Appreciating that we are co-occupiers of a world teeming with life allows us to understand how destructive human activity has been and compels us to do something about it, poet and broadcaster Adam Nicolson says.
Recently Nicolson has been staring into rockpools, trying to work out what might stare back. He tells Nine to Noon the experience had been profoundly transformative for him.
Nicolson has been writing books about how we interact with our environments since the 1980s and his newest tome The Sea is Not Made of Water: Life Between the Tides is no exception.
In the book he wanders around the world to try and understand what the liminal space of the world's seas can tell us. He's also been captured by the way we think about that thin strip that isn't quite 'land' or 'ocean'.
Adam Nicolson Photo: Screenshot
“Rock pools are one of the most revelatory places we can encounter," he says. "Every day, twice per day, you’re shown another whole world when the sea withdraws, and you’re shown almost kind of like a parallel planet to the one we walk about on every day…
“They’re both like tiny natural aquariums or like tiny versions of the whole oceans.”
With the approval of authorities in Scotland, Nicolson made three rockpools in a bay in Argyll on the west coast of country and waited to see what the sea would bring in.
“It gave fabulous little collections of prawns and winkles and sea anemones, gobies, little shore fish and all the rest of it," he says.
“So, I just felt that it was the most magical time. It was over two years and interrupted by various lockdowns, of being there and not being able to be there.
“I felt like I was being given an insight into how life happens and that’s really what the book is about. How does life colonise a place, what happens between the different layers of life when it does occupy place and how does that ecology emerge when all you got is rock and water and literally, 18 months to two years later you have highly complex, eight-layered ecology in a place that hadn’t existed before.”
He said creatures arrived in the pool after a day or two. Looking at the content of the sea water itself through a microscope left him astounded. He said it was dense with life.
“You genuinely have no idea how rich the world is until you actually look, slowly, carefully, in detail, microscopically… it’s everywhere. The sea is not made up of water, it’s made of life and that was excitingly revelatory to me.”
The book also describes the transformation Nicolson felt taking place in his own consciousness, about the world we live in as a co-occupant of the world full of life.
“I’ve usually used the sea to sail about in and go fishing and just hauled mackerel, cod and pollack out of the sea and cooked it on the sea. I kind of thought of myself as a great clumsy Gulliver figure, really just stomping all over the incredible fineness of what is actually there. Before, I never acknowledge it as real,” he says.
Nicolson knew that the experiment would be an intellectual journey, but was not expecting to have the emotional reaction to the creatures he was studying. There was a feeling of togetherness, as part of a common creation. He found himself caring for the existence of this web of life and came to a different philosophical position on life at the end.
“I hadn’t really expected the kind of degrees of affection that I felt in the end for these creatures,” he says.
“I was with them intermittently for two years and would go back… and recognise individuals. Certainly, with the big shore crabs and stuff I came to know them. How very odd this is to realise you can have an emotional attachment with a crab or a prawn who is separated from me by something like 700 million years of evolutionary distance.”
He says the revelation is surely the beginning of a genuine attempt to address the destructive human activities destroying the planet and find our true place in nature.
“Rock pools are places that encourage reflectiveness and I had lots of time there and I read lots of philosophy about this. The 20th Century philosopher Martin Heidegger says that the great mistake of our culture is the Descartes mistake to say ‘I think therefore I am’.
"The great dominating ego that strides around the world, the great rational being who understands and so allows himself a kind of grand stature in the world. That is the sort of foundational mistake and we need to replace ‘I think therefore I am’ with ‘I care therefore I am’, only because I connect on some really quite deep level with the other creatures on the planet.”
The experiment came to resembled an act of “bioreceptivity” or “bioreciprocality”.
He says it felt like that whole enterprise was “to make a place in which life felt at home and that somehow I, as the pool maker and the pool observer, could come and co-occupy with these wonderful creatures that came into it. And so, it was genuinely a transforming experience for me".
Photo: Adam Nicolson
There are many things threatening the health of these places of living abundance along the shorelines of the world. But one stands out for Nicolson.
The acidification of the sea from carbon dioxide pollution makes it much more difficult to make shells and therefore tips the balance in favour of sea predators, he says.
This major disruption to ecological systems is made worse by other physical effects acidification has on shellfish species. He says studies have shown that the neural pathways of these creatures are disrupted as well, making it harder to detect predators.
“It happens to bony fish as well and it is the actual mental processes of these animals that get disrupted…and that is going to take a long, long time to revive. The seas have obviously locked up an enormous amount of carbon dioxide and it’s going to take a long time for it to be leached out."
