Each year my family spends a week on the beach at Pawleys Island, South Carolina. Pawleys (as we call both the island and our yearly vacation there) is a barrier island a little south of Myrtle Beach. It is lined with houses that are mostly weekly rentals for the families that appear on each Sunday afternoon and leave the next Sunday morning.
This year, my friend, Leah, and I got up every morning before sunrise (Pawleys is the ONLY week of the year I do that) and walked the beach while the coffee brewed. Most of the sunrises were pretty, but only once did we see the sun actually "boink" above the horizon. Most people don't know that it makes that exact sound when the first bright bead of sun appears.
If you get to see the sun rise above the horizon, it is the only time you can observe its movement through the sky as visible motion. I didn't time it, but I'm sure it was just a couple minutes from "boink" to seeing the full flattened disk hover above the water.
The life in the tidal zone is particularly specialized and precisely attuned to the rhythm of the tides. Ghost crabs are the most animated. At sunrise, they have all come out of their burrows to scavenge and to refresh their gills in the ocean (they still breathe through internal gills that must be kept wet). You usually don't see them until they move, and then they dash quickly into a hole or, if no hole is available, they cover themselves in sand with a quick flick of the claws leaving only their two eye stalks exposed. If you do not see where they bury themselves, you never know they are there. One crab we surprised was close to the water and ran into the sea. As the wave receded, I could see the eye stalks above the water observing us and then moving seaward with the wave as the crab moved deeper so as to maintain cover. There was something comical about being scrutinized by a crab through twin periscopes, kind of like the crab was a Nazi submarine that never got word that the war was over.
Coquina clams also inhabit the tidal zone. They are small (about 3/4 of an inch long), variously colored bi-valves (mollusks) that follow the water line as it moves in and out. When the tide is coming in, you can see them pop above the sand just before a wave hits. They must hear or feel the wave coming because their timing is precise, but the most mysterious thing is that they do it together, in unison. Somehow, they all agree when it's time to pop up and let the wave carry them higher up the shore. Once washed a few feet higher, they quickly burrow back into the sand and leave a tiny net exposed with which they capture plankton. I don't know how they can agree when to pop up and ride a wave or how they know how far up the beach to be washed. It's more than I would expect of a small clam, but I guess they've had a 100 million years to get it right.
The Dolphins come by twice a day, in the morning moving south to some feeding place around Georgetown and, in the evening, moving north back to the place where they spend the night. There seemed to be 15 or 20 in the pod, although they are hard to count when you only see one or two arch above the water at a time as they breathe. Troubled by anxiety? Watch dolphins go by.
Ospreys are the best show in the air. You may see two or three at a time cruising at about 200 feet looking for fish. When they spot some, they momentarily orbit or hover, wings flapping, before beginning the dive to the water. Unless the dive is aborted at the last second because the fish has disappeared, the dive will end in a crash and splash from which, more often than not, the Osprey will arise clutching a fish. It will shake itself off and turn toward the beach at low altitude as it checks for jealous competitors, then climb toward its nest located in the uninhabited land across the inlet. They have to bring home a fish about 5 times a day to keep their brood happy.
The island is a beautiful place to observe life and, of course, ponder your own or the lives of the six billion other people walking this big beach. We have overrun this planet. We have already changed its ecological balance, diversity and climate irreversibly. It is not a matter of IF we will do tremendous harm, only how much.
Those who love the Earth can be easily discouraged. For every person who sits at a dock on the inlet to watch a snowy egret step methodically through the shallows looking for minnows, there is another who speeds mindlessly up and down the quiet waterway on a screaming jet ski. When contemporary culture offers nothing except a series of escalating motorized thrills and increasingly realistic "first-person shooter" games, it's not hard to envision a future of sterile suburbs full of people watching various forms of video and raising their young primarily to replace the current target audience with a fresh one.
You can get really cynical if you care about the Earth, or not.
I was driving to the library during my beach week to check e-mail and my stocks. NPR had a talk show going about Norway's desire to end the 20 year ban on commercial whaling so they can kill minke whales. Some lobbyist for Norway was debating Joshua Reichert of the Pew Charitable Trusts. The lobbyist answered each charge with diversions or subtle changes in subject.
Charge - nobody needs whale products
Answer - it's our tradition to hunt whales
Charge - it's inhumane to spear those mammals and wait for them to choke on their own blood
Answer - people have to eat
Charge - the whaling industry has driven most species of whale close to extinction
Answer - but there are still plenty of minke whales
The ban on commercial whaling has allowed some species to return from the brink of extinction. Now, Norway, Iceland and Japan would like to end the ban and start killing whales again because (see arguments above). Lately, Japan has used foreign aid bribery to bring otherwise disinterested members of the International Whaling Commission over to their side. Although the ban is still in place, friends of whales are losing ground. The only encouraging thing is that, at least, we are having the conversation.
Even so, saving whales is a relatively minor part of the effort to reach that sustainable place where the world stops being a place we "use" and becomes the home of which we are the principle stewards. There are bigger problems to be solved. This last week, Secretary of State Rice delivered a "stern" warning to North Korea about their plans to test an ICBM. Of course, a representative of the government that owns the biggest nuclear arsenal in the world, wants to extend nuclear weapons into space and wants to develop tactical nukes specifically designed to attack a particular country (Iran), sets a new standard for hypocrisy when it lectures nuclear hopefuls. Sadly, the only cure for the Bush administration is to wait two years and hope they don't screw up something else real bad. So far this week, so good.
Afraid of terrorists getting a nuke? Why not be afraid of a good old fashioned nuclear war? Bush's latest foreign-policy "triumph" was to cave in to India's demand to increase their production of nuclear bombs tenfold. In return, India promised to behave (cross their hearts). To make Pakistan feel better, they get the F-16s.
The nuclear problem is very simple. As long as countries have them, there WILL come a day when these weapons will be used. The only way to prevent that day, is to start taking them apart. Nuclear disarmament would surely be a long, messy, faltering process measured in decades if not centuries, but it is not an impossible goal and you get there by going, one step at a time. To make any difference, you have to believe that it is possible and you have to convince others to believe also.
In truth, the Earth doesn't care. We can hurt her, but we can't destroy her. If the Earth were turned into a radioactive desert, she would only shrug and pick up where she left off, somewhere around the Paleozoic Era I imagine. I would be the last to recommend religion as a solution for anything, but certain parts of the Bible speak even to heathens like me. One passage is this:
"One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever."
The Earth will always be here, but it will only be as good as we are able to make it. The cure for the Earth's current infestation of reckless humanity is not angst, or passion. The cure is to make ourselves less harmful to the earth and more supportive of ourselves. We do that by believing in the destination, convincing others to follow, and by taking one step at a time.