Free The Human Age by Diane Ackerman Page A

streets, the garden is icy-blue and glaring, with air that’s clear as a bugle call.
    “The granite cliffs are amazing,” I say, inhaling their feline beauty. Flecked with velvet-black biotite and streaks of cream andgray quartz, in the speckled sunlight, with the boisterous sea slapping at their base, they look more animal than mineral.
    “It’s the same pink granite that helped build the Statue of Liberty,” Bren explains, “and the Lincoln Memorial and the Library of Congress. In Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead , the architect stands at the edge of a local granite quarry . . .”
    “Full of capitalist machismo, as I recall.”
    “Exactly!” Bren says, blue eyes flashing. “I came here in part to erase that image and that extreme ideology.”
    I know the passage he means, the one in which Howard Roark, clothed only in his grandiosity, stands above the quarry, with all of nature his raw material, something to be devoured by the few powerful men who deserve to rule the world:
    These rocks, he thought, are here for me; waiting for the drill, the dynamite and my voice; waiting to be split, ripped, pounded, reborn; waiting for the shape my hands will give them.
    “I pillaged the seas,” Bren admits in a conscience-stricken voice. “When I look back over my life, I see it as a story of ecological redemption. I was a kid working thirty-hour shifts, fishing around the clock, and I absolutely loved it because I got to be on the open sea. But, you know, we scoured the ocean floor, ripping up whole ecosystems. We fished illegally in protected waters. I’ve personally thrown tens of thousands of dead bycatch back into the sea. It was the worst kind of industrial fishing.”
    There was a time when cod grew large enough to swallow a child. But fishermen have been systematically harvesting the largest fish, and the cod had to mate earlier and at a smaller size to survive as a species. The successful ones passed on their genes. Now a cod will fit on a dinner plate. Soon there will only be small fish in the sea. In the process of reducing them we’ve also remodeled our vision of cod—from a behemoth that could feed a whole family to a small and harmless fish. Even those are vanishing, along with other marinelife forms, in one of the greatest mass extinctions ever to befall the planet. For Bren, the whole foraging, hunter-gatherer mentality has led to decades of what he thinks of as a kind of piracy, minus the romance.
    “I went back to Newfoundland once it was clear to me that fishing like that wasn’t sustainable. I loved the sea and I could see the destruction, and I became much more conscious of the ecosystem. After that I went to work on some of the salmon farms, but I saw the same sort of industrial farming. Not good for the environment, and not good for people. Wild fishing and farming fish—neither one was sustainable. The sea was in my soul; I knew I needed to work on the sea. But I was part of a new generation that wanted something different. So how could I evolve into a green fisherman, I wondered?
    “I ended up here in Long Island Sound right at the time there was a movement to bring young fishermen under forty back into the fisheries. They opened up shellfish grounds. You see, it’s very hard to get shellfish grounds because they’re all owned by about six families going back generations. But when they opened up these grounds ten years ago, I came and started aquafarming. I thought, okay, on this sixty-acre plot of ocean, what species can I choose that will do several things to create sustainable food in a good way? And can I think beyond that and actually restore the ocean while we’re farming it, and leave the world better than we started, but also grow great food?
    “Suddenly I found myself growing food in the most efficient, environmentally sustainable way possible—vertically. And it grows quickly. The kelp will grow eight to twelve feet in a five-month period. And the whole food column is