The Fate of Nature: Rediscovering Our Ability to Rescue the Earth - Hardcover

Wohlforth, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312377371 ISBN 13: 9780312377373

Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books, 2010

Synopsis

“What capacity for good lies in the hidden depths of people?”

Starting with this question, award-winning author Charles Wohlforth sets forth on a wide-ranging exploration of our relationship with the world. In The Fate of Nature, he draws on science, spirituality, history, economics, and personal stories to reveal answers about the future of that relationship.

There is no better place to witness the highs and lows of our treatment of the natural world than the vast wilds, rocky coasts, and shifting settlements of Alaska. Since the first encounter between Captain Cook's crew and the Alaskan Natives in 1778, there have been countless struggles between people who have had different plans for the region. Some have hoped to preserve Alaska as they found it, while others aimed to create something new in its place.

Incidents such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill may seem like cause for despair. In the face of such profound tragedies, Charles Wohlforth has found heartening developments in the science of human altruism. This new understanding of what causes humans to cooperate and act conscientiously may be the first step toward taking the actions necessary to preserve an environment that has already been altered drastically in our lifetime.

A clear-eyed, original work of research, reportage, and philosophical reflections, The Fate of Nature gives us a chance to change the way we think about our place in society and the world at large.

About this title

About the Authors

Charles Wohlforth is a lifelong Alaska resident and author of The Whale and the Supercomputer, winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize, as well as many other books and articles about nature, history, politics, and travel in the North. An avid cross-country skier, Wohlforth lives during the winter in Anchorage with his wife, Barbara, and their four children. In summer they live off the grid on a remote Kachemak Bay shore reachable only by boat. Wohlforth began his career as a reporter for a small-town newspaper. As a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News he worked months in the field covering the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

CHARLES WOHLFORTH is a lifelong Alaska resident and author of The Whale and the Supercomputer, winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize, as well as many other books and articles about nature, history, politics, and travel in the North. An avid cross-country skier, Wohlforth lives during the winter in Anchorage with his wife, Barbara, and their four children. In summer they live off the grid on a remote Kachemak Bay shore reachable only by boat. Wohforth began his career as a reporter for a small-town newspaper. As a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News he worked months in the field covering the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Learn more online at www.fateofnature.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Fate of Nature

Rediscovering Our Ability to Rescue the Earth

By Charles P. Wohlforth

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2010 Charles Wohlforth
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-312-37737-3

Contents

Introduction, 
Part I: The Context: Natural History and Human Nature, 
1. The Gulf of Alaska Cauldron, 
2. Killer Whale Culture and Human Spirituality, 
3. Chugach Culture and the Spirits of Nature, 
4. How Animals Think, 
5. Thinking and Being a Person, 
6. The Essence of Carol Treadwell, 
7. Connected or Alone, 
Part II: The Enlightenment Comes to Alaska, 
8. How Captain Cook Saw Alaska, 
9. Rethinking the Moon, 
10. Competition in Men and Snails, 
11. The Russian Conquest of Alaska, 
12. The American Conquest of Alaska, 
13. Evolution, Free Will, and Hope, 
Part III: How Conservation Happened, 
14. Taming the Gold Rush, 
15. The Anatomy of Sharing, 
16. Catalysts for Conservation, 
17. Whistle-blowers to Save Alaska, 
18. Conservation and Eugenics, 
19. Fantasy Meets Reality at Katalla, 
Part IV: Property Rights and Community Rights, 
20. Chenega Destroyed, 
21. Ownership in a Liquid World, 
22. Clem Tillion and the Ownership of the Sea, 
23. An Alternative to Tragedy, 
24. Chenega Reborn, 
25. Native People Become Native Corporations, 
26. The Broken Covenant, 
Part V: Exxon Valdez: Blackness Visible, 
27. Finding Oil, 
28. Costs and Values, 
29. A Community Collapses, 
30. Rick Steiner and the Fight for the Trees, 
31. Understanding Life as a System, 
32. Hearts Connect to the Coastal Forest, 
Part VI: Conclusion: The Problem and Hope, 
33. Choosing Good (Beach Cleaners Part 1), 
34. How Change Happens, 
35. Chenega's Next Generation, 
36. The Hedonic Treadmill, 
37. Making a Difference (Beach Cleaners Part 2), 
38. Celebrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Gulf of Alaska Cauldron

What seems solid and permanent swirls and disintegrates, spun by invisible forces. Sand and mist blast along the seven-mile beach of Softuk Bar, entrained in an east wind tearing the tops off roaring gray breakers and hurling them into the twilight. A lumbering brown bear, hunched against the flying grit, digs for a beach plant that the wind has buried in wet sand up to the tips of its leaves. The leading arm of a vortex hundreds of miles wide is sweeping the exposed shore of the Gulf of Alaska, east of Prince William Sound, half a day's walk from the next nearest human being. As the storms of September and October pulse unremittingly and the dark of winter thickens to impenetrability, the last person will desert these hundreds of miles of shoreline and even the blubbery, salmon-fattened bear will disappear. Sand lance, silver slivers of fish, will bury themselves in the beaches like hidden mineral veins. Humpback whales will retreat to Hawaii and stop eating, trading food for warm water. Herring will gather in the sound's fjords where cold, hidden waters may, in stillness, allow a store of fat to last through the winter. While animals wait, life recharges in the mountains above. The storm is depositing energy there, in deep fields of snow that will power the spring.

This is the starting point, within a three-mile-high semicircle of mountains along the gulf's northern rim. Remote from human experience or even detailed scientific understanding, mighty forces and abundant organisms combine in a system of life that ultimately sustains animals and distant, unknowing people and restores the air and stirs the ocean. The furious chaos vibrates with creativity and destruction, as virile and unknowable as an ancient, all-powerful god. From ingredients of water, air, light, and rock it produces the aged giants of the deep and the weightless feathers that lift terns balancing on gusts. From a swirling cauldron come delicate patterns of meaning.

Here, at this beginning, we can begin to decipher what we are, although not in any simple way. To know our own human nature we must examine our context, the ecosystem that precedes us, especially that wild part that defies human habitation or control. For example, consider the sea's alchemy that spawns tiny, crystalline herring eggs on fronds of seaweed, delivered to the lips of a woman on a warm spring afternoon next to calm water, sustaining her in body and spirit. Food, the essence of what one is, and who, and even why. She will know answers just by crushing the salty gems between her teeth — about the sea's generosity and its demand for humility. Somewhere the stormy night hides an origin for that understanding.

First the storm reaches shore, falls into the mountains' snare, screams in alpine wind tunnels, and bleeds out. Moisture rising against rock condenses into water and snow. This snowfall accretes to become the continent's largest glaciers, snow becoming dense, glassy ice and oozing downslope, grinding and shattering solid rock on the way back to the sea. Downslope from the permanent ice in the perpetually damp temperate rainforest grow enormous trees and bottomless spongy wetlands pocked with small, clear pools. In winter, all is buried under yards of heavy, wet snow. In the spring, the rivers will flood with melted snow, ice, and sediment, eventually fertilizing the ocean's plankton with iron and extending quarter-mile-wide ocean beaches.

The fresh water itself moves the ocean. Freed of their banks, the rivers turn right, pumping the coastal current toward the west. No, the water doesn't turn right. It flows straight. It's the earth that's turning. Like a marble rolling across a spinning disk, water seems to turn. The runoff from the gulf's coastal mountains follows the shore to the west, sucking behind it warmth from the American West Coast, whose energy in turn melts more snow and ice and powers stronger storms to pile more snow and ice in the mountains. Spirals within spirals: the storms bend, too. Air rushes toward their low-pressure centers, but the spinning earth diverts the wind to the right, on the long, circuitous route of a cyclonic vortex, like water going down a drain. The storm's leading edge of east wind collides with the Gulf of Alaska's coast, hurling sand west along endless, bear-tracked beaches and pushing water west, along the shore. In the dark of autumn, the waves grow into hills.

There are mountains and canyons under the sea also, along the ragged-edged continental shelf, the fringe between land and the abyss. At the center of the gulf's arc, vertical rock confuses the waves and wind, with contradictions offered by fjords, islands, channels, and spires, and within the unfathomably complex inland sea of Prince William Sound, which encloses a world of its own, water-floored corridors walled by brooding spruces leading to secret, fecund gardens of mud and flashing fish, prey for eagles. Winds funnel and focus through these mazes. Currents twist in baroque patterns, changing with each turn of the tide or season. Intricate forces entangle ecological stories into as many digressions and surprise endings as there are eddies and tide pools. But the tempo of every tale comes from the beat of the storms and the timing of the moment in the spring when the sun emerges warmly on stilled waters.

The prodigious biological productivity of the Gulf of Alaska owes everything to that moment when the surface's crop of phytoplankton is perfectly prepared for growth. The winter storms have stirred up organic nutrients from the seafloor, mainly nitrogen; few other waters in the world are as rich. The rush of fresh water from the mountains, more than the Mississippi River's annual flow by half, and all in a few months, disgorges atop the heavier salt water. Iron and other mineral nutrients arrive with the fresh water to mix with the nitrates. As the storms die and the fresh water spreads, a surface layer develops to hold blooming plankton near the sun (when the sea is mixed, the plantlike organisms fall into darkness). Now, in May, sunshine is high, gaining every day until it lasts almost all night, brightness reflecting off still-snowy shores. Water is calm and rich in fertilizer. Everything is perfect for an explosion of photosynthesis, and the phytoplankton blooms.

The energy that plankton capture from the sun over a few weeks will feed zooplankton by the billion — tiny creatures like krill and copepods, which look like shrimp, and larval forms of many other animals, such as crabs, barnacles, and other shellfish. The water clouds with them, especially where tidal currents meet, fronts between waters of different temperature or salinity that concentrate matter like invisible walls in the ocean. Forage fish such as sand lance and herring gather to feed on zooplankton in crowded schools. Gulls find the schools from the air and dive on the water, wheeling and dropping straight down, as violently as spears, then hurriedly climbing up the air again to protect a catch. Humpback whales lunge through the schools, bursting diagonally from the surface, occasionally catching a bird, too, before rolling over and sinking back again with a giant slosh. Salmon, lightning fast and bright, blaze through the schools of forage, fattening for a single spawning journey upriver. Rivers along the gulf coast reaching hundreds of miles over the mountains will receive salmon eggs and carcasses. Salmon flesh will feed bears, birds, and scavengers, whose waste will fertilize the trees, moss, and grass. Long before that can happen, during the spring, the phytoplankton bloom subsides, having consumed the winter's mixture of nutrients, but that energy flows on through the system, from mouth to mouth, up the trophic levels of the food web, and up to the floppy tops of towering hemlock trees fertilized by bear scat.

Described that way, the Gulf of Alaska ecosystem sounds like a huge organism. But it's something entirely different. Living organisms repeat processes in cycles, over days and seasons, and over life cycles that recapitulate with each generation. But unlike an organism, the Gulf of Alaska sometimes transforms itself, unpredictably, and as drastically as an otter waking up as a fish. An entirely changed system of life arises: new water temperatures, altered currents or storms, a shift in the entire ecological regime. Crab and shrimp disappear for decades and enormous schools of bottom-dwelling pollock show up. Salmon runs jam rivers but sea lion colonies dwindle. Until, without warning, the gulf wakes again as something else.

Scientists can find plenty of clues to diagnose these transformations after they happen — far too many clues. Tiny changes easily become big ones, and tiny changes happen all the time. A fluke of winter weather could bring very cold air during an especially low tide, killing most of the mussels and, if the timing is right, allowing competitors like barnacles to take over the tidal rocks; and the mussels might not recover for years. And big forces can be subtle. Oddities in the paths of the earth and moon through space repeat the pattern of the size of the tides every 18.63 years, and somehow that affects the population of fifty-year-old halibut resting on the dark sea floor. Systems interact constantly, invisibly — the concentrically nested ecosystems, the interwoven currents from the far side of the globe, the swirl of wet winds and the mountain claws that catch them. Internal resonances switching frequencies, plus fishing, pollution, and climate warming: nothing causes the changes, or everything. Science calls the system complex. The unknowable giver of life answers no direct questions.

In Prince William Sound, spring used to reach an orgasmic climax when cloudlike schools of herring gathered to spawn in late April and early May. Females would lay eggs on kelp and rock along miles of shoreline, and males would spew sperm into the ocean to float freely among the eggs, white plumes drifting like curtains, streaming in the water from headlands. Birds, seals, whales, and people gathered for a feeding frenzy. Twenty years ago, after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the fish became deformed and diseased and then the huge schools stopped returning. Years later unrelated herring populations in the gulf crashed as well. The cause, like so much else in this spinning, disintegrating universe, cannot be proven.

But enough herring remain so that, on one bright day in May, Diane Selanoff, a Chugach Native, climbs sure-footed in rubber boots from a skiff, over seaweed-covered bedrock near Tatitlek, in the heart of the sound, to pick fresh sprouts of popweed coated with translucent herring roe like tiny bubbles glistening in the sun. Her eyes shine and her smile refuses to be repressed, as happens when an experienced middle-aged woman feels an old joy well up. She says she'd like to lie down and eat it all. This is the food that sustained Diane and her single mother when she was a girl, beach food, when she was growing up poor in the village of Port Graham. She picks a piece for the bag and picks a piece to eat. Slightly salty bombs of pure freshness explode on the teeth. The animals long ago taught the people which foods would heal them, Diane says, and popweed was a good cure, eaten with this delicious seasoning of eggs or laid on the place that hurts when taking a steam. Diane smiles, works, and talks, mostly in English, but with a lot of Alutiiq words. They say in Chugach villages that when the tide is out, the table is set. Chitons, clams, mussels, and cockles, the seaweed and beach plants, the seabird eggs and octopus — it's all there at your feet, delicious and healthy, much of it ready to eat raw from the ocean. The sound seems to gently offer us everything we could need. In the sun, on the rocks, above water so clear the skiff seems to levitate, I smell the seaweed and herring spawn. Tiny intertidal creatures let out barely audible clicks in the drying air, a sound like scattered raindrops, over which the flow of Diane's low, steady voice continues.

She says, "The ocean is the source of all life for our people. Not only for our people. For everyone."

CHAPTER 2

Killer Whale Culture and Human Spirituality

Dropping to her knees, Eva Saulitis, a young whale biologist, cast a slip of paper into a fire on a pebble beach. She had just begun learning about Prince William Sound, but, like many others, she could sense spirits above in the misty spruces and down below in narrow underwater canyons, where great, warm creatures slid through green shadows. She summoned them with her burning words, calling to the killer whales. In the morning, Eva and another researcher would sometimes stride through forest and over meadows to the top of a mountain behind the camp, where they scanned miles up and down the passages of the western sound. Upon spotting the killer whales' black backs and high dorsal fins they galloped down the steep path to a little aluminum boat with an outboard motor to photograph and identify the whales. At night, on a cot in a canvas tent behind a storm berm of rocks, Eva worried that she wouldn't find the whales from the mountaintop next morning, or she'd make a dangerous mistake, or there would be something wrong with her, personally, that would doom the work. When she fed the fire, she incinerated her doubts, written on slips of paper, bidding the whales to show themselves. They usually did. Killer whales were easier to find in the sound then, a quarter century ago.

When killer whales' backs break the surface, the sea itself comes to life. Their skin has the liquid smoothness of calm water. A black bulge rises like the sea flexing a muscle. The dorsal fin comes next, a vertical saber that seems to rotate along the axis of the back. Now comes another back and fin, and another, different sizes and slightly different shapes, apparently swimming in formation, silent and without a splash, but quick. The pod is cruising its territory, circuiting home waters the way Native hunters do, surveying the homeland to find out what's changed. Eva and her colleagues know the pod right away and set about photographing each back and dorsal fin. These fish-eating killer whale families are the most stable in nature — including humans — with children that never leave their mothers. Eva can remember the first time she saw each whale.

The sea is another world that science encounters where the waves meet the air, or a little below, at the low tide line or with cameras or divers lowered from ships. From those moments we've learned something, but in little pieces, as if seeing through a distorted glass that can focus on just one narrow spot at a time. Often the glimpses only accentuate the immensity of it. These scientific challenges deal out discoveries grudgingly and leave much unknowable, but the quality of mystery itself helps in an investigation of human nature. The sea teaches humility even as it excites the imagination. It is populated by animals similar in many ways to our own kind, but who remain always intriguingly beyond reach. In its capacity to inspire, the world below the ocean's surface raises an essential question for understanding ourselves: why do we care about these creatures? Mere curiosity doesn't begin to answer it.

Killer whales emerge from that other world like spirits at a séance, focusing the attention of the researchers in the boat to a transcendent level, but giving only clues and cryptic suggestions about what their whole lives are like on the other side. Without looking at notes or photographs, the scientists immediately recognize animals, delight in new offspring, and wonder about those missing. Sometimes they're able to see flashes of a successful hunt, when meat-eating whales take a porpoise or a seal, or when a coordinated team of hunters kills a huge gray whale — then they can hear, as well, the raucous sounds of victorious whales celebrating underwater. But conclusions about the majority of the whales' lives come slowly, because these brief sessions — like murmurs from the departed — tell mostly of the moments when the two sides meet.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Fate of Nature by Charles P. Wohlforth. Copyright © 2010 Charles Wohlforth. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312377371
• ISBN 13: 9780312377373
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 434