not. We can sometimes outsmart her for a lifetime or two but she’s coming to get us eventually, and she’s coming back to haunt us right now.”
I think of an interview I heard with a New Orleans scientist. The reporter kept talking about the oil—the action, the adventure, the disaster!—but the scientist insisted on talking about the Mississippi, which he did until the reporter finally got fed up and ended the interview. A lot of people from around the country are mystified when Louisianans, upon being asked about the oil, start talking about erosion, the Mississippi Delta, the river.
“That’s because the loss of the wetlands connects to so many things,” Ryan explains when I bring this up. “People talk about greenhouse gases and global warming. But think about what losing these wetlands means. These marshes are like prairies, so rich in grasses, and they produce so much oxygen, you can almost see it pulsing off the marsh. I imagine it shimmering off in waves, the way the heat from a fire does.
“Think about what it means to lose a million acres of habitat like this. How many trees are equal to a million acres of grasslands? Many, many . . . a tropical forest’s worth. Then think of the way a healthy marsh reflects back sunlight with its pretty blue water and grasses. What do you think all this black water around us is doing? It’s sucking in the heat.”
I’m not sure if this is what the Ocean Doctor has come to hear, but either way he’s not complaining. I, for one, am spellbound. It is a bravura performance, obviously practiced but also passionate, delivered from the soapbox of the seat behind the boat’s console.
“Everybody wants instant gratification; humans only think of their own lifetime. But what happens is while we’re thinking in our seventy years, everybody wants their project started tomorrow and then they want it done the next year. It’s not going to happen like that: it took eons of time to build this land and it will take time to build it back. But if we don’t start right now, my great-grandchild will never see what I’ve seen and what my ancestors saw. And this part of Louisiana will not be here in thirty years. This is a national treasure, but we’re letting it slip right through our fingers. It makes me sick.”
Ryan is not a big gesticulator. For all his intensity, he keeps relatively still, hands on the steering wheel. No doubt he has spent a career telling fish stories from that very spot, regaling his customers. He is part nature boy, part showman, part arm-twister, and we, floating in the middle of the bay, are a captive audience. I’m not sure if Brian and Nathan, drifting fifty feet away in the Zodiac, understand what is going on—engine trouble?—but maybe they have stayed in Ryan’s lodge long enough to get it. Whatever the case, they wait patiently.
“I used to see deer and bear and bobcat out here when I was hunting and fishing,” he continues. “Now I see raccoons and otters clinging to little spits of grass that aren’t big enough to sustain life. A whole world is going away in front of our eyes. Not too long ago people made their living trapping down here. But there are no more animals to trap. They’re dead, there’s no habitat. So instead of yelling and screaming because someone was trapping animals, why aren’t people yelling and screaming because the animals are dying because there’s no habitat. There was once a way of life, but that way of life is gone. People used to hunt ducks for a living and sell them on the market. Well, now we have processed ducks—that way of life gone too. If it keeps on going like it’s going there will be no shrimp. And then, what next? This is the best place in the world. And for me not to know that my kids can come and see it? ’Cause it won’t be here? Scary.”
Ryan starts the boat up again. He seems to be done for the moment. The rest of us look at each other, stunned, and resist our instinct to applaud.
I love Ryan’s description of the way energy shimmers off the marsh in waves. And I also love the way it shimmers off the most motivated and driven people. I am energized by obsessed people like Ryan, who manage to unite a wild personal energy—an energy beyond reason—with a love of what they have found here on earth. Running into someone like Ryan is reassuring in the face of a larger hopelessness; it’s good to know that if we are going down, at least we’ll go down fighting.
Ryan is greedy for this wild place, he wants it for himself and for future generations. He needs it. Our best hope lies in working with nature, just as we must work with human nature, and that does not mean sitting in a field and picking daisies. It does not mean denying self-interest either. Self-interest, rather than an evil, contains as much energy as anything else on earth. What is a more glorious fuel, capable of getting more done?
I think back to a lunch I had a couple of years ago with Jim Gordon, the president of Cape Wind, who had fought for almost a decade to put a wind farm out in Nantucket Sound.17 When he first made the proposal I reacted with outrage, like so many other Cape Codders did. “It can’t happen here, not in this beautiful place.” But I evolved, and that day over lunch Jim pulled out his iPod and showed me that, though it felt calm, the winds on the Sound were blowing strong enough to provide us with around 67 percent of our electrical needs, even during the crowded summer.18
“The environment is changing with or without Cape Wind,” he said. “This region is one of the most susceptible to sea level rise. Already you’ve got insurance companies pulling out from houses within a half mile of shore. You’ve got more intense storms, beaches eroding. And as the population doubles, where is our energy going to come from? It would be nice if it were a choice between Cape Wind and nothing. But it isn’t. It’s either gas and coal or us. We need to make some hard choices.”
I liked what Jim was getting at, but what I liked even more was that he admitted his motives were not pure:
“My opponents say, ‘He just wants to make money.’ And I do want to make money. I want to show that it’s not just coal-driven power or oil-powered power plants that make money. Alternative energy can make money.”
I have held on to that conversation during these dark times in the Gulf. While this past April was a bad mnth environmentally, there was one bright note that did not get much attention outside of the Northeast. During the very same week that the oil started gushing, Jim’s project, the first offshore wind farm in the country’s history, was approved by the Department of the Interior.19
Perhaps I can better explain what I am talking about by using an example of what I am not talking about. Not long ago I watched a film of a lecture recommended by a friend who knew I was going to the Gulf. In the lecture, Jeremy Jackson, a famous coral reef ecologist, described the current and future state of our ocean. The news was bleak: corals are gone, fish are gone, algae blooms are everywhere, and the ocean floors now look paved, all previous growth dug up by trawling that kills the very grounds where future fish will be born. In twenty years we will have only minnows left, and that if we are lucky. Jackson’s talk was an apocalyptic tour de force and you could see people in the audience nodding even as their hearts and hopes sank. Then, after delivering his funeral oration for twenty minutes or so, he concluded: “The thing we really need to fix is ourselves. It’s not about the fish, it’s not about the pollution, it’s not about the climate change. It’s about us, and our greed, and our need for growth. . . .”
It sounded familiar: we need to change something basic about ourselves. I think Jackson is probably right about the fate of the oceans. Certainly I would not debate him on a subject that he has spent his life studying. But I think he is dead wrong about human nature. I would argue that while he was busy staring down at sea urchins through his microscope, he did not keep quite as careful note of the species he is part of.
“We
