There is a place, a sanctuary, a refuge where I sometimes go, on a tidal creek near home, to drift in a canoe, greenwalled by wild rice and swamp maples from all sight and sound of humanity.

It is not the quiet and solitude that renew me there so much as the power -- all-encompassing, throbbing; though at first you might scarcely notice.

But listen. Wings whir -- the vanguard of blackbirds, flown clear from New England to stoke their little engines with a summer's-worth of seed production from the fecund marsh. And look. An osprey has just swooped, elegantly plucking a big, glistening perch from the shallows.

These are common events on the creek; also high energy events as spectacular, in their way, as lightning bolts.

The white perch, a slow grower, has spent perhaps a decade achieving its present pound or so of flesh by capturing the nourishment in hundreds of pounds of lesser fish. Those perch-prey in turn have embodied the food energy in thousands of pounds of barely visible zooplankton; which in their turn captured the energy from tens, or hundreds of thousands of pounds of algae.

The algae represent the absorption of million upon million of BTUs of sunlight falling on the water, and of tons of nutrients washed by rain from the 64,000 square mile watershed of the bay, delivered by the currents of some 40 river systems that feed the estuary-- and also feed the marshes whose seeds fuel the peregrinations of blackbirds.

If you could see, in a single burst, the energy that must be thus distilled to support a single osprey -- or a falcon felling a marsh-fattened blackbird -- it would strike you blind. Energy is both the source and limit of all the planet's activities, and learning its language can afford delightful new ways of seeing the familiar.

What is a blazing campfire but centuries of sunlight, captured by millions of oak leaves, banked in cylinders of cellulose, now liberated in a few hours for our pleasure?

The spring spawning returns of bay shad and herring and rockfish complete an elegant circuit. The harvested nutritional energy of a year in the oceans is thereby injected as sperm and egg into every crevice of the winter-worn estuary -- just as its rivers swell with freshets, sweeping calories downstream to stoke the young life.

The energy language is also useful -- often sobering -- as a common denominator between the works of nature and humans. Reduced to the calories and BTUs involved in their making and maintenance, we can more meaningfully compare concrete and rice marshes, ospreys and aircraft. A poet who wrote from a hut on the shore of another estuary captured the idea: The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/drives my green age; But the next lines in Dylan Thomas's poem saw the dark potential of energy in modern forms, as something so concentrated that it: blasts the roots of trees/Is my destroyer.

Indeed, we modern humans seem veritable Olympians, gods on the energy scale. Even the blinding energy, the massive biotic production embodied by the swooping osprey is only enough to sustain a single bird, and perhaps its mate and chicks, and only for a few hours before it must hunt again, or rapidly cease to exist. Compare that to me in my petroleum-based plastic canoe, beneficiary of a society so sopping rich in energy that I can afford to spend whole days in nothing more productive than watching ospreys fish.

I have excess energy enough at my disposal to make ice to cool my thermos of tea. The beef in my sandwich comes from an agribusiness that uses a dozen gallons of oil just to get a pound of protein to market.

An ecologist conversant in the energy language once said you could pretty well describe the world in terms of "balls of energy, chasing other balls of energy to make more of themselves." Ospreys chasing perch, falcons knocking off blackbirds, Rockefellers investing in nuclear power, Saudis pumping oil. It tempted me to conclude that it is not just opposed thumbs and large forebrains that separate us from the animals -- we've also got bigger balls of energy. Bigger ones, in fact, than the planet ever knew until a few centuries ago. Few events in our species' history have been more transforming than tapping earth's buried coal, oil and natural gas -- all the compressed and distilled products of sunlight that fell for countless eons on prehistoric vegetation.

It has made us rich and powerful -- also wasteful and a tad drunk, careless of the side effects of so much power. In recent decades, for example, increased energy, flowing to the bay from fertilizers and human sewage, favored algae floating near the surface over rooted grasses that once covered much of the bottom. Almost without noticing, easily as a cat flips a mouse, and with the merest residues from our modern power trip, we very nearly flipped the ecosystem from bottom to top.

That is one reason we need to be more conversant in the language of energy. Another is we aren't likely to live so richly forever on our buried treasure. The easy fossil fuels have been gotten. We will dig deeper, go farther, squeeze harder -- but increasingly, it's going to take more energy and dollars to get energy. Nuclear fission from uranium, once you acknowledge the true costs of safely using it, comes close to costing more than it's worth. Fusion energy from hydrogen, touted as a future source of cheap, inexhaustible power, requires the generation and containment of incredibly high temperatures; few experts think it will yield a large surplus over the energy needed to make it.

And meantime, what else might we be doing with the tens of billions the government plans to invest in the hope that fusion can fuel a new energy spree? This is yet another reason to learn the energy language: to ask, in effect, what is our species to be about -- a spare-no-expense quest for ever-bigger balls of energy; or learning to use what we've got with maximum efficiency?

It is a common progression in natural ecosystems that the first growth that springs from a barren plot consists of "pioneer" species -- weedy plants poor in structure and quality, but adept at quickly maximizing the energies of soil and sunlight to colonize the place. Over time, the colonizers give way to a mature "climax" forest, dominated in our area by long-lived species like oaks. And this "steady state" can last indefinitely, recycling the nutrient energy in its own rotting leaves and fallen wood. That is likely our future, too, some ecologists say, as yesterday's sunlight, the fossil energy, gets scarcer and pricier. The only question is whether we shift gracefully, or chaotically.

Drifting here amid the swamp, I sincerely wish we were moving faster toward the forest-future. Because in the next few years, our continuing passion for more energy is almost certain to mean a huge, new power plant close by this creek.

It will be state-of-the-art in meeting pollution standards; but it will also require a smokestack so high that, day and night, for the rest of my life and my children's, it will intrude on the view from this creek and others for miles around.