Читать книгу The Tarball Chronicles - David Gessner - Страница 13

THE CASE AGAINST STRAIGHT LINES

When we get back to the lodge I want nothing more than a nap. This will not be happening. The lodge hums, a nest of activity. The Ocean Doctor, aka David Guggenheim, has arrived. David is a scientist and radio personality who has traveled the world reporting on the state of the coasts, and today he is joined by an NBC Nightly News cameraman who circles him like a pilot fish. The cameraman, fresh off of a stint in Baghdad, another war-torn region, is South African and his words sound thick and garbled. (“He has a funny accent,” Ryan says in full-on Creole singsong.) Guggenheim’s brother, Alan, has also come along and we say hello as Holly and Ryan try to organize the afternoon’s expedition.

In the midst of the chaos I get a phone call. At the end of my trip out on the water with Captain Sal, we came upon a row of fish camps. Through the rain I stared out at the dilapidated shacks that lined the canal about a mile from the marina. They appeared fragile, permeable even, built as they were on a watery foundation. They were unabashedly ramshackle, pieces of plywood nailed here, a screen door thrown up there, rickety docks jutting out like the tray on a toddler’s high chair. I decided I needed to find a way to spend a night out in one of them. They reminded me of other modest coastal dwellings I had known, and they were right out on the frontlines of the oil. I ended up talking with a woman named Leona, who ran the Myrtle Grove Marina store. She told me to call Anthony, a sixteen-year-old local kid who liked to hang out at the marina and whose parents owned one of the fish camps. I got his outgoing message, a loud and blaring country song, and wasn’t sure I’d gotten through.

“Hallo,” he says now. “Are you the guy who wants to go out to camp?”

I am, I tell him, and he says that he could maybe get me out there tonight. I explain that I will already be out on the water for most of the afternoon and am not exactly sure when I’ll get back.

“That’s okay,” he says in a rushed musical mumble. “I’ll get the place ready. I don’t mind waiting.”

I hang up and within minutes we are driving two cars and towing two boats across the road to the local boat launch, not three hundred yards from the lodge. The plan is to head out on the Gulf in the Cousteau pontoon boat and Ryan’s single-console fishing boat. Brian and Nathan take the pontoon boat, a Zodiac VI, while I climb into Ryan’s boat with the Ocean Doctor, his brother, the cameraman, and, of course, Ryan at the helm. Soon we are racing across Barataria Bay, wind and spray in our faces, and it strikes me how strange it is to be traveling through the very same waters I was just staring down at from a half mile above. Meanwhile the Ocean Doctor is interviewing Ryan, and the cameraman is bouncing on the bow, trying to get good shots of both men.

“Look at my GPS,” Ryan says. “It still shows this as land. Not long ago this was 6.3 miles of solid grass. Now I can point my boat right over those 6.3 miles and never see a blade.”

Ryan pulls up to a spot where wooden posts thrust up through the water. Dozens of huge black and white Frigatebirds, the same type of birds I saw from above this morning, lift off. I have never seen this many Frigatebirds outside of Central America. They rise from the posts in slow motion, beautiful and gawkily elegant, as Ryan cuts the boat’s engine.

As we drift, he explains that the posts are not just a perch for birds, but also a kind of grave marker for an old bayou camp.

“Locals would come here—right here—and fish and trap and hunt and have fish boils and crab boils and shrimp boils and they would walk out their back door and hunt ducks. And now look—there’s not a blade of grass for miles.”

It’s true; we might as well be in the middle of a lake. In every direction we can see places where land used to be and where we now see only clouds reflected in the water. In the distance small strands of marsh islands barely keep their heads above the tide, just the hair of their grasses showing. In spots we passed earlier you could see dead trees going under.

“This is not something that is happening over centuries,” Ryan says. “Just a few years ago I could look as far as I could see and there was grass. Now it’s all underwater. Whatever the reason—sea level rise from warming, the land sinking due in part to oil extraction—it really doesn’t matter. The point is that it’s happening.”

I knew the seas were rising, of course, but before I came to Louisiana I didn’t know that the seafloor was sinking through a process called subsidence. Over the centuries, sediment dumped by the Mississippi has weighed down the Gulf floor, causing it to literally sink. And as the land sinks and waters rise, saltwater invades the marsh, killing cypresses and other plants that help stitch the wetlands together. Louisiana’s erosion rate is the worst in the country and the equivalent of sixty football fields of wetlands are lost every single day. Which means that if you stand in one place long enough, it might just turn from land to water.¹⁵

Among the things killing the wetlands are straight lines. Nature, of course, isn’t very fond of straight lines, and for centuries creeks wound sinuously through this area. But humans long ago decided that winding was not a good way to travel. They dredged straight canals to replace the creeks without considering the consequences. Straight lines are also required for the ten thousand miles or so of pipeline that travels through the wetlands, carrying oil from the offshore rigs to shore, unintentionally ushering saltwater deeper into the marsh.¹⁶

This morning, looking down from the copter, I could see how these straight lines crosscut the marsh, and I could also see the rectangular holes of water where oil rigs used to be. The juxtaposition of wild marsh and planned grid made me think back to being a kid at the beach. I loved playing on the small sandbar islands that revealed themselves at low tide: when the tide started to come back in, I would aid the rising waters by digging lines across the sandbars with my heel, creating canals for the incoming tide to run through. I would dig a dozen of these lines across the sandbar islands, flooding them before their time. The same thing is going on here on an enormous scale.

Ryan has stopped the boat for a reason. Though two of us aboard are professors who lecture for a living, we will learn now that we’ve got nothing on the boat’s captain. Ryan, it turns out, is not just a man with energy and passion. He is also a man with a cause.

As we bob on the water Ryan talks movingly about the loss of people’s livelihoods, the loss of animal habitat, the loss of human culture that has accompanied the disappearance of the marshes that made this one of the most biologically productive estuaries in the world. The barrier islands and outer marshes have always been the frontline of defense against hurricanes, and now they are the frontline against the oil, too, keeping it from working its way into the heart of the wetlands. A second defense, Ryan explains, is the Mississippi River itself, which had done more than its part to keep the oil at bay, its massive outward flow pushing back against the Gulf’s inward surge. He worries that this might change once the river’s seasonal strength wanes.

“The river protects these marshes,” he tells us. “But it’s also what made Louisiana. The sediment it brought here, the nutrients that helped grow these wetlands.”

And the river would still be doing this if it were not hemmed in by the levees.

“What we have to do is redistribute,” he says.

He doesn’t mean the wealth, God no. He means the water. “Free the Mississippi,” it turns out, is Ryan’s rallying cry. He is not talking about radical freedom here, since without the levee his lodge would be underwater; what he is really looking for is a series of diversions so that the river can feed the marsh at various points, rather than dump all it has to offer in one great slug out in the Gulf.

“You know, it’s funny,” he says. “A little while ago I was in Alabama on Lake George with some friends, and they said, ‘Oh, I wish those boats wouldn’t go so close to the shore or they’ll cause erosion.’ And right then it dawned on me what the rest of the country thinks erosion is: a little bit of dirt falling down a bank. But when we speak of erosion down here we are speaking of millions of acres of land going away, never to return. And the only thing that is going to make this land come back is the same thing that built it in the first place. The Mississippi River. All we have to do is let the river go through these marshes like it did for eons of time when it built Louisiana. We have to break it out of the levee and reintroduce the river through different diversions and spillways. We could start slow, maybe one diversion channel, but that would be sufficient to bring in the freshwater and to grow the freshwater aquatics and to keep the saltwater at bay and start to rebuild Louisiana. If we let the freshwater start flowing into the wetlands it would start growing the land that very first day.”

I think of how the river looked this morning from above: corralled by its levee, segregated from the wetlands. In Ryan’s vision the river would spread out more naturally, like a watery hand, feeding the marshes with nutrients it has gathered during its powerful crawl and sludge from Minnesota down through the country’s middle and finally to the Gulf. Of course, far from “natural,” this would be a massive engineering project on the scale of building the levee itself. But it would be engineering toward a different end, toward releasing the river, to an extent, and letting it do what it once did naturally.

“It is such a beautiful solution and it doesn’t just solve the problem of erosion,” Ryan continues. “It protects us from hurricanes, and oil, and it tackles the problem of the dead zone in the Gulf. Right now we have a dead zone the size of New Jersey out in the Gulf, where the Mississippi dumps all the crap from a thousand farms—the manure and fertilizers and insecticides—along with the nutrients. This creates algae blooms and removes the oxygen and kills all sea life too. But if this same nutrient- and fertilizer-thick water runs into the marshes, the result is completely different. Everybody says, ‘We got to stop the nutrients; we got to stop the fertilizers,’ but you know, we really don’t. All the wetland plant life will use the nutrients, filter the leftover fertilizer, and when it comes out the other end it will be pristine, crystal-clear water. If we let the river go where it’s supposed to go, we will be using those nutrients while also cleaning up the dead zone. Let nature do that herself, the way she intended. We think we’re smarter than Mother Nature, but we’re 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 humans are an elsewhere,” said my old friend and mentor, the poet and essayist Reg Saner.²⁰ The natural human state is that of hunger. We are always reaching, reaching, grasping, wanting to be somewhere other than where we are. It is not my role to stand apart from this and say, “No, it is bad to reach and grasp.” That is as foolish as it is ineffective. A better question is how to use this desire, and the unimaginable energy it unleashes. Is it possible to change the objects we grasp for? To refine and revise what we mean by “more” and “better”?

Talk of our doom is supposed to motivate us to change, but most often it leaves us feeling impotent. Rather than cause us to fight, it makes us withdraw. And to set the problem in terms of changing our basic nature is to insure it is a fight we will lose. It would be like saying to a bee, “You’ll be okay as long as you stop buzzing and working so hard on the hive.” If we set ourselves against human nature we propose an impossibility, insuring our own failure.

The question is not “How do we change human nature?” That has never been the question. The question is “How do we use human nature?”—just as surely as it is “How do we use the river or the tides or the winds?” The environmentalism that makes me most uneasy is a rationalist’s environmentalism, one that seems to hint at the perfectibility of man. I do not believe that humans are perfectible, or even very rational. We are a tribe with restless minds. We move and we shake and we need fuel to do it. For most of us, there is no greater punishment than sitting still and, faced with our current crises, we are not going to suddenly turn ourselves into Zen monks. Instead, maybe, at best, we can take some of this restlessness and energy and put it to better uses. Maybe we can nudge it in new directions, or, better yet, divert it toward older, deeper channels where it used to run. Maybe, as we do this, we can be guided, not just by the desire for ease, but also by older ideals of sacrifice; of good work and growth and wildness beyond an engineer’s dream of straight lines.

Which does not mean we should deny our engineers entirely, just suggest that they work with the world and not against it. We all have an engineer’s voice inside us—calm, rational, logical. We need those voices in difficult times, but we have made the mistake of thinking that that one voice is all. It is not: along with that voice we need one that is wild, inspired, simultaneously guided by, but somehow beyond, mere reason. It isn’t that I don’t believe in reason, willpower, all that; it’s just that I believe in this other thing too. And that other thing is where we merge with the world beyond us, a world that does not believe in straight lines. This is not a New Age sentiment. It is rather a very old one, one we need to get back to. The trouble is that we seem hell-bent on destroying the only thing that might hold a clue to an alternative way to be. And that thing we are destroying is a machine of such complexity that it makes our strongest computers look like children’s toys.

Over the last few years we have lost a clear-cut definition of what it means to be environmental, and that is good. So many things are mixed up that we have now entered a world where developers can be the good guys. I like 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 their desire to save the world. Maybe they are the poster children for a new environmentalism, a hard-nosed environmentalism that sees how wind and water can coincide with profit.

Maybe it is time for the word environmentalism to go away altogether. Maybe the word needs to be knocked over and shattered. Whatever we call the shards that are left, it is not time to think in terms of black and white, good and bad. Black and white is what led to the checkerboard grid that covers the delta, slicing and sinking the marsh. What we need is creative, energetic thinking, but thinking that really takes the world into account—what my father called “the real world,” though his meaning was the opposite of mine. The real world is the one that has been here for millennia, not the industrial model that has been stamped upon us over the last hundred years.

We need to unleash our imaginations, wedding them to good science and engineering, while working with the world. This is not a conservative or liberal issue. It is a practical one. How will we next fuel our tribe? What juice will make us go? Do we keep pumping what is basically a dry hole, in the meantime taking risks that will destroy not just ecosystems and habitats and animals, but lifestyles and human culture? Do we do this in the name of sucking the last drops out of an old well, an old way? Or do we start doing now what we will have to do soon enough: looking for a new one?