The Fate of Nature

The shore of the Arctic Ocean along Alaska’s northern coast is unlike any most people have seen. To the south, flat wetlands extend to the horizon with green tundra so soft and damp that summer travel is only possible by boat. To the north, the water is frozen most of the year, with sea ice pressure ridges that rise rougher and steeper than anything seen on the coast.

Other than a few Native villages and the oil facilities already in place, these thousands of miles of coast have no port, no roads, no people. It’s one of the world’s few places where wildlife outnumbers human life.

The oil industry and its political supporters maintain drilling offshore here is safer than in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Indeed, BP hopes to complete a well this year despite the moratorium declared by the president. Its Liberty Project is technically considered onshore because it stands on a tiny manmade island of gravel. The project will push the edges of technology by drilling up to 8 miles horizontally under the ocean.

Shell’s exploratory drilling dozens of miles off Alaska’s Arctic shore has been delayed only temporarily because of the BP disaster. After years of legal battle with local Iñupiat people opposing the project, the company was poised to begin this summer.

Arctic offshore drilling presents challenges unseen anywhere else in the world. A moving icepack the size of a major landmass, powered by a storm, delivers an amount of force that is scarcely imaginable. Like a colliding continent, ice can override the land and destroy anything in its path, an event called an ivu in the Iñupiat. A video floating around the Internet shows what an ivu looks like when hits a drilling island. If you’ve been there, it’s hard to picture a structure that could resist it.

In the struggle to remove oil from ever more remote and difficult-to-reach places, the Arctic is every bit as much a frontier as the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

The record of the oil industry offers little confidence it is up to the challenge. Amid its scandals for shoddy maintenance and spills in Alaska, BP and its contractor, Nabors Drilling, were accused by whistleblowers in 2005 of routinely faking tests of blowout preventers on its Arctic rigs. The Anchorage Daily News revealed June 27 that the State of Alaska regulators allowed the company to participate in the subsequent investigation, including coaching witnesses to change their testimony.

And what if a spill occurs? It almost goes without saying that on those remote shores, without roads, ports or even dry ground on which to stand, it would be impossible to mount a cleanup effort anything like what is going on—however ineffectively—in the Gulf of Mexico.Indeed, experts say the industry has never demonstrated an ability to clean up oil from amid broken sea ice. Again, if you’ve been there, it’s hard to see how anyone could.

Accidents happen. The Minerals Management Service, in approving Shell’s project, estimated a 40 percent probability of a spill of at least 1,000 gallons during the life of that project. Spills cannot be cleaned up (Shell’s project would be 240 miles from the nearest support facility). And the potential impact is extreme in this unique ecosystem, where life persists in a habitat suitable only for a limited number of adapted species, including polar bears, walrus, bowhead whales, and other marine mammals.

The current discussion over oil development should include the option of simply setting aside some places where drilling is entirely inappropriate. Offshore in the Arctic should top that list.

For a blog that asked about page 99 of my book:

Is page 99 of my book, The Fate of Nature, representative of the quality (or content) of the book as a whole? Yes, because my book ranges so wide in its attempt to take on an enormous topic that any page would probably fit the bill.

The Fate of Nature asks if our species is equipped to save the environment–do we have it in us to cooperate as we would need to, or are we essentially selfish beings who can only compete in this finite Earth commons until there’s nothing left but the things we ourselves make, buy and sell?

I use the story of my home, coastal Alaska, and I find that culture is the key. Human beings are capable of extraordinary good and bad behavior. Many cultures at many points in our hisotry have shared and cared for the ecosystems in which they live.

In Prince William Sound, the Chugach people owned the ocean in common and felt a link to the place and the animals that gave them meaning and purpose. Russians, originally informed by the free maket philosophy of Catherine the Great, invaded in the 18th and 19th centuries and stripped the waters of its fur bearing animals. Their treatment of the indigenous people has rightly been called genocidal.

The Russians fur traders are long gone, but the Chugach people still suffer from their brutality. On page 99, I write, “Strands of Russian ways and traditional indigenous ways were wrapped with another strand, the strand of the grief itself, the kind that comes too fast to work through, that runs too deep, because not only have the teachers died, but the universe they inhabited and taught is dying as well.”

For some of those who love wild places and the animals there, there’s a similar sense of grief as we watch the losses mount. But there’s also hope in those feelings. Our connection and caring mean we’re not entirely selfish. We do have a chance.

In his Anchorage Daiily News column Steve Haycox raises a concern many readers have with my book. Here’s a response:

Professor Steve Haycox suggests a question mark for the title of my book, The Fate of Nature. If the question is whether or not nature’s fate is sealed, I agree the question is outstanding. But I don’t think there’s a question of whether we have the capacity to do the job, as an inherent part of our humanity. And I think it’s tragic that so many believe we can’t stop ourselves from consuming the biosphere, for surely that belief contains its own fulfillment.

That so many believe my book is overly optimistic, although my claim is so modest—merely that the destruction of nature isn’t completely inevitable—tells more about the ideological and media environment in which we live than the true potential of our technology or ourselves. An underlying premise of our economy and politics is that unlimited growth and personal wealth are basic human needs. In a finite world with a large human population, standards of wealth that grow without limit resemble a cancer upon the life of the planet, and that is, indeed, hopeless.

What I aim to show in the book is that our perception of ourselves as being fundamentally greedy and insatiable is a product of an intellectual and social tradition, not a universal in human experience. The spread of this ideology to the developing world certainly is a negative trend, as people seek to overshoot material wellbeing into the same surfeit of wealth, stress and unhealth we enjoy in the United States. But that outcome is not a fait accompli, and there is nothing about the human organism that makes that way of living our unavoidable goal. Many people at many times have lived otherwise.

It’s difficult to see a more positive potential future because the system in which we live—and which delivers information to us—assumes the worst in people. For example, we assume mass coercion is needed to help the environment. This idea is contained in the model of meeting environmental problems through big science and big government. Find the problem, pass a law forcing everyone to contribute to the solution. It doesn’t work because politicians cannot stay in office by forcing their constituents to make sacrifices. So studies tell us what we need to know, government fails to act, and we feel helpless.

But at a community level, people are listening, and acting. These changes are unnoticed by the corporate media, and for that reason are largely invisible to their elected leaders. The values of good-hearted local people don’t fit the ruling paradigm. But their decisions are real—to live more fulfilling lives with less, to save nature when they can, and to influence their neighbors to cherish the future, too.

Our hope may be slim, but it lies in the success of these individual and community efforts to change the values of the culture positively. Whether it works or not—the big question mark I willingly grant Professor Haycox—it is worth doing if only for our own well-being and sense of connection to the world we love.

Two responses to The Fate of Nature, one emotional, the other intellectual. Both come to essentially the same place, which is essentially hopeless. That’s perhaps the most interesting reaction I’ve gotten from the book– that it’s message is too hopeful, not quite realistic. Yet the book in fact says only that we have the capactiy to save nature, not that we will do so. Are we trapped in dispair? I’ll write more about this in an upcoming post.

Professor Steve Haycox takes on the topic in the Anchorage Daily News: “It’s a profound and uplifting vision, one we must hope is prophetic. But the prospects don’t seem promising.”

Another writer, in January magazine, offers this touching review, saying “There are times, while reading The Fate of Nature, I just felt like weeping. It’s a beautiful book. A painful reminder. A unforgettable journey: one that ends in hope.”

What makes an effective interview, where the subject gets to put across a meaninful message that is some of the best he or she has to say? It may seem obvious, but a lot of what’s done isn’t very good. The interviewer needs research to know what the subject has to day, needs an angle into the topic, and needs interest to develop a real conversation. In my PR journey over the last few weeks, I’ve found the best have been the non-commercial NPR and C-SPAN, and not only because they have the time to do the interview, although that is a prerequisite. It’s also because they seem sincerely curious. Here are my top 3, for listening an viewing:

NPR’s Science Friday: 18 minute interview that relates the oil spill to the book in a real way. A great producer, Christopher Intagliata, who read the entire book, got excited about it, and did an hour-long pre-interview the day before to develop the right questions for host Ira Flatow.

APRN Alaska News Nightly: This edited intervew by Lori Townsend included the most thoughtful questions of any. The crew in Anchorage at APRN and KSKA (the NPR affiliate) is more professional than 90 percent of the big city and national media I worked with over the last two weeks.

C-SPAN Washington Journal: This 45 minute interview , which I’ve already blogged, was unique in allowing the time to really explore the issues. The host was smart but relaxed. It really worked.

This was fun. These guys have a great job.

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