As a wildlife biologist whose primary interest lies in conservation, I find myself drawn towards wilderness, towards opportunities to immerse myself in natural systems whose parts are as intact as possible. The more intact the better. This is something that gives me the greatest fulfillment, and it always has. Studying the complex relationships found in nature, working towards keeping them safe from the missteps of our own species, and restoring them when they have been fouled: these are my paramount goals.
With that said, I love cities. More specifically, I should say, I love those cities whose urban fabric is laid out in such a way that it provides a healthy and enjoyable “human habitat”. I live in a city, and I suspect I always will. Although I love wild places, I believe that any attempt to live permanently in a wilderness (or even “out in the country”) would undo exactly that which draws me there in the first place. This is the tragedy of suburbs as well, and the reason I keep my time spent in them to a minimum.
So how does someone who loves to work in wild and intact natural systems but yet live in a city pull off this contradiction? There are likely several answers to this question. Mine happens to be that I leave my home in the city for extended periods of time, to go off to work. For the past six years or so, I have worked on ships quite a lot, both research ships that conduct marine mammal and seabird studies, and passenger ships where I work as a nature interpreter and educator. I am, at the moment, on a US government research ship off of Baja California, Mexico, where we are collecting genetic samples from several species of dolphins to better understand the relatedness of different populations.
For me, the sea is one of the great natural systems on the planet. Its sheer vastness and depths put forth the impression of a massive wilderness. Its featureless surface hides from view much of what lives beneath, obscuring how intact the system actually is, requiring us to look closely if we are to truly know.
The human taste for wild-caught seafood has drastically changed the ocean ecosystem in recent decades. For example, oceanic white tip sharks have declined 70% in the Northwest and Western Central Atlantic between 1992 and 2000; adult blue fin tuna have declined 82% in the same area over the past 40 years. My hope is that we humans will begin to put more importance on knowing where our seafood comes from, how sustainably it is caught, and if there is indeed enough of it for us to eat in the quantities we do. In the meantime, I’m quite sure that in centuries to come, environmental historians will speak of our current treatment of the oceans in the same breath as our ancestors’ treatment of the tall grass prairie over the past 200 years, an ecosystem that now occupies less than 1% of its former extent. But the difference is that with the ocean, it’s much more difficult to see what we’ve done; an overfished ocean has the same glorious blue surface as a healthy ocean.
To continue on with the juxtaposition of nature and human development, one of the goals of this study is to examine blubber samples to compare the levels of contaminants in dolphins living in heavily polluted bodies of water (like Santa Monica Bay off of Los Angeles) with those living in more pristine waters (like off of central Baja California). All of this is accomplished from the ship on which I am currently writing, a ship that may well be one of the most interesting metro-nature juxtapositions of all.
There is something ironic about traveling far offshore to watch dolphins, whales, fish, and sea turtles going about their daily lives in this huge ecosystem that is the ocean; all seen from this loud, floating, industrial complex that is the ship. Sometimes the calls of the circling gulls are hard to discern over the sound of the ship’s engine cooling fans. The tangles of floating detached kelp, which harbor small fish and resting sea lions, pale in size comparison to the massive spaghetti-like web of electronic cords and cables in our workspace down below. I am used to approaching a mountain forest with nothing more than my hiking shoes, a desert with nothing more than my sleeping bag and the anticipation of seeing a million stars twinkling overhead. But out here on the sea (arguably a hostile environment for humans without the aid of some type of technology), when I journey out into the wilds to observe the natural world, I go wrapped up in something that feels completely unnatural, a platform where feng shui was left abandoned on the pier and where the hand of humankind reigns supreme.
Published in the blog, Metro Nature: City to land pendulum. 10/22/09.