Restraint has an ecology

There is an hour before sunrise on our coast when the tide has finished its work and left everything it carried in a single line along the sand, shells and weed and cuttlebone and the occasional float from some other country, all of it sorted by weight, with no interest at all in origin.

I have walked lines like that most of my working life. The sea keeps no record of where anything came from; it delivers, and then it moves on, and whatever arrives becomes the property of the shore that received it.

This week gave us two deliveries, and I have found it impossible to think about either alone. Oil reaching our coastline, carried by currents that were never asked to consult us. The arrival was the only part of the process we were present for.

What a coastline holds before anything happens to it is the part nobody counts. Loggerheads coming ashore at Masirah in the dark, hauling themselves up the same beaches their mothers used, working for an hour in the sand before laying, covering, and turning back towards the water ahead of the light. Humpbacks that never leave the Arabian Sea, the only population of their kind anywhere in the world that stays home. Sardines running in numbers that hold up whole villages.

Weathered crude is a patient substance. It smells of asphalt with something sweeter underneath, and it declines to stay on the surface where hands can reach it; it works down into sand, settles into sediment, releases for years, and travels upward through everything that eats until it arrives in a household as a smaller catch and a thinner month. The beaches will photograph well again long before any of that has finished.

Loss becomes hardest to dismiss when somebody counted before it happened. The ordinary work of walking beaches in ordinary years with a clipboard and quadrat decides whether change can be demonstrated, responsibility established and recovery measured. Baselines are built when nobody expects to need them. A crisis spends what is already there.

Countries hold memory too. Oman’s restraint lives in relationships maintained across difficult years, institutions that establish facts before urgency bends them, and channels kept open when conversation offers little reward. The reserve was drawn on again this week. A sentence takes seconds to utter and can spend trust accumulated over 50 years.

Our coast receives trade, wildlife, weather and pollution; our diplomacy receives the fears, demands and contradictions of competing powers. Holding the middle carries dignity because others depend on it, and cost because pressure arrives from every direction.

Restraint has an ecology because it depends on relationships that sustain one another. Experts measure what others cannot see; institutions create order before urgency becomes panic; diplomats preserve enough trust for another conversation; communities grant these systems the time and legitimacy to work. Every element holds something the others will eventually need.

Reciprocity keeps that ecology alive. Those who move cargo through shared waters carry obligations towards the environments and communities exposed to their choices, and those who rely on Oman’s access and credibility carry obligations towards the sovereignty and respect that make both possible. 

The tide will lay down another line tomorrow morning, sorted by weight, indifferent to where any of it began. I have always found something steadying in that indifference, and this week I have started to wonder whether we have come to treat our own steadiness the same way, as a feature of the place, arriving on schedule and asking nothing of anybody.

Rumaitha al Busaidi. The writer is an environmental strategist and advocate for sustainable development. Follow her on LinkedIn@rumaithaalbusaidi