I know what you’re thinking — “Not another ‘can we save the planet’ tome. Hasn’t that theme been done to death?”
I know because that was my exact thought when I first looked at picked the book. It’s heavy, a thick, hard-bound volume with the obligatory cover photo of an orca breaching the surface of the ocean (the “isn’t Nature awesome?” shot), and numerous quotes and accolades from wellknown environmental and conservationist writers and speakers.
“Not another one,” I moaned. “How do I get enthusiastic about yet another doom-and-gloom treatise on the end of life as we know it? It will be ponderous,” I was sure, “filled with scientific words and long sentences of gobbledegook and facts and opinions guaranteed to cure insomnia. Whoopee.” Well, I’m committed, so I sat down with the book. And found myself unable to put it down. It’s that good.
Wohlforth, author of “The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change,” and a lifelong Alaskan, begins his search for the good he believes is inherent in mankind using the ocean as an illustration. “Each of my oars produces a pair of vortices, those spiral waves that drill into the surface, and smaller swirls burble out behind the boat as I row … along the shore of Alaska’s Kachemak Bay. My small liquid spirals spin in the same shape as the deep, dark gyre of water that circles the bay…” This adventurer’s interest is piqued. Wohlforth continues: “The ocean is so vast, it’s everything — the source and sustenance of life, the birthplace of the rain and cleanser of the air, the planet’s essential medium, upon which all the land is but an island. … To ponder its totality is like trying to think of the entire universe at once.”
But there’s a dark spot to his point: because of overfishing, climate change, and habitat destruction, the ocean is on the brink of its demise, wobbling precariously at the edge. He admits the message is one we’ve heard numerous times, to the point of suffering “a sense of mental fatigue.” On the one hand is the “magnificent vastness” of the ocean, on the other are the petty and mundane things that tilt the scale — “human values overbalancing toward cheap fish-and-chips and motor oil left to dribble into storm drains.” And he asks the first of many questions that all somehow morph into that one big one I started with: How did we make the choice for “things that are small and fleeting over an eternal source of life?” As I said, it’s an answer swamped by complexity.
There’s no quick, simple, two-minute-sound bite yes or no box we can check. It involves those things we really hate — introspection, reflection, examining the past and making hard choices. “We must look into our spirituality, economics, politics, and personal relationships. The exploration leads into the roots of caring and selfishness, well beyond the ocean’s edge, eventually including our entire physical space.”
The Introduction delves briefly into what Wohlforth believes is the start of the slide down to the abyss, the idea of humans as competitive beings and life as a series of contests in which only the strong survive, and deserve to survive, which arose out of the European Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. With it came the market economy and freedom of the individual over the well-being of the group. He calls this the “hermit crab doctrine,” brilliantly illustrated in a story he tells of his young daughter growing up in Kachemak Bay. Putting a group of hermit crabs into a tide pool, Wohlforth and his daughter watch the crabs “brawling madly,” attacking each other in the hopes of winning themselves a larger shell, which they wear on their backs as armor against other crabs looking for their shell McMansion.
“The pursuit is indiscriminate, apparently with the default assumption that any shell might be better.” It’s a world of escalating struggle and never-ending war. Peace hasn’t got a chance in this tide pool.
Science, and the success of the new societal norms, seemed to back up this view of humans as hermit crabs.
We survived, and thrived, as a species, spreading out like a plague upon the land.
As I read this section of Wohlforth’s book, I kept thinking of a Thomas Hobbes quote from “The Leviathan”: “…the life of man is [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Quite a bleak picture that paints, eh?
But Wohlforth posits this is not the universal nature of mankind; before we were “enlightened,” we lived very differently, closer and more connected to the land and our fellow human beings.
But rather than assume such attributes are long gone, science is finding, Wohlforth says, “individual competition is not universal human nature. It’s only one way of living, and a peculiar one that doesn’t address the deeper needs of most people.”
Left on their own, most humans show a remarkable tendency to be connected to other people and nature, to feel empathy, to care about our surroundings. We prefer fairness and bonds to material possessions. We are positive, rather than negative.
It’s a major break from what we’ve always “known,” and like most new, radical concepts, it takes some getting used to. And lots of evidence.
Wohlforth informs the reader he wrote this book to “unmask false assumptions about human nature.”
Through the eyes of people around Alaska, some wellknown, others not so much, he explores how the good side of human nature comes out — in attending to environmental disasters, cleaning beaches of never-ending mounds of trash, struggling to save unmarked wilderness from willy-nilly development.
He shows how cooperation, caring, and working together can accomplish seemingly impossible tasks, making those who struggle better people than they were, and giving the rest of us a brighter place in which to exist.
Of course, this isn’t just a theoretical treatise on the human relationship to nature. Wohlforth flat-out admits he’s got an ulterior motive: “… my audacious purpose in writing: to prod this unseen organism of collective belief.”
That refreshing honesty, the lack of spinning his desire with politically correct and false blandishments of bettering the collective, is one reason this book is so good. It reverberates throughout the book; an unflinching, honest look at what we as humans do, what we are capable of, and why we don’t always live up to that promise. He uses Alaska as the testing ground, because we are already feeling the effects of a changing climate. The arguments over what is causing it, whether it’s natural or man-made, and can it be stopped, are moot for us — it’s happening now, changing our state, and we have to act now. Debate is a luxury one can’t afford in the midst of crisis; it’s like discussing an escape plan as the building burns around you.
I can’t even begin to point out all his wonderful phrasings and poetic narrative.
His ideas are many, his ways of illustrating and making a point so varied, I can’t do justice to the writer or the book.
This is a must-read, and not just because it is such a joy to read a well-written, thoughtfully produced, thoroughly researched work. It’s worth reading for the way it makes you think about all the things we’ve held as absolutes, all the hopelessness those absolutes have fostered in us. When you finish reading, you get the sense we really can make a difference, we really can stop this bus from toppling over the cliff into the dark, unforgiving sea.
Libbie Martin is a freelance writer who lives in Fairbanks. She can be reached at martinlibbie@yahoo.com. The Fate of Nature: Rediscovering Our Ability to Rescue the Earth by Charles Wohlforth
Thomas Dunne Books
2010 • $27.99
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