ENVIRONMENT Archives - Page 9 of 46 -

Working Together

By Simone Lipscomb | May 1, 2016

“Sea turtle nesting season has begun?” the gentleman asked. “Yes. Today’s the first day and isn’t it lovely,” I replied. We conversed a few moments and then he walked east, I walked west and each of us continued our tasks. He with his trash bag and pick-up stick to aid in his cleaning the beach, me looking for sea turtle tracks with my camera and green Share the Beach shirt that identifies me as a sea turtle volunteer.

What a glorious morning. Not just because of the soft sunrise, gentle breeze and waves pushing on to the shore. For the first time in four years there were no tents, chairs, fishing rods or other entanglement hazards (for wildlife) left on the beach. The new effort by the cities of Gulf Shores and Orange Beach has turned progressively trashed beaches into place that felt welcoming to humans and wildlife. Leave Only Footprints!

As I continued my walk, looking for sea turtle tracks near the wrack line, I thought how wonderful it felt to have so many groups and individuals on board to help our beaches and the wildlife that inhabits them. The US Fish & Wildlife Service, Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge, Cities of Gulf Shores and Orange Beach, volunteers who walk all Alabama coastline from May 1st to September 1st, individuals who use their morning stroll to clean up debris left or washed in by the tide. It takes all of us working together to make it work.

The dunes are building with sea oats that the city planted a couple years ago. These small plants are anchors for small dunes to build in front of the primary dune line. People are working together. It felt like balance returning to our beaches.

This is good news. This is what it takes to make positive change….working together.

Whale Time

By Simone Lipscomb | April 25, 2016

As I floated weightless with humpback whales below, I had never felt more present. Extended quiet moments floating in the peaceful sea offered an expansion of time as my mind opened to their minds.

I am forever changed, my DNA rewired into something different than before I entered whale time.

Gratitude expanded within my heart and I knew in those moments the true meaning of receiving…the gift…of the present.

This is Why I Cried

By Simone Lipscomb | January 19, 2016

Driving to the state park to walk with Buddy, I was listening to the Eagles Long Road Home. Glenn Frey is gone? He wasn’t a personal friend but the music of the Eagles was the soundtrack of my youth. Peaceful, Easy Feeling is probably my favorite of their earlier songs and brings back the innocence of younger days. The song that spoke to me this morning was one from their more recent work and tears flowed as it played….”I’m not gonna say a word. I know I can’t change your mind. You know where you need to go. I know I’ll be left behind. I won’t hold you back, I won’t stand in your way. If you need to make a new start…But I still wanna know when my arms let you go…what do I do with my heart.” I was sitting in my husband’s blue truck when I first heard this song and realized our relationship was slipping away. Nearly four years have passed since I last saw him and when this song plays that memory rushes in.

But it wasn’t just a love song and music from my young adult years that touched me the past few days. David Bowie died of cancer. Then Alan Rickman (Snape…Harry Potter). But Eva Saulitis died, too. She was a marine biologist that documented the decline of an transient orca population in Alaska that has never produced a surviving calf since the 1989 Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. As Krista Langlois said, “Her own life and those of the orcas were spiraling into the sea together.” Eva died of cancer. Bowie died of cancer. Rickman….and countless others whose name we will never know died of cancer….are dying of cancer. Epidemic?

Photograph Summer 2010...Shell Oil — *Photograph Summer 2010…Shell Oil…Courtesy BP*

Recently President Obama said he was forming a new initiative to cure cancer. I appreciate your work Mr. President but it’s not a cure we need…it’s prevention. It’s cleaning our polluted waters and sky. We are poisoning the planet and therefore we are poisoning ourselves. Orcas are at the very top of the food chain and therefore consume the highest level of toxins. It’s the same with humans.

Photograph I took Summer 2010. It reminds me of a woman's body and so I call it the Rape of Mother Earth — *Photograph I took Summer 2010. It reminds me of a woman’s body and so I call it the Rape of Mother Earth*

Times like this morning, when death and planetary challenges seem so evident, are a knock on my inner door. When I was a teenager we knew fossil fuels were problematic yet nothing changed. We were told to turn off lights back in the 1970’s to conserve energy but solar and wind development took a back seat for decades. There have been improvements…remember Erie Canal being so polluted it caught on fire? Thankfully the EPA tightened restrictions on much of the industrial processes.

Given all this…how can anyone suggest lessening EPA standards and regulations? We know that corporate industry will do anything to save money, to make more profit. Deregulation would increase already polluted waters and land and air. Why is this even a political battle? Anyone with an active, healthy brain can easily see the link between cancer and human-created environmental pollution and toxins. How could anyone who cares about their health or the health of children vote for candidates who lobby against the environment?

My heart breaks over pollution and toxins that are killing our wildlife….killing us. Take that Eagles song and sing it to our Earth Mother and all life on this sacred planet…”Tell me you’re not leavin’ now, Tell me you’re not leavin’…..Tell me that you’re gonna stay, Please say you’ll stay with me, baby….For this and this alone I pray, Fall down on my knees and pray…I’ll do anything. Yes, I would to save what we have, To keep you by my side…I’ll love you ’til death do us part….But what do I do, what do I do when I’m still missing you? What do I do…what do I do with my heart?”

Innocent no longer….the carefree days of youth have passed. The loss we face is much greater than a lover or music icon or actor or even a diligent marine biologist. We are at the brink of losing much more than we can even imagine. This is why my heart breaks. This is why I cried today.

Night Before Christmas….From the Reef

By Simone Lipscomb | December 24, 2015

Night Before Christmas…Turtle Island Style

Adapted by Simone Lipscomb

From Clement Clarke Moore’s Poem

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through Coral Park

Not a fish was stirring, not even a shark.

The stockings were hung on the brain coral with care,

In hopes that Santa Loggerhead soon would be there;

The Parrotfish were nestled in cocoon beds,

While visions of candied algae swam in their heads;

And daddy under his coral ledge, and I in my gap,

Had just settled down for a long winter’s nap,

When out from the deep there arose such a clatter,

I sprang from the reef to see what was the matter.

Away to the drop-off I swam a fast clip,

Right through Tube Sponges and over Sea Whips.

The moon on the breast of sand, white like snow,

Gave the luster of mid-day to objects below,

When, what my wondering eyes saw from the dark,

A Giant Clam and eight big Bull Sharks,

With an ancient old driver, who looked well-fed,

I knew for certain, it was Santa Loggerhead.

More rapid than Barracuda’s his coursers they came,

And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;

“Now Billy! Now Bruzer! Now, Bobby and Barry!

On Betty! On Beatrice! On Emily and Mary!

To the top of the reef! To the top of the wall!

Now dash away! Dash away Dash away all.”

As palm leaves that before the wild hurricanes fly,

When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky,

So up to the reef-top the bully’s did tow,

A clam full of goodies and Santa Loggerhead, Oh!

And then in a twinkling, I heard on the reef

The gnashing and gnawing of all those shark’s teeth.

As I drew in my head, and was turning around,

Down the reef Santa Loggerhead swam with a bound.

He was old and wrinkled from head to flipper,

His shell full of barnacles, but he couldn’t look hipper.

A bundle of goodies he had flung on his back,

And he looked like a diver just opening his pack.

His eyes-how they twinkled, so ancient and wise!

His head was enormous, his shell a huge size!

His beaked mouth was strong, I’m here to tell,

His overall look was really quite swell.

The stump of a Tube Sponge he held in his beak,

And Blue Chromis encircled his head like a wreath;

He had a broad shell and quite a round belly,

That shook, when he laughed like a Cannonball Jelly.

He was ancient and huge, a right jolly old elf,

And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;

A wink of his eye and a turn of his head,

Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread;

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,

And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,

And laying a flipper aside of his nose,

And giving a nod, off the reef he rose;

He sprang to his clam sleigh, to his team said, “GO!”

And away they all swam like a five knot flow.

But I heard him exclaim, ere he swam out of sight,

“Happy holidays to all, and to all a good night.”

The New Normal

By Simone Lipscomb | September 2, 2015

The usual situation of having at least three books going at once gave a strange coincidence last week. On the sofa I was reading, Telling Our Way to the Sea, by Aaron Hirsh. The book is about two college professors who take students to the Sea of Cortez via the Baja Peninsula. The quote that caught my eye? “We live amid wreckage yet we hardly notice that something has changed. Why are we so blind to the destruction–so forgetful of what was here? Knowing only the natural world we’ve encountered in the short interval of a life, we fail to notice the substantial transformations wrought by previous generations; and so we over look the absence of all that was already gone when we ourselves first arrived on the scene.”

Then migration to the bedroom and the book on the bedside table about the Amazon River, Mother of God, by Paul Rosolie, presents this quote on the same evening: “I have witnessed a kind of generational amnesia to ecological abundance. It is a sinister phenomenon whereby members of each generation seem to accept what they see around them as the way things ought to be. It is a problem of shifting baselines, a lowering of the standards by which we judge the condition of our environment. Over generations and across continents, this collective inability to accurately assess environmental change has become a serious problem.”

From May 1st through August 31st I walk one morning a week at sunrise looking for sea turtle tracks–evidence of a nest—as a sea turtle volunteer. The mile and a half section I walk begins at the wildlife refuge and goes eastward. The first part is in an exclusive, gated development but it isn’t immune to litter. And not just a plastic bottle here and there. Metal tent frames are abandoned here just like all along our Alabama beaches. People leave tents, ice chests, beer bottles and cans, plastic water bottles, chairs, plastic toys, cigarette butts, kites and string, fireworks, balloon remnants, diapers, condoms….it’s an endless list of nasty human waste and the weird thing is people walk by like it’s not even there.

Tar balls, oil containers, gas containers, antifreeze containers….doesn’t seem to faze our tourists or those that live on the beach.

Drilling in ocean water too deep to be safe…drilling in sensitive environments like the Arctic…fracking shale near homes, schools, playgrounds…clearcutting forests….overfishing…dumping sewage in the sea…violence against the planet, wildlife, humans….yet we seem numb, immune.

Are we so used to trash, pollution and rape of the planet as the norm it no longer affects us? S.N.A.F.U. I suppose. Seriously S.N.A.F.U. Sadly so. I don’t like this new normal. How about you?