The View from Lazy Point - 9780805090406

A deeply personal book with a broadly global message, The View from Lazy Point is an exhilarating journey with a distinctly coastal flavor. In this intertwined story of humanity and the natural world, Safina shows that nature and human dignity require each other.

On Safina's coasts, nature pulses to a continuous series of migrations. We're alongside him as birds and fishes flock to and from his Long Island shores. Then we go global. During the span of a year's four seasons, we travel with him from the intimacy of his home to the four points of the compass, from the high Arctic to Antarctica and across the tropics from the Caribbean to the west Pacific.

While we revel in the resilience of wildlife migrations and the magnificence of natural spectacles, we meet Eskimos and islanders, face foraging bears and visit breeding penguins, and sail to formerly devastated reefs that are recovering with human help. We see a world brimming with vitality but changing. Safina's lively stories grant new insights into what the changes mean for wildlife and people.

Along the way, Safina shows that we run our lives and our world with ancient and medieval ideas; that our philosophy, ethics, religion, and economics were all devised before anyone realized the world was round. Resisting change, these institutions don't correspond to what we've learned in the last century. They are out of sync with how the world really functions. The View from Lazy Point shows how this makes them unable to detect dangers or respond to new realities.

Safina's answer is not merely more scientific information but an ethical rebirth. "I've come to see that the geometry of human progress is an expanding circle of compassion," he writes, "and thatùif the word 'sacred' means anything at allùthe world exists as the one truly sacred place."