Sometimes you go to Drake's Beach at Pt. Reyes and it's just you and a couple of gulls, with maybe a semipalmated plover or two on the reef and a wandering whimbrel probing for sand crabs. I was amazed on this gray September morning a couple of years ago to find the shoreline teeming with young Heermann's gulls and brown pelicans.
Unfortunately, the whole Seashore is closed due to the Woodward Fire. I'd take a gray day on Drake's Beach over another day of self-imposed house arrest due to Covid-19 and wildfire smoke any day.
One of the things that gets me through the urban exile is a good book, like the one I just finished called The Nature of Nature, by Enric Sala. The writing is engaging and hopeful, and even includes some photography, as you might expect from a book published by National Geographic.
I didn't start underlining passages until nearly midway into the book, when I could no longer help myself: "A recent study suggests that a global shift to regenerative agriculture--practices designed to produce and restore the life of the soil--would have the ability to sequester most of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere."
After that I was underlining sections about how trees share carbon through underground mycelial networks: "During the summer months..., adult birch trees in the sun help fir trees in the shade. But in the fall, when the birch loses its leaves but the fir still has green needles, it is the fir that sends nutrients to the birch."
The book is full of these kinds of tidbits, but they are just parts of the intricate ecology of the story Sala tells, such as how an increase in whaling leads to the depletion of sea otters, or how PCBs that were banned 40 years ago continue to wreak havoc on killer whales which are now "among the most contaminated animals on our planet...."
The main thing I got out of this book is how global heating (Sala calls "climate change" a euphemism) and other impending ecological calamities are not inevitable, even at this late date. As the book jacket says, "In this impassioned and inspiring book, world-renowned marine ecologist Enric Sala illuminates the many reasons why preserving Earth's biodiversity makes logical, emotional, and economic sense."
Unfortunately, those are not the kinds of things that move your average chucklehead influencing public policy. While they're busy fretting about class war, race war, and civil war, a real monster is coming to eat their grandchildren. Someone needs to write a book about how to shift the trajectory of selfish, short-term greed and mean-spirited contrariness toward intelligent action to make a better world.
As Sala shows, that better world is still within humanity's grasp. It's something to think about as we experience a record heat wave this weekend and choke on a record string of Spare the Air Days. How sad would it be if 20 or 30 years from now, we're thinking about this as being the good old days.
* * *
