personal highlight as a phenologist. It was fall and we were living on the beach on Cape Cod, and after a walk I said to my wife, “The seals should be back soon.” Each summer “our” seals migrated to the cooler waters of the Gulf of Maine, and each fall they migrated back.

The next day, walking again, I saw that the seals were indeed back, loafing on the offshore rocks. I couldn’t have been more thrilled by a promotion at work -- and in a way, that’s just what it was.

Phenology has always been a private science, a way of getting your own clock in synch with the world’s, and so far there have not been any Nobel Prizes awarded for knowing when the seals will be back. But that may be changing. It has been reported that the notes made in the journal of the granddaddy of phenology, Henry David Thoreau, are finding a whole new relevance.

It turns out that the meticulous phenological notes that Henry made in his journal are now being used to confirm what anyone who has lived through this non-winter already knows: spring is springing much too early. Recently, Richard Primack, a professor of biology at Boston University, and Abe Miller-Rushing, who was his grad student at the time, took notes on the same species that Thoreau had observed beginning in 1851 and concluded that nature's timing has changed for the earlier.

How wonderful that Henry’s private notes should play this public role. I think of one of his own favorite metaphors, one he employs on the last page of Walden, that of the “strong and beautiful bug,” which emerged after lying dormant inside of a farmer’s wooden table for sixty years, after having been deposited in the living tree “many years earlier still.” Thoreau concludes: “Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this?”

What thrills him is that something -- insect or idea -- can sleep for decades before springing back into “beautiful and winged life.” And now his journals are doing the same thing, speaking to us a hundred and fifty years after he spoke to them. It's true the news they tell is bad, but I can’t help but find the fact that they can speak to us at all is hopeful.

Who would have guessed? Noticing, it turns out, can be valuable.

The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature
Eco Porn Quiz: Name That Chick!
Slaves to the Screen: A Cartoon Caution

A Child's Guide to Concrete

David Gessner — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 15:36:05 +0000

By David Gessner

What is Titan? Well, Titans were mythical figures who were overthrown by the younger Olympian gods.

But Titan is also a cement company that wants to come in from Greece and set up shop in my adopted hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina. It is trying to build a plant on our river (the Cape Fear) that will produce a million or so tons of cement.

The trouble is, the plant will also produce mercury that recent health studies suggest could be deadly.

I decided that an occasion like this called for a children's book. So here is A Child’s Guide to Titan:

P.S. Find more at Stop Titan. You can also sign the petition here.

P.P.S. Here's a a movie called “Stop the Titan Hippies” that I made with a student activism group at the University of North Carolina Wilmington called “The Eco Avengers.”

Get the Lead Out (of Your Garden)
Slaves to the Screen: A Cartoon Caution
Wild Child, or, I Fathered a Wolf Girl

The Ghosts of Rocky Flats: A Meditation on Health, Regulation, and Radiation

David Gessner — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:05:43 +0000

By David Gessner

Click image to enlarge

Twenty-one years ago this month, when I was twenty-nine, I learned that I had testicular cancer. As it happened I had recently returned to live in Worcester, Massachusetts, my hometown, and I joked to friends that I didn’t know what was worse, cancer or Worcester.

It was in Worcester that I underwent an operation to remove the malignancy and then endured a month of radiation treatment. And it was in the middle of that treatment that I, feeling queasy the way I always did during that ugly month, got a letter in the mail that would prove to be a kind of deus ex machina in the story of my life. The letter informed me that I had gotten into grad school in Boulder, Colorado, and less than four months later I left Worcester behind and moved to the appropriately named town of Eldorado Springs, a few miles outside of Boulder.

It was a deliverance of sorts. I would end up writing a book about the re-birth I experienced by moving west, but the short version is that I fell immediately in love with my surroundings. Gradually recovering, I threw myself into first hiking and then running the trails up into the flatirons, swimming in the creek, watching the swifts and falcons carve the sky as they flew down from the canyons, and biking up the roads above the city. Of course this sort of activity is not unusual in Boulder, since being unfit is against the law there, but I approached my own regimen of fitness with the particular vehemence of the recovered. Or, I should say, recovering. Because of course, somewhere in my mind, I feared cancer’s reoccurrence.

“If I’m going to die,” I wrote in my journal. “It will be in the best shape possible.”

There was an irony to my, and the town’s, focus on health. To the south of the city, not far beyond where I lived in Eldorado, stood Rocky Flats, a plant that made plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs. Rocky Flats had only about a year left as an active plant when I moved there, but it already had a history of disasters. Dow Chemical broke ground at the plant in 1951, and by 1957 twenty-seven buildings had spread over the grounds of the facility. That year a fire broke out that released plutonium into the atmosphere, and two years later radioactive barrels were found to be leaking, a fact that was not released to the public until eleven years later, in 1970, when “wind-borne particles were detected in Denver.”

More fires and leaks followed, resulting in the “costliest industrial clean up in United States history to that time.” Some 4,600 acres of land were purchased as a buffer zone around the plant, but water did not respect these borders, and nearby creeks were found to have elevated tritium levels. Meanwhile, topsoil at the plant was discovered to be contaminated with plutonium. The plant closed in 1992, but the plutonium, with a half life of 80 million years, lingers like an industrial ghost, haunting the scarred grounds.

In his brilliant essay, “Technically Sweet,” Reg Saner, a Boulder resident, writes of just how deadly plutonium can be to human beings: “Plutonium doesn't have to be in a bomb to kill me. Its toxicity in the human system is almost beyond belief. One half of one hundredth of one millionth of a gram isn't exactly oodles. However, a half-hundredth microgram dose of plutonium 239 per gram of bloodless lung has been shown to produce cancers in 100% of dogs used for experiment. And through Rocky Flats pass tons of the stuff. Since latent cancer may take 20 years or more to announce itself, plutonium is the perfect industrial murder. Two decades from now, if my lung cells betray some long-hidden, accelerating derangement, there'll be no clue to that cancer's having begun this afternoon, with a given breath.”

Like me, and like so many Boulderites, Saner was an active biker, and he sometimes pedaled right by the plant. He was well aware of the potentially unhealthy consequences of this healthy activity. This paradox was eventually confirmed by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, which, in its report on Rocky Flats, concluded: “People who lived near the plant and led active, outdoor lifestyles had the highest level of exposure to airborne plutonium.”

* * *

This week, as I celebrate cancer’s anniversary, I have been thinking about health, both public and personal, and about the need for conscientious oversight and, yes, for clear-sighted regulation in our lives. One of the things I find most troubling in our current national debate is the idea that freedom and regulation are antipodes. “Regulation” may make a nice bugaboo, but can anyone seriously believe that it is a good idea to do away with most of it? Or to put it another way, without it where are we? Any reasonable adult knows that regulation and freedom go hand in hand, that the two rely on each other for balance. What is the personal equivalent of regulation, after all, if not self-discipline? And how can a life be free without restraint?

I can say honestly that I never felt more free than I did during those first weeks in Eldorado Springs, roaming the hills, dipping into the creeks, feeling health surge back into my limbs. I had left dirty Worcester and radiation behind, not yet aware of the potential radioactivity of the neighborhood I was celebrating. To a certain extent, Rocky Flats and I have had parallel journeys in the years since. Five years out from my cancer I was declared “clean,” and ten years later so was the by-then-Superfund site of Rocky Flats. In 2005, the clean-up of the site was declared officially complete, and in 2007, four thousand acres of what had been the plant’s buffer zone became the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge.

At fifty I feel strong, but like any cancer survivor, I am on not-unfamiliar terms with occasional dread. Meanwhile, mule deer and elk roam the former industrial site, through a habitat containing hundreds of acres of rare xeric tallgrass prairie, and meadowlarks sing from the ground while northern harriers and peregrine falcons fly above. I’m sure there are days when one could look out at the place and it would seem a kind of paradise.

Anatomy Lessons
In North Dakota and Nationwide, A Boom in Health Problems Accompanies Fracking
Solar Skirmish, Bed Bugs Lose Bite, Save the Rainforest (from Bad Legislation)

An Elemental Life: Cape Cod in Winter

David Gessner — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:04:37 +0000

By David Gessner

My favorite tree (from a bit earlier in the year)

When I agreed to do this blog on a weekly basis, I vowed that it wouldn’t be all rage and grumble. I wanted to mix in a little delight, too, to remember what I was fighting for, as well as against. One of the things I am fighting for, and that I take delight in, is our right to live a more elemental life. In other words, it is not just nature being destroyed, but our ability to live our lives closer to nature.

Over the holiday break I got to spend a couple of weeks back on Cape Cod. This is not your summer Cape Cod of yacht clubs and cocktail parties. It is a place where you feel like you have stepped into the pages of a story by Hawthorne. The leafless pines and oaks strain upward (though never too proudly), like gnarled hands against a sky bulked up with clouds. Occasional shafts of light shoot down through the clouds like light I have never seen anywhere else. (The closest I got was on a stopover once in Iceland -- the same strange light spraying down on a purple landscape.) The cranberry bog is a purple all its own. The frozen whitecaps of the bay let you know it’s not summer anymore and that you wouldn’t last a minute out there.

My fortnight on Cape Cod was my first true break in a year and a half. I ate a lot, walked the dogs through the deserted summer camp near Slough Pond, slept a good nine hours a night, didn’t check the Internet (much), and read my daughter Hadley the adventure book I wrote and gave her for Christmas. And, while it may not go with the rest, I also drank beer while staring up at those black branches from the un-environmental hot tub that came along with the house where we were dog-sitting.

I read, too, of course. After a fall of hearing myself talk -- at readings, in class, on radio interviews -- I was pretty sick of my own words. How nice to wake up and turn not to the pages of a writer named David Gessner but to Mary Oliver’s poems, and Jackson Benson’s biography of Wallace Stegner, and Ed Abbey’s Black Sun, and Donald Hall’s Life Work.

And since this was Cape Cod in winter, I also dipped back into Henry Beston’s The Outermost House, his account of living through a winter in a cabin on a beach on the outer reaches of Cape Cod. Beston, even more than Thoreau, gets across the sense of ritual that is involved in the adventure of following the sun through the year, in living a life tied to nature. In fact, I’ll let him take it home from here with three quotes -- one from the book’s first chapter, one from the middle, and one from the end. The language is old fashioned, but to me the sentences speak directly about what I get from spending so much time in the so-called natural world.

Take it away, Henry:

My house completed, and tried and not wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go. The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.

A year indoors is a journey along a paper calendar; a year in outer nature is the accomplishment of a tremendous ritual. To share in it, one must have a knowledge of the pilgrimages of the sun, and something of the natural sense of him and feeling for him which made even the most primitive people mark the summer limits of his advance and the last December ebb of his decline….We lost a great deal, I think, when we lose this sense and feeling for the sun. When all has been said, the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama by which we live, and not to have joy and awe of it, not to share in it, is to close a dull door on nature’s sustaining and poetic spirit.

Whatever attitude to human existence you fashion for yourself, know that it is valid only if it be the shadow of an attitude toward nature, a human life, so often likened to a spectacle upon a stage, is more justly a ritual. The ancient values of dignity, beauty, and poetry which sustain it are of Nature’s inspiration; they are born of the mystery and beauty of the world. Do no dishonour to the earth lest you dishonour the spirit of man. Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love here, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach.

The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature
Fracking Envy, Apple Dumps Coal, Australia Gets Hotter
Eco Porn Quiz: Name That Chick!

"The Beaches Are Sparkling!" and Other BP Apologia

David Gessner — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:30:29 +0000

By David Gessner

How good of New York Times columnist Joe Nocera to let us know that BP has made amends and that all is well in the Gulf of Mexico. Last week the Times printed Nocera’s op-ed "BP Makes Amends," a piece of pure propaganda that makes BP’s cheery commercials look downbeat in comparison.

“The beaches are sparkling,” Nocera says in the piece. I say otherwise in a segment on NPR’s “Here and Now.” You can decide whom you want to believe, but while you’re at it, consider that three tons of tarballs have washed up on the beaches of Alabama and Mississippi in the first 10 days of 2012.

Which leads to this simple question: did Mr. Nocera actually go down to the Gulf before he wrote that the beaches sparkled?

I'm reminded of a walk I took along a Gulf beach six months after the spill. It seemed pretty clean until I came across a scientist named Alyssa, who was supervising a clean-up crew. Instead of digging with shovels, the crew members were down on their knees, picking at the scarp line, like a squad of determined archeologists, or maybe badgers, digging into the wall. They sifted through the sand as if panning for gold.

I asked her if there was still much oil down below the sand.

“I know there is,” she said quickly. “I was here when we took core samples the other day. There are great tar mats down there. They look like vanilla swirl ice cream.”

The problem is that we in the media aren't quite as good at digging as those in Alyssa's crew. And sadly, the New York Times, the paper that so many of us depend on, hasn’t been a great friend in digging down to the deeper story in the Gulf.

Like most of the media, they were right on it back when it was an action story, the "Occupy Tebow!" of its day. But when the rosy NOAA report about everything being fine in the Gulf came out in July of 2010 (you know, the one about how the oil had all “evaporated” or been eaten by oil-eating microbes) the Times summarized it as if it were gospel in a front-page article called “Oil in Gulf Poses Only Slight Risk, U.S. Report Says.”

This article, and others like it, set the tone for coverage from then on, even though the report was almost universally assailed by scientists. After that, the paper's coverage dropped off the same cliff that everyone else’s did. The criticisms of the report never quite made the front page the way the report itself did. The word from the top was that it was okay to move on. Story over.

Which paved the way for editorials like Mr. Nocera's. The complex results of this spill are just starting to be understood, but no matter. BP is being allowed to get back to drilling in deep water, and the beaches are sparkling!

But I'm being too sarcastic. Too mean, perhaps. I'd like to end on a more positive note, a note of reconciliation.

In fact, I'd like to invite Mr. Nocera to have a picnic with me on one of his sparkling Gulf beaches. For lunch we could grill up some local shrimp. And for dessert? What else but vanilla swirl?

BP Ponys Up, Hit the Beach (While You Still Can!), Baby Cheetahs Cheat Death
Can the Cruise Industry Clean Up Its Act?
Slaves to the Screen: A Cartoon Caution

Occupy BP

David Gessner — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:27:35 +0000

By David Gessner

I’ve done some environmental equivocating in my most recent posts. Not this week. This week I’m pissed off.

Why? Because I continue to be astounded by the lack of coverage of the consequences of the BP oil spill. Let me be clear about this: Yes, there was coverage galore of the spill itself. (As I mentioned here before, at the spill’s peak CNN was devoting 44 percent of its total coverage to it.) Back then, we were covering the action -- the gushing oil and inept attempts to stop it -- but the underlying concern, the reason for all that coverage in the first place, was anxiety about how the spill would impact the region's economy, health, wildlife, and habitats, both human and animal. That’s why the president called it “the worst environmental disaster in United States history.”

So if that was our concern then, why do we seem to have zero concern now, since now is when we are beginning to learn what those consequences actually are: a failed shrimp harvest, dolphin deaths, sea turtle deaths, dire worries about human health, an ocean floor deadened by blankets of oil and dispersants, and long-term damage to Gulf fish, including possible cellular damage.

As this news trickles out -- in a manner that is the opposite of an explosion, true -- there is almost no coverage at all from CNN, the New York Times, and the other major networks and papers. This might be one thing if the event were a natural disaster, where most of the impact is immediate. But in a human-caused environmental disaster like this one, it stands to reason that the consequences will come later. And they have.

I understand that there is a dilemma here. As media people, we are supposed to stick and move, hit and run. If we continue to dwell on the spill -- as I obviously have -- we are accused of beating a dead horse. We are no longer with it. But if we don’t continue to cover this dead story, if we move on as we are told we should? Well, I think then that we -- and by "we" I mean the members of the national media -- are abdicating our responsibility. We are behaving dishonorably -- and make no bones about it, we have behaved dishonorably -- allowing BP and their chipper commercials to tell the national story and win the narrative battle.

I know the spill is no longer the flavor of the day. I know we have since been through tsunamis and Tea Parties and a half-dozen more obsessive headlines. But maybe there actually is a way for the issue to get the attention it deserves. Maybe if you put “occupy” in front of BP, a national media outlet will deem the consequences of the spill worthy of coverage. You might think my choice of the above title was a bit cynical, and it was, dear reader, it was, in hopes of getting you to read about a topic that is regarded about as current and hip as the Walkman I still listen to when I run.

But there is also truth in comparing what happened in the Gulf to Wall Street’s most heinous crimes. In both cases, corporations ignored the good of the many for the profit of a few, and in both cases this was part of an accepted culture*. In both cases, “regulation” was decried and rules loosened before disaster struck. (Not long before the spill, BP, a billion-dollar company, the world’s fourth largest, decided it needed even greater profits, and so sent a top-down directive to cut costs by 25 percent.) In both cases, profit was put above all else, and many lives were ruined as a consequence. And in both cases, few were really punished (no one is going to jail from BP), despite the fact that laws were broken and the result of those broken laws was death and ruin. Finally, in both cases, things returned to “normal” fairly quickly: BP is showing enormous profits again and being granted the right, despite its clearly criminal actions, to again drill in the Gulf.

Given all this, am I wrong to suggest that we, as reporters and storytellers and humans, have a moral obligation to follow through on what we started? Am I wrong to suggest that, having covered the spill’s beginning, we should follow through where it has led? Am I wrong to keep asking: “How can no one be hearing this?”

* * *

*From my book, The Tarball Chronicles:

In the story being told right now the Deepwater explosion was a great tragedy, but also something anomalous, an “accident” of course, a terrible accident. But is something an accident if crucial tests are skipped, if costs are cut, if warning systems are turned off so alarms won’t ring, and if even the CEOs of Shell and Exxon -- a Big Oil cohort that is known to stick together -- have sworn in front of Congress that the Deepwater Horizon well did not come close to meeting industry standards? Is something an accident if a billion dollar company, the world’s fourth largest, decides it needs even greater profits, and sends a top-down directive to cut costs by 25 percent? “I’m not a cement engineer,” BP’s CEO Tony Hayward told Congress in way of feeble defense, but presumably he had a few cement engineers working for him. He also said famously “I’d like my life back,” a sentiment no doubt shared by the eleven dead crew members and their families.

Far from anomalous, disasters were, by the time of the spill, become commonplace in the world of British Petroleum. Over the past decade the company went from the little brother of oil to one of the big guns, acquiring Amoco and Arco in the process. But during that heady rush the company’s M.O. was to take risks and cut costs, safety be damned. This is not overstatement. BP has led the Big Oil League in deaths and disaster. In 2005, fifteen people were killed and 170 injured when BP’s Texas City refinery blew up due to shoddy safety standards. In July of that same year BP’s flagship for deepwater drilling, the giant off-shore rig, Thunder Horse -- Thunder Horse! -- was toppled, seemingly by Hurricane Dennis but in fact by faulty valves hastily installed. The next year BP hit the disaster trifecta when 20,000 gallons spilled from a rusty pipeline in Prudehoe Bay on the north slope of Alaska.

Which leads to the question: if things happen regularly and for the same reasons do they still qualify as accidents? Which leads in turn to the next and larger question: if we, as a country, keep acting in ways that lead to shocking events, isn’t it time to stop being shocked?

Image: Fibonacci Blue

BP Ponys Up, Hit the Beach (While You Still Can!), Baby Cheetahs Cheat Death
In North Dakota and Nationwide, A Boom in Health Problems Accompanies Fracking
Growing Pains: Scenes from the North Dakota Drilling Boom

A Hopeless Mess

David Gessner — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:38:42 +0000

By David Gessner

This summer I fired a couple shots across the bow of fellow writer and environmentalist Derrick Jensen. It was bad form no doubt, and in times like these we greenies should all stick together, but there was something about his language, his insistence that we are all doomed (his best-known essay is called "Beyond Hope"), that seemed somewhat hysterical and also seemed to demand that someone -- me -- give him a good shake. This was my shake. And here is the reply (or at least a reply from the organization that shares the same name and website as a book he co-wrote).

Most of the time I stand by what I said to him. But there are other times ... well, to paraphrase Emerson, “My moods hate each other.” That is, there are times when I worry that I am becoming an apologist, becoming -- dare I say it -- Obama-like in my calm and ability to see all sides of the issue. It’s then that I want to shake myself and remember that in many ways Mr. Jensen may be exactly right. I have argued, again sounding scarily like a certain pragmatic president, that we must unite self-interest with the fight to save the wild world. And back in February I wrote in this very magazine that:

I like the fact that things have become muddied and complicated. I like that at the moment two of my favorite environmentalists are a businessman from Boston and a conservative Louisiana fishing guide, both driven as much by self-interest as by their desire to save the planet. Maybe they are the poster children of a new, hard-nosed environmentalism that sees how wind and water can coincide with profit.

I am still a believer in the fact that we will fail to make any real changes unless we channel human nature, rather than trying to change it. But at times I want to re-define, and broaden, what we mean by self-interest. Environmentalists like to argue that saving an ecosystem is “useful,” and, given their opponents’ attitudes, this is perhaps a sensible approach. But it’s such a limited way to think. By agreeing that that’s the table the game will be played on, we tilt the game itself. Rather than use, it is the sheer wild uselessness of nature, the sheer non-utilitarian, unrelated-to-human uselessness, that is cause for celebration. As a writer, I have always thought that nature was the source of my creativity, and the source of creativity for most artists, even those who never set foot on a beach or in the woods. But my thinking is evolving, and I am moving beyond those inchoate ideas. I am coming to believe that nature is creativity. Not just a wellspring for humans but the thing itself.

Isn’t it in our self-interest to hang on to that wellspring? Or at least to make sure that a path back to it exists? How odd that we are destroying the very thing that lets us imagine more. And by extinguishing things at the rate we are -- there’s no need here to drag out the well-known rollcall of extinction and habitat destruction -- we are doing no less than putting an end to creation. This may sound like overstatement, but it isn’t. For millions of years different species have evolved from each other in a thousand miraculous ways -- shrews becoming dolphins! -- and now we have said, “Enough is enough. Time for this messiness to end.” We are busy neatening up the world, getting it organized, making it useful for humans, building our castles.

At my most pessimistic, I see no way of halting this. After all, we can never stop banging on things, can never stop making and improving. Most of us are no more capable of keeping still than beavers, whose own teeth impale them unless they constantly gnaw. And so how can we, busy beavers that we are, have any hope of not chewing down all our trees and damming the world?

We are told that businessmen are the ones who understand the “real world.” We’ll see. The proof is in the pudding, and that pudding will be served up soon. We are also told that there is no time to get sentimental about nature, and anyway nature is in the way -- it simply must go. And the scary thing is that most of us nod numbly and agree, if not in theory then in practice. But with every step forward we lose the path back. The more the straight-line thinkers win out, the less of a source is left for creativity. The less creativity, the less chance of getting back. When we kill the woods or beach, we are killing possibilities. Our options, biologically as well as artistically, become limited. After all, you can’t simply re-create dolphin or kangaroo.

I could go on but will stop my preaching now. We are approaching the year’s end, and I am tired, weary. One of the things that straight-line thinkers like to do is to segregate, keeping everyone, and everything, in their separate cells. In this way, we can focus on the narcotics of our specialties: macramé or biochemistry or golf. In my field this means keeping art separate from politics, which is one of the rules of literature in the past century. It is a rule that I would, quite honestly, like to follow, and one that I did follow for the first twenty years of my career. But it just doesn’t seem possible anymore, what with the world ending and all. I’d like nothing more than to hole up in my garret and make art. But I can’t. I am part of the great mess we are making.

Image: spekulator/SXC

The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature
Eco Porn Quiz: Name That Chick!
Slaves to the Screen: A Cartoon Caution

We Need Hypocrites!

David Gessner — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 16:18:49 +0000

By David Gessner

I’ve spewed a lot of words in the last few months as I’ve run around the country talking about (and reading from) my new books. When you read something out loud, or just say it out loud, you can get a fairly quick sense of the audience’s reaction. I think it’s fair to say that the biggest reaction I’ve gotten, overall, comes when I read the words spoken by Dan Driscoll, the Boston environmental planner who has spent the last twenty years fighting to green the banks of the Charles River.

I originally wrote about Dan for OnEarth in the article "Riding the Wild Charles," which I expanded into the book My Green Manifesto. The scene below is from our first day of paddling together:

“We nature lovers are hypocrites of course," Dan says. “We are all hypocrites. None of us are consistent. The problem is that we let that fact stop us. We worry that if we fight for nature, people will say ‘But you drive a car’ or ‘You fly a lot’ or ‘You’re a consumer, too.’ And that stops us in our tracks. It’s almost as if admitting that we are hypocrites gets people off the hook.”

I pull my paddle out of the water and turn back to listen.

“What we need are more hypocrites,” he says. “We need hypocrites who aren’t afraid of admitting it but will still fight for the environment. We don’t need some sort of pure movement run by pure people. We need hypocrites!”

I think of Ed Abbey fighting for the West while throwing empty beer cans out the window of his truck. I think of my own environmental Achilles heel, a dainty preference for hot baths over showers. And then I think of everyone I know and know of and can’t come with anyone who has an entirely clean eco slate. Which seems to mean that, logically, Dan is right: if only non-hypocrites are going to fight for the environment then it will be an army of none.

So there it is: We need hypocrites! Fighting hypocrites!

Why do people respond to that line? I think because it offers up the possibility of a less pure environmentalism, a sloppier environmentalism. An environmentalism that doesn’t turn its nose away from us and walk away. Rather it offers an embracive environmentalism that opens its arms and welcomes us, whatever our faults and flaws.

And that, I’ve come to believe, is what we need. An army of people who care despite their imperfections. An army of flawed and sloppy hypocrites.

(Not long ago I talked about this idea on the public radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge.)

Illustration: Gary Hovland

Transit Cuts, Scary Super Weeds, Better Water Use: Fracking or Fighting Fires?
Slaves to the Screen: A Cartoon Caution
Wild Child, or, I Fathered a Wolf Girl

Top 10: Sexiest Nature Writers in History

David Gessner — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:20:47 +0000

By David Gessner

This list of the sexiest nature writers of all time is also posted at the writing blog I share with Bill Roorbach, which we call Bill and Dave's Cocktail Hour. Naturally, we felt it only fair to exclude ourselves from the competition.

NUMBER 10: JOHN MUIR

It wasn't all mountains and trees at Yosemite. (Here's the link to where this photo orginally appeared.)

NUMBER 9: RACHEL CARSON

The "come hither" look that sold a million books (and helped outlaw DDT).

NUMBER 8: HENRY "BIG DADDY" THOREAU

Just because he never had sex doesn't mean he wasn't sexy.

NUMBER 7: WILLIAM LEAST HEAT MOON

Some call him "Most Heat" Moon.

NUMBER 6: VIRGIL

The original beefcake.

NUMBER 5: ALDO LEOPOLD

Everyone knows about his land ethic, but few have heard of his secret "sex ethic."

NUMBER 4: ED ABBEY

Number 1 on our list of horniest nature writers.

NUMBER 3: TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS

Saving the West, and lookin' good doing it.

NUMBER 2: GARY SYNDER

"Hey, Baby, want to come back to my Tepee?"

NUMBER 1: WHO ELSE BUT ANNIE DILLARD?

The famous cover shot.

Annie says: Thanks, Dave.

Slaves to the Screen: A Cartoon Caution
Wild Child, or, I Fathered a Wolf Girl
Living With the Gulf Oil Disaster, Two Years Later

Beyond Flipper: Dolphins are Dying in the Gulf

David Gessner — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 20:44:23 +0000

By David Gessner

Like any sane person, I am fond of dolphins. For the last seven years or so, since I moved south, we have been on neighborly terms. I remember my first New Year’s Day in the South, eight years ago, when I kayaked over to Masonboro Island. Escorted by a squad of pelicans, I paddled across the channel thinking of birds and looking to the sky, until, suddenly, something rose out of the water. A dorsal fin. Then three more, close by. I’d like to say that I reacted immediately with sheer delight at the wonder of nature, but that would be a lie. The first moment was one of panic, before slow identification of friend, not foe.

On some levels my life has been an erratic one: hard years of debt, failure, and frustration. But one thing I am proud of is this: I have always made an effort to get to know my non-human neighbors. Dolphins have been particularly good neighbors. Moving to the island town of Wrightsville Beach, outside of Wilmington, North Carolina, was a little like moving to the set of Flipper. It’s true the dolphins were less interactive than on the old TV show, rarely crying out to you in their ratcheting chatter, never imploring you to save a distressed swimmer or put out a boat fire, but you got the feeling that it was only a matter of time. I’d never felt as unsettled as I did our first fall in the South. My wife and I had a new baby and a new place, and I had a new job. Those early months after the move were a sweaty nightmare.

But dolphins helped. All through our first fall, I would carry my daughter Hadley down the beach in a little papoose contraption called a Baby Bjorn. We would stop and watch the dolphins as they lifted up into our world before dipping back into theirs. Thinking it was only polite, I started to teach myself all I could about dolphins. Like most people, I knew they used sonar, but what I didn’t know could fill a whole world. What I didn’t know was that just as a person experiences his or her life mostly through sight, and a dog through rivers of smell, dolphins experience the sea around them acoustically. They do this through a process called echolocation that involves emitting between thirty and eight hundred clicks a minute, sending these sounds bouncing off the world around them and then receiving, and analyzing, what echoes back. In this way dolphins sonically understand both where they are and what is around them. In this way, they place themselves and other objects, the bouncing signals providing complex and ever-changing maps of their underwater world.

Looking back now, I see that learning all I could about my new home was metaphorically akin to echolocation. I felt massively out of place in the South and needed to bounce off everything surrounding me before I could call it home. But to suddenly have dolphins in my backyard! Not long after that first New Year’s paddle I paid a visit to Dr. Ann Pabst, a professor and marine scientist at the school where I taught. She articulated my still vague thoughts.

“The fact is that no other large wild animal regularly lives so close to man,” she said. “It’s like sharing land with a grizzly bear."

***

The latest dolphin news from the Gulf of Mexico is not good. Dead dolphins are being found at four to ten times the normal rate since the spill. No study has yet explained the high mortality rate, and scientists warn us not to jump to conclusions, but …

… but let’s put it this way: I have been asked more than once this fall why I harp on old news and keep writing about the Gulf oil spill, despite the fact that it is so clearly “over.” Dolphins are one answer to that question. When people tell me it is over, old news, I say, “It may be over for you, but not for the locals.” And no one is more local than the Gulf dolphins.

I remember a day during the height of the BP spill, when I was out in a boat with some members of the Cousteau Ocean Futures Society film team. There was a thunderstorm over the marina in Buras, Louisiana, and we were waiting out the storm in Barataria Bay when a pod of dolphins showed up. We watched the dolphins sea-serpent in and out of the water, their bodies sleek, black-gray rubber balls gleaming with water. They cycled up and down as if moving in a circle: a constant rotation from air to water. From up close you could stare right into their intelligent black eyes -- no pupils, all black. The best moment was when a mother and her two young glided close to the boat. The mother swam by and the young one followed.

Despair mixed with delight, as it often did during those strange days. Seeing the dolphins reminded one of the Cousteauians of the plight of the dolphins' large cousins, the sperm whales, out in the Gulf. The team had been out on the Gulf trying to film the whales over the previous weeks, but this was not an easy task, given how few were left and how deep they swam.

“They like to hunt and feed along the continental shelf,” my new friend said. “They prey on giant squids that live exactly where the oil is. There are only about 1,300 of them left here, so the loss of even one whale is crushing.”

It is hard to overcome our anthropocentric bias, to understand that animals have complex lives and that the loss of those lives is not just simple cold fact. But in the midst of considering our own plight, don’t we owe it to ourselves to consider theirs? I remember a story that a charter fisherman named Kit told me back on Wrightsville Beach. We were drinking beers at the marina when Kit, a Hemingway look-alike, described watching a dolphin give birth from his boat. The dolphin baby was stillborn, but the mother wouldn’t accept the loss. She kept nudging the small dead body up toward the surface with her snout. When the baby got to the surface, it would sink back down. Then the mother would once again push it up toward air.

Here is what I thought that day as the dolphins swam by our boat in the Gulf: these sentient beings, these families, are now swimming through 200 million gallons of oil and millions of gallons of dispersants. A people that rarely have empathy with Homo sapiens from other parts of the world, and that only recently released a substantial percentage of its own population from human slavery, may not be expected to have empathy with Tursiops truncates. So how to stretch our minds, how to understand that this was not just one of the greatest environmental disasters in United States history, but in dolphin history? We will not see the full body count of course, since most dead dolphins, like the stillborn baby that Kit saw, sink to the ocean’s floor. Out of sight, out of mind.

That day we watched the dolphins for a while longer, though they seemed to be getting bored with us. They swam, farther away from our boat, but, before they exited, they provided one final treat. A large individual circled back and slapped its tail, a big sharp crack. Then it dove down and swam off. I wondered out loud if the dolphin we saw was “fishwhacking,” which consisted of batting fish with their tail flukes, so that the poor stunned fish sometimes flies 30 feet in the air. The truth was that the dolphin might have slapped its tail for any number of reasons, including sheer exhilaration. Who knew? Dolphins are generalists, with no one set fishing behavior, and adapt differently in different places to the local tides, geography, and fish population. In other words, they are creative thinkers, not inclined to doing things just one way.

After a while the storm passed and we headed back to Buras. I stood in front of the boat and held onto the bowline as if surfing, bouncing along, wondering if any dolphin bowriders would join us. I loved the feeling of being out there, of salt and sand and sun, of having spent a day outdoors with dolphins, of living out a childhood fantasy by riding in a Cousteau boat. But the feeling was not a childhood feeling. I knew too much. I couldn’t stop thinking about the dolphins. I couldn’t stop imagining those smart, interactive, family-oriented animals swimming through an oil-and-chemical pool of slime.

Was there anything good in all the ugliness? I had heard a hundred people say that perhaps the spill would lead to a time of reckoning. That even those of us who would rather not think about these things, would find ourselves thinking: just what have we done?

But these questions faded when the spotlight did. We humans can handle only so much guilt, and we grow weary of the work of empathy. Soon enough the national media skipped on to its next big story.

The problem was that there were many, both dolphin and human, who weren’t able to move on. This is where they were from. And they have stayed stuck here in this place they call home. Mired.

It is the locals who often take the hit in service of our global needs. Dolphins are locals here, more local even than the Cajuns and their drowned camps, and they have their own local culture that will be lost along with the human one. From different places spring different dolphin qualities. When I paddled from North to South Carolina a few years ago I stopped at Jeremy Creek in the town of McClellanville, South Carolina. There the local dolphins are famous for self-stranding on the town boat ramp and eating fish out of hands of people. In other words, this is a tradition particular to the place, taught from parents to children. I only bring this up so that we don’t fool ourselves into thinking it is “just animals” we are killing. These are beings with cultures and traditions.

When we tally up our ledger sheet of gains and losses, we had better consider this. We are gaining oil, yes. But one of the things we are ripping apart is culture. Just as local fishermen won’t be able to show this eroding land to their grandchidlren, so dolphin communities may not be able to continue living in a place they have lived in for centuries if we keep taking wild risks for the last drops of oil. The Deepwater spill might not do them in, but what about the next one? In the past few weeks BP has gotten the offical go ahead from the Department of Interior to resume deep water drilling in the Gulf. When we consider what we are sacrificing at oil’s altar, we had better not forget certain mammalian neighbors, neighbors who live in communities, mourn for their dead and unborn, teach their children, and call their friends by name.

My initial reaction to seeing dolphins near my home was an almost aesthetic one, like oohing and ahhing at a particularly pleasing painting. But dolphins are not paintings, and they are not symbols of my attempts to find a home. They are the true locals, and I’ve come to believe that it’s just common courtesy, no more than good manners, to treat them with respect. This is not “environmentalism.” It’s just looking out for one’s neighbors.

This post was adapted in part from my new book, The Tarball Chronicles, and in part from a longer essay on dolphins that originally appeared in the Toad Suck Review. I'll be reading from The Tarball Chronicles on Monday, November 14, in New York City. Come join me.

Image: Nathan Rupert/Flickr

BP Ponys Up, Hit the Beach (While You Still Can!), Baby Cheetahs Cheat Death
INFOGRAPHIC: What a Blind Scientist Sees
In Each Shell a Story

The Trouble With Trophy Homes

David Gessner — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 18:31:43 +0000

By David Gessner

While I was in Concord last week I took a tour of some writers’ homes, a thrown-together affair that included staring up at Louisa May Alcott’s place, tromping on the hill behind Hawthorne’s, walking Thoreau’s backyard, and, finally, taking the official tour of Emerson’s. That last was remarkable for the fact that I took the tour with just two other people and that one of them looked remarkably familiar. He was tall, with a long prow of a nose that almost perfectly matched the bust in the upstairs landing, and sure enough it turned out he was Ralph Waldo’s great-great grandson.

My home tour continued, less formally, in East Dennis, where I walked out to the bluff that faces Cape Cod Bay, a body of water that is as close as I’ll ever get to my own Walden Pond. It was a wild day, the water frothing with whitecaps, and the sight reminded me, not of another body of water, but, in terms of vastness and beauty, of certain spots where I have stared out at the canyon lands in Utah. Just the looks of the place, the ocean crashing against the shore as it has forever, the sand leading down to the raised cliff beyond, the rocks making walking difficult and guaranteeing privacy, the whole sense of strolling into a great painting, filled me with a sensation that it would not be so wrong to call love.

There was a long history with the place, too: here I had watched bird migrations shoot through, studied a dead coyote cadaver, and rescued stranded loggerhead turtles. Here I had walked with my daughter in that poorly-buckled Baby Bjorn and spread my father’s ashes off shore. And here, by connecting so deeply to one place, I felt connected to other places.

Which is a nice sentiment. But before getting too carried away I should add that the bluff, like so many places on the coast, comes with its own built-in irony. That is because the place where I feel most at home is actually owned by someone else. Whenever I walk to the bluff -- something I have done thousands of times over the years -- I cross an invisible line between public beach and private property. Which means that, thanks to Massachusetts’s archaic coastal laws, I am in fact trespassing as I walk out over the rocks to the bluff. And so, before I got too gooey with sentiment for the place, I should remind myself that my little nature walk could get me arrested.

In fact, above me, up on the bluff, sat one of the largest trophy homes in New England. I had a long history with the owner of the house above the bluff, the man who supposedly owned my beach. My wife and I had been renting the house next door when he bought his land and decided to tear down the old mansion and build one of the Cape’s biggest houses. One day at dawn, soon after the building began, I climbed the bluff to baptize his newly laid foundation, marking my territory as it were. In a more traditional form of protest, I attended town meetings and argued for imposing some restrictions on a project that was wildly out of scale with the land and buildings around it. During one of those meetings, the owner had turned to me with a beleaguered expression and said of his mansion: “I just want a home for my family.”

Pity the poor 1%.

The other day, as I stared up resentfully, I didn’t discount the possibility that I had simply been jealous. This was the place where I’d always wanted to buy a home, after all, but hadn’t been able to afford it. How come he got to? But it also occurred to me that a larger part of my objection was aesthetic. In George Howe Colt’s The Big House, he writes about his family’s rambling 20 bedroom mansion, built by his great-great grandfather on Wings Neck in Bourne on Cape Cod in 1903. Though the house was enormous, and would no doubt spark a great hue and cry (led by me) if anyone attempted to build it in on Cape Cod today, it had a certain shaggy style, “an informal style for an informal season,” and modestly hid itself from the street behind the catbriers, poison ivy, and trees that quickly grew up around it.

Until very recently this was the prevailing ethos of those who headed to Cape Cod in the summer; it was a time to get away, to at least play at the pretense of living a simpler life. It was only in the early 1980s that summer homes started to recreate the luxury of first homes, and it was then that I first heard the hum of air conditioners on Cape Cod. Until then, even the wealthy saw their summer lives as an alternative, not an extension, of their winter lives. Imagine a week without AC or e-mail!

But there is something else I object to in these homes. I can’t help but feel that there is something bullying, almost predatory, about them, the way they bulge to the edges of their property lines, peering down onto the beaches and into the neighboring homes. If these houses could be said to have a personality, it is that of the straining overachiever. It may ally me with the Yankees and WASPs, or someone who has fallen for the quaintness racket, but it occurs to me that modesty and neighborliness are not merely WASP or Yankee values. Nor is consideration for others, and many of these new homes jockey for position, muscling out the views of others like power forwards. They don’t seem settled in any sense of the word. They look ready to scurry off at the first chance.

***

In my last post I described a visit to Walden I made a couple of summers ago. What I didn’t mention was that that visit was just the beginning of a larger New England home tour. I used my visit to Thoreau’s cabin site, where he built his 10-by-15-foot shack, as a kickoff to a tour of some slightly larger homes. I started by driving from Walden up to Kennebunkport, Maine, in search of an easy target. Ducks in the barrel (or is it fish in a barrel? -- I forget).

I’d never been to Kennebunkport before, but of course I drove into that quaint town with a very modern sense of ironic self-consciousness. Having just visited Thoreau’s cabin, why not visit its opposite, the place where the anti-Henry had spent his summers? Perhaps I was planning on dashing off a kind of angry set piece upon first seeing the house that Bush built. After all, this was the home seat of the clan of oil sellers and oil-eaters, the great anti-Thoreauvians, that imperil Americans. As I drove along the coast, out toward the fabled Walker’s Point, I fully expected to be appalled and outraged by the Bush ancestral home.

Instead I was blown away. Who had built this thing -- this beautiful gray-shingled house that seemed to grow out of the gray rocks -- Frank Lloyd Wright? I pulled over and parked at a rest stop where I could stare at the house from across the inlet. It was raining which fit the scene nicely. Seawater sloshed against the granite boulders that defined the Maine coast. The house was large, no doubt about it, but it had a great sense of scale and seemed to grow down into the rocks that led to the water. Its shingles were the same color, the same shape as the coastline it segued into. Looked at another way, the house was a well-camouflaged reptilian creature emerging from the sea.

Earlier I had stopped for a lobster roll at a store called The Landing and asked a cab driver for directions to Walker’s Point. “Sometimes Old Bush comes out himself and waves,” he said.

At Walker’s Point there was no sign of Old Bush, but, to get a better look, I climbed out of the car and walked out onto the enormous rocks on my side of the little cove. It was a different coast than the sandy Cape beaches I knew best. Covered with rocks like the one I was now scrambling across and infused with that particular Maine smell -- what was it? A rank, low-tide seaweed smell. I listened as the water below sloshed in and out of secret rock caves, one of the thousands -- millions? -- of caves along this coast. Then there was a sound like thunder as the water boomed against the cove walls. A lobster buoy had been thrown up next to where I stood, and little tidal pools of rainwater filled the skull dents atop the rock. It was seaweed-slippery near the rock’s edge, so I backed up a few feet.

The Bushes must have long grown used to being constantly watched. Through my binoculars I could see a Dalmation puppy urinating on some bushes just outside of the property. Tents rose from the lawn for a wedding, and inside the compound some guy walked his golden retriever. Who could it be? Jeb? The butler? Lobster pots bobbed off the coast: waves kicked up off seaweed-wrapped rocks guarded by cormorants. To my surprise I found myself paying the place just about the highest compliment you could pay a house: It knew its place. Even the trees, eastern red cedars, were perfectly proportioned to the landscape. So there it was. My disdain for Bush was now balanced by my love for his house.

It was disappointing that the Bush home had not provided me with the expected rage, but I suspected the next stop would do the trick. I drove to the Breakers in Rhode Island to see the home of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Though Vanderbilt’s house could swallow up a dozen Cape Cod trophy homes, it was once again hard to muster up the requisite outrage. Standing outside the fence on the seaward side of a yard three football fields long, and staring up at the huge building with dark red roof shingles, my first thought was, “Geez, I can see why Cornelius liked this spot.” While the view of the house was OK, the view from the house dazzled. Gulls flew up from the cliff below, and beach plum and rogosa rose and Queen Anne’s lace grew out of the craggy cliff top where granite was daintily splattered with gull shit. I stared out at the water for a while, watching a single sea rock being covered and uncovered by the tide, water splashing over it like unruly white hair. It would have been easy to be critical of Vanderbilt, and I was, but I was also impressed. Being the richest of the rich, the biggest of the big, having what must have seemed unlimited resources and having chosen the diametric opposite route from Thoreau, Vanderbilt had also had the good sense to pick this particular spot, this ledge above the sea. Not bad.

It was true that, given today’s arithmetic of limited resources, the house was morally offensive, especially when you remembered it was a summer home. But it was hard to get too worked up. Yes, it is big -- really fucking big -- but if it had been a castle in Europe, or even a grand hotel, would I have happily checked my moral baggage? Either way, time’s varnish had me looking at the place in a way I couldn’t quite look at the trophy house back home on the bluff. Would people cut my bluff neighbor the same historical benefit of the doubt in a hundred years? That seemed unlikely. Because although The Breakers was wildly ostentatious, and the thinking behind it aggressively primitive, there was a certain obliviousness to that thinking, a lack of awareness of what the final toll would be. Could they have really comprehended that soon there would not be enough left? (Whether they would have cared is another question.)

These days anyone with even a dim degree of world awareness understands how limited our resources have become. Which was why today’s trophy homes and the next house I visited were so much more offensive. It now takes a real effort to squander, a rigorous and conscious decision to bury one’s head in the sand. That makes it hard to grant the same leniency to today’s trophy homes: if there is still obliviousness, it can only be willful obliviousness. In search of just such obliviousness, I took the ferry to Long Island, then crawled down a cluttered Route 27 into the Hamptons, all in search of the largest residential house in the United States.

The traffic and congestion were even worse than on Cape Cod, but once I turned off the main drag, the houses grew older, funkier, and more interesting, and you could start to see how people might fight through traffic to get here. They all wanted to get to the water, motivation I could understand. I crossed a nice old-fashioned bridge spanning a salt marsh, where a couple of old guys fished with nets. I pulled over and asked if they knew where a writer hero of mine, Peter Matthiessen, lived, and they pointed me toward a house that was modestly tucked behind a row of trees. After that I got lost and before I knew it ended up in the beach parking lot at the end of Sagg Road. I talked to a woman with a nice floppy hat named Rebecca, and when I told her I was going to write about the local trophy homes, she cautioned me.

“Just don’t stereotype us,” she said. “Remember there’s still a lot of beauty on this island. People don’t understand that. And there are a lot of us who don’t want these houses here.”

I asked her about the particular Sagaponack house I’d come to find.

“It’s a nightmare all right,” she said. “But the truth is, there are more ostentatious-looking houses. That one looks like the Getty Museum. Low enough so you have to try to see it.”

She led me to the house in her car. We made a few turns before heading down Peters Pond Lane, rolling through farmland and some beautiful old gray-shingled homes. Then we bumped down Daniel’s Lane toward a beach that the locals used. She pointed out the window emphatically, and I took it to mean that the hedges to our right were hiding the house I’d come to see. She was right about the house, too. There were many gates, and obviously the place took up a lot of space, but it was hard to be outraged at what you couldn’t see. The owner apparently shared some of Peter Matthiessen’s instinct to hide rather than to show off.

Of course I know that this modesty extends only so far. Before my trip I had read an article that told me that the house had 29 bedrooms and 40 bathrooms and topped out at 100,000 square feet. At a time when most people understand that there is a moral obligation to be small, or at least smaller, how could the man behind the gates rationalize this? But if I simply turned the other way, as with the Breakers, the view was pure delight. I was too tried for great moral outrage and decided on a swim instead. A small group of four wheelers clustered on the beach to the northeast, but I walked the other way, trespassing over the billionaire’s beach. His house was relatively well-hidden, and I felt fairly well hidden myself. Enough so to strip off my clothes and head out into the water. It was good there was no one to see me, because I wasn’t a pretty sight. I didn’t care. I swam out into the waves rolling in from Europe.

Image: the author's Walden, by the author

The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature
Eco Porn Quiz: Name That Chick!
Slaves to the Screen: A Cartoon Caution

Why Thoreau Wouldn’t Buy a Prius

David Gessner — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:36:31 +0000

By David Gessner

The short answer: he couldn’t afford it.

The long answer: he wouldn’t afford it.

Let me explain:

Last weekend I spoke at the house where Thoreau was born, a talk sponsored by the Thoreau Farm Trust. I got out to Concord early and took a walk around Walden. The place was crowded on a fall Sunday, and what was once a one-man show was now a crowd of more than a hundred. The last time I had visited, during summer, SUVs crammed the parking lot and an ice cream truck played its seductive tinkling song.

During the warm months, the beach at Walden is usually jammed, chairs and umbrellas and floats and life guards and families yelling at each other: People yak into cell phones and boats putter about with the words “Walden Patrol” on their bows. Large sections of the pond are fenced off, and when you walk along the shore you are herded through paths as crowded as airport escalators. Irony is always thick at the modern Walden, and to get to the site of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin, you often have to barge and dart and slide past the hordes that clutter the trails, the place having become a Disney recreation of its former self.

But yesterday was slightly less crowded than my summer visit, and if you ignored the fences you could almost imagine the pond as Thoreau had known it. The leaves glistened and the air was cold, and I passed a cove where the water shone a deep blue-green. The cabin site was marked with a great pile of rocks, a cairn, and a sign that informed me, among other things, of the fate of the cabin after it was removed from the site: “At first, it was used to store grain. Then it was dismantled for scrap lumber and the roof was put on a pig pen.” That sounded about right. The house itself was a single room, 10-by-15 feet, a kind of anti-trophy house.

As I walked, I thought about how Thoreau’s experiment of living by the pond, and in particular Thoreau’s personal math, is more relevant than ever. Everywhere you look these days people are singing the praises of restraint and bemoaning the failings of sheer excess. Frugality, that unfashionable virtue, is suddenly back in fashion. How do we make our own home economics, our personal ledger sheet, balance with what is happening in the larger world? Although Thoreau did his share of finger-wagging, it isn’t his moralizing that interests me. What is truly exciting is what you might call his celebration of the joys of restraint, his thrill in self-abnegation, as long as it is self-abnegation for a purpose. Perhaps most vital for our moment is his deep-seated and deeply-lived belief, that one can live a good life, and an interesting and compelling life, by consciously doing with less instead of striving, incessantly, for more.

His larger question was “how to live?” and his answer came down to this: since it takes great effort and energy to get the money to get the time to live as one wants -- that is, in his case, to walk four hours a day, immerse oneself in nature, and find time to write -- why not cut out the middle man? Why not attempt to set directly about doing what one wants to do?

But what about money and getting more? Well, what if instead of needing more, one has a talent for and takes pleasure in needing less? The thrill of this equation for Thoreau, and the challenge for so many of us that have followed, is that he, unlike the rest of us, seemed temperamentally suited to this reductive math. One day he might have three acorns for lunch and, rather than feeling deprived, Henry, thrilled by the momentum of austerity, would the next day cut that number down to two, and then, what the hell, have just one the next. Though he liked being extra-vagant in his language, piling on the sentences, that was just about the only place he indulged in the excessive.

What would his reaction be to the recent news that growth has slowed? Hooray! It’s about time! Now we finally have to face reality and can no longer ride along on the illusive wave of eternal growth. And we don’t have to be grim about it, either. Our new ambition can be to see how much we can do with little -- in other words, we have the chance to refine our ambitions. For Thoreau, as for a fanatic accountant, life was a giant ledger sheet. Of course it was many other things, too, including an arena for heroism and a place of beauty and wildness, but the ledger sheet was never far from his mind. What comes in, what goes out … What do we give up? What do we gain?

Which brings me back to the Prius. It’s true that Thoreau, loving the wild world as he did, would choose a car (assuming, for the sake of argument, that he would buy a car at all, an admittedly suspect assumption) that damaged the world as little as possible. But one thing that Thoreau the transcendent accountant abhorred more than anything else was debt. He wrote famously:

How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

A barn, a mortgage, a car are all things we push before us as we creep down that road. And a Prius, by my estimate, costs about $400 a month, an amount that Thoreau would not just balk at, but probably laugh at. Much preferable would be a car that was far cheaper and still got good mileage, a car that would not require the monthly pushing of a barn, even a barn with wheels. After all, part of the pleasure of the car for Thoreau, even while working as a handyman, would be to see just how little he could use it. That would be fun! And better yet he would buy a used car. You see, he really liked re-using things. (He would have loved that his cabin later lived on as a grain storage bin and then again as a pig pen.) Why not take someone’s old car and make it his new one?

Personal addendum: I will end by admitting that the above was, among other things, a rationalization. When I was reporting in the Gulf during the oil spill, I got around in an old RAV4, a car that didn’t get particularly great gas mileage. Though I believe that we are all environmental hypocrites in this day and age, I was stung by my own hypocrisy, guzzling gas as I criticized BP. I vowed that when I got home I would buy a Prius, putting an end to my hypocrisy. I put that decision off for a while because we could not afford a new car right away. We finally put the RAV out to pasture and lived with one car for a while, which was a good solution until the school term started and one car no longer worked. So I was now ready to buy my Prius and found myself facing … $400 a month. I do not keep as strict a ledger as my friend Henry, but I knew I was not ready to accept that level of debt. Suffice it to say that the used Scion that now sits in our driveway gets pretty good mileage.

Caricature of Thoreau by the author

What do you think Thoreau would drive if he had to commute to Walden today? Let us know in the comments below or on Facebook.

The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature
Can the Cruise Industry Clean Up Its Act?
Eco Porn Quiz: Name That Chick!

Death on Dauphin Island [Video]

David Gessner — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 21:04:20 +0000

By David Gessner

I’ve been down to the Gulf of Mexico three times during the last year and a half, and on my second visit, almost exactly a year ago, I went out to Alabama’s Dauphin Island and made this short film.

A few months before, during the height of the BP spill, I had paid my initial visit to Dauphin Island with Bill Finch and Bethany Kraft, and blogged about it for OnEarth. Over the course of the year those blogs became the raw material out of which I built my new book, The Tarball Chronicles. Some readers might be curious about how blog becomes book, and the differences between creating something at the moment and having some time to go deeper. With that in mind, here is my initial blog post about Dauphin, and here is how the section appeared as part of a chapter in the book:

Things were going fairly normally, though Bethany and Bill and I were still wearing our marsh-wet sneakers and pants, until, heading down toward the west end of the island, we hit a roadblock. I felt like we’d driven right into a joke: a cop, a rent-a-trailer, and a woman who looked like my grandmother in a security uniform blocked the road. We asked what was going on. “They’re padding the beach,” the cop said. None of us knew what this meant despite the fact that our car was loaded with coastal experts. “Padding the beach” was a new one on us.

We tried to talk our way in; Bill after all was a well-known local environmental reporter and Bethany the head of an environmental NGO, but no go. So Bill, a little too fast, pulled his car into a side road, parked, slammed the door, and started marching down the road on foot. He walked impossibly fast, and I, after changing from wet sneakers into kayak booties that looked like black ballet slippers, was too far behind to catch up. Bill, it turned out, was pissed about being kept out of a place that he considered part of his home range. In my former life, as a cartoonist, I might have drawn smoke coming out of his ears.

Beyond security, we found huge piles of sand, some thirty feet high, lining the beach on the south side of the island, and further to the north two more rows of sand ran in lines down the island’s spine. Trucks full of sand rumbled up and down the road. Having lived on a barrier island for years, I instantly knew what was up. Sand from the calmer northern side of the island was being carted over to the Gulf-facing south side to protect the homes that were threatened by erosion and storms. What I didn’t know yet, but would soon learn, was that this was all being done -- trucks had been running up and down the island for two months already, and millions upon millions spent -- under the auspices of protecting the islanders, and more importantly the homes of the islanders, from oil. In fact the residents had been trying to bolster the sand in front of their Gulf-side homes for years but some very sensible environmental regulations prevented it. This sort of project was euphemistically called “beach re-nourishment,” though it nourished nothing. In fact, the reason it was banned was because it destroyed beach ecosystems. But when the oil started spilling, these keen-eyed opportunists saw their moment. They petitioned for some of the millions that BP had given the governor of Alabama and, since all rules were off during the gold rush of emergency, they finally got not just the beach re-nourishment project of their dreams, but had it all paid for. You may think people who take advantage of a disaster are venal, but you can’t say these folks weren’t smart.

Bill was so far ahead now, with Bethany a hundred yards behind, that I decided not to bother to even try and catch up. Instead I climbed over one of the sand piles that looked like they were dumped there to fill a giant’s sandbox, and down the other side. Abruptly, I found myself on a small skirt of beach. No wonder those homeowners were desperate for the sand, I thought. From the water there was only about twenty yards of sand and then a sharp scarp, or sand wall, above which their teetering trophy homes sat. One house already had waves beating against its foundation.

I am not heartless. I understood why a homeowner would want to try and pile sand in front of their home to keep it from falling into the sea. But there are a couple of problems with this approach, the first being it is almost always a mere postponement, until the next storm drags the new sand away. Millions of dollars are spent and then nature does what it was going to do anyway, just a little later. The larger problem is that this “solution” shows an almost complete misunderstanding of the way that barrier islands work. To start with “barrier” is really the wrong word; while these islands do defend the mainland to some degree, they are essentially permeable. They survive through a method quite different, and more fluid, than that of the homo sapiens that have claimed them as their homes.

Barrier islands migrate. They move, and grow, most often shoreward. This is happening constantly, but particularly during storms. The way an island handles a storm is through a kind of elemental judo, letting the water rush over, its sands breaking down and reforming, retreating to the marsh on its backside, rebuilding in a new place, giving and taking. An island lets the surge flow through it, breathing with the storm, never foolish enough to imagine it can block it. Think of Muhammad Ali fighting George Foreman, the way Ali hung back on the ropes. In short, the island survives through a primal rope-a-dope, an ancient and time-tested technique.

Since homeowners don’t like to be told that their backyards are migrating, they draw lines in the sand. But the ocean doesn’t care about lines. The residents on Dauphin believed in straight lines, suburbia, surveys. But no matter how much sand they pile, and how many of BP’s millions they use, they can’t change the fact that they just happen to have built their homes on a living island.

I hiked up the beach on the seaward side of the huge sand piles. The beach, I knew, wouldn’t be around for long. Pelicans dove over the water and natural-gas derricks dotted the horizon. Far from “re-nourishing” this beach, the tons of new sand was burying a world of coquina clams and crabs and thousands of tinier creatures. Sand was simply being piled, without thought to the world already there, and that sand would be blown and washed away. I remembered something the coastal geologist Orrin Pilkey once said to me:

“People fear storms but barrier islands need storms to live. Storms are the way the islands migrate and the way they build elevation. If sand is not pushed across an island by storms then the island drowns.”

Despite the ultimate ineffectiveness of dumping sand as a defense, it is done all over the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. But by hiking back across the island to the sound side I saw the true and particular genius in what the residents of Dauphin had done. When I finally caught up to Bill and Bethany, it looked like they were standing next to a series of Olympic-size swimming pools, until the pools gradually revealed themselves for what they were. They were huge holes, now filled with water, where sand had been dug out for the piles on the front side. Which meant they served a brilliant double purpose. Not only did they “re-nourish” the beaches in front of the houses falling onto the sea, but they returned the houses on the tamer sound side to what they once were: oceanfront property.

When the island had naturally migrated toward the mainland, it had left these backside residents high and dry, with landlocked docks that ran out from the backs of their houses, docks that once were on the water but now found only sand. Until two months ago. Now the docks reached the water again, the new Olympic pools connecting them to the Sound. Which meant everyone was happy! The islanders, both Gulf and Sound side, were happy because they finally got what they wanted. The Governor was happy because the islanders might vote for him. And BP was happy because these folks sure weren’t going to be complaining about a disaster that they had cannily turned to their advantage.

“Everyone is happy,” Bill agreed. “Except the island.”

And, of course, Bill himself. One thing he was particularly unhappy about were all the beach grasses and plants, grasses and plants that held the island together, now uprooted and dead in the massive sand piles on the Gulf side. But if he was unhappy, he was also energized. Gone was the professorial figure of the morning, dispensing Latin names of plants. Here was a new Bill, charging around, assessing the damage, beginning to make calls to his editor and local politicians, ready to uncover this mess.

On the walk back to the car I slowed to take notes -- I scribbled down the words “Organized Chaos,” which appeared on a sign on the front door of one of the beach houses -- which left me behind again, and Bill and Bethany made it to the car long before I did.

I tried to speed up, but it was dangerous. A rush hour of oversized vehicles crowded me off the street. I had grown used to all the dumptrucks rumbling past, but now, in the homestretch back to the car, dozens of Humvees flew by, coming from God-knows-where. Bill was ready to go, eager to spread the news of what was going on here, so he ignored the septuagenarian policewoman and drove past the barricades to pick me up. This created quite a clamor at the security booth. One of the security cars trailed us as we left the island, and when Bill dipped in and out of sidestreets, they followed. When we finally turned for the bridge Bill waved goodbye in the rear view window.

“It’s unbelievable,” he said quietly. “They claim they are trying to protect themselves from the oil. But these clowns have done a thousand times more damage to this island than any oil will.”

Portions of this post were adapted from The Tarball Chronicles.

BP Ponys Up, Hit the Beach (While You Still Can!), Baby Cheetahs Cheat Death
Whoa Canada, Bad Vibrations, Attack of the Tiny Crabs
Slaves to the Screen: A Cartoon Caution

Faith and White Pelicans: Finding Hope in the Gulf Spill's Aftermath

David Gessner — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 13:56:40 +0000

By David Gessner

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

INFOGRAPHIC: What a Blind Scientist Sees
In Each Shell a Story
On This Earth, a Shadow Falls

Telling a Deeper Story [Video]

David Gessner — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 20:25:14 +0000

By David Gessner

“Why does that guy keep writing about the BP oil spill?” you may rightfully ask.

Well, part of it is certainly the fact that I just had a book come out about the subject, and am therefore required by law to keep on topic.

But there’s another reason, too. After several months of studying the spill, I realized that I was also studying the way we tell our national stories. The way we the people, or at least we the press, seem to suffer from an advanced case of A.D.D., the way the spill was EVERYTHING for a while before we skipped on to tsunamis and Tea Parties. The way this short attention span leads us to over-dramatize a subject while it is hot and forget about it when it’s not. And, perhaps most importantly, what this says about what those who run the media think of their audience, the way they underestimate us and treat us like candy-craving children.

Personally, I don’t really think we are that dumb. Certainly the people I met on my travels through the Gulf were not. I remember the one time I watched the national news with some locals, how we rolled oureyes and laughed at the way they made it all seem like an adventure story out of an action film.

So maybe that’s another reason I haven’t “moved on.” Maybe that’s why I’ve stubbornly stuck with this story, believing that there is still a deeper, longer story to be told.

That said, you may still be sick of my writing about it. So here’s a movie where I talk about it instead:

BP Ponys Up, Hit the Beach (While You Still Can!), Baby Cheetahs Cheat Death
VIDEO: Algae As Fuel
Slaves to the Screen: A Cartoon Caution

Revenge of the Tarballs

David Gessner — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 18:44:30 +0000

By David Gessner

Last Thursday, I took a walk along the Gulf of Mexico in the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge in Alabama. I had walked that same beach during the height of the BP oil spill last summer, and though seventeen months had passed since the Macondo Well exploded, and a year had passed since the same well had been declared capped and the tragedy over, you wouldn’t have known it if you had been with me.

Up the beach, to my west, dozens of BP workers combed the sand for a fresh crop of tarballs that had come in with Tropical Storm Lee and a thunderstorm that had hit earlier that day. And it wasn’t just the tarballs that were fresh: BP was back in the news. Over the span of the last couple of weeks, BP has been declared legally culpable in last summer’s Gulf disaster; the BP spill was declared the origin of the new tarballs; and a new scientific study from Auburn University has concluded that the oil on the Gulf floor isn’t degrading quite as fast as the earlier, cheerier scientific reports suggested. Finally, this week marks the first time that BP has submitted a new deepwater exploration plan in the Gulf since the spill.

Still, the national news didn’t do justice to what I was seeing with my own eyes. From the newspaper articles I had read, you would have thought that six or seven tarballs had washed ashore, and a few of the old BP regulars had been called up, had a kind of reunion, said, “Hey, what you been doing since last year?” and then set to cleaning. It wasn’t like that. The workers were out in force, about forty of them, and after spending a couple of weeks cleaning the more public beaches, they were now turning their attention to this stretch of less-trafficked seashore, where a fresh mess had been tossed up, revealing what BP wanted to keep swept under the Gulf’s rug.

I approached a couple of the workers, a man and a woman, who weren’t supposed to talk to me, but who, I had learned from experience, usually were so bored after a day of tarball farming that they couldn’t help themselves.

“You finding much?” I asked.

The woman held out a net that looked more suited for mullet than oil.

“We’ve been walking all day,” she said. “There are balls all up and down the shore.”

The tarballs in the net were the size of quarters, and I mentioned that they didn’t look all that big.

“We’ve got some this big,” she said, making a fist.

I thanked her and walked down the beach, away from the workers. A great blue heron barely flew off as I approached, and sanderlings pecked the sand before skittering away. I counted nine natural gas platforms off shore, and soon enough I came upon some tarballs of my own, as well as an orange squiggling line that worked its way down the beach, a kind of foamy stew. This once famously white beach was stained and smeared, as if Dr. Suess’s Things One and Two had raced about with cans of red paint.

I hadn’t planned on coming to this beach. I was down in the Gulf to hawk my new book about the BP disaster, not to hunt for tarballs. But although I’ve written the last sentence of that book, the story just keeps on going. I had been eating barbecue chicken and fried okra at a local restaurant called Live Bait when I asked my waitress how the clean-up was going on, and she told me I should drive down to Bon Secour. The locals know that this thing isn’t over and that they can expect to see tarballs kicked up by storms for years to come.

The only ones slow on the uptake are the majority of scientists, who have tried to claim the mantle of reason. They have cautioned that it is too soon to make any rash conclusions, that science takes time, and that the studies of the environmental dangers of oil might take years. That’s fine, but on the other hand, many of these same scientists are quick to assure the public there is no threat.

George Crozier, director of the Alabama state sea lab at Dauphin Island, told the Associated Press that he doubts that the new tarballs pose much of an environmental danger. But isn’t that a fairly rash statement without evidence or long-term studies? Where is the skepticism and caution now? The point is, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that scientists are not allowed to make broad sweeping statements about the dangers of the spill and then turn around and make broad sweepings statements about the fact that there is no danger.

The new report from Auburn is welcome because very few scientists, outside of the University of Georgia’s Samantha Joye, have had much negative to say about the way that millions of gallons of oil have affected the Gulf. Many of the Gulf studies are funded by BP, but there are other reasons for this caution. No one wanted to say anything too early and later be proved wrong. Then there is the fact that many scientists, like many people in most professions, are careerists who don’t want to scoop themselves by revealing results before they publish them in a paper in a journal. Finally, there is the larger point: scientists are, increasingly, specialists, and can’t be expected to see the greater whole.

But it doesn’t take a specialist or scientists to see what I am seeing now, and it doesn’t take any special observational skills to see this smeared beach. I understand why the cameras are gone. Complacency, boredom, and love of novelty might make us want to turn to something new. But seventeen months later, the oil is still here. It’s on my feet, and it’s on the skeletal plate of the blue crab swimming in the pool of orange spew, and it’s down on the sand that the sanderlings are picking at. I don’t need a scientific report to tell me that something is not right here. You can tell me this is normal, but my eyes tell me it is not.

President Obama Bought My Book. Did He Learn From It?

David Gessner — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 19:44:32 +0000

By David Gessner

According to the Boston Globe, President Obama purchased my book, My Green Manifesto, while shopping at the Bunch of Grapes Bookstore on Martha’s Vineyard last month. No writer expects this kind of thing, and in fact my attitude toward publication is usually more in line with Ed Abbey’s: “One more book down the well of oblivion.” But with the president’s purchase, my book suddenly felt slightly less destined for the oblivion hole. The article about the purchase sent a flurry of congratulatory phone calls and e-mails my way, and left me with a general sense of giddiness that lasted the weekend.

But after those superficial pleasures faded, I was left with a deeper question. What did I want -- really want -- for the commander in chief to take away from my book? It puts forth the idea that environmentalism has become too elitist and stuffy, and that it tends to swing from hysterical END OF THE WORLD warnings to mystical mumblings to dry technocratic language, and that, all in all, that language needs to be thrown over a clothesline and beaten with a broom.

The reason I focus on language is that I believe if we are able to speak more clearly about the so-called environment then we might be able to think more clearly about it too. If we did, we might realize that we, as species, evolved in nature, and that we are still drawn to it in a way that, when denied, twists us up inside. We might also understand that connecting to places, and loving and fighting for them, is about as natural an urge as a human can have. When I was finishing my book the editors suggested that, since mine was an environmental book, it should have bullet points, likely thinking I would make a list of how we should all take the lint out of our driers and screw in those twisty light bulbs. I complied, but with a different kind of list. Mine had only two points:

1. Have a small love affair with something in the world, a place or an animal or idea.

2. Fight like hell for that thing.

But what does this all have to do with our president? Am I suggesting that he sneak out of his vacation house on the Vineyard next summer, smear clay and osprey feathers on his body, swim naked, and howl at the moon? Well, yes, partly. But I’m also suggesting, to a man who puts such a high premium on being practical, that it is possible to weld pragmatism and passion.

This combination of qualities is embodied in my book’s protagonist, Dan Driscoll, an environmental planner for the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, who spent over twenty years working toward what most deemed an impossible goal: cleaning up and re-planting the banks of the Charles River, a river once so famously polluted that it inspired the Standells’ “Dirty Water.” Dan Driscoll’s quixotic goal was to sell the idea of the Charles as a nature preserve, all the while wrangling, talking, and legislating land away from encroaching factory owners, homeowners, and even a local Mafioso in his attempt to restore native plants and trees to create a green corridor through the heart of Boston. Dan’s was an odd quest, no doubt about it, but in this age of environmental losses and hand-wringing, perhaps the oddest thing about it was this: it was successful.

Four years ago I paddled the length of the Charles River with Dan and wrote about it, first in an article for OnEarth (see "Riding the Wild Charles"), and later in My Green Manifesto. What especially struck me about Dan, other than his obvious love and attachment to the place, was his hard-headed and practical manner. His was not a pure environmentalism.

“We nature lovers are hypocrites of course,” he said as we paddled down the river. “We are all hypocrites. None of us are consistent. The problem is that we let that fact stop us. We worry that if we fight for nature, people will say, ‘But you drive a car’ or ‘You fly a lot’ or ‘You’re a consumer, too.’ And that stops us in our tracks. It’s almost as if admitting that we are hypocrites gets people off the hook.”

I pulled my paddle out of the water and turned back to listen.

“What we need are more hypocrites,” he said. “We need hypocrites who aren’t afraid of admitting it but will still fight for the environment. We don’t need some sort of pure movement run by pure people. We need hypocrites!”

This was what I found so exhilarating about being with Dan, a mix of raw passion and realism. Dan’s view seemed to open up environmentalism to the rest of us, to make it sloppier, more hypocritical, more fun, and, ultimately, more effective. In fact, Dan Dricoll seemed to approach fighting for the earth with an almost entrepreneurial gusto, exactly the kind of eco-fighter that the president himself envisioned during his first campaign, before all things environmental fell off his radar. Dan takes particular pride in the fact that he worked with corporations and businesses, and while some of those first fought his plan, they all now support it and act as stewards on the land.

So I suppose my hope would be that Mr. Obama, reading my book during all his spare time, would recognize in it not just the type of man he once held up to us for admiration, but the man that many of us hoped he was. Because if Dan Driscoll was open-minded and pragmatic, he also knew when to dig in his heels, to fight for something he believed in, no matter how absurd it might seem to others or how much ridicule was heaped on him, and to fight with the same spit and vinegar spirit as one of his own heroes, Teddy Roosevelt. It was simple really: he fell in love with both a place and an idea, fought for a couple decades for that place and idea, and did so in the face of great criticism, shaken at times but sure he was right.

Am I wrong to think the leader of the free world might learn something from a guy named Dan?

Editor's note: David Gessner's latest book, The Tarball Chronicles, which also grew out of his reporting for OnEarth, is out today ... you know, just in case the president is looking for a sequel. Publisher's Weekly calls it "brilliant." Really. That's why we hired him, folks.

Foot Power, Rio Beckons, Congress to Navy: Screw National Security, Burn Oil
Transit Cuts, Scary Super Weeds, Better Water Use: Fracking or Fighting Fires?
Slaves to the Screen: A Cartoon Caution

Believe the (Long-Term) Hype

David Gessner — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 14:00:58 +0000

By David Gessner

The author in front of damage from Hurricane Irene on North Carolina's Topsail Island. Credit: Mike White

For a long time environmentalists have fretted that people don’t take their warnings about global warming seriously. I have an idea. Maybe Al Gore and Bill McKibben can get folks to pool their money together and hire Jim Cantore and the rest of his Weather Channel gang.

"I am standing here watching a polar ice cap recede," one would shout into his microphone. "Wow! Did you see? That was historic melting!"

After three days of raw hype and some wind down here in North Carolina (and throughout the East Coast), it’s tough to say whether the professional weather dramatists -- buffeted about as they are by every breeze -- do more harm or good. My wife watched a local forecaster, getting her melodramatic groove on, as she stood on one of our local beaches and warned that no one -- no human being -- should be out on the beach, a point that was somewhat undermined by the mother pushing a baby stroller behind her.

Warnings are good of course, but the worry is the boy-who-cried wolf factor. Hype this one and watch people laugh at the next one. We North Carolinians are battle hardened, and after getting all my lawn furniture in, I rode my mountain bike over to Halligans, the local bar, to watch the storm come in both on the Weather Channel and through the window. On the stool next to me was a lifelong Wilmingtonian who could read the signs in both the sky and the television, signs that told him that though Irene was big, it was far from a big one. He knew what he was doing, but most people don’t. The problem is that if enough folks say, "Oh, that wasn’t so bad," then they will likely underprepare for the next one. And if this is true for North Carolinians, imagine what New Yorkers will be like if the storm surge doesn’t breach the sea walls at Battery Park. "You think I’m gonna evacuate again?"

But at this very moment there are more tropical depressions brewing in the Caribbean, and hurricanes have the unpleasant habit of both doubling up and being nothing like each other. Once the winds died down enough on Saturday afternoon, a friend and I drove up through Irene’s relatively minor wreckage to Topsail Island, an overdeveloped island that Orrin Pilkey, the Duke geologist who has been among the loudest voices warning against our overdevelopment of the coastline, believes to be the worst example of coastal management in our state.

Some of Topsail’s homes are so close to the water that they seem like they are being offered up to Poseidon, but Irene did relatively little harm there. There was the usual street flooding, and the fairly feeble north-end berm had been eaten away some more, but we were not treated to the floating houses that have made this island such a dramatic player in earlier hurricane narratives. In fact, the main damage we witnessed was to gas stations, specifically to the metal awnings of gas stations. Before we even got to the island we saw a huge awning that had crashed to the ground just twenty minutes before our arrival. I talked to the owner, who said that they hadn’t used the gas pumps for a couple years, after the price went up above $2.99, since the counters on his pumps didn’t go up as high as 3. "We didn’t sell gas anymore, but it gave us good shade," he said, then explained that his car had been parked where the awning had crashed until a few minutes before. We saw a similar scene repeated once we got on the island itself, and though I felt bad for the station owner, I was pleased to see that it was BP’s creepy sun logo that had crashed to the ground.

Cops wouldn’t let us get to the north end of the beach, so we parked and hoofed it. The waves looked scary, like something from a North Atlantic crossing, and black clouds churned north as if heading toward the land of Mordor. But some people were out, and so were some birds: sanderlings, plovers, oystercatchers, and a willet or two. The storm had chomped into the fragile berm but few houses had crumpled to their knees, which is saying something since on Topsail a strong sneeze can often set houses floating. I remembered coming there with Orrin Pilkey and seeing houses far down on the low tide sand, their pilings in the water. Those houses looked like they had had grown sick of land and begun a single-minded migration out to sea. The sheer incongruity of seeing those water houses was startling, and maybe a little thrilling. Walking over the sand toward the buildings I got the sense of something massively out of place, and maybe knew a little how Charlton Heston’s character felt coming upon the Stature of Liberty on the beach at the end of Planet of the Apes.

In fact, Topsail Beach may be just the kind of place we all should be contemplating as we (those of us in North Carolina, at least) wipe our brows "whew" and start to think about how tough we are, and how a puny little thing like a hurricane couldn’t hurt us. Topsail tells a different story. It wasn’t developed until the 1940s, and due to its low elevation, lack of vegetation, eroding inlets, and overbuilding, Orrin Pilkey and others think it is a prime candidate for being destroyed by a powerful storm. In fact, it has already suffered that fate once, in 1954, less than ten years after becoming a town: Hurricane Hazel washed over the entire twenty-two mile island and destroyed 210 of 230 houses. But that was just a warm up for the summer of 1996, when the island was the stage for just the sort of mini-apocalypse that Orrin Pilkey spends his spare time envisioning. Within the space of eight weeks Topsail was dealt a double blow by hurricanes Bertha and Fran, which served to first strip away the scant dunes and then wash over the entire island, leaving all the buildings battered and many, including the police station, washed out to sea.

The houses that did not float away were flattened, except for the lucky few that were merely flooded. If these had been archetypal storms, essentially razing and submerging the town, then the reaction to them was also an archetypically human one. If ever there was a time that people might have been ready to listen to Pilkey’s cry of "retreat from the beach," this would have been it. But Americans don’t like the sound of the word "retreat," especially Americans who have invested millions of dollars in their homes. And so like ants barely pausing after their hill has been kicked over, the residents set out to re-build exactly where their homes had been built before: that is, right in the line of fire of the next storm. They were helped in this by federal aid and by a federal flood insurance program that encouraged people to build on the shore in the first place.

The houses that have been re-built along this beach now stand like a great monument to human stubbornness.

"What’s remarkable so far is how storms barely slow down coastal development," Orrin told me the day we visited. "I was down in Florida after hurricane Donna hit in 1960 and people said, 'Well I guess this is the end of the Keys.' Of course it was really just the beginning. They started building even bigger places. When the North Carolina coast started being developed heavily, we coastal scientists used to say, 'What we need is a big storm.' We figured that people would see what a storm did and heed its warning. But then Hurricane Hugo hit and we learned that people start building again as soon as the wind dies down. Hurricanes have actually become giant urban renewal projects. The buildings come back bigger than before. But of course the site they are building on is even more dangerous because the shoreline has retreated landward and the dunes have been damaged. But still they re-build. It’s really a form of societal madness. I can’t put it any more strongly."

A form of societal madness. Well, maybe, yes, sure. I agree with Orrin, of course. Though not entirely. It is hard for me to be too moralistic since I live by the shore. And while I admit that there is something massively idiotic about all the re-building, there is also something oddly admirable. Nothing, not even repeated beatings by storms, can squelch our urge to live by the sea. The lesson most people took from Katrina, it seemed to me, was not that "it could happen here," but that it could only happen in New Orleans. The logical thing would be to not build by the water, but every day, as the water rises, more and more of us rush forward to greet it. In fact, for the first time since colonial days more of us live near the shore than not. And more and more people are building larger and larger homes closer and closer to the sea just as the shoreline is eroding and the sea level is rising, not to mention the fact that coastal storms, including most obviously Atlantic hurricanes, are becoming more violent.

Maybe we can’t help ourselves. Maybe it’s natural. Like children playing in the waves, we want to be close to all that beauty and wildness. And like children we build castles, imagining them to be permanent. But we had better not be like children in other ways. For all Irene’s power, the tendency is to laugh now that it’s almost over, to say "Nah-nah, Nah-nah, you missed me."

And it might have.

So let’s luxuriate for a while. Let’s feel relived and a little cocky as we clean up our yards. Let’s even laugh at the Weather Channel buffoons.

But then, let’s watch out for the next one.

BP Ponys Up, Hit the Beach (While You Still Can!), Baby Cheetahs Cheat Death
Foot Power, Rio Beckons, Congress to Navy: Screw National Security, Burn Oil
INFOGRAPHIC: What a Blind Scientist Sees