Most people seem to think that to reverse population you’d need violence, epidemics, or forced sterilization. Actually, you need literacy; read on. Many other people think technology will save us.

Photo by Carl Safina

Probably the greatest technological advance ever implemented to ease the likelihood of population-induced starvation was the Green Revolution. Engineered to end hunger, the Green Revolution failed because most of the world allowed the increased food to grow more hungry people than ever. China, partly because of its one-child policy, has eased more hunger, faster, than anyplace ever has. Meanwhile, India’s population growth largely erased its food-production increases. Now a record billion people suffer malnutrition; 10 million more each year. A recent U.N. report titled “The State of Food Insecurity” came with a press release saying, ‘For millions of people, eating the minimum amount of food to live an active and healthy life is a distant dream.’

Land, water, population growth—violence. When Rwanda’s population tripled between 1950 and the early 1990s, it became Africa’s most densely populated country. Farmland and food—and tempers—grew short. And in the ethnic rampage that killed 800,000 in ten days, whole families were hacked to death lest there be survivors to claim the family farm-plot. Sudan’s Darfur genocide was also ignited by disputes over farmland, exacerbated by drought. Sudan’s population, about 10 million in 1950, is projected to hit 70 million by 2050. If it does, Sudan will likely fight a newly doubled 120 million Egyptians for Nile water—unless Ethiopia, having more than doubled to 80-plus million, tries diverting the 85 percent of the Nile headwaters it controls.

Photo by Carl Safina

Poor people don’t want to stay poor. But there’s a misconception that it’s somehow “unfair” to poor people to let them in on the main secret of wealthy, educated, and successful people: smaller families mean larger lives.

The thing that brings fertility down fastest happens to be the same thing that brings down poverty: educating girls. Turns out, illiterate women bear three times as many children as literate women, and their children tend to stay poor. Meanwhile, each year of schooling raises earning power 10 to 20 percent. And when people are a little better off, they desire fewer children.

Photo by Carl Safina

Good news: Things are getting worse at a slower rate; the rate of population increase is easing. Over 40 countries now have populations that are stable or slowly declining, including Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan. At present trends, the world population will likely peak around mid-century (at between 8 and 11 billion). By then, something like 50 countries will likely already have fewer people than today. People can live crowded and in fear. But real human beings will always need soil, water, food, wood, air, beauty, freedom from oppression, freedom of expression, room for compassion, the company of creatures, and a future.

When the ship Titanic set out to cross the ocean, its proprietors believed it indestructible. So they did not equip it with enough lifeboats for all the people on board. History is sometimes destiny. Believing ourselves too clever to sink our enterprise, we’re on another voyage where lifeboat room is limited. And we’re discovering there are more passengers than the mothership was built to handle. No known island exists, no opposite shore, no passing ships to call to for rescue. Just us. Just us, and the wish—perhaps too late—that we had steered a more careful course while the band gaily played.

As we bravely enter the new time of the Anthropocene and the uncertainties of a world with us at the helm, it’s worth reconsidering Thoreau’s declaration, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Wild places produced the living world and its inhabitants in abundance and resilience.

On the other hand, let’s not forget that for most of human history, natural things stood poised to recycle us at any moment. Weather, beasts, famine, enemies. We can live safer and better by enjoying those elements that have come under control—agriculture, medicine—. I wouldn’t recommend a “return to nature.” I like books and science. I like music. I am willing to abandon the concept of Nature. I’m willing to abandon it—for any approach that works better.

Nature is moot, anyway, because we’ve so thoroughly changed the world. As oceans get depleted, water tables drop, sea levels rise, and forests fall, you begin to realize that the draw-down of “nature” is just one side of a coin on which hundreds of millions of people face a world wherein likelihood of dignity—always so elusive throughout history—now drains away with the fresh water; hope flies away like the birds that no longer return.

If, to paraphrase Aldo Leopold’s dictum, “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty” of the living community, then we’ve passed “right” traveling in the opposite lane. If our values change, we might use science and technology to save us. If our failed values persist, science and technology will only press our accelerator.

Adapted from: The View From Lazy Point; A Natural Year In An Unnatural World, by Carl Safina, published by Henry Holt (Hard cover) and Picador (paperback, 2012); winner of the Orion Book Award.

Sources:

Africa populations, relation to Nile water, and population projections and tensions, also Rwanda: Brown, L, 2008, Plan B 3.0, Norton, New York and London, p 117-119. See also: L. Brainard, et al., eds. 2007. Too Poor For Peace? Brookings Institution Press, Washington, D.C.

Education and reduction in fertility: Brown, L, 2008, Plan B 3.0, Norton, New York and London, pp 109, 134.

Getting worse at a slower rate: Longman, P., 2006, “The Depopulation Bomb,” Conservation in Practice 7:40-41.

Fifty countries will likely have fewer people: Lierowitz, A. et al., 2005, “Sustainability, Attitudes, Values, And Behaviors: A Review Of Multinational And Global Trends,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 31:413.

“How we think of problems,” see: Lovins, A., 1991, “Technology Is The Answer (But What Was The Question?), in: G. Tyler Miller, Environmental Science, 3rd Edition. Wadsworth. Belmont, CA. pp 56-57.

Adapted from: The View From Lazy Point. Henry Holt Co.  New York, winner of the 2012 Orion Book Award.

Along the coast where I live, at almost any time of year I love to experience the energies of various migrations of birds and of fish and whales. I think of it as the real world, as natural.

But can we distinguish real from artificial when the world has become so human-dominated that some geologists have suggested naming our time the Anthropocene, the time of people? The migrations, the weather—when we look closely, all bear our thumbprint.

In my idealistic youth I was sometimes told to “pay attention to the real world.” But there I saw a place of tedium tallied in digits and zeros, where strings of zeroes are pursued and prized. The mass delusion of business’s “real world” is the faith that the ledger books capture the value and the consequences of our transactions. They don’t. Yet that collective delusion is real enough to mask some very concrete things.

If people are using the world’s forests, fishes, soils, freshwater and other resources something like 25 percent faster than the world can replace them, it means, basically, that the world would already be broke if we weren’t taking so heavily from the future. People call it “leveraging,” but a new word for delusion doesn’t cure the illness.

In his prescient 1848 essay The Art of Living, John Stuart Mill foreshadowed much of what we’ll be talking about regarding what counts as progress—and what really is progress:

There is room in the world, no doubt…for a great increase in population… I confess I see very little reason for desiring it.

If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which…the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or happier population, I sincerely hope…they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.

… A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living, and much more likelihood of its being improved…

All the mechanical inventions yet made have… enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes.

By around 1800, when the world had about one billion people, The Reverend Thomas Malthus had become alarmed at the implications of population growth. Though water remained plentiful, vast tropical and temperate forests still stood as strangers to the saw, and the oceans shimmered with fishes that had never met a strand of twine, Malthus divined trouble brewing.

Growing at just one percent annually, a population doubles in just 70 years. The U.S. already has twice as many people as when I was born; Tokyo’s greater metropolitan area—35 million—now has more people than all of Canada. During the 20th Century, world population quadrupled; it’s now approaching 7 billion. By 2050, we’ll add to that more than the total human population of 1950.

How many people can this world support? It depends how they live. If everyone gets 800 kilograms of grains annually, like Americans, then the world can carry 2.5 billion people. Problem: we passed that in 1950. The world could support ten billion people living like Indians. Problem: most Indians want to live more like Americans. (It would be interesting to see a 70-year-old American standing next to all the food—and everything else—that person had consumed in their lifetime.)

Of course, before we eat our dinner, we need a refrigerator to store food. In 1980, China produced 50 thousand refrigerators; in 2004 it manufactured 30 million. We need to put the refrigerator in a house, and houses use wood. The forests of Indonesia, Burma, the Russian far-east, and Papua New Guinea will be largely gone by around 2025, and with them their birds, bugs, and Orangutans.

To buy the food, we drive to the store. The Chinese would also like to drive to the store. To have as many cars per person as the U.S., China will need 30 percent more cars than exist worldwide today. Driving them would burn 98 million barrels of oil a day (the world now produces 85 million barrels). If this can’t work for China, it can’t work for India—it can’t work.

We need a new, non-burning energy economy, a way of reducing population, and a way of replacing the delusion of infinite growth. That’s what we need.

Dividers: Four billion people live on less than $2 per day. Nearly a billion people get less than 80 percent of the UN-recommended caloric intake; they are, technically, starving. Undernourished women annually bear 20 million underweight infants, and more than half of Indian newborns would be in intensive care if born in California. A billion and a half people are overweight.

So there are two kinds of people in the world: those who want more, and those who need more. And those who need more, want more. One-quarter of the world’s people consume more than three-quarters of the world’s goods. That’s not fair. But as I mentioned, to give everyone an American level of material living, we’d need two and a half Earths. That’s not possible.

Because forests, oceans, croplands, and water supplies are all being depleted by the number of people we have now, a grim logic appears irrefutable: As we add people, either everyone will get poorer on average, or the poor will get much poorer. Or the population will be adjusted in the usual way: with shortages, bullets, and bombs.

References and Further Reading:

Using resources 25 percent faster than the world can replace: “WWF Living Planet Report; Humanity’s Footprint,” available online.
“The Art Of Living,” by John Stuart Mill, 1848, in: Principles Of Political Economy, Book IV, Chapter VI, Section II.

Number of people the world could support: Brown, L, 2008, Plan B 3.0, Norton, New York and London, p. 188. Chinese refrigerators and China’s resource consumption: Plan B 3.0, p. 219 and elsewhere. Forests largely gone by around 2025: Plan B 3.0, p 88. See also: FAO, 2006, Global Forest Resource Assessment 2005, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome.

Comparisons of Americans with other nationalities: Pearce, F., 2009, “Consumption Dwarfs Population As Main Environmental Threat,” Yale Environment 360 13 April, Available online.

Four billion people live on less than $2 per day: Lierowitz, A. et al., 2005, “Sustainability, Attitudes, Values, And Behaviors: A Review Of Multinational And Global Trends,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 31:413.

Inadequate caloric intake, and Two and a half Earths: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment available online. See also: “Number Of World’s Hungry Tops A Billion,” United Nations World Food Programme, 2009, online.

On May 3 THE VIEW FROM LAZY POINT was named the winner!  View the announcement here.

I could not be more pleased. The award vindicates a lot of difficult effort in puzzling out the concept for this book, then executing it.

This award is given by Orion Magazine for the best book of the year addressing the relationship between humanity and nature.

Criteria for the award include that the book “deepens our connection to the natural world,” “presents new ideas about our relationship with nature,” and “achieves excellence in writing,” according to Orion Magazine’s website.

The award finalists include FIRE SEASON by Philip Connors (Ecco), OIL ON WATER by Helon Habila (W. W. Norton & Co.), SWAMPLANDIA! by Karen Russell (Vintage), and RAISING ELIJAH by Sandra Steingraber (Da Capo).

To read more about THE VIEW FROM LAZY POINT and the award, view this link. http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/article/6197/

Photo credit: KPA-Zuma-Rex Features

When the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico blew out in 2010 and then was finally capped months later, there was room for optimism that the aftermath would not be as bad as feared. Fish were abundant because fishing had been closed, and most seemed to survive the oil itself. Marsh grasses were growing back.

But while I hoped that trend would hold, I knew the real test would be about whether the next couple of breeding seasons would work. Larval fish and shrimp, and their tiny eggs of course, are more vulnerable. They have to develop properly, a process involving incredibly fine-tuned chemical reactions and perfect timing.

How would they fare in a toxic soup? Would the oil and dispersant be degraded and diluted enough to let the next generations flourish?
The first sign of trouble came a few months later, when hundreds of newborn dolphins washed up dead. Their mothers had carried them in their first trimester through the worst of the oil and dispersant.

And now, fish are infected, crabs are clawless, and shrimp have no eyes.

Al Jazeera reporter Dahr Jamail has written an excellent but appalling piece on the horrific condition of fish and shellfish right now in the Gulf http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/04/201241682318260912.html.  There’s an excellent interview with him on Amy Goodman’s superb show Democracy Now http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/23/gulf_oil_spill_bp_execs_escape.

Here’s just a little bit of it:
AMY GOODMAN: “Dahr Jamail, you’ve been following this BP oil spill since the beginning. Talk about what you have found.”

DAHR JAMAIL: “We have recently come across very, very disturbing information from Gulf region scientists. You know, the first person I came across was Dr. Jim Cowan with Louisiana State University, and he’s been working on a project, getting his funding from the state of Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. And he’s been, actually, for many decades, sampling red snapper, which is a very popular fish in the industry. And he’s been finding that before the BP disaster in April 2010, that of all the red snapper he was sampling, he was finding point-one-tenth [0.1] of 1 percent snapper coming up with lesions and other types of problems. Post-spill, that has gone to between 2 and 5 percent of all samples. That means an increase of between 2,000 and 5,000 percent, and in some areas as much as 20 percent, he said, in other areas who have extreme impact, where the oil and dispersants came in nearby the shore, of as many as 50 percent of fish sampled. Very, very disturbing information there.

“And then, another doctor that I spoke with, Dr. Darryl Felder with University of Louisiana-Lafayette, he also has before-and-after samples. He was working out around the Macondo wellhead area on the sea floor with a grant from the National Science Foundation, that they wanted him to investigate just overall drilling impact on species in the area. And so, he had deep sea crab, deep sea lobster, deep sea shrimp, from before the spill, and then many, many sampling trips after the spill. And what he found was obviously a very, very large increase of finding crab and lobster, etc., that had black gills, that had appendages falling off, again similar stains on their shells, and again similar to findings not too different from Dr. Jim Cowan’s, in that when the oil, that much unnatural oil introduced into the environment, coupled with the dispersants, that it’s causing these lesions that are burrowing into the carapace and the shells and eating into the wax of the shells, causing an increase in the microbes that do eat oil. Not only are they not eating just oil, but eating into the shells, and then parasites and diseases and other illnesses are being formed.

“And then, lastly and I think most disturbingly, as you already touched upon, the eyeless shrimp. We’re seeing very, very large incidence of eyeless shrimp now popping up not just in Louisiana, but in Alabama and Mississippi, not just inshore, but further far ashore—offshore. And some of the shrimp that we’re seeing, they came from a shrimper in Louisiana that was caught—caught 400 pounds of white shrimp in one catch in last September, just off the outskirts of Barataria Bay. And that was—of the 400 pounds of shrimp, the shrimpers told us that all of them were eyeless. So, very, very disturbing findings. And unfortunately, we’re expecting more to continue.”

Nat Geo’s new TV Show, Wicked Tuna, aired its first episode last night. The show had come under a lot of pre-airing criticism, including by me on this site. The main criticism: Why would Nat Geo choose to glamorize people who kill a magnificent endangered species — the giant bluefin tuna — for money? (Bluefin tuna are not listed as endangered under U.S. law; they are listed endangered on the World Conservation Union’s Red List. They’re depleted because sushi and sashimi dealers in Japan pay insanely high prices.

Some of the criticism of the show was perhaps a little premature (I wrote my first salvo based on Nat Geo’s press release, before I saw the final product), but some was deserved (I wrote my first salvo based on Nat Geo’s own press release, after all), and I think the criticism from various corners motivated National Geographic Society to improve the balance of the final product. Nat Geo included a conservation message in the beginning and several conservation cut-aways (including a very brief bit of video with me) and reference to overfishing at several points. And there’s more new material on the show’s website.

Contrary to worst fears, the show’s first episode did not glorify the fishing. Contrary to romanticizing the fishery, I felt, the show can make one feel that this isn’t an attractive way to try to turn a profit. These guys are addicted gamblers, gambling on getting a bite, themselves lured into a high-stakes game, and prompted to work even in dangerous weather.

The show made the life look hard, the financial pressure very tense, and the people crass to one another (part of the game involves having highly competitive “colleagues” who don’t really like each other, move in on top of one another if the fish are present, and often withhold information or mislead each other if they find fish first). I don’t know if the inter-boat and inter-personal rivalries were exaggerated for effect on camera, but I had enough experience in that fishery to know they are real enough.

Having been involved in this kind of stuff in the 1980s and 1990s, it really brought me back; I felt the bodily tension of wanting to get that bite when you see fish on the sonar, and the incredible surge of power when they get on that line. I remember the compulsion to be out there. Though I’ve killed them myself in years past, I did not like seeing these magnificent fish killed on TV. And I felt very glad that I am no longer involved in any of that.

Overall, the show was better than I’d anticipated. Based on my meetings with National Geographic during February and March, I found the folks there to be remarkably open to criticism. They worked hard to make the show better in the final edit. For future episodes, I’ve also suggested that they consider finding ways to show a little more of other, worse, ways of catching bluefin tuna that has contributed to their depletion, and — because images overwhelm words — to use graphics to show their migrations, their incredible biology and physiology, and population trends. So we’ll see if they decide to work some of that into later shows.

So I would say the show presents a realistic portrayal of that slice of the U.S. bluefin tuna fishery. It’s the slice that would be the most sustainable, and that is best regulated. It’s easy to feel sympathy for these guys and gals.

But there is also a much deeper history here, one that I’ve been in and around for nearly three decades. Many of the fishermen in this category are not just innocent victims of bad management elsewhere. Many pay dues to a lobbying organization that for over 20 years has fought against the science and scientifically recommended quota reductions (the captains of the big netting boats who founded that lobbying group — and brought into it so many dues-paying small-timers — are now all out of business as a result of the consequent depletion). Over these years, their efforts helped allow continued overfishing off North America. And their anti-science lobbying and paid consultants helped reduce the Atlantic tuna commission to a cynical and ineffective political circus. All of this allowed a new round of overfishing in the East Atlantic and Mediterranean to get a firm and corrupt grip. Now it’s out of control.

And so — U.S. fishermen suffer. Ironically, now that the U.S. fishing is more under control, they cry foul. Yes they are victims. But, to a significant extent, they are victims of their own device. Thus my sympathies are tempered. Wicked indeed. Any way you slice it, it’s a nasty business.

A couple of years ago, Whole Foods Market invited my not-for-profit outfit, Blue Ocean Institute, to help them inform their customers’ selections of wild-caught seafood. Whole Foods wanted to display our seafood rankings in their stores, to show customers which seafood we’d rated green (abundant and sustainably fished), yellow (some problems), and red (major problems: depleted, and or entailing high incidental kill of other species, and/or caught with habitat-damaging methods). In some regions, Monterey Bay Aquarium also works with Whole Foods.

I thought it was pretty great that Whole Foods had opened that dialogue and, frankly, invited some criticism by being so open; a common question I got was, “Why would you work with them if they’re still going to sell “red”-rated fish?” Well, here’s why –

Starting on Earth Day (April 22), Whole Foods won’t be selling any more red-rated seafood. They’ll be the first (and so far only, but we hope that will change) national grocer to do so. Their original target date was one year from now. But they’re so committed, they got there a year early. That’s why.

We could have said no. We could have said, “We’ll work with you after you get the red out.” But the perfect is the enemy of the good. By working together, but us sensing Whole Foods’ commitment and supporting but not rushing them, and by putting the information out there and letting customers take it all in at their own pace, I think we started at good and are now seeing a change that brings a major national grocery trendsetter closer to perfection. And it was all their idea.

Whole Foods Market’s seafood guru Carrie Brownstein has for years worked on this, and we’ve enjoyed a smooth, efficient working relationship. (Blue Ocean’s liaison is Dr. Alan Duckworth: aduckworth@blueocean.org) But much more important than what they’ve done with us, Brownstein and other Whole Foods staff have worked closely with their seafood producers to move some of them closer to sustainable methods. Those who’ve improved enough to make the cut get to stay in the fold. That’s progress.

Whole Foods also offers various seafood certified sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council (founded in the late ’90s via partnership of World Wildlife Fund and Unilever; so beware of industry-spawned imitators), such as Alaska salmon, Pacific halibut, Pacific cod, and Nova Scotia harpoon-caught swordfish. (Fourteen years after the “Give Swordfish A Break!” campaign, those swordfish are recovering. This fall on an upcoming episode of Saving the Ocean — a new series that I host on PBS television — we’ll be showing how harpoon-wielding Nova Scotian fishermen travel more than 100 miles from land to find and catch swordfish.)

If you want to make change, “Show me how” can be a stronger, more effective approach than “Just say no.” That’s what I think. Kudos to Whole Foods Market for showing how it’s done.

Season's Closed so We Threw It Back

Today was the first day of abalone season. These mitt-sized snails cling to rocks in water from the high-tide zone down to about 60 feet deep. We accompanied several fishermen who dive among the sea lions and kelp to find them.

They contend with water in the 50s, Fahrenheit, and strong surges from open-ocean rollers. In about 40 minutes, the diver on our boat caught 100, his limit. For that, he said, he’d earned about $500. He does this several times a week for several months.

He explained that the official government opening of the season was two months ago, but that here the cooperative delays the opening so they can spawn, then bulk up in weight, so they kill fewer and get more money.

He also surfaced with an octopus for the pot, and a 10-pound lobster which, after being admired, was released; lobster season is closed. Our underwater cameraman showed us images of lobsters practically stacked on each other.

What do the fishermen think of it all? They think that without their 60-year-old cooperative, none of these creatures would still be here. They’d have been depleted by now.

This cooperative, self-limiting community supported, self-policing, locally patrolled kind of management could never happen in the U.S. There is no way a group of fishermen could patrol an area and keep away outsiders, nor do U.S. fishermen agree on much. And the scale of most U.S. fisheries makes community organizing next to impossible. Nor would current law allow it. But there’s a flip side too. The U.S. does have government laws, management, and enforcement that Mexico lacks.

I wish I could witness a merger of the two approaches—good law and smart government, and even smarter local control with a very strong emphasis on conservation and the future.

Our abalone diver said that his grandfather had settled here, and his father was also a fisherman; he’s third-generation. But unlike others we talked to here, he doesn’t want his children to follow in his footsteps. “Too much work,” he says. His dream is for them to go to university and have more options. Here, because conservation pays, he can afford that dream.

In our country we used to have something similar. We called it, “the American dream.”

I was sorry our eye-opening Baja trip had to end so soon. There was more to learn.

To see what we did learn, look for Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina this fall on PBS and on the Web.

Abalone and Octopus

Holding Position for the Abalone Diver

Sea Lions

Dave Huntley, Dan Lyons, Tim Wessel, Jesus Mayoral, Carl Safina, Eddie Kisfaludy

Mexican Green Turtles are Blackish

Today Javier took us to a gorgeous estuary called Estero Coyote. There’s a little tourist place here called Camp Rene that has very cheap accommodations and was almost empty when we were there. But beautiful! The fishermen here grow oysters (they’re delicious and cost about 25 cents apiece).

The estuary is filled with migratory and nesting herons, shorebirds such as curlews, godwits and others, Ospreys, and fish. And Coyotes (we saw 3 on the sand flats in about an hour). And—sea turtles.

We set two gillnets and in a short while we had our hands on six turtles weighing between 50 and 170 pounds. We brought them to shore where Javier and his wife Claudia measured and weighed them. Javier let me measure and tag a couple. The numbered tags let them understand survival rates, travel distances, and where the turtles that come here to feed eventually go to nest.

Mexican Green Turtles—called Prietas here—are so dark they’re called black turtles. Those we caught were charcoal-colored with just a slight green cast.

Javier has now spent many years monitoring and protecting the turtles here. Turtles are protected by law in Mexico, but they’re still poached and sold on the black market. But for Javier and the fishermen here, they’re worth really protecting. This place has a reputation to uphold and the premium prices they get for their seafood depends on that reputation.

It must be working; the tagging shows that the turtles here are increasing in number, something that depends not just on local survival but on better protection all along Mexico’s west coast. (I saw and wrote about those protection efforts in my book, Voyage of the Turtle). For his efforts, working with Wildcoast and Grupo Tortuguero, Javier has received national recognition.

Javier and Friend

Estero Coyote

A Turtle to Tag

Claudia Villivicencio, Javier V., and Carl with 160-pound Turtle

Tagged and Released

Safina and Javier Villavicencio Photo by Eddie Kisfaludy

Small Lobster Flying Lesson. Photo by Eddie Kisfaludy

Punta Abreojos (Point Open-eyes) lies about 50 miles north of Laguna San Ignacio. Eddie Kisfaludy flew us up from the lagoon. It’s a small, dusty town, bookended by desert and sea. Coyotes walk the streets with some frequency, and ospreys’ huge stick nests adorn many of the utility poles.

The draw here is a 60-year-old fishing cooperative so oriented to conservation and sustainable fishing—and to patrolling their area against outside pirate-fishing—that their catch has been certified sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council. Not only do they do an excellent job of managing; they get a better price.

On our first morning, Javier Villavicencio took us out to see how members of the cooperative catch Red Rock Lobster. They launch their 23-foot boats by resting them on an axle with car tires, then pushing them by hand into surf. It works surprisingly well.

It’s only about a mile or two to the lobster grounds. The season has just closed so we pulled a few traps for demo purposes, showing how they monitor their lobsters in the off-season.

After coming ashore we watched three boats come ashore with several thousand Kelp Bass they’d caught with traps. They ride right through the surf and beach their boats; a tractor then hooks them and hauls them high and dry.

Fish Processors

We went next to the town’s fish-processing facility, which seemed a perpetual work in progress. We were here to see how they breed the big snails called abalone in captivity. A couple of years ago, toxic algae blooms called red tides killed nearly half the abalone in nearby waters, so the fishermen decided to try breeding them to augment natural reproduction. We saw plate-sized breeders, and many tiny juveniles. So tightly do they hang on to rocks—or in this case their tubs—that the adults were impossible to pry off by hand (there’s a special tool for abalone-prying). The juveniles are going out in nearby fishing areas and people are monitoring to see if they really augment natural numbers once they’re out in the cold, cruel world.

Launching in Surf

Small Lobster Boat, Big Swells! Photo by Eddie Kisfaludy

Osprey String Theory

Playful Gray Whale Calf. Photo by Eddie Kisfaludy

Shortly after breakfasting in a sand-floored adobe dining hall whose thick walls are made of old car tires, we boarded 2 outboard-powered open boats called pangas.  Our boats were captained by Pachico Mayoral and his son Jesus, who started guiding visitors to the whales here when he was 14 (pachicosecotours.com).

Pachico told us that after that terrifying approach by the first whale in the early 1970s, he felt that he and that whale had made peace, and that “the whales have forgiven us for all we did to them.”

I’d seen two whales blow while standing on the beach, and that seemed impressive. But we went in a different direction, a half-hour boat ride to where the whales were “more concentrated.”

I certainly didn’t mind the ride. The weather was nice and I enjoyed seeing Bottlenose Dolphins and birds like brant, grebes, scoters, terns, godwits, and sandpipers. And a coyote trotting along the desert shore. This desert lagoon seemed full of life.

With all that to occupy my attention, in no time we were among so many spouting, rolling whales that even within the arc of a glance around, I could not count them. It seemed there were always a dozen or so within a few hundred yards of us. Overall, Jesus told me, there were about three hundred whales in the lagoon. (There total population now stands over 20,000, coast-wide.)

They come to give birth and to mate. So pregnant females as well as males and females seeking mating opportunities all enter the lagoon in winter and spend several months. The babies put on about 50 pounds a day. Now one to two months old, most are around 20 feet long.

But they look and act like babies. They’re oriented to their moms and they’re active and playful. Not that the adults aren’t active. We frequently saw enormous heads rise straight up and slide down again, “spy-hopping.” And there was the occasional lagoon-detonating full breach, visible over long distances.

This place is very well managed. A world Biosphere Reserve, the whale-watching is limited to core areas, with other areas off-limits. Sixteen boats, max, can use the whale-watching area at any one time, and only for an hour and a half. A guard, hired by the tour operators, “to keep it a nice experience,” says Jesus, polices the rules. The boat operators are skilled at letting the whales set their own perimeters. The boats don’t chase or hassle them here.

We saw many whales, as I was saying, and watched the boats and their passengers. Soon it was time for the boats to do in. Except ours; we had a special filming permit. And soon it was the lagoon, the whales, and just us.

One departing boat had called Jesus about a particularly friendly female and calf, and we slowly motored over there. And sure enough, we encountered a completely mellow 40-foot mother and her frisky 20-foot-long baby. The calf came right to our boat, and when its eye met mine what I saw was not a look of wisdom or of caution, but the innocent curiosity we are all born with and that we bring, before the hardening of the world sets in. It reminded me of a puppy-open, curious, and anticipating a good time.

I knew that every boat that comes here hopes to encounter “a friendly,” a whale that will tolerate a human touch. Still, I was wondering about bothering these beasts with the intrusion of our urge to make contact. My concern was dispelled by Jesus instructing, “If it comes to us, you have to pet it. If you don’t, it might leave.”

The baby lifted its head alongside the boat. With no hesitation I landed my palm on its snout and stroked its head. It was soft, rubbery, with a few short bristles you could easily see and feel. Cleary the animal easily feels you. I patted it more vigorously and it half-spun and presented its chin, which I duly scratched. I talked to it as I would have talked to a puppy. It was that kind of interaction. Safe, playful, innocent—and understanding; the whales knew the drill.

I thought about people who once came here to kill these whales, what Melville called, “so remorseless a havoc.” I thought of these wide-eyed innocents following their moms toward Alaska and the Killer Whales who, experienced in interception , would trigger terror en route and the full fury of these mothers to defend their babes.

Most of the while, the mother simply lay there. But a couple of times she put her head in reach. She was vastly bulkier, of course. And her body itself was a habitat to barnacles and to the crab-like whale lice that eat dead skin. When she rolled, her bottom looked like a boat ramp, like you could easily walk out on her.

The experience was quite moving. Surprisingly so. I’ve seen many whales, often at very close range. But these interactions, unique in the world as far as I know, represent the relationship with animals and nature that I wish we could have everywhere, all the time.

At this point in the history of humans and the world, that’s not possible. In many ways the world is a harsh and unfair place. Humans are the world’s best chance to set a few things right, but so far we are a long way from being capable of fulfilling our, and the world’s, potential.

It was interesting to me that here, in this desert, where we would say the people are very poor, those who live here are, in fact, rich enough in spirit to afford the whales respect and peace.

“Often, over all these years,” Pachico told me, “I have wondered what message the whales are trying to give us. But what I have learned from being with them is that the world is for us to share.”

If only we could all simply learn just that. Perhaps that message is so big, it does indeed take a whale to bring it out in us.

Whales and the Pachico, The Man They First Approached. Photo by Eddie Kisfaludy

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Big Mama Gray Whale. Photo by Eddie Kisfaludy

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