Spending a year at Long Island's 'Lazy Point'

THE VIEW FROM LAZY POINT: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World, by Carl Safina. Henry Holt, 416 pp, $30.

Before Carl Safina published his first book, "Song for the Blue Ocean," in 1998, environmentalists could often be heard wondering where the next Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold or Henry Beston might be hiding. There were - and still are - a handful of dedicated literary journalists like Bill McKibben, who wrote about climate change as early as the early 1980s, and writers like Edward Abbey, who conveyed a searing love of place and a rage against governments that could inspire readers to write checks for environmental efforts. But the pure sensuous detail, the feeling of wilderness, of getting lost in it, seeing the natural world from a variety of angles (naturalist, activist, hunter, fisherman, hiker), was missing in the generations after Carson and Leopold. Some cord had been cut. Getting people to care enough to act would mean nothing less than reconnecting readers with the wild. Words had to conjure breezes and smells and a sense of scale. They had to deliver pure beauty.

"The View From Lazy Point," Safina explains, is not about "solitude and peace." This story includes heartbreak. If only we could wise up faster, get with the program, change our old ways of thinking about the world we inhabit, then we might realign our priorities, reinvigorate antiquated institutions, throw off the fusty philosophies of Aristotle, Adam Smith and Freud, which separated us from nature, erecting a "firewall between us and the rest of creation." Safina has compassion for their fears: "The scale of the human enterprise was small, the world vast." It is only in the last few decades, he writes, that we have had the information, the knowledge to truly understand that "all life is family, and the world is finite."

So there is heartbreak: species loss, habitat degradation all around, climate change, a diminution and lack of respect for the marvelous. But Safina has a natural ebullience (which, I suspect, comes from spending a great deal of time outdoors when he was growing up on Long Island, particularly in boats). "On a morning this placid and beautiful," he begins, "dying and going to heaven wouldn't be worth it." Lazy Point is on the bay side of eastern Long Island, northeast of Amagansett and southwest of Montauk. A few years ago, Safina bought a dilapidated beach cottage a five-minute walk over a dune from the ocean. The name "derives from ne'er-do-well baymen who'd come to squat on worthless land." In summer, the writer boasts, it's Margaritaville; in winter, the wind could drive a person crazy. Safina takes us through a year, beginning in January, spent walking, fishing, observing and traveling.

In each month Safina marks the comings and goings out his front door, then alerts his readers to some of the issues we face. Safina's writing projects the beauty that surrounds him onto the pages, also the sounds and smells: "An airplane drags slow thunder. A dog barks. The twilight woods tinkle with the calls of unseen birds already self-secured into briar-tangled roosts," he writes in March. "Robins are talking in bed." Most readers will gravitate to these observations more than, say, "Land, water, population growth - violence."

I am certain that Safina hoped to draw these realities a little closer by opening our hearts first, and he does. There is no such thing, even for the very wealthy, as "not in my backyard" anymore. Nature is our community, he writes, summoning Aldo Leopold, "beyond people, beyond even wildlife and plants, into the very soil and water and life-supporting systems."

February - woodcocks, March - tree frogs and osprey, May - terns and bluefish; the book teems. Heartbreak: the end of Main Street and the rise of Big Box malls. Beauty: peregrine falcons. Heartbreak: consumption and greed. Beauty: blue crabs and Monarch butterflies.

In May he watches a bayman ripping horseshoe crabs mid-egg laying out of the bay to use for bait. In June, he and some neighbors rescue a stranded bottlenose dolphin. The writer travels to the Svalbord Islands off the coast of Norway where coal mining is destroying the climate, to the Shishmaref Inlet in Alaska where rising seas are forcing the Inupiat Eskimo to move their villages inland, to the Caribbean to watch scientists studying disappearing coral reefs. All the while what we want is for him to go home and tell us what's happening on the beach.

Safina talks himself out of depression and in the process pulls us up as well. "This morning, full of such rich, deep, savage beauty, where predators and their prey perform their rituals as they always have, indicates that there remain on Earth some remnants of a long-lasting world." He relies on beauty for his faith and finds that there is plenty of it. And yet, and yet: Imagine for a moment that you are a reader who has never smelled high tide or heard a loon or felt the silence of a pine forest in snow. Could his words, suffused with beauty, convince you that these things matter, that without them life is barely worth living? Can language alone, no matter how organic, bear this burden of proof?