A Shoreline Remembrance
Well over forty years ago—I was about five—my father drove us from Brooklyn to Long Island for a day of picnicking and fishing at a coastal state park. At one point, my mother bravely walked me into the edge of a gull colony. A city girl from Manhattan, s
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A Shoreline Remembrance Carl Safina
Orienting Memories Well over forty years ago—I was about five—my father drove us from Brooklyn to Long Island for a day of picnicking and fishing at a coastal state park. At one point, my mother bravely walked me into the edge of a gull colony. A city girl from Manhattan, she must have been almost as frightened as I, because I remember her squeezing my hand and holding her hat down as the birds—seemingly the size of condors—swooped in with menacing threat calls and the close whoosh of wings. I was terrified. But then suddenly at my feet, there was an amazing bowl of grass and feathers cradling three astonishing, huge speckled eggs. It was my first brush with something wild, and it filled me with a sense of mystery and magical potential. Before the escalating agitation of the great birds forced my mother and me to beat a prudent retreat, that nest made a lifetime impression. Years later I began a decade of studying terns just down the beach from that same colony, and I visited the gulls regularly. When I began research toward my Ph.D. in ecology, I ran my boat each morning past the same island the gulls nested on and the very shoreline my mother had led me along. For more than twenty years, I lived only about four miles from that gull colony, and each morning when I walked the mile from my home to J.B.C. Jackson (eds.), Shifting Baselines: The Past and the Future of Ocean Fisheries, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-029-3_1, © Island Press 2011
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the bay I saw that gull island. No one else in my professional world stayed in a single place for so long. Everyone went from home to college to graduate school to post docs to jobs. I did most of these things, but just by chance, I never moved very far. During this lifetime in one place, I noticed changes in abundance of fish and other creatures. The fish I hunted for food and fun—striped bass, flounders, sea bass, sharks, marlin, tunas, plus sea turtles—all seemed in a continuous ebb tide of excessive catch and population decline. Fishermen I knew were grumbling, but virtually no one in the scientific community and not a single environmental group was talking about changes in fish populations. Learned, sophisticated people, it seemed, just didn’t stay in one place long enough to see changes over time. Funding agencies wanted results, not pointless, repetitive long-term monitoring studies. Other ecologists were obsessed with “hypothesis testing”—preferring to guess rather than patiently observe—a quicker route to “getting papers” and getting promotions. But for the simple reason that I stayed put long enough to gain a placebased personal history, I witnessed the diminishment of my natural world. First it saddened me, then angered me, then outraged me to action. My approach to fishing changed and my career as scientist took a different direction. I wanted to tell everyone how drastic these changes had been. Personally witnessing history made me appreciate time’s great orienting power. Time constantly trans
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