Love Letter To Lazy Point Is Also A Call To Arms

M

y dog, Kenzie, a 50-pound black wolf—more or less—goes loping along the shore as is her custom, energetically invested in the obvious truth that all adventure lies at the tip of one’s nose. The familiar is always also the exotic, and if you can detect the scent and follow it, it’ll take you far. And soon, as always, she’s way ahead.”

“Today we woke to glass-calm water. The Sound is stretched taut to the far points of land. Out across the open water, the sea melds with hazy air and blends skyward without horizon. On a morning this placid and beautiful, dying and going to heaven wouldn’t be worth it.”

Thus begins the first chapter of “The View From Lazy Point,” Carl Safina’s ode to the small peninsula on the north side of the Napeague Stretch in Amagansett and, by extension, the natural world. Or what is left of it. The just-published book is subtitled “A Natural Year In An Unnatural World” and it is a chronicle of Mr. Safina’s reflections and observations about Lazy Point and his travels to other parts of the planet to confront what endures and what may be sinking into extinction.

The book contains a lot of factual scientific information, too, much of it quite sobering.

“Population growth adds about 70 million people to the world each year, twice as many as live in California,” he writes in the “Coast of Characters” chapter early in the book. “Meanwhile, since 1970 populations of fishes, amphibians, mammals, reptiles and birds have declined about 30 percent worldwide. Species are going extinct about one thousand times faster than the geologically ‘recent’ average; the last extinction wave this severe snuffed the dinosaurs. We’re pumping freshwater faster than rain falls, catching fish faster than they spawn.”

During a recent interview, Mr. Safina said he realizes that such writing is a kind of balancing act, to inspire people to action without making them feel despair.

“The way I see that fine line is I’m not trying to be alarmist but I do want to sound some alarms, and I’m trying to tangle people up in the way I love the world,” he said. “I’m not trying to say, ‘Oh, it’s all lost.’ In fact, the reason I set it in Lazy Point is to show explicitly that despite all the gloom and doom the world is still brimming with living vitality. There is a still plenty enough left to protect.”

This writer has had a keen interest in the natural world since he learned to fish as a child and his father began breeding pigeons. Mr. Safina was born in Brooklyn, and from age 10, he grew up in Syosset. He earned a degree in Environmental Science from SUNY Purchase and master’s and doctorate degrees in Ecology from Rutgers University. In 1979, he began working for the National Audubon Society and 11 years later he founded its Living Oceans Program. For this program and others and for the books he has written, which include “Eye of the Albatross” and “Song for the Blue Ocean,” Mr. Safina has traveled to the far corners of the earth.

In 2003, he co-founded the Blue Ocean Institute in Cold Spring Harbor, and he remains its president. However far he has to roam, Mr. Safina returns to Lazy Point, his anchor in the natural world.

A decade ago, he stumbled on a cottage there. Though it was badly in need of repairs, Mr. Safina said he had to find a way to buy it. A so-called “genius” grant came in handy.

“I had the misfortune of having three different people tell me that they had been contacted about a MacArthur Fellowship for me, so there was the anxiety of knowing I was being considered and perhaps would not be selected,” he recalled about the grants given annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. “It was supposed to be a bolt out of the blue but instead it was pins and needles. When I got the call, it definitely was a game-changer. Among other things, I invested in a place called Lazy Point. So there is a direct relationship between the foundation and this book.”

The book was written as a series of essays, beginning in February 2009 and ending in January 2010. The settings shift from Lazy Point to the Arctic and the western Pacific and other regions and back again, with the author drawing connections between the local and the international environments. Ironically, once the book was finished, natural and unnatural disasters further emphasized Mr. Safina’s discussions about a planet in danger.

“When I was working on the book I truly enjoyed it and I worked on it for a long time, and the terrible natural events of 2010 gave further credence to what I write about,” he said. “Then the Gulf of Mexico spill happened and I rushed down there and did another book. That took only four months to write, but instead of that being a labor of love, that was a total aggravation, I was so upset and angry, those travels were so unpleasant. It all averages out, I guess.”

The resulting book, “A Sea in Flames,” will be published in April. The author will likely be reading from both books when he appears at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor in March.

While Mr. Safina’s focus has been on international environmental issues, he has kept his eye on the home front.

“It’s gratifying that so much of the eastern portion of Long Island has been protected by the local governments. Some pretty significant pieces of land have been set aside, and we’ll be reaping the benefits of that for many years to come,” he said, adding his observations on the species protection of the piping plover. “It went from being the most endangered breeding bird on Long Island to now being quite common. Accommodations were made to allow people to use the beaches and also for these birds to have their lives.”

Especially this winter, with record-breaking snowfall in the Northeast, Mr. Safina said he has heard the sneers in the media about global warming. He said that the heavy snow has changed nothing about the direction of the Earth environmentally.

“It was recently pointed out in the New York Times and elsewhere that while we’re having a harsh winter, it has been abnormally warm in Greenland and parts of Canada,” he said. “They recently cancelled an annual snowmobile race in Greenland because there is no snow. There are some people who have decided they are going to believe what they want to believe no matter what. Okay, forget all the science and the scientists; if you travel the world as I do, you see that the ice is shrinking in the polar regions, the coral reefs in the Pacific are dying, it’s simply getting warmer on a global basis. It’s not a matter of what the weather is in any particular place on a given day, it’s the average of the planet, and the average temperature in rising. That is visibly clear, and it’s true whether or not people choose to believe it. It’s physics, not politics.”

During the next few months, Mr. Safina will be on the road quite a bit on expeditions and to give talks about his books. In addition, a television series, “Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina,” will debut on PBS later this year.

Despite all this productivity, he said that he will try to spend a little more time in his kayak at Lazy Point. It will be interesting to see if he can resist writing about that.