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In this episode of Writer’s Voice, we explore the intersections of personal and ecological narratives through two powerful interviews.
Francesca speaks with writer and musician Eiren Caffall about her memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary, and naturalist Betsy McCully, author of At the Glacier’s Edge: A Natural History of Long Island from the Narrows to Montauk Point. These conversations explore the interconnectedness of environmental degradation and restoration, personal story, and the history of place.
Topics Covered:
- Environmental Parallels: How personal narratives of illness can reflect larger environmental crises.
- Climate Change and Coastal Resilience: Insights into Long Island’s history of glaciation and ongoing environmental restoration efforts.
- Ecological Restoration and Community: The importance of grassroots efforts in restoring and protecting local ecosystems.
- The Human Connection to Nature: How loss, grief, and recovery in our own lives can mirror those within the environment.
Writers Voice— in depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.
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Key words: marine ecology, Long Island Sound, Gulf of Maine, Eiren Caffall, Betsy McCully, global warming, climate change, PKD, Writer’s Voice, environmental memoir
Eiren Caffall: A Personal and Ecological Grief
Caffall’s The Mourner’s Bestiary intertwines her experience of living with polycystic kidney disease (PKD) with her deep concern for environmental issues, particularly the degradation of aquatic ecosystems.
Caffall describes how witnessing environmental collapse, such as the mass die-off in Long Island Sound in 1987, paralleled her family’s history with PKD. She uses this backdrop to reflect on the broader implications of how humans and the environment experience collapse and healing.
As Caffall states, her work seeks to “ground our understanding of what’s happening to the planet in something as physical as our own disease progress.”
Key Quote:
“I was born in a flooding body, on a flooding planet, in a flooding family.” — Eiren Caffall
Betsy McCully: Long Island’s Fragile Ecosystem
In At the Glacier’s Edge, McCully examines the natural history of Long Island and how human intervention has reshaped this delicate landscape.
From coastal erosion to the loss of barrier islands, McCully explores how unchecked development threatens not only human settlements but also diverse habitats.
She stresses the urgent need for sustainable practices to preserve Long Island’s unique natural history. As McCully explains, “Barrier islands were never meant to be built on… as the sea level rises, we are essentially erasing these natural systems.”
Key Quote:
“We are ourselves as a human species, in a way, being on an edge… a metaphor for how precarious our position has become.” — Betsy McCully
Transcript
Francesca Rheannon
This is Writer’s Voice Today, a Venn diagram of sorts, two books that share a look at the natural history of one of America’s richest waterways, the Long Island Sound. But one of those books adds a personal memoir of illness to natural history.
Eirenn Caffall
It was at that point that I realized I couldn’t write about the ecosystem from my perspective or my understanding without writing about my family and our bodies at the same time. For so many reasons. But part of it was because that connection felt impossible to avoid for me personally, but also because I think it’s an important way to ground our understanding of what’s happening to the planet in something as physical as our own disease progress, to be able to understand in a visceral way what it is that’s happening on the planet so that it’s not outside of us. Because it isn’t actually outside of us. Not for anyone.
Francesca Rheannon
We talk first with Eirenn Caffall about the Mourner’s Bestiary, which weaves together a literary memoir on loss, chronic illness and generational healing with the author’s stories of the creatures of two collapsing marine ecosystems, the Long Island Sound and the Gulf of Maine.
Later in the show, we talk with naturalist Betsy McCulley about her beautifully rendered portrait of the natural history of Long island at the glacier’s edge.
That’s all coming up on today’s Writer’s Voice, in depth conversation with writers of all genres on the air since 2004.
Thanks for joining us this hour on this station, your favorite podcast app, or@writersvoice.net I’m Francesca Rheannon.
Eirenn Caffl isn’t supposed to be alive.
Diagnosed at an early age with an inherited kidney disease called pkd, she was told she’d probably not make it past the age of 40.
Her disease has been a constant in her family for 200 years, and she’s the mother of a child who may inherit that legacy.
Illness and loss have been part of her family culture, but so has silence about them.
With her memoir, the Mourner’s Bestiary, Cathal eloquently breaks that silence, but she goes further, linking mourning on a personal level to mourning for the loss of the species she grew up loving in the Gulf of Maine and the Long Island Sound.
She reflects on what it means to inhabit a flooding body on a flooding planet and draws compelling parallels between the way disease alters bodies and how human actions disrupt the environment.
Her connection to creatures and ecosystems adds a profound layer to her story, exploring grief, survival and resilience.
Eirenn Caffel is a Writer and a musician, her writings on loss and nature, oceans and extinction has appeared in Guernica, Los Angeles, Review of Books, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. The Mourner’s Bestiary is out from Simon and Schuster.
Eirenn Caffel, welcome to Writer’s Voice.
Eirenn Caffall
Thank you so much, Francesca.
Francesca Rheannon
This book, the Mourner’s Bestiary, right up in the title, it tells you that it has something to do with animals and the natural environment and it also has something to do with confronting loss and death.
The book weaves the story of your own history of a genetic illness, pkd with the larger assault on the health of our waterways and our oceans from climate change and also from other forms of human assaults on the environment.
You say I was born in a flooding body, on a flooding planet, in a flooding family. What do you mean by that?
What do you mean by that?
Eirenn Caffall
Yes.
Well, I was born into a family that had over 150 year history of a genetic disease, polycystic kidney disease, that creates fluid filled cysts in the kidneys until the kidneys are overwhelmed and go into kidney failure. And the disease is really, it’s about flooding the body in a way that is unmanageable. So you have a relationship as a kidney patient to the way that your body processes fluid and water. And as a person with this disease, you spend a long time slowly filling up with unmanageable water. I had a family history of it. My father had it, his father and his father before him. And I watched the work of it on my dad’s body, the flooding planet. Obviously I was born into a planet already undergoing the processes of climate change. I was born in 1971. My mother was a hydrogeologist, so she began her training in that field when I was 10. And I came of age in this space where I was thinking a lot about water and what we were doing to water and waterways and how they worked and how they were changing. So it felt very much a part of my consciousness, not only of the landscape, but also of my body at the same time.
Francesca Rheannon
Now tell us more about the parallels you draw because they’re not just about being on a flooding planet, but you actually interweave the creatures, the bestiary of the title, into the story.
Talk a little bit about how you found the reflection of your own life in the creatures that you study.
Eirenn Caffall
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’ve joked with people before in interview situations that I really just wanted to have an excuse to write about fish because I grew up as a kid really obsessed with aquatic creatures and with whales and aquatic mammals. And so for a long time when I was trying to write this book, this has been something I’ve been working on for over a decade. At this point I really wanted to try to avoid writing about my body because I couldn’t make a one to one parallel between my genetic disease, which is not environmentally constrained or created, and the ecosystems that I was really interested in. And it seemed strange to weave the two of them together for a really long time until I got deeper into understanding the mechanisms of pollution and collapse and warming and the ways in which the kind of complexity that we’ve introduced into the ecosystem creates these extremely complex responses in the bodies of animals. And as I did that work as a researcher, as a science journalist, I started noticing that there were, I mean, they’re almost like little mirrors of what I understand about my disease and the ways in which the toxins building up in my own body mirror that toxic environment in aquatic ecosystems and in the bodies of animals. And so it was more that even though there wasn’t a one to one correlation, and my story isn’t my family got a disease from pollution that was involved in the environment, it was the systems and the mechanisms and the feelings of the connection between my body and the bodies of my non human kin were so evident in the language, in the scientific reference points, that it felt like I was creating something that was rhyming or mirroring anyway.
And it was at that point that I realized I couldn’t write about the ecosystem from my perspective or my understanding without writing about my, my family and our bodies at the same time. For so many reasons. But part of it was because that connection felt impossible to avoid for me personally, but also because I think it’s an important way to ground our understanding of what’s happening to the planet in something as physical as our own disease progress. To be able to understand in a visceral way what it is that’s happening on the planet so that it’s not outside of us, because it isn’t actually outside of us, not for anyone.
Francesca Rheannon
Yes, that’s so true. And I was really struck by that. When you talk about the mass die off in the Long Island Sound in 1987.
I live in East Hampton, New York and I live near a bay that’s on the Long Island Sound.
My favorite beach is there.
And I’ve been in this house since I was a teenager.
I’ve seen incredible changes over that time.
My mother lived here throughout and I can remember when I came to visit her after that mass Die off.
How totally transformed were the beaches?
Gone was the eel grass, and it’s applied so much habitat to animals. I haven’t seen a starfish on the beach since the 1980s, and I’ve seen only one horseshoe crab, which, you know, their malted shells just used to litter the beaches.
Eirenn Caffall
Oh, everywhere. Yes.
Francesca Rheannon
Talk about that as an example of what you were just saying.
Eirenn Caffall
Yeah. You know, I mean, I was lucky enough to have a grandmother that rented a cottage on the Long Island Sound for my whole childhood. And it was the same beach that my mother had grown up on since the late 40s. And so we had a generational relationship to that waterway that was really. You know, I don’t remember a time when I didn’t go to the Long Island Sound.
And I remember versions of it that no long longer exist, but that were incredibly formative. I remember the 70s version where you could find radial tires washed up on the shore in Connecticut, where you couldn’t swim because of red tides, because the jellyfish population had exploded. All of these signs and symptoms of a waterway that was getting sicker and sicker. And then 1987’s mass hypoxic event. I actually didn’t have a relationship to the sound at that point. We had stopped going to that beach. And so I learned about it afterwards in reading a really great book called this Fine Piece of Water, which is An Environmental History of the Long Island Sound that’s written by Tom Anderson. And in framing his understanding of the environmental history of the Sound, he talks about this event, which I went back to the sound later as an adult and saw it as this completely changed waterway, where, yeah, there wasn’t as much sort of what I remember about the vibrancy of that waterway, the way that you could find sanderlings on the. The beach all the time, constantly flooding the place, the way that you could find horseshoe crabs. And there were so many of them that you couldn’t even walk on the beach on some days.
That sound was gone. And in its place was this waterway that was trying desperately to come back from almost being completely destroyed. And the mass hypoxic event extirpated almost all the life in the sound, everything in the center of it. And so there was only life at the edges, closer to New York and closer to the Atlantic. And the last three decades have been about trying to return as much balance as possible to an incredibly destroyed ecosystem. For me, it was really similar to what had happened in my family life, because at that point in 1987 was kind of in A way the nadir of our family story when we were at a place where technologies were beginning to be available to save the lives of my family. But it wasn’t quite soon enough. And my father lost his brother and sister to the disease. He went through a failed transplant.
And so we were kind of experiencing this transformation that was going on in our family of just the worst version of our experience of illness. And at the same time, my mother was training to be a hydrogeologist who was looking at the waterways that had created the pollution event that created the hypoxia in the sound and kind of finding that moment and realizing that as a family, we’d been coming back from that worst case scenario through the help of enormous amounts of legislative support, medical innovation, and economic change.
At the same time, that the sound had been trying to rebuild from the same kind of almost evisceration of its entire existence was really fascinating to me and not something I would have understood unless I had been able to go back to that waterway and think about the version of it that I knew when I was a child.
Francesca Rheannon
Right. I mean, we’ve entered the era where we have to intentionally create the conditions to regenerate what used to be created by nature without any restrictions.
Eirenn Caffall
Yes.
Francesca Rheannon
And we are talking with Eirenn Caffel about her book, the Mourner’s Bestiary. It’s a memoir. It’s a book of natural history and an exploration of family dynamics in the face of mortal disease.
And so you mentioned the red tide, and I was struck. You say that red tides used to be part of a healthy ecosystem back in the days before the white settlers came and upended everything.
What happened to make the red tides go so out of balance?
Eirenn Caffall
I mean, in a word, really, it’s the mass industrialization of consumer life in America. And that starts as far back as the 1700s in New England, when we begin not only having destroyed the relationship of landscape that existed with the indigenous management of the ecosystem, but also we begin doing things like damming the rivers and creating factory structures on these huge waterways. The Long Island Sound especially, and this is true of the Gulf of Maine as well, which is another subject of the book. These are waterways that are fed by enormous watersheds full of rivEirenne ecosystems that pour into the waterways of the estuary in the Sound and of the Gulf in Maine. And everything that comes down those rivers comes into the estuary and changes it.
If you are suddenly doing hat manufacturing that requires mercury, or you’re producing copper, small parts for small manufactured goods, you’re starting to Change what’s in the silt and what’s in the land. And as you begin to industrialize farming and nitrogen becomes part of what you’re doing to enrich the soil enough to support mass agriculture, you’re starting to add nit nitrogen into the soil. And all the soil then sheds its nitrogen because it’s not a natural part of its soil ecosystem. And that goes down the rivers as well. And so what you’ve got is this incredibly over enriched space that is coming from all of the waterways. And at the same time you’re also seeing the increase in population in places like New York City and the problem of sewage and the problem of car pollution. And all of those things are changing the, the aquatic chemistry of the sound and allowing overgrowth of types of animals that used to be a part of the natural ebb and flow, the seasonal changes to the waterway.
A red tide was a way to rebalance the production of certain types of plankton. And when that gets out of balance and there’s this incredible overgrowth, you have these red tide events that are actually just incredibly toxic to fish life and can be toxic to humans as well. And it’s a sign of just this overabundance of incorrect chemical distribution that’s part of capitalism. It feels almost like you’ve got this capitalist output pouring into the sea and the sea can’t actually rebalance itself without these extremely drastic measures of something like a red tide.
Francesca Rheannon
Yes, exactly. Capitalism that forces a kind of overproduction in order to drive consumption.
Let’s talk a little bit about the personal side of this story.
Just going back to PKD.
You were diagnosed at the age of 24 and your first nephrologist told you that he knew how to end PKD in one generation.
What did he tell you and how did that make you feel?
Eirenn Caffall
Yeah, I was in his office and he said to me, oh, well, you know, you’re young. Are you considEirenng having children? And I said, I thought so. I would like to have children. And he said, I know how to end PKD in one generation. And I asked him how and he said, people like you should never have children.
And I mean, it was such a shock to my system at the moment because I mean, that’s.
I know what eugenics looks like. I had studied it in college. I knew that it was an absolutely horrifying thing that he was saying in this intimate space that was supposed to be about my care and my thriving and also my personhood. And I obviously never went back to him. But it reinforced a story that my family had told itself over the generations. You know, when the first of us had the mutation that created pkd, we started hiding it as a story. We didn’t talk about it publicly.
I actually took a long time to convince myself to write about PKD because it was so ingrained in me that we don’t reveal this because it’s so shameful. And we can mostly pass for a long period of our lives as healthy people because the safety net is not there for people like.
Like us, people with chronic genetic diseases. Especially in my youth, when I was diagnosed, there was still a preexisting condition clause that meant that I couldn’t get health insurance for many years until the Affordable Care act was created.
And so in that moment, I also was seeing the story of my family because my father’s brothers and sisters didn’t actually have their own biological children. One adopted. The others opted not to have children of their own because they were so cognizant of the pain that they had experienced as people with pkd, that they had seen their parents experience as parents of people with pkd. They made the voluntary decision to try to opt out of it. And my father and mother thought my father didn’t have the disease and decided to have me. And then when I was one, my father was diagnosed with the illness, and they never had any more kids. So it was the simultaneous horror that my personhood was being reduced to my genetic cost to society.
But also it felt very familiar, because the decision to have a child, the decision to try to claim my own right to exist, and the right to exist of people who are born with genetic disabilities, genetic chronic illnesses, felt like a really radical act, even within my own family.
Francesca Rheannon
Yeah. So say more about that.
Why did you decide to have a child, and what have you struggled with in terms of that decision?
Your son, Dex just comes across as such a wonderful child, a really sensitive being, someone who, very much like you, has been passionate about animals since a very early age.
You know, I wouldn’t have regrets, and I’m sure you don’t either.
Eirenn Caffall
No, I don’t. None at all.
And I think that the question that I was wrestling with was a question that so many people wrestle with, about whether their life matters enough, whether they matter. And I go back to. I’ve got a really good friend who works on questions of reproductive justice in the era of climate change. And the thing that she always says, and I love this so much, is that it’s not that people are asking themselves whether to have children in the face of climate collapse.
The children aren’t the question, the quest. The problem is that we’re asking ourselves that question anyway, as if denying ourselves our own existence, denying the existence of any children we might want to have is going to fix a problem that actually is not going to be fixed by individual choices and decisions.
And it was in watching my father die. I was, I was at his bedside taking care of him in hospice as the disease was claiming his life. And I was in my late 20s and I. I was with a good friend of the family who asked me if I wanted to have children. This is maybe five years after the conversation with that nephrologist. And I said I wasn’t sure and I didn’t know if I felt like I had the right. And she said, would you wish that your father hadn’t existed or that you hadn’t existed? And it was an instantaneous. Of course not. My father’s life was wonderful.
He had an incredible existence. He offered an enormous amount to the world. He was a great dad. And I didn’t feel like I could look at my own life and decide that I didn’t deserve to be alive. And so why was a genetic illness that could be treated, that could be healed, that could be managed. The disqualifying factor that seemed to me as if I hadn’t purged myself of my own eugenic notions of whether I was fit enough to be alive. And I feel it was an instantaneous and almost spiritual biological decision where I was like, oh, yes, no, I’m going to have a child. I’m allowed. Because I’d rather push back against this conversation that says that if you are not fit, you are less than if you are a drain on the, on the culture that you don’t get to exist because capitalism and the structures of it are a bigger drain on all of our future. And we don’t question them the same way that we question whether disabled people or people we just don’t happen to believe deserve resources, get to be here on the planet with us. It’s the wrong question. And I have not had a moment of regret of becoming a parent. We still struggle with the question of whether Dex is going to have pkd. He hasn’t been diagnosed yet. He’s waiting. I’m supporting that.
He doesn’t need to know until he wants to know.
And that’s an internal project that’s supported by lots of really good therapy and lots of really good soul searching and open conversations and has nothing to do with the value and the glory of his life or my life. And it felt like an important thing to say publicly in a way that I didn’t expect to do. I expected this to be a private story, but especially given what we’re all living through at the moment. It didn’t seem possible to talk about the way in which we write off whole ecosystems and whole species without talking about the way that we write off human beings as well, with this idea that somehow if we sacrifice the vulnerable, we’ll all be safer, which is never true.
Francesca Rheannon
And we are talking with Eirenn Caffel about her book the Mourner’s Bestiary.
Now I just have to ask you, how are you doing? Now?
You’re not supposed to be alive as you write at the beginning of the book.
Eirenn Caffall
Nope.
Francesca Rheannon
So how are you doing?
Eirenn Caffall
I’m doing really well right now, which is so surprising to me every day because not only did I expect not to be alive based on my early diagnosis in my 20s, but also I expected at this age to be experiencing what the rest of my family did, which was the ones that survived past 50 were all, at this point many years into dialysis or several years into a kidney transplant. And right now I am still using my native kidneys. I’m not on dialysis. My blood pressure is controlled.
And the reasons for that are really about innovations in access, good health insurance.
I’m married to a union organizer. We have Teamsters health insurance. It’s better than most of the people in the United States has. It’s enabled me to see a specialist who’s at the forefront of working towards medications that can change the outcome of my disease. I’m currently on one of those an experimental medication that is available globally but wasn’t available until about I’m forgetting the year that it was added to the FDA roster. But I’ve only been on it for four years, and it’s been transformative physically, and it’s slowed the progress of my disease down to almost nothing.
You know, I think that the story of my illness is really important for that piece, too. It’s not just the emotional resiliency or the decisions about resiliency, reproductive justice that come into my story, but it’s also about what each generation gets to experience in terms of innovation, if we can survive long enough to get to that point.
And for me, you know, this is a disease I manage. There are many symptoms that are deeply annoying.
My kidneys are six times their normal size. There’s a component to that that’s got Body shame involved in it. There’s physical discomfort that I experience. I definitely don’t have the stamina I did as a 20 year old. But the basics of what my disease looks like are so well managed at this moment in a way that the 22, 23 year old version of me just could not have imagined.
Francesca Rheannon
And just for our listeners who may be interested, what is that medication and is it available or is it still in experimental trials?
Eirenn Caffall
It’s available and it’s available to most patients who qualify with this stage of pkd. PKD is one of the most common genetic illnesses in the world. Actually, there are about statistics vary, but I’ve seen up to 12 million people who have the disease worldwide. And the medication that I take, the brand name is Genarq, but it’s also called Tolvaptin if it’s available in other countries as that. And I have to go through a specialized pharmacy and be enrolled in a program where I am routinely tested for negative side effects that do accompany this for some patients. But I’m part of a huge cohort of people who are all eligible for the disease. You need to be at a certain point in your disease trajectory to be able to go on it. But at that point they estimate that it slows your cyst’s growth by about 30%. And also some studies have resulted in stating that it can cut your pain experience because there’s a chronic pain element to the disease by about 40%.
So most people who have a nephrologist can ask about it if they’re not already enrolled, if they have this condition. And it’s for me, and it’s not true for everyone. Obviously results may vary, but for me and my disease progression, it has been life changing. It’s given me back a lot of energy and health that I didn’t have five years ago, even so. Yeah.
Francesca Rheannon
Wow. So glad to hear that. And I want to go back to something that you said earlier about the silence in your family.
Talk a little bit about how that silence impacted your family dynamics and then how you have made a completely different way of relating to your son. What’s been important to you about helping him prepare for dealing with the possible eventuality of finding out he has pkd.
I mean, you’ve mentioned you’ve supported his decision not to know until he has to, but what are some of the contrasts that you’ve made in your own decisions to be a model to your son from how it was in your own family?
Eirenn Caffall
Yeah, I mean, that’s such A great question. And I think that, you know, the more that I.
So I parented very intuitively and I approached my disease very intuitively. So I didn’t go through, I had great therapy, but I didn’t go through a kind of investment, investigatory process in terms of looking at the psychological impacts of this disease until I started writing this book. And what I understood intuitively from my family was that the more silence there was about our disease, the more we were separated from community, from support, from the care and healing that we needed to deal with the psychological impacts of it, the more that our grieving was private and internal, the less support and the less growth and the less care we had.
So from my diagnosis, I really started to try and think about what it looks like to be in a state of permanent mourning in relationship to my health and to think about how mourning is different than grieving. For me, I think of mourning as the public face of loss and the one that involves community and that involves a ritual and that can involve a joyful transition into living with, with loss.
I did that in my own life. I made sure that I, whenever I was afraid of what I might be risking as a person with this disease, if I tried something that I wanted to do, being a musician, being a writer, being a mother, I would try to remind myself that it was in the openness, to the fullness of my experience as a human being apart from my disease, that I had a better relationship to my disease.
My parents psychology in relationship to their loss turns out to be very, very common to people with our disease. There are a lot of really wonderful psychological studies that were done in the 70s and 80s that when I started reading them, was like a blueprint for what my family faced. And it was about the denial and the rejection of the story within the internal family system that was the real danger to how people psychologically coped with the long term effect of the disease. And so I started thinking of it as, especially because I was writing about climate when I was a new mother, that I was looking at the statistics and the, and the language around. How do we teach children about climate collapse or ecological collapse in a way that feels safe, appropriate to their age, manageable psychologically? How do we accompany them on the understanding of what is fearful that could come in their lifetime?
And it seemed to me that it was exactly the same as trying to teach someone that they might inherit a disease that could affect their health outcomes.
It was the same set of tools and the same set of skills, which was never lie, never say something age inappropriate for the kid, never resist the emotional upwellings of it. Be present, accompany the person through their understanding and their revelation and meet them where they are every time with the grace that you might be able to find.
And as I’ve done that as a parent about climate change and about kidney disease, it’s been challenging. For sure. There’s a lot of rest that is possible if you ignore things, you feel like you’ve got a nice, calm life. Certainly confronting the most difficult and dangerous things that can happen to you or your child is not relaxing sometimes. But at the same time, the intimacy and the trust that it fosters in terms of I see you, I know what’s scary. And also, look, it’s also very beautiful here.
Yes, we have a deadly disease. That’s terrifying. I’m so sorry. But also, your life is amazing and vibrant and look at all the things you get to do by being alive. And also this is universal. Something comes for everyone.
And so trying to I talk about it with my students a lot. You know, that what I’m trying to do with my book, with my writing, with my parenting, it’s the same. It’s building up a muscle that allows me to look at the things that are the most terrifying and then pull back and look at the things that are beautiful because I think it’s the muscle that we need. We’re not going to lose the tragedies of climate collapse or of generational illness or individual illness, but we are going to try to build up a consciousness that allows us to see both so that we can act from a place.
Francesca Rheannon
Of strength that’s so moving and so beautiful, as is this wonderful book, the Mourner’s Bestiary. Beautifully written, truly a book of the heart as well as a book about science. Eirenn Caffall, it has been such a privilege to talk with you.
Eirenn Caffall
Oh, thank you so much, Francesca. This has been an absolute delight.
Francesca Rheannon
Eirenn Caffall, you can find a link to a video excerpt from the mourners bestiary@writersvoice.net Next up, a natural history of Long Island.
Stay tuned after the break.
That was the Water Song by the Incredible String Band.
Welcome back to Writer’s Voice. I’m Francesca Rheannon.
Betsy McCulley is a nature writer and historian. Her first book, city at the Water’s Edge, was a natural history of New York City.
With her new book, at the Glacier’s Edge, she’s expanded her view eastward to explore the natural history of Long island from the Narrows to Montauk Point.
McCulley’s book is a deep exploration of Long Island’s unique landscapes shaped by ancient glaciers and its delicate ecosystems now threatened by climate change and human intervention.
She shares the island’s geological past, the processes that shaped its coasts, and the ongoing battle to preserve its natural habitats against rising sea levels.
McAuley’s writing is animated by the credo she expresses on her website, New York Nature.
Whether we are urban, suburban, or rural dwellers on the land, we are part of the larger biological community.
Put simply, we share our living space with other living things.
Let’s listen to my conversation with Betsy McCulley.
Betsy McCulley, welcome to Writer’s Voice.
Betsy McCulley
Thank you very much for having me.
Francesca Rheannon
This is just a wonderful book. At the Glacier’s A Natural History of Long island from the Narrows, which is in New York City, to Montauk Point.
It is such a remarkable system.
First of all, it’s the largest island in the continental United States.
Tell us first about your own connection to Long Island.
Betsy McCulley
I moved to New York 1984, when my son was born, and I moved to Brooklyn, and we were in a community in Manhattan beach, which is on the water.
And as I was raising my little boy and I became interested in where I was living. And that came out of a sense of not feeling connected to a place. And I that sense of displacement when you’re moving from somewhere else to a new place.
And there was that sense of, well, how do I connect?
And to me, who’ve always been connected to nature, and here I am in an urban kind of neighborhood, I felt that the way to connect is through nature and through knowledge of nature. And I became curious about the place where I live.
Not just in the sense of the cultural human history, which is very important to know, I believe, but digging beneath all those layers of concrete and beneath the city and what was here before and who was here before and how did they live?
And I just delved deeper and deeper. So I embarked on a long journey to get to know the place where I lived. And I realized that Brooklyn is not just part of New York City, just a borough. It’s part of an island, Long Island.
Francesca Rheannon
And the title is at the Glacier’s Edge. So let’s start with the glacier that formed Long Island.
Tell us about that glacier.
You say that.
I mean, describe what it was like when there was a glacier and then when it retreated.
Betsy McCulley
Well, I tried to describe that in the first chapter. It’s always fascinated me, this sense that, hey, once this place was covered by ice. Well, Long island wasn’t completely covered by ice. New York City, Manhattan was. It didn’t reach all the way across Long Island. But to learn this glacial history, the glaciers advanced and retreated and really shaped and created Long Island. It was not an island always.
The ice itself sculpted the land, made the moraines and outwashed plain, the flats and the highlands of Long Island. So we understand the topography in terms of the glacial advances and retreats. It didn’t recede from the area till around 18,000 years ago and then took thousands of years melting back. And all that melting back, of course, sluiced all these melt waters that created what’s called the outwash plain and also has left us with an incredible sort of lacy network of streams and rivers and creeks and reservoirs and springs. So we’re a well watered island, you might say. What was south of the ice was tundra, just as you would see today, where glaciers still are, of course they are melting back. And that gets to one of the reasons of calling it at the glacier’s edge. And also having that first chapter be about the Ice Age, about Ice Age Long island is to capture that sense that the Earth has undergone these cycles of what they’re called like ice house and greenhouse cycles.
And of course we’re in a greenhouse cycle which has been accelerated by global warming.
So you have a natural cycle that has taken place many times over of warming and cooling, of glaciers advancing and retreating.
But we, our human activities are causing such accelerated warming that we can hardly predict just how devastating this could be in terms of, say, drowning so many of our coastal cities, a lot of low lying land as the sea level rises, not to mention communities all along the coastal areas, and not to mention the effect on all species.
I wanted to give this historical perspective which reading about the Ice age can give us and to humble us in the face of these huge natural processes and then to see how we are disrupting many of the natural processes.
And I get into that, into my chapters on shoreline development, for example, that blocks the natural migration of barrier islands and shores and marshes and dunes where our hard shoreline developments prevents their migrating as the sea level rises, they’re not able to do this kind of natural process.
We’re disrupting it.
Francesca Rheannon
You know what struck me, one thing that struck me? I live not too far from the Montauk Lighthouse, which is on the very tip of Long Island.
It used to be 300ft from the shore. From the ocean, it is now 50ft. 50ft. Where do you think it’s going to be by 2050?
Betsy McCulley
I think. Well, I Suggest in the end of that first chapter, as I’m standing on the cliff by the lighthouse and thinking about this very same thing, is where will we be? Well, underwater, at least the. Where the point is, we’ll probably be surrounded by water. They are trying to bulkhead all around the lighthouse, but those cliffs are falling away all around it.
So it could well become on an island or islanded.
But yeah, that’s the question I raise. Where will we be? And I like to put myself right there on the ground in the land, which is something I do. I walk those cliffs by the Montauk Lighthouse and. And I have observed over 20 years on the east end where the Montauk lighthouse is located, those bluffs eroding. And the scale of erosion is incredible. And it keeps increasing and it seems to be going faster and faster. So the old walkways now are completely gone. They’ve sort of crumbled and gone down to the shore, and they’re going to have to keep rerouting the pathways there because the cliffs keep collapsing at the edges. So there again is that idea of the edge glaciers, edge shoreline, edge coastal edges. And we’re ourselves as human species in a way, being on an edge, to use that as a metaphor.
Francesca Rheannon
So explain the process.
You know, you say that Long island was never meant to be built on.
Why? What do you mean by that? Talk about the process of migration, sand migration, how coastlines actually work, and why is it not a good idea to build on them?
Betsy McCulley
Well, I don’t say Long island was never meant to be built on. I say that the barrier islands were never meant to be built on. And I think this is probably true of all coastal barrier islands. And it’s astonishing to me how they continue to be built on, even knowing that the sea levels are rising faster than was predicted, say 10 years ago, that it’s accelerating, yet people continue to build.
I think that coastal retreat is eventually going to become a necessity.
The reality is sea levels are rising.
Our hard development on barrier islands and shorelines is preventing a natural sort of migration inland of barrier island and marshland. I should say I have a chapter given to our wetlands as well.
So they are getting drowned as well, the marsh islands, they have nowhere to go. So the sea level, the sea is simply reclaiming them.
So that’s what I mean by they should never have been been built on. But alas, the reality is they have been built on and are still being built on.
Yet what will happen in the future with those communities?
And I feel for. But I understand, I’M one who lived by the water myself in Manhattan Beach. So my heart breaks for people when I, for example, after hurricanes, and I see people whose homes were destroyed in a place that they love. So my heart breaks for people. So there’s an understanding, is what I’m trying to say, that I understand why we’re drawn to the sea, to living by the sea, but I don’t think we should be continuing to build by the sea.
Francesca Rheannon
And you do tackle this idea of hard armoring of the shoreline versus soft structures.
For example, in Montauk, again, in order to protect the resorts, the hotels that are right on the beach, the town and the Army Corps of Engineers built a very controversial armoring of the beach with geotextile bags, these enormous bags. People called it dirtbag beach, and people, in fact, protested it.
Why were they protesting? What’s wrong with those so called called soft structures?
And what’s wrong with, you know, building hard structures as well, like groins and the actual seawalls?
Betsy McCulley
Well, what happens is when you build groins and seawalls is, well, the groins especially, which are built out into the ocean perpendicular to the shore. They starve sand down the beach from downshore communities or downshore beaches. So they may be there to prevent the erosion of the beach in that particular place where they’re placed. But then they’re starving the shores further down, away from the groins.
So the hard structures do that. The dune project with the geotextile cores.
Some argue in the protests, among the protesters that these are not really soft beach structures, they’re hard structures. And that as soon as the storm comes along, they’re going to erode just the same. They’re not truly soft dunes like natural dunes, in other words. And in fact, the next storm did erode them.
The Army Corps of Engineers, I praise their work where they are doing some really excellent work, for example, in Jamaica Bay with the Marsh Islands trying to rebuild them. You know, they’re involved in many good projects, but there’s one huge project on the eastern end of Long island of about shoring up the shores, basically. And even they say that a project which extends from Fire island all the way to Montauk, and it’s designed to shore up the beaches with sand, lots of sand, that it’s not going to last forever, that eventually it will 10 years, 20 years, it will all be gone. They’d have to start over again.
So that’s where you get to the question of, well, maybe coastal retreat is the only solution if we wish to save our communities.
I make a point in the chapter, and this is all based on research and studies by specialists, and that is that sand is a finite resource, and we don’t think of it as such. We think that we can continually just rebuild our beaches. It’s called beach nourishment, and it’s thought of as quite benign. It’s soft shore development in that sense, but it can only go on for so long.
Francesca Rheannon
This is Writer’s Voice, and we’re talking with Betsy McCulley about her book at the Glacier’s A Natural History of Long Island. San.
And you actually also say that, well, it’s really not so fine because a beach is a living biome.
And so I’d like you to describe that biome and the kind of sand that is brought in. This dredged sand.
It’s like, you know, dumping something that has nothing to do with what was there before and pretending that it’s actually reclamation.
Betsy McCulley
It’s not the beach itself, of course. It’s another ecosystem. It’s that habitat, the living web of life.
We don’t think of the sands and the beach as being alive. You know, there are eroded grains of rocks that have eroded over millennia by the water.
But within those grains of sand, you have all what’s called myofauna, microscopic fauna. There is a living world within even the sands on the beach. So all those grains of sand, not to mention, of course, the whole. The interconnected web of species, from the barnacles on the rocks, you know, to the birds who forage in the kelp that washes up the seaweed, to the little crabs that dig their little burrows in the sand, and the fiddler crabs, so. So there is a whole world.
The beach is a living biome. We don’t think of it that sand underneath our feet. Well, we think, well, sand is just sand. So they just dredge some sand from offshore and dump it and think they’ve created a beach. Well, yes, it becomes a beach for beach walkers, for humans to use and rec for recreation. And that’s all very nice. And it’s something that they’ve done for a long, long time. Decades. You go back to Coney Island, Coney Island Beach. They have to replenish it every single year. And they’ve been doing this going back from the time the amusement park was created. You’re going back over a century.
So it’s a long, practiced thing that they have done to constantly re. Nourish the beach.
They call it beach nourishment for the sake of people and, and of course, I understand we want our beaches. We love our beaches. But we need to understand, too, the ecological costs of constant renourishment as sea level rises and erodes the beach. How long can we continue to do this with a finite resource?
Francesca Rheannon
This is Writer’s Voice, and we’re Talking with Betsy McCully about her book at the Glacier’s A Natural History of Long Island Sound.
You mentioned Nepeague Beach. I know it well. Nepeag was the word by the indigenous, I guess, Matauket people for drowned land.
So it was drowned at one point, and it will certainly be drowned again before centuries end, is the estimation.
It’s the low lying land that connects Amaganset, which is up on a bluff, to Montauk, which is also kind of hilly. But this is the part that’s in between.
You say Nepeak beach is one of only seven remaining undeveloped beaches on Long island, but there’s a huge controversy over it. I’d like to ask you about it, the truck beach controversy. There were a group of private homeowners who objected to the fact that there was.
I mean, when we’re talking about truck beach, we’re talking about a line of maybe 50 to 100 vehicles in the summer every day lined up on the beach. Not just vehicles, but of course, these monster trucks.
And I have always been opposed to driving on a beach because I think, first of all, it really destroys the peace and beauty of the beach for the other people who are there.
But it’s also, I cannot think that it is good for that living biome of the beach to drive on it. So weigh in on this controversy.
Betsy McCulley
Well, there had been a tradition going back decades that allowed working fishermen the rights to drive onto the beach.
However, the tradition came from a time before cars.
So, yes, fishermen were allowed to use the beach, but it was never expected that there would be cars driving on the beach eventually and really eroding it. That was another way of eroding a beach, by the way. Not to mention nesting birds, like piping plovers, whose nesting becomes disturbed, and they’ve been so disturbed to the point that they’re having to cordon off piping plover nesting areas to protect them. And then you get all this resentment from beachgoers, including the drivers who want to drive on the beach, and they don’t like the fact that there’s an area cordoned off to protect birds. But the problem was that once you allowed cars and cars became trucks, then what happened was in the height of summer, with people from out of town. These are not the traditional fishermen or shellfish gatherers that go back centuries on Long island and have a right to their livelihoods. These are tourists driving on the beach and it became a kind of trek party.
And of course that’s. That ruins the beach for not just other species, but of course for people who want that peace and quiet that walking the beach and walking by the water can give one, as you mentioned. Yeah, so that’s on the Napig, the Atlantic Ocean side of Napig. Whereas the harbor side is a much quieter place and happens to be my favorite place, place to walk. It’s an absolutely beautiful little beach set up against the walking dunes and fairly quiet.
Francesca Rheannon
It’s very beautiful there in the hither hills. And finally, I’d like to ask you, I mean, we’ve been talking about the terrible damage that humans have done to this really fragile and incredibly biodiverse ecosystem of Long Island.
You also talk about remediating the damage, restoring the land and the waters. What’s being done to do that?
Betsy McCulley
I think one, I mean, there are many, many things being done to answer your question directly to remediate the ecological damage that we have done.
And I wanted to tell these stories.
It gets to why I want to tell the stories of eco restoration and the people who do the eco restoration and recovery.
It’s habitat restoration, habitat recovery, and in some cases even habitat creation where possible.
As for example, rebuilding marsh islands in Jamaica Bay, rebuilding dunes, truly rebuilding dunes, not with geotextiles, but actually planting dune grasses and, and encouraging natural dunes. But I wanted to do this because I think we can become so devastated, depressed at the sense of loss and the sense of the damage we humans have done. The sense of loss as species are declining, going extinct. We live in the sixth era of extinction.
I wanted to balance, balance that negative.
The fact that we are capable as human beings of truly being destructive as a species on the planet. I wanted to balance that with the creative, compassionate roles that we may play as restorationists.
So yes, I tell various stories. For example, the Central Pine Barrens of Long Island.
It really took the work of people from the grassroots, local people who loved the Pine Barrens, who cared about the place. But it took years of advocating and being active for preserving that ecosystem, that habitat.
Another example is Hempstead Plains.
Often it starts with one person. In the case of Hempstead Plains, for example, Betsy Gulata was the person who really started the organization of group, a conservation group, to conserve whatever was left of our only prairie, the only prairie east of the Appalachians. It’s our little prairie that Long island used to have. It’s a little prairie now, but it was once 50, 60,000 acres in size. So they were fighting, even if it’s just a remnant that they’re fighting to save, is their efforts to restore, recover and protect. And so I wanted to tell the stories of what people can do so we don’t walk away feeling, oh, we’re damaging the earth beyond repair. Well, we have a creative role to play.
Francesca Rheannon
And there’s so many more stories in this book. Really a lovely book with so much information and so much heart. At the Glacier’s A Natural History of Long island from the Narrows to Montauk Point. Betsy McCulley, thank you so much for talking with us here about this book.
Betsy McCulley
It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Francesca Rheannon
Betsy McCulley’s book at the Glacier’s Edge is out from Rutgers University Press.
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