The Self-Discipline of Leaving Room for Nature in the Gulf of Mexico

But even laws that make it illegal to shoot songbirds, for instance, often do not offer enough protection. Human activities simply impinge in too many ways on the well-being of animal populations. That is what makes the Endangered Species Act so remarkable. It's an extraordinary monument to human self-awareness as well as to our awareness of the world around us. It says that for certain species — determined by their vulnerability, not by any obvious value to humans — we're willing to place their interests ahead of ours. As an act of conscience, it's hard to beat.

What got me thinking about this was an endangered Kemp's ridley sea turtle. She lay in the back of a pickup truck on Padre Island, Tex., a few miles north of the national seashore. Her shell was nearly circular, almost exactly the size of a manhole cover, with an unexpected concavity on her left side. The truck bed was lined with a blue plastic tarp, which kept slipping under the turtle as she tried to climb out. She had just laid a nest full of eggs, and as soon as the scientists on hand — led by Donna Shaver, from the Padre Island National Seashore turtle lab — had taken a blood sample and inserted a tag, the turtle would be lifted out and released on the beach, a few dozen yards from the Gulf of Mexico.

An endangered species sounds, almost inevitably, like a bureaucratic pigeonhole. But there was nothing abstract about this turtle. She showed an almost painful determination to get out of the truck bed and back onto the sand. It had taken the same determination for her to stride out of the surf, walk across the sea wrack — a ridge of seaweed cluttered with plastic debris and a few stranded Portuguese men-of-war — and lay her eggs on the beach. A marine biologist lowered her from the bed onto the sand. I helped hold her while the final tag was inserted. I knelt directly in front of her and placed my hands on what I thought of as her shoulders. She drove against me, the last human obstacle between her and the gulf. The wind blew, and behind me the surf roared. Then it was time to let go.

When she moved at last, she marched briskly down the sand between a double cordon of beachcombers and tourists who had happened upon the scene. Like me, none of them had ever knowingly come this close to a member of an endangered species before. The turtle rested for a few minutes, then struck out again. She nosed her way over the tidal debris, and then the biologist lifted her over a driftwood log that lay in her path. From there it was a clean break for the sea, down the slick sand and into the pooling backwash of the surf. I watched until the crest of her shell had gone under and the last swirls caused by her powerful strokes had been gathered up in a new inrush of water.

It was one of those rare moments when you suddenly realize, viscerally, the profound otherness — the astonishing sufficiency — of nature. "Habitat" barely suggests the convergence between the turtle and the sea she re-entered. It seemed, at the moment of re-entry, to have the force of an atomic bond.

And yet what lay ahead of her was a radically impaired gulf, with a hypoxic dead zone at the outlet of the Mississippi River nearly the size of New Jersey. Many of the commercial fishing boats in the gulf now have nets fitted with turtle-escape devices. But the only way to make certain is to police the boats, a job the Coast Guard used to do in the days before homeland security moved front and center.

That Kemp's ridley female wasn't merely an individual turtle, fortunate to have lived to lay a nest of eggs that would be carefully incubated. She's also the denizen of an administrative zone — a legal habitat — that exists solely because of our intermittent human ability to restrain ourselves. All the force of her prodigious will, her enormous drive seaward, adds up to nothing without that.