From Bad to Worse

What now? Nature is in trouble. Our human relationship to nature is cockeyed and destructive.

Most of us are a guilty party to it, and most of us know it. So, as writers, where do we go? As readers, what do we do?

Each month, each year, each tale seems to cry out for ... well, for plenty more than we’re giving it. That is, we are sorely in need of inspiration as we confront our failing partnership with this planet. At the moment, though, I’m afraid our best writers suffer vapor lock. Too much of what I read today has an interchangeable cast of characters--turtles, whales, abalone, coral reefs, sharks, swordfish, sea lions, spotted owls, rain forests--each telling its version of the same tragic story: In nature’s economy, humans are beating out the competition and not for anybody’s long-term best interests.

Thank heavens for the Sierra Club lobbyists, the Natural Resources Defense Council lawyers and the daring Greenpeace activists, or else things would be worse yet, because we can’t count on our writers just now to engage our sense of purpose and make the hopeless worth hoping for. Our writers are like schoolteachers drawing from yesterday’s lesson plan. Too much of their work springs from a tired conceit: Merely writing about something will make it better.

Think back to the last half century or so to the nonfiction literature that propelled us forward: In 1949, Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand County Almanac” helped redefine our relationship with the land, at least for those with minds open to think of such things. Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in 1962 shocked us about the dangers of pesticides and for-profit-only industrialization. Edward Abbey’s 1968 “Desert Solitaire” was my own enlightenment because it set to music the heart of man.

There have been other monumental testimonials since, including Marc Reisner’s “Cadillac Desert” in 1986. These are books around which gravity formed. They taught us that we cannot separate ourselves from the workings of the nature. They shaped our consensus that we have a right to demand a clean environment. But there is tedium to our writings now. Grains of sand infect the flesh of the social oyster, so where are the pearls?

I regret having to argue this point by using the example of such a hard-working, sincere and scientifically valuable little book as Osha Gray Davidson’s “Fire in the Turtle House.” But this is the book before me. With its subtitle, “The Green Sea Turtle and the Fate of the Ocean,” you know where this story is going. Naturally, in the telling, matters are far worse yet. Davidson is a fine researcher and his perspective is global. He is a disciplined and cogent storyteller.

The result: A book that makes me want to reach for a tall flagon of arsenic to go with my drinking water just so I don’t have to endure these things.

Not only is humanity wrecking the turtle’s habitat and plundering its meat, but epidemic disease has also broken out among these ancient creatures, who have survived 110 million years but perhaps won’t much longer. A malady that goes by the shorthand of FP (for “fibropapillomatosis”) leaves them blistered and blinded with tumors. Davidson takes us into a surgery room where a veterinarian tries to save the turtles one by one, cutting off these ugly stalk-like growths. The tumors pile up in a revolting heap on the table, big and little ones, black ones and cream-colored ones, warty ones and others that look like pencil points, some of them crawling with leeches. They are filled with the yellow eggs of blood flukes.

Are you still with me? We are only on page 12 of Davidson’s prologue. By comparison, an afternoon in the dentist’s chair would be relief.

Davidson aims to shock. He does. His story proceeds to wander the world as scientists and turtle lovers close in on the cause of this global outbreak, with all signs pointing to you-know-who and our pollution. And guess what: It’s not just turtles that are susceptible but maybe you-know-who too. He strives for the punch of “Silent Spring”: It is a truly menacing and heart-achingly sad tale. But it’s been told before in different ways, and many times over by now. Facts, no matter how shocking, have grown so mountainous as to become matter of fact.

But Davidson sputters to a standstill just when we need him. What are we to do with his reportage? What are we to do for the turtle? For ourselves? We could quit treating our oceans like cesspools, he concludes. We could “end our mindless plundering of the sea.... We could balance growth and development with habitat preservation.” And, oh, “we could finally get serious about stopping global warming.”

Yes, if only we could. But first we have to lock arms for the cause and shake off our pervasive self-doubt about the futility of trying. Humans are nature’s animals too. And we don’t make it easy for ourselves. We need purpose in our lives as well as healthy turtles in our oceans. The challenge for writers is to rekindle idealism, to bridge the gap between what must be done and what we fear we cannot do. If writers fail, I’m afraid, we’ll stumble to the brink like the class of fourth-graders I met not long ago. With worried looks, they told me, oh yes, they understood there was acid in the rain, poison in the ocean, the forests were shrinking, the animals in trouble and the glaciers melting. So what did they want for themselves? They brightened. A Hummer, a Jeep Cherokee, a Dodge Viper. They wanted $1 million like Shaquille O’Neal.