Connections: Genius Among Us
“The View From Lazy Point,” one of Carl Safina’s eight books, had been on my bedside table, unopened, for several years. What prompted me to pick it up last week was the appearance of his essay in the first edition of The Star’s new magazine, East.
Coincidentally, just last week we drove around Lazy Point with two friends who wanted to find out why they had been told the area was a world away from “the Hamptons.” I lived just up the road from Lazy Point for many years, but it had been a long time since I had actually been there, or had a good look at Napeague Harbor, which borders it on the east. I’ve always thought the small houses there were perfect summer haunts: What could be better than living simply between the bay on one side and a broad marsh on the other — at least in good weather? There are 49 modest houses on land leased from the East Hampton Town Trustees at Lazy Point and others on private property.
For Dr. Safina, a naturalist with a deep commitment to what he says is the compassion for living things required to save the planet, Lazy Point is a place where he can expand his already encyclopedic knowledge of birds and animals . . . and go fishing. He is at once an extraordinary scholar and an elegant writer.
The book is easy to enjoy because it is really two books in one. Chapters alternate between those based on observations of each month of the year at Lazy Point and accounts of his forays into the wild — in the Arctic Circle, the Antarctic, Bonaire in the Caribbean, Papua, New Guinea, and Alaska. You can read it straight through or pick and choose. Every where, however, is his message: The world is changing, and not for the better, because we have ignored the relationship between ourselves and all living things, failing to connect the dots between the declines in one species after another, failing to recognize a warming planet.
Yes, there is much to be learned, factually, from Dr. Safina, but he is a spiritual person and excellent storyteller. He reports on his experiences are compelling, whether an encounter at Lazy Point with baymen harvesting horseshoe crabs for bait or a dangerous adventure across a “ragged, broken, crenellated, corrugated” glacier with the thermometer reading 5 degrees Fahrenheit with two scientists searching for rare Chinstrap penguins.
Dr. Safina, a MacArthur fellow, is not afraid to speak of loftier matters. He quotes from some of the world’s revered scientists and philosophers, Einstein and Socrates, for example, to bring home his points. But he is speaking of himself when he writes, “Life is a fully networked community; that because expanding knowledge suggests remaining ignorance, we ought to act with humility, reverence, and caution; and that the story we write with our lives affects those living near and far and not just now but in the near and distant futures.”
I found my encounter with “The View from Lazy Point” fascinating and think you will, too.