Review : Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit of the Earth's Last Dinosaur

Carl Safina’s mellifluous prose evokes the beauty and mystery of the sea and its ancient denizen, the Leatherback turtle


Voyage Of The Turtle: In Pursuit Of The Earth's Last Dinosaur
by Carl Safina
Published by Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (May 30, 2006)
Rs 689 on Flipkart

Carl Safina is a marine scientist and the founder of the Blue Ocean Institute. This is his third book after the much acclaimed and award winning Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World's Coasts and Beneath the Seas and Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival.


Safina starts his travels in Trinidad where this noble giant,  survivor of more than 100 years of evolution, is giving birth on a dark beach, and then takes us on a trip through Florida, South Carolina, Cape Breton Islands in the ice-cold waters off the Canadian coast, Malaysia, Costa Rica, Mexico and finally New Guinea – all the remaining (and sadly former) habitats of the Leatherback Turtle (Dermochelys coriacea). In the course of his travels he meets scientists, law enforcers, poachers turned conservationists, resort owners, fishing boat captains and gives us an intimate view into the life and biology of this beautiful creature – in the ocean, on land, at the moment of its first swim and washed up carcasses. What results is a compelling, passionate but honest account of the species and the mesh of attitudes, laws (or their absence), threats (including destructive fishing techniques that have depleted the oceans) and research that may eventually pull it back from the brink.


The book is full of facts and data that can come from intimate contact and close study alone. For instance, the Leatherback is the only turtle that, after laying almost seven dozen billiard-ball-sized eggs, lays another two dozen embryo-less eggs on top, their purpose yet unknown. It is conjectured that they may play a role in providing air-space on the top of the nest, stabilize humidity or protect against fungal infection.


In another place Safina writes about the failure of the initial TEDs (turtle exclusion devices) since the opening size allowed only the juveniles to escape and it took years to enforce a larger opening by law. Or, for instance, that well into the 1990s, the Japanese imported turtle shells – 30,000 kg of it (amounting to almost 30,000 adult Hawksbill turtles harvested annually) to be carved into hair ornaments for ladies – a craft called bekko.


Through his travels Safina cites several cases that underscore how difficult (and counter-intuitive) it can be to formulate a sustainable and effective conservation strategy. For example, in Malaysia, the Leatherback population has plummeted from 10 to 15 thousand adult females and 3,000 annual nesters in the 1950s to virtually zero today. For 50 years almost every egg was taken and when finally artificial incubation was tried out wrong temperature control produced either all females or sterile intersex individuals. 


In Florida, beachfront high-rises and luxury condos that adhere to a strict night-time “light curfew" offer a safe backdrop for hatchlings crawling towards the sea. The open beaches close to the towns disorient them, the hatchlings mistaking the light-polluted land horizon for the real one. Having evolved on Earth where for millions of years the horizon is the brightest pre-dawn area, for the turtles such disorientation means almost certain death. Clearly, there is no substitute for accurate scientific knowledge, more often than not gained painstakingly on the field. Romantic greenhearts take note. Throughout the book Safina succeeds in seamlessly relating the plight of the species to the larger issues and threats that plague the oceans and touches upon the other surviving sea turtles as well – the Green Sea Turtle (Chelonia mydas), Hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata), Flatback (Natator depressus), Loggerhead (Caretta caretta), Kemp's Ridley (Lepidochelys kempii) and Olive Ridley (Lepidochelys olivacea).


Safina’s prose is mellifluous and evokes the beauty and mystery of the sea. One of the most poignant passages in the book, just after he has described the newly hatched Leatherbacks on their first swim, full of life and oblivious to the threats that await them every single moment of their lives, summarizes the moment of extinction, “The end of a species comes as tranquilly as this gentle sunrise. There’s no final struggle, no valorous last stand or terminal flourish. Just one final puff of breath, then mere absence. No creature mourns its own passing. The grief and the consequence lie solely with us, but few feel the loss.”


The book is one of the finest on natural history I have read and a must-read. It is guaranteed to make you fall in love with the oceans and their denizens especially the large brooding  vagabonds of the blue – the Leatherback.


Reviewed by Sahastrarashmi

Le Question: Will you get me a new globe?

For his seventh birthday I gifted Shashwat a globe. It met a long-standing demand and soon enough he had charted the oceans, seas, continents, polar ice caps (the great melt, breaking ice shelf), the Pacific Ring of Fire (volcanoes), Polynesia (extinct flightless birds), Madagascar (the island and the movie), the Sahara (the Sidewinder’s abode), the Himalayas, France (local colonizer), England (the bigger colonizer), India, a few countries, major cities and Semri (our village in Uttar Pradesh – the approximate location in this case). 

All was well in our miniature heaven, now home to a miniature Earth. Until Le Question was popped. 

Thus it went:

Shashwat: So in a few years' time will you get me a new globe? 

Me: Why? Nothing will change, except maybe a few new countries (I am still in shock after the breakup of the USSR and the resultant mass-production of countries -- and careful never to rule out another such event). 

S: No, not countries. The shorelines may change, islands will disappear, and ice caps may not be there either. 

Me: Why? 

S: If global warming continues... 

Our heaven had been invaded by a dark malevolent religion practiced by the Eco-Warriors, and one of its trusted followers was now a full convert. It was like finding a pagan in the midst of priests. Not only did he profess a different faith, he was asking questions, extremely uncomfortable ones at that.

I wonder how he would have imagined the islands drowning. Waters slowly rise, everything gets cramped in smaller and smaller spaces, earth is washed away in chunks. Desperate to reach higher ground, predator and the prey are confined in ever-closer proximity. Short-term survival is pitted against eventual and certain doom. 

For a child it’s the stuff of nightmares -- and children have vivid imaginations.

Jane Resture, a poet from the Pacific Oceanic Islands, has felt sea levels rise slowly and surely in her time. She writes:

But as years go by we wonder why the shoreline is not the same
The things we knew as always true somehow do not remain
The breakers break on higher ground - the outer palms are falling down

The taro pits begin to die and the village elders wonder why.

I will read it out to him when I have the courage to do so.

I suspect -- actually, I am quite convinced -- that children, unlike us, lack the subconscious filing system that we employ so effectively when faced with inconvenient truths. Unlike adults they cannot tuck them away in the netherworld of conscious memory and then force them to stay put with firm ignorance, deliberate forgetfulness or simple rationalization until they cease to matter. Unlike us, each child who is aware of the state of the planet carries a heavy burden with which he or she tries to grapple, often with no help. Our every action is scrutinized and their minds are busy answering self-posed questions. It’s a continuous process into which grownups are not co-opted, especially since around them, they see scant evidence of any action even when global warming is now a part of our lexicon and every TV channel worth its airtime is blaring out the message 24x7. 

Maybe they prefer to preserve our respectability and hence keep the questioning on a tight leash, preferring internal dialogue instead. Shashwat thinks that the water used (or rather wasted) while shooting the “Jab life ho out of control” song in the Aamir Khan-starrer 3 Idiots must be special effects. Why would responsible grown-ups waste so much water when they know that producing clean water requires energy, and hence carries a price tag in terms of greenhouse emissions? 

The question has been posed and answered; our dignity is preserved, or is it? Mine is not, and I have the answer from him. 

Recently, faced with the prospect of riding pillion with our family of four, my wife asked me to carry on with the kids while she walked back home (I suspect it also had something to do with my riding skills). I rode on, circled the next block and crept up behind her. Uncomfortable questioning ensued immediately. 

S: Why did you do that? 

Me: I wanted to surprise your mom by coming up from behind her. 

Pause

S: And produce more global warming? 

My crime? I had driven the two-wheeler for an extra 500 meters than the absolute minimum needed to get home. Talk of marriage ending the romance, kids absolutely annihilate it! And ecologically-minded ones are out with the probing knives. It’s time for us to feel the pain.

Text and Photographs by Sahastrarashmi

Shake it up, brotha, shake it up

As humans, we have bestowed upon ourselves the power to engineer great catastrophe - fire and flood, of course. But would you have thought earthquakes? Yo, man, we have the power to shake it up. Among the top 5 ways to cause a man-made earthquake, as Wired blogged in June, are dams, tall buildings and coal mines. And if that's not news enough and if you will excuse the pun, it seems the continent of Africa is splitting at the seams. Obviously not with laughter (as you would be at a joke like this). In fact, Momma Earth is constructing a new ocean for herself along the East African Rift - all the way from the tip of the Red Sea down to Mozambique. Of course, the fact that it will take ten million years to get the job done makes the whole thing less frightening. What's more worrying is if we will give this planet the next ten years (drat, my home loan tenure runs way beyond that).