The wind was blowing crazy out here on the Cape on Friday. On Saturday morning, IFAW (the International Fund for Animal Welfare) started getting calls. The Marine Mammal Rescue and Research team kicked into full gear, calling on volunteers and New England Aquarium staff to help with the rescue of common dolphins that were being found from Eastham to Brewster. About 30 dolphins were found altogether, ten dead, making it one of the largest dolphin strandings known on the Cape. IFAW and volunteers loaded some of the rescues into trucks and brought them to Scusset Beach for release, seeking calm and deep waters where both dolphins and human helpers could successfully get the cetaceans back into the water.

When I got down to Scusset Beach, by Sagamore Bridge in Sandwich, Massachusetts, it was around one o’clock. There was one van where four dolphins were getting checked out by biologists, who were assessing stress levels, possible injuries and conducting research on dolphin sounds. It sounded like there’s still a lot of mystery around strandings. It could have been the weather, rough water or wind, or high tides that left them banked on shallow shores. One of their pod could have been hurt or dead and the others wouldn’t leave it, or a leader could have simply led them astray. The fact that they were scattered across a wide area adds to the mystery. One dolphin hadn’t made it through transport and lay covered with a sheet outside the truck.

Mary Albis, a local middle-school teacher of Latin who has been volunteering with IFAW for a decade, told me the miraculous story of how they’d found one particular animal. It was stranded in a creek ditch in Rock Harbor in Eastham, on Dyer Prince Road, in a place where searchers would likely have not spotted it. But a nearby house had a nine-year-old golden retriever that they’d just adopted last week. The dog had been agitated all night, and when they finally let it out in the morning, it ran straight to the dolphin. It’s a fine reminder of how much we humans are capable of missing.

After the physical exam, the crew used heavy tarps with handles to hoist the dolphins onto a cart with fat beach tires so they could bring it down to the water’s edge. Once they had all four down there, resting on foam pads, long noses pointed to the sea, the people in dry suits carried pairs of dolphins into the water, held them there for a few minutes to adjust, waiting for the tail flukes to begin to flap to show they were ready, and then on the count of three, they’d drop the tarp deeper into the water, releasing the creatures to head out to sea.

Another truck arrived with six more, including a youngster, shown here with an adult, and the process started again. One thrashed about, and the vet assessed that it was too hurt—a broken fin and more—and it was euthanized. But all together, they released nine dolphins over the course of the day.

It was magical. I’ve been writing about the Holocaust lately, and spending the off-hours watching movies like Persepolis, about the Iranian revolution, and generally getting too many reminders about how incredibly terrible humans can treat other humans. There was something restorative there in that bitter cold air, watching people go to such great measures to save these animals. I salute them.

In graduate school I studied under religion writer Jeff Sharlet. It was through him that I learned how every story is a story of faith. The debate around climate change—is it happening, how bad is it, if it is happening what’s causing it, what should we do about it?—really comes down to a question of belief.

This summer, Andrew Hoffman had a piece in the Christian Science Monitor that addressed this fundamental notion of worldviews and cultural beliefs underlying the divide between climate skeptics and believers. He wrote, “For skeptics, climate change is inextricably tied to a belief that climate science and policy are a covert way for liberal environmentalists and the government to diminish citizens’ personal freedom.” For the skeptics, the science is merely a guise for a liberal anti-capitalist agenda.

But does the public agree?

Read the rest at Dissent.

On Monday, the Worldometers clock, which rapidly ticks off the ever-increasing number of humans inhabiting our planet, leapt across the seven-billion mark. In honor of the staggering sum (and with a hat tip to Harper’s), let’s look at some other numbers relating to population.

• Cost of raising a child, birth to age eighteen, excluding college, for a middle-income, two-parent family in the United States as of 2010: $226,920

• Percentage increase of cost to raise a child since 2000: 40

• Nationwide rank of Texas, whose primary approach to sexual education is abstinence-only, in teen pregnancy rates: 5

• Annual cost of teen pregancies to Texan taxpayers: $1.2 billion

• Ranking of frank open discussion about sex between men and women as the most effective form of birth control, according to researchers: 1

• Percentage of married or coupled women of reproductive age in the least developed
nations who want to delay their next pregnancy but are not using birth control: 23

• Percentage of married or coupled women of reproductive age in developing nations who want to delay their next pregnancy but are not using birth control: 9

• Year that contraceptive use was made legal in the United States: 1965

• The average number of births to each death this year: 2.3

• Percentage of Medicare spending that goes to the 5 percent of people who are in their last year of life: 25

• Year the first IVF (in-vitro fertilization) baby was born: 1978

• Percentage chance that a U.S. child born today is a result of IVF: 1

• Number of children born every second: 2

• Minimum worth of the U.S. infertility services market in 2008: $4,000,000,000

• Cost of one round of IVF treatment: $12,000

• Cost of artificial insemination treatment using sperm donor found on the Internet: 0

• Sentence Trent Arsenault (trentdonor.org) faces if he does not obey the order from the FDA to cease-and-desist from freely distributing his sperm to Bay Area lesbians:$100,000 fine, one year in prison

• Number of children “donorsexual” Trent Arsenault claims to have sired: 15

• Amount a college male can make annually by selling sperm twice weekly: $12,000

• Minimum number of children a married couple needs to be raising in order to be eligible for Russia’s Order of Parental Glory, formed in 2009 to reverse the country’s negative population growth: 4

• Amount of Russian government money the couple receives as part of Order of Parental Glory decoration: $1700

First we basked with whales, then we explored the aquatic food chain, from the micro to the mouthwatering. In the final part of this mini-series on the state of the sea, let’s turn our gaze to the Pacific Ocean, where coral reefs are tumbling into oblivion, plastic is taking on the form of large land masses, and rampaging rubber duckies are on the loose. There’s some good news too.

Coral reefs are the oases of the oceans, the “rainforests of the sea,” sustaining a quarter of all marine species though they occupy less than 0.1 percent of the world’s watery surface. They are living structures formed by colonies of small creatures that exude calcium carbonate as an exoskeleton, creating masses that are underwater havens of life.

But they’re picky buggers, worse than that prima donna Goldilocks….

Read the rest at Dissent.

Goats were grazing on a patch of grass littered with plastic garbage when Phylis Mueni passed by. She carried three 20-liter jerrycans that once held vegetable oil, one a bright yellow that matched her oversize T-shirt. Everything else was a wash of browns and reds—the rusted metal of corrugated roofing, the labyrinth of mud houses, the drainage ditch that ran along the gullied path. Mueni is a resident of Korogocho (which means “shoulder-to-shoulder” in Swahili) one of Nairobi’s largest and roughest slums. She was in pursuit of a most basic element: water. No one in places like this has running water. On a good day, locals travel 300 feet to fill up their cans for a few cents. On shortage days, which happen about once a week, the search can take most of the day, and people can end up paying six times the usual price.

Read the rest at Smithsonian.

Last time I wrote, we were out watching whales, the biggest creatures in the ocean. This time, let’s start small, with those phytoplankton that are the foundation of the marine food web, the organisms that make water so blue to our eyes. According to NASA’s Earth Observatory, phytoplankton serve as a “biological carbon pump” that transfers about 10 gigatonnes of carbon from the atmosphere to the deep ocean each year. They bloom and retreat. They move and wander through the ocean. They provide sustenance for everything from teeny tiny fish to the great whales I saw off Cape Cod.

Warming ocean temperatures…

Read the rest at Dissent.

The Brooklyn Book Festival is the largest free literary event in New York City presenting an array of literary stars and emerging authors who represent the exciting world of literature today. Killing the Buddha will be there. Will you?

I’ll be moderating the panel, The Sacred and the Profane: A Modern Pilgrim’s Progress, featuring Buddha-killers Darcey Steinke (Easter Everywhere), Michael Muhammad Knight (The Taqwacores), and Peter Bebergal (Too Much to Dream). We’ll be exploring unorthodox approaches to faith—how we find it, how we lose it, and how we redefine it for ourselves. Sex, punk Islam, and sober psychedelia will all be on the offering table. Hope you can join us!

Sunday, September 18, 2011
5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Brooklyn Borough Hall (209 Joralemon Street, Brooklyn, NY  11201)
St. Francis Mcardle Hall

She thought she might study religion. She bought herself a concordance. She would sit cross-legged on the floor, the concordance’s giant pages spread on her lap like the wings of a gull, a cup of wine or a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a Marlboro in the other. Her back curved like calligraphy—she had worn a brace as a girl, and her legs were a bit crooked, and her toes wrapped onto one another because when she was little she’d refused to abandon a pair of shoes that she’d loved—and she would parse scripture.

Read Sweet Heaven because you love words and stories. Read because you long and love. Read Sweet Heaven because you believe, or wish you did.

Buy this book, for yourself and a friend.

Last month I boarded a small ship in Cape Cod and headed out to sea in search of whales. The going was easy, the day pleasant, the seas calm. The voice of a naturalist wafted from the loudspeakers, filling our heads with biological facts and pointing out shearwaters as they skimmed above the surface of the water on lance-like wings. And the whales! We observed cetaceans of the filter-feeding mysticetes variety. Humpbacks rose from the water, just a hint of their immense size revealed with each surfacing, “carrying their tonnage / of barnacles and joy,” in the words of poet Mary Oliver. Three traveled together, each emergence and descent repeated in the same order…one, two, three. One minke whale penetrated the surface of the water just off the ship’s starboard side, and vanished a second later.

At any one moment, only a fraction of the leviathans were visible, but even with their immensity, the whales only represented an infinitesimal percentage of the abundance of life we witnessed that day. The color of the water revealed much of the rest. Water, alone, is colorless. Come winter I’ll crave the crystal-clear liquid that hugs the equator, warm and wet, as will the humpbacks that will travel there to calve. But those tropical waters are aquatic deserts where life hovers only around the oases of coral reefs, many of which are dying. Here in the North Atlantic, the deep blue-green waters teem with untold existence—carbon-sucking, oxygen-generating, bottom-of-the-food-chain, maybe-not-so-charismatic-but-unbelievably-important phytoplankton. Without these creatures, an entire web would unravel.

That day, we were in Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, a federally protected marine habitat, but “protected” is a hugely ambiguous word….

Read the rest at Dissent.

“So I assume she’s not coming this year,” I say, as we wiggle and shake and zip up.

“No, no, of course she’s coming!” she replies.

It’s time for Rhino Charge, an annual pilgrimage…

Read the rest at Dissent.