California Coast & Ocean

You should receive this issue in January. I'm writing these words on the winter solstice and trying to imagine how you'll read them a few weeks from now. That's not possible. I can only perceive the present, so I'll write from my immediate view and hope to arch across time to you.

As I begin here, in this quiet room on the longest night of the year, however, uninvited images slide into my peripheral vision. Joel Hedgpeth, who died July 28 at age 94. He was one of the amazing human beings I was privileged to meet during my decades as reporter: brilliant, irreverent, funny, cantankerous, a great marine biologist who played a big role in the saving of the coast. I knew him only slightly, but he was generous with his scientific help and advice. If I called him with a question, he would send pages of information, and if he found an error, he'd let me know. But when I interviewed him for Coast & Ocean, he was impossible, interrupting constantly by bursting into a Welsh song with many verses. He was already in his late 80s, but his voice was beautiful (see Coast & Ocean, Vol. 15, No. 1). Goodbye, Joel.

Now others appear. Buckminster Fuller. I had prepared for months before the interview. When I arrived, he was scribbling numbers on a note pad, the Los Angeles Times on the dining room table in front of him, open to a story on the dollar cost of eliminating sulphur emissions. He had just finished calculating what the numbers broke down to and told me. I said that was a lot, surely industry wouldn't go for it, and he got furious. Only later did I appreciate why: I was thinking politically and thereby compromising a principle. We have a right to clean air and must insist on it.

Behind Bucky Fuller I see A. J. Muste and Norman Thomas, thin, tall old men striding briskly along 42nd Street in Manhattan toward the United Nations building on a dark wet afternoon, leading yet another protest against the Vietnam War. They were followed by only a few stragglers. Maybe they looked silly to most people hurrying, heads down, through the rain, but I saw them as noble. They were marching not to win but because, for them, it was the right thing to do. And so now, more than 40 years later, I am still inspired by that glimpse of Muste and Thomas, two life-loving giants encountered ever so briefly, because they helped me to understand our world and my place in it.

What is the present? In the December 18 issue of the New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg writes that "the present is simply the past's ever-moving edge, it cannot help looking back." He tells how members of the Iraq Study Group insisted that, in writing their report, they had decided to "take the situation as it exists" and not examine the past. But that proved impossible, writes Hertzberg.

It's not only impossible; failure to include the past in the immediate view leads to tragic consequences. In this issue, you will find an article by Anne Canright on the shifting baselines syndrome, which I found highly enlightening. The term was coined by Daniel Pauly, a Canadian fisheries scientist who noticed that young biologists tend to accept as normal whatever they see before them, and therefore miss gradual changes that can mount to catastrophic consequences. "Each generation accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers," he wrote. Stories of past abundance are irrelevant to them. Consequently, as stocks shrink and fisheries collapse, these scientists lack the breadth of perspective to address the situation--which gets worse with every generation as the concept of "normal" shifts.

The concept of shifting baselines may seem simple and obvious, but many great concepts are. I find it exciting because it has many applications during this time of global change. It also helps me to understand why many young people take for granted what to some of their elders is unacceptable and outrageous, why the study of history is essential, and why we accept the continuing degradation of the natural world. The Coastal Act established a baseline, as did the United States Constitution. We need to know both. We can't see the present or prepare for the future without a perspective that includes the past. We must understand what people had in mind when they fought for the Coastal Act, and insist on the rights it established.

My idea of normal includes what I learned from many people I have encountered and admired. Yours will be different. Perhaps some of the people you meet in these pages will stir your imagination. What we all have in common is the need to keep recognizing the baseline shifts and keep broadening our vision. That requires loosening our grip on reality a bit and softening our gaze to see what's subtly evident on the periphery.