Opinion | The Climate Activist and the Sea

Tight quarters require compromise.

Our first long crossing, from Auckland to Sydney, Australia, was the stormiest. We spent eight out of 11 days on the Tasman Sea pounding into chaotic gale-driven seas. Without GPS or an autopilot, we had taken on extra crew members to handle the night watches. In cramped conditions day after day, everyone aboard felt unfairly overtaxed. But you learn to smooth rough edges, tamp hard feelings and not hoard the Hershey bars. Despite a no-smoking rule, the skipper, Lon Bubeck, even allowed the two chain smoking New Zealanders to light up — in the inflatable dinghy trailing behind.

This gets to my first point. In hashing out climate policy, accommodation is vital among those who have the same goal but differ on how to reach it. I’m thinking here, for instance, of clean energy advocates who disagree about the role of nuclear power in reducing emissions. It’s vital to acknowledge the inevitability, even desirability, of having a diversity of climate solutions.

Panic doesn’t help.

When a rogue wave blew in a porthole crossing the Tasman, a piston-like column of green water blasted in every few seconds. A similar porthole incident happened more than a year later in the Red Sea. Each time, the skipper, who had spent years as a handyman in Santa Cruz, Calif., had an astonishing ability to assess the situation, identify a fix and hand out orders. When his calm demeanor caught my attention, I stopped flailing around and focused on my task.

Which gets to my second point. Many pressing for a Green New Deal of any sort have tried changing the global warming hashtag from #climatechange to #climateemergency. Whatever you call this moment, it took more than a century for the world to become dependent on fossil fuels and, as the Paris Agreement on climate change recognized and Axios just reported, it will take decades to move the global economy to clean energy and cut or collect tens of billions of tons of annual emissions of carbon dioxide. Urgency has to be blended with patience.

Vastness has limits.

I still meet people who insist that the human influence on the vastness of the atmosphere and oceans is inconsequential. At sea, I experienced the full sense of the size and depth of the oceans when we were becalmed for several days halfway across the western Indian Ocean. To cool off, wash and pass the time we went swimming — in water 14,300 feet deep. I still get a cold chill when I recall looking down through my face mask at the vanishing points of my shadow and the Wanderlust’s bobbing a few hundred feet away.

But vastness has limits. Long before today’s “planet or plastic” campaigns, we encountered jarring evidence of the activities of man even on isolated island beaches that rarely saw a footprint. Anchoring off a remote beach on Mount Adolphus Island in the Torres Strait between Australia’s Cape York and Papua New Guinea, we collected a dizzying array of plastic flotsam — mostly lost or tossed fishing gear. In 1980, transiting the Red Sea, we sheltered from gale winds in the lee of an uninhabited island off the coast of Yemen. I hiked to the windblown southern shore and stumbled into tide-tossed heaps of light bulbs of all sorts.