The oil spilled into San Francisco one week ago and even today, even with all our news vectors and sources and RSS feeds, we still don't seem to be able to wrap our minds around it. Baker Beach, where I walk each morning, remains closed. The sign announcing its closure has a peculiar old-timey look to it. White wood stencilled with words about the oil spill. This being a former Army base, it should come as no surprise that there are Army-letter-looking stencils lying around, waiting for the day an impromptu sign needs to be made.
So. The daily walk now leads east-north-east, towards the cemetery, a national cemetery, a place meant to ensure that these people would not have died in vain. The walk moves me away from the Pacific and closer to the site of the spill. Spill: to flow or allow something to flow from a container. Yes: Event of one week ago matches dictionary. Yes: Container ship gashed along a bumper on the Bay Bridge and then oil flowed.
And now, yes, and now the birds die. I try not to think about this and feel this, the idea that while I sit here with fingers lightly tapping keys, less than a half mile away, in the cold dark, some shag or gull feels the deep cold of oil coated feathers. Feels cold, then slowly gives into this wave of fatigue, all the while wondering, what can all this be?
What to do while we wait to hear that the beach is open or that they need more help -- there remains endless cheer herein with the news there are too many volunteers at present -- what to do? Well, the decision was reached this is no time for long, blond hair. If the birds found themselves reduced to the deep brown of bunker oil, I would join them. I wandered down to my friend Patrick Richards salon, where he ageeably chopped my hair short and then coated the blond with brown dye. I no longer look precisely like me. I am no longer me, and I am no longer me because the place where I need and desire to walk has been taken away. What I mean to say is just this: I think we each of us are defined and created by the landscape in which we live. When we stop responding to the demands of our current reality in a specific place, we cease to be fully human and alive.
As example, I think of my friend Ed, who lives in a town called Orinda. In Orinda, people place lights under their front-yard trees and illuminate their yards at night, next to their illuminated homes, gestures wherein one begins to feel the lure of the Taj Mahal after sunset. But what do these lighted trees mean for the birds who try to make sense of 24-hour light pollution? Does this cross their minds? When the sun rises, and the tree-lights fade in comparison, the homes sit and stare at the few walkers on the street. Walking in Orinda is an exercise in jumping the hell out of the way of ginormous black SUVs roaring towards the clogged freeway. Walking in Orinda is something people choose not to do, not in the sunlight, and certainly not at night. So who are the tree lights for? What do they mean in the context of placing ourselves in a landscape? How is this at all connected to the oil spill?
Spill: To come from a building or other confined space in large numbers. I invite the people of Illuminated Tree World to spill into the streets, to cut their hair, to lay down in the dusty road and see who can make the first angel.
Meanwhile, my hair remains chocolate brown and short. Meanwhile, the beach is closed. Meanwhile, as a poet once wrote, the real world goes like this: Each day we awaken to the same white light creeping into our eucaluptus stand, the banana slugs remain eager to gnaw the skin on my palm given half a chance, and our local crow family dives and alights in the silver trees. Meanwhile it is yet a beautiful day.
When you drag a comb through your hair today, think of the birds of the near-shore Pacific. Hope they fly clear when word gets out something evil this way comes.
11/14/2007
10/25/2007
Permaculture
We gathered around an open-pit fire at Hidden Villa, in Northern California's Los Altos hills, a landscape where they teach "sustainable" practices on farms and for humans in general on Earth. Hard to believe this parcel of 1600 acres, woods, mountain, and farm, were a mere 38 or so miles from San Francisco. So far that day, we had hiked the trails and talked about how this part of the lithosphere was once deep under the sea, how banana slugs on the palm will gnaw skin, and we had worked the farm, milking, feeding, and learning how all the wiggling piglets, covered in shiny umber down and born three days earlier, were bound for the fry pan.
All this filled my brain as a shooting star zipped across the cool violet night while one of the interpreters, Will, talked about a sustainable world culture. The term he used was "permaculture, " and he explained the ideals: rather than thinking about the individual elements themselves, think about how they all weave and unify.
Most of this audience had logged a mere decade on the Earth's surface and I wondered if Will's urgings seemed too fantastic. Yet children do indeed consider all ideas -- from flying wizards to talking pigs to the possibilities of deep ecology. A hopeful moment.
Soon we broke into smaller groups and headed away from the camp fire out into the woods for a night hike. In my group , there were two other mother/chaperones along with our two wilderness guides. Both of these mothers wore lipstick, which they must have applied sometime between dinner and the walk into the dark woods. One of our exercises entailed staring at an index card displaying an outline of a Disney mouse head and then writing down its color. The guides described how in the dark, we lose our ability to see color; because three things are required to sort out color: a light source, an eye, and something at which to gaze. I thought about the lipstick. A gesture that made sense in a night world of lights and restaurants but here you had to adapt.
What came to mind as we stood listening to a Great Horned Owl,
bubo virgianus, was how out of luck we would be if we had to actually survive at night without light. Most of the children in our group lost themselves in some version of mini-terror when we were challenged to make a short "solo" hike on the trail.
Perhaps most of our current debate on how to maintain human habitats on Earth as the climate changes, a miasma of light bulbs and hybrid engines and plastic shopping bags, questions about permaculture and embracing ideas of deep ecology, then, are simply questions of fear.
After we returned to our city school later the next day, the children watched "An Inconvenient Truth." My little daughter said the film made her feel both sad and afraid, which seemed like a reasonable and thoughtful response.
For some reason, this reminded me of something an editor at The Washington Post had once told me, as way of a scolding: Fear is a great motivator.
Tonight I plan to lay in my bed and listen to the ocean's roar and consider the weave, the sea and its ecosystem, the stars overhead, those piglets down the pike. Is our sort of soft indifference to their fate, amazingly, the dominant sentiment about our fate as well?
All this filled my brain as a shooting star zipped across the cool violet night while one of the interpreters, Will, talked about a sustainable world culture. The term he used was "permaculture, " and he explained the ideals: rather than thinking about the individual elements themselves, think about how they all weave and unify.
Most of this audience had logged a mere decade on the Earth's surface and I wondered if Will's urgings seemed too fantastic. Yet children do indeed consider all ideas -- from flying wizards to talking pigs to the possibilities of deep ecology. A hopeful moment.
Soon we broke into smaller groups and headed away from the camp fire out into the woods for a night hike. In my group , there were two other mother/chaperones along with our two wilderness guides. Both of these mothers wore lipstick, which they must have applied sometime between dinner and the walk into the dark woods. One of our exercises entailed staring at an index card displaying an outline of a Disney mouse head and then writing down its color. The guides described how in the dark, we lose our ability to see color; because three things are required to sort out color: a light source, an eye, and something at which to gaze. I thought about the lipstick. A gesture that made sense in a night world of lights and restaurants but here you had to adapt.
What came to mind as we stood listening to a Great Horned Owl,
bubo virgianus, was how out of luck we would be if we had to actually survive at night without light. Most of the children in our group lost themselves in some version of mini-terror when we were challenged to make a short "solo" hike on the trail.
Perhaps most of our current debate on how to maintain human habitats on Earth as the climate changes, a miasma of light bulbs and hybrid engines and plastic shopping bags, questions about permaculture and embracing ideas of deep ecology, then, are simply questions of fear.
After we returned to our city school later the next day, the children watched "An Inconvenient Truth." My little daughter said the film made her feel both sad and afraid, which seemed like a reasonable and thoughtful response.
For some reason, this reminded me of something an editor at The Washington Post had once told me, as way of a scolding: Fear is a great motivator.
Tonight I plan to lay in my bed and listen to the ocean's roar and consider the weave, the sea and its ecosystem, the stars overhead, those piglets down the pike. Is our sort of soft indifference to their fate, amazingly, the dominant sentiment about our fate as well?
10/20/2007
The Ropes Course
I spent Friday in the tall redwood stands of Sonoma County, thinking about "outdoor education." Among the ideas presented to me were "ropes courses," which forced people into the trees, balancing, earning each step on a thin tendril in the sky. And yet. Is nature meant to be depicted and staged thus? Is nature meant to perform a service for us? What, I wonder, happened to the simple walk in the woods, quiet with one's own thoughts, or better yet finely and keenly attentive, attuned to each small murmuring from the trees. This forest, the site of earlier redwood logging, guessed at 100 years ago, looks like this: five or six new shoots of trees from a stump the width of a tractor-trailer tire. Tree says, what a great idea, to fell one wide single tree and allow six thin descendants to avail themselves of the space.
Wide-open space and how we avail of ourselves of it: On Saturday mornings in Iowa, I walked across the alternately bright or amber fields and hills outside town with my friend Tom, his dog Lucy, and my young daughter. Tom is a retina surgeon and photographer. We met while editors at a small science magazine; Tom was the "medical editor" and I was the "lay person" who made sure the ideas and images were true and accurate on paper that was then fastened together each month and sent out in the mail.
Tom takes pictures now of Iowa, its aging barns and lavender sunsets and long cast shadows in early October, air a little hint of winter to come. He still cuts into eyeballs to help people see better.
I have never understood how anyone can cut into eyes for a living and then wander the world looking into people's eyes and not feel some peculiar disconnect. I don't know how Tom does it. He addresses this question by saying, no surgeon would think like that!
Iowa, its fact and reality vs its mythos, still occupies my mind. It is one of the most altered landscapes on the planet, vying with New Zealand, another place I have lived. In Iowa, the tall grass prairie no longer exists as a force of nature. Now it exists as pockets of "rehabilitated" land. Instead, the miles stretch in all directions with corn and some soy. Small towns slowly die in their midst, people pushed out and deconstructed by corn they themselves planted. Corn takes over Iowa: Film at 11.
Another Iowa friend, Sasha Waters, has made a documentary about a version of these ideas and sent it to me last week in the mail. My daughter and I watched it and she said, hey mom, I remember how Iowa looks different from San Francisco. Sasha's film, This American Gothic, looks at life in Eldon, Iowa, where Grant Wood painted "American Gothic." We were surprised to learn that Midwesterners thought the painting was making fun of farmers. Like they were all somehow lesser beings.
So. It is Saturday and we are in San Francisco and our day is clear and the air cool. Tom and Sasha are in Iowa on this October day getting a look at red and yellow leaves, days of singular clear skies.
In Iowa I adapted to the habitat thus: If you simply refuse to look at the corn, or if you squint, you can almost see what is described in the diaries of women who migrated westward on Conestoga wagons, called prairie schooners, tall grasses, 200 or more grass and plant species per acre, grass moving in the wind like great waves across the sea.
Wide-open space and how we avail of ourselves of it: On Saturday mornings in Iowa, I walked across the alternately bright or amber fields and hills outside town with my friend Tom, his dog Lucy, and my young daughter. Tom is a retina surgeon and photographer. We met while editors at a small science magazine; Tom was the "medical editor" and I was the "lay person" who made sure the ideas and images were true and accurate on paper that was then fastened together each month and sent out in the mail.
Tom takes pictures now of Iowa, its aging barns and lavender sunsets and long cast shadows in early October, air a little hint of winter to come. He still cuts into eyeballs to help people see better.
I have never understood how anyone can cut into eyes for a living and then wander the world looking into people's eyes and not feel some peculiar disconnect. I don't know how Tom does it. He addresses this question by saying, no surgeon would think like that!
Iowa, its fact and reality vs its mythos, still occupies my mind. It is one of the most altered landscapes on the planet, vying with New Zealand, another place I have lived. In Iowa, the tall grass prairie no longer exists as a force of nature. Now it exists as pockets of "rehabilitated" land. Instead, the miles stretch in all directions with corn and some soy. Small towns slowly die in their midst, people pushed out and deconstructed by corn they themselves planted. Corn takes over Iowa: Film at 11.
Another Iowa friend, Sasha Waters, has made a documentary about a version of these ideas and sent it to me last week in the mail. My daughter and I watched it and she said, hey mom, I remember how Iowa looks different from San Francisco. Sasha's film, This American Gothic, looks at life in Eldon, Iowa, where Grant Wood painted "American Gothic." We were surprised to learn that Midwesterners thought the painting was making fun of farmers. Like they were all somehow lesser beings.
So. It is Saturday and we are in San Francisco and our day is clear and the air cool. Tom and Sasha are in Iowa on this October day getting a look at red and yellow leaves, days of singular clear skies.
In Iowa I adapted to the habitat thus: If you simply refuse to look at the corn, or if you squint, you can almost see what is described in the diaries of women who migrated westward on Conestoga wagons, called prairie schooners, tall grasses, 200 or more grass and plant species per acre, grass moving in the wind like great waves across the sea.
10/17/2007
Blurbs.
I don't know where the term "blurb" came from but I find myself saying that word now on a daily basis.
I need blurbs for my book by December 1. Like most authors, I have to get the blurbs myself. My publisher, Nebraska, even sent along the "format" for the email requesting blurbs. I don't use it, because it sounds sort of canned to me -- and isn't the idea that people blurb your book for specific reasons of love, art, and knowledge? So shouldn't the request be created in the same spirit?
Thus, I made a list of favorite nonfiction writers: Orwell, Saunders, Koestenbaum, Beard, Tempest Williams. Orwell wouldn't be blurbing any time soon, so I moved on to George Saunders.
My boyfriend, Ed, is sort of jealous of George, because I find his books exceedingly witty and clever and illuminating and thus I like to talk about George and his work like we are old friends. Ed says jealous-man things like, well, it says here George is married. I bet he's happily married too. Look at this author photo. He looks like a happily married man.
Anyway, George makes me believe the world contains more good people than bad, and seems to believe that telling a good story can change the world. I believe those things as well.
At any rate, I didn't really know who George was beyond his writing, so I did the modern thing and Googled him. This lead to me emailing him. George wrote right back. It seems George has opted out of the blurb business because it had become too time consuming. It was a nice note. He also thanked me for teaching his Dubai essay in my graduate class at the California College of the Arts.
I called Ed and breathlessly gave him the news. George blew me off, I said, but he was so polite about it. I knew he would be a good guy. Ed cheerily said he knew I would survive the blow. He sounded relieved in some small way.
What is the deal with blurbs? I know I read them, but do they influence actual book buying? If a writer whose work you despise says, I love this book, will you then despise the unread book? What if someone who has nothing to do with books at all, like a football player, or the guy with the best ERA in the NLCS blurbs my book? Would their opinions sell books? Why is it other writers we call on to judge and sell our work?
With this in mind, I am going to venture into more creative blurb territory. More soon.
I need blurbs for my book by December 1. Like most authors, I have to get the blurbs myself. My publisher, Nebraska, even sent along the "format" for the email requesting blurbs. I don't use it, because it sounds sort of canned to me -- and isn't the idea that people blurb your book for specific reasons of love, art, and knowledge? So shouldn't the request be created in the same spirit?
Thus, I made a list of favorite nonfiction writers: Orwell, Saunders, Koestenbaum, Beard, Tempest Williams. Orwell wouldn't be blurbing any time soon, so I moved on to George Saunders.
My boyfriend, Ed, is sort of jealous of George, because I find his books exceedingly witty and clever and illuminating and thus I like to talk about George and his work like we are old friends. Ed says jealous-man things like, well, it says here George is married. I bet he's happily married too. Look at this author photo. He looks like a happily married man.
Anyway, George makes me believe the world contains more good people than bad, and seems to believe that telling a good story can change the world. I believe those things as well.
At any rate, I didn't really know who George was beyond his writing, so I did the modern thing and Googled him. This lead to me emailing him. George wrote right back. It seems George has opted out of the blurb business because it had become too time consuming. It was a nice note. He also thanked me for teaching his Dubai essay in my graduate class at the California College of the Arts.
I called Ed and breathlessly gave him the news. George blew me off, I said, but he was so polite about it. I knew he would be a good guy. Ed cheerily said he knew I would survive the blow. He sounded relieved in some small way.
What is the deal with blurbs? I know I read them, but do they influence actual book buying? If a writer whose work you despise says, I love this book, will you then despise the unread book? What if someone who has nothing to do with books at all, like a football player, or the guy with the best ERA in the NLCS blurbs my book? Would their opinions sell books? Why is it other writers we call on to judge and sell our work?
With this in mind, I am going to venture into more creative blurb territory. More soon.
Ice. Ice Is. Ice Is Nice.
Earlier this year I returned to Christchurch, New Zealand, completing the last bits of research for The Entire Earth and Sky. When I am in town there, my colleagues at Gateway Antarctica let me work in one of their offices. The final chapter of the book had been reserved for information on global climate change and I wanted to hear what the scientists in New Zealand thought of the latest round of reports -- more change happening more quickly than expected appeared to be the headline. Or was it?
While I had worked at Gateway over 15 months in 2003-04, each of the scientists working alongside me had been exquisitely generous with what they understood of the continent, based on both their field research there and their wide readings in the literature. I actually found the scientists far better readers and far more curious about the ideas behind The Entire Earth and Sky -- how we place ourselves into a landscape, how we understand place through story, how the Antarctic is all about fantasy and desire -- than any of the English professors I came across at Canterbury.
If you are curious about Antarctica, a continent that is basically a cold desert, check out the excellent online guide, which the Gateway scientists have charmingly named a "visitor's introduction to Antarctica and its environment."
At any rate, I kept putting off writing about climate ideas, because each week seemed to bring something important over the transom: the IPCC, more rapid melting, penguins marooned due to too much big ice. My head spun. Thus, on an early autumn day I found myself sitting in Prof. Bryan Storey's office, listening to his ideas on global climate change, while staring at the photo on his wall of Shackleton's Endurance trapped in the ice.
With Al Gore and the IPCC winning the Nobel Peace Prize, I cast my mind back to Storey's words. He spoke in his serious, resolute, calm manner, it is amazing that humans have effected the planet so, that we have altered the system with our "little fires" and cars. We have changed the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Now we see that the Earth-system science approach is the only approach for studying and understanding climate. Now we see that if you mess with one part, it all changes. Nothing happens in isolation.
Storey added, but because of very complicated feedback mechanisms, while we are certain we have altered the system we cannot say what effect that will have on climate.
That is, the only word that seemed entirely true: Change. The film "The Day After Tomorrow," he said, was actually not that far fetched.
Sometimes people ask me about Antarctic research, and because Antarctica for many is synonymous with melting ice these days, they also ask me about climate change. Sometimes I tell them what Prof. Storey said earlier this year.
In America, one of the most common comments after this story, unbelievably, is the pronouncement that the listener either drives a Prius or is thinking of buying one. Maybe, people tell me, when Toyota comes out with the new model in 2008 I will get one.
Yikes. Maybe we should all watch The Day After Tomorrow Again. And again. Maybe art will make the Earth seem more real in its change.
While I had worked at Gateway over 15 months in 2003-04, each of the scientists working alongside me had been exquisitely generous with what they understood of the continent, based on both their field research there and their wide readings in the literature. I actually found the scientists far better readers and far more curious about the ideas behind The Entire Earth and Sky -- how we place ourselves into a landscape, how we understand place through story, how the Antarctic is all about fantasy and desire -- than any of the English professors I came across at Canterbury.
If you are curious about Antarctica, a continent that is basically a cold desert, check out the excellent online guide, which the Gateway scientists have charmingly named a "visitor's introduction to Antarctica and its environment."
At any rate, I kept putting off writing about climate ideas, because each week seemed to bring something important over the transom: the IPCC, more rapid melting, penguins marooned due to too much big ice. My head spun. Thus, on an early autumn day I found myself sitting in Prof. Bryan Storey's office, listening to his ideas on global climate change, while staring at the photo on his wall of Shackleton's Endurance trapped in the ice.
With Al Gore and the IPCC winning the Nobel Peace Prize, I cast my mind back to Storey's words. He spoke in his serious, resolute, calm manner, it is amazing that humans have effected the planet so, that we have altered the system with our "little fires" and cars. We have changed the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Now we see that the Earth-system science approach is the only approach for studying and understanding climate. Now we see that if you mess with one part, it all changes. Nothing happens in isolation.
Storey added, but because of very complicated feedback mechanisms, while we are certain we have altered the system we cannot say what effect that will have on climate.
That is, the only word that seemed entirely true: Change. The film "The Day After Tomorrow," he said, was actually not that far fetched.
Sometimes people ask me about Antarctic research, and because Antarctica for many is synonymous with melting ice these days, they also ask me about climate change. Sometimes I tell them what Prof. Storey said earlier this year.
In America, one of the most common comments after this story, unbelievably, is the pronouncement that the listener either drives a Prius or is thinking of buying one. Maybe, people tell me, when Toyota comes out with the new model in 2008 I will get one.
Yikes. Maybe we should all watch The Day After Tomorrow Again. And again. Maybe art will make the Earth seem more real in its change.
10/16/2007
Planetary: Teaching Environmental Humanities
Last night, after finishing homework with my daughter, synonyms of villain and dispute, then ripping through 11 long-division problems featuring decimals, I settled in to plan a course for the Spring semester at the California College of the Arts. There's an area of growing interest called environmental humanities, and the course I had in mind was "An Inconvenient Art," how writers, artists, and filmmakers across genres respond to environmental threat -- beginning with Thoreau and Emerson and fast-forwarding to Abbey, Carson, and then the IPCC report, among others.
My own writing -- a literary take on science and history -- is often called "inter-disciplinary." I must admit all this feels rather stiff to me. I mean, the idea that we need to name the discussion of the Earth, our place, as "environmental humanities" doesn't sit all that well with me.
At any rate, regardless of my own angst about how we marginalize place with fact and name, there is an interesting blog, Planetary, that offers both news and commentary on eco-activism specifically geared towards people who teach "environmental humanities."
A recent post found them contemplating a review of Into the Wild, which many of us who teach really struggle with as a depiction of life "outside the box" -- that is, the protagonist is either a complete genius or utter madman when you study Krakauer's account.
When I taught the book at the University of Iowa, the students were stunned by how stupid this rich white kid was about the wild. Most of those Iowa kids were from poor or struggling rural areas and had worked outside on the land. Many enjoyed hunting. Weather was something to watch and respect. Food sometimes was in short supply, even as they lived amidst corporate fields of corn and soy, a monoculture that some find beautiful but which brought to my mind recent horror films where creamed-spinach creatures come calling after dark.
How does this reside in our minds, this dissonance between what we believe the wild Earth to be, what the "countryside" is supposed to be, and what it is? On that note, may I suggest some further reading from my favorite online thought journal, The Electronic Book Review? Check out a review of McMurry's Environmental Renaissance: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Systems of Nature, published by the University of Georgia (2003.)
As the writer notes, "everyone who is anyone after Kant agrees that the real eludes us in its concreteness..."
My own writing -- a literary take on science and history -- is often called "inter-disciplinary." I must admit all this feels rather stiff to me. I mean, the idea that we need to name the discussion of the Earth, our place, as "environmental humanities" doesn't sit all that well with me.
At any rate, regardless of my own angst about how we marginalize place with fact and name, there is an interesting blog, Planetary, that offers both news and commentary on eco-activism specifically geared towards people who teach "environmental humanities."
A recent post found them contemplating a review of Into the Wild, which many of us who teach really struggle with as a depiction of life "outside the box" -- that is, the protagonist is either a complete genius or utter madman when you study Krakauer's account.
When I taught the book at the University of Iowa, the students were stunned by how stupid this rich white kid was about the wild. Most of those Iowa kids were from poor or struggling rural areas and had worked outside on the land. Many enjoyed hunting. Weather was something to watch and respect. Food sometimes was in short supply, even as they lived amidst corporate fields of corn and soy, a monoculture that some find beautiful but which brought to my mind recent horror films where creamed-spinach creatures come calling after dark.
How does this reside in our minds, this dissonance between what we believe the wild Earth to be, what the "countryside" is supposed to be, and what it is? On that note, may I suggest some further reading from my favorite online thought journal, The Electronic Book Review? Check out a review of McMurry's Environmental Renaissance: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Systems of Nature, published by the University of Georgia (2003.)
As the writer notes, "everyone who is anyone after Kant agrees that the real eludes us in its concreteness..."
10/15/2007
Synonyms: For each word below...
My daughter is 10 and at this age thinking about antonyms and synonyms remains a part of each day. Tonight, as we read through the week's vocabulary, assault, strategy, villains, misleading, abandon, productive, I had to laugh. Who's behind this list of words? Karl Rove now that he has free time on his hands? My daughter had all the synonyms right, save one, I reckoned:
7. On a productive day you would
a. play outside
b. get a lot done
c. stay inside
d. get nothing done
What do you think is the correct answer? It reads like a trick question. In order to find the right response, you have to gaze into the mind of the synonym-list maker, and realize, no, it is not productive to:
d. get nothing done
c. stay inside
a. play outside
My daughter and I thought about this and decided one could argue with equal force for all of these -- and went with "play outside." This list, I might add, comes to us from a "progressive" school in San Francisco.
If words are the tools we use to build culture and our 10-year-olds learn that being productive means blandly to "get a lot done," and then we later add to this concept the idea of material gain synonymous with "get a lot done" -- as opposed to the slouch people, like writers and artists, really not getting much "done" because there is no serious "pay check," are we all doomed? Here we are on Blog Action Day, pondering "environment." What is the synonym? Landscape? Or in this case, better as, "life?"
7. On a productive day you would
a. play outside
b. get a lot done
c. stay inside
d. get nothing done
What do you think is the correct answer? It reads like a trick question. In order to find the right response, you have to gaze into the mind of the synonym-list maker, and realize, no, it is not productive to:
d. get nothing done
c. stay inside
a. play outside
My daughter and I thought about this and decided one could argue with equal force for all of these -- and went with "play outside." This list, I might add, comes to us from a "progressive" school in San Francisco.
If words are the tools we use to build culture and our 10-year-olds learn that being productive means blandly to "get a lot done," and then we later add to this concept the idea of material gain synonymous with "get a lot done" -- as opposed to the slouch people, like writers and artists, really not getting much "done" because there is no serious "pay check," are we all doomed? Here we are on Blog Action Day, pondering "environment." What is the synonym? Landscape? Or in this case, better as, "life?"
Blog Action Day: Environment
Back in 1988 I lived for four months in Antarctica. Why I went there no longer matters. The facts of my life there were simple, morning, noon, and night sunshine in the 24-hour summer blast of radiant light. This light gives you a peculiar energy. In my case, it made me want to walk around. In Antarctica, this can be dangerous but I was young then and did not worry about death in a specific way. If I fell down a crevasse, I reckoned, I would use my strength and wits to get myself out of that jam.
I write this recollection now because today we have been invited to weigh in via Blog Action Day on the environment. Because I read from my book and teach nature writing, I get asked with some frequency what people can "do" or "buy" to help make the Earth better again.
Here is my simple list of easy-make life changes.
1) Do not buy things. Use what you have. Instead of buying something, like a belt, or a new dress, or that iPod in red, stop and consider the broader implications. Will the world end if you don't buy that belt? No. Will it end if you do? Maybe. Seems like you have your answer.
2) When you need food, buy things that have not been stepped on in various manufacturing processes. That is, watch out for how many hermetically sealed bags you have around -- things like corn stamped into little shapes then baked. Things like frozen food. Think about frozen food for a minute. I mean, how does it even have any nutritional value, wrapped in plastic and then in a cardboard box decorated with a photo of the food -- and it never really looks like that when you eat it.
Ask yourself, why do I choose to eat like one of the Jetsons, heating frozen food from a box in a microwave? Do I live in some sci-fi version of the future? Make food the old-fashioned way -- find things that are grown near your home and not in some distant land. In winter, don't expect to eat strawberries. Eat less in general. We all eat too much.
3) Never buy plastic bags or wrap. Just stop. Right now.
4) Don't drive every day of the week. Stay home some days. Stay home and go for a walk. Or read. Do things that don't require burning fuel.
Think about all your life's activities in terms of burning fuel. If you read Antarctic diaries or live in Antarctica, well, you will see how in a place where the fuel is all imported, save wind energy and solar, people conserve as part of each day.
If you don't conserve your fuel in Antarctica, we have seen from the stories of early explorers, you die.
I write this recollection now because today we have been invited to weigh in via Blog Action Day on the environment. Because I read from my book and teach nature writing, I get asked with some frequency what people can "do" or "buy" to help make the Earth better again.
Here is my simple list of easy-make life changes.
1) Do not buy things. Use what you have. Instead of buying something, like a belt, or a new dress, or that iPod in red, stop and consider the broader implications. Will the world end if you don't buy that belt? No. Will it end if you do? Maybe. Seems like you have your answer.
2) When you need food, buy things that have not been stepped on in various manufacturing processes. That is, watch out for how many hermetically sealed bags you have around -- things like corn stamped into little shapes then baked. Things like frozen food. Think about frozen food for a minute. I mean, how does it even have any nutritional value, wrapped in plastic and then in a cardboard box decorated with a photo of the food -- and it never really looks like that when you eat it.
Ask yourself, why do I choose to eat like one of the Jetsons, heating frozen food from a box in a microwave? Do I live in some sci-fi version of the future? Make food the old-fashioned way -- find things that are grown near your home and not in some distant land. In winter, don't expect to eat strawberries. Eat less in general. We all eat too much.
3) Never buy plastic bags or wrap. Just stop. Right now.
4) Don't drive every day of the week. Stay home some days. Stay home and go for a walk. Or read. Do things that don't require burning fuel.
Think about all your life's activities in terms of burning fuel. If you read Antarctic diaries or live in Antarctica, well, you will see how in a place where the fuel is all imported, save wind energy and solar, people conserve as part of each day.
If you don't conserve your fuel in Antarctica, we have seen from the stories of early explorers, you die.
10/11/2007
Why Write?
The previous post is from the beginning of my book The Entire Earth and Sky. I think about Antarctica every day and usually try to begin my day by looking at photos of the ice and seas. For some reason, and I don't know why, I feel very much at home in Antarctica, and did from the first time I went there in 1988. I remember quite clearly when my first sighting of the continent. Words fail me when I try to lay down that feeling as type.
Later, when I read accounts of similar moments -- when James Clark Ross first spotted the Ross Ice Shelf and compared it with the White Cliffs of Dover, it occurred to me how few places on Earth offered this view: Unaltered wilderness, one that looked precisely today as it did when another was there in the mid-19th century. Lately, this idea has come to occupy my mind. The question is, how can we begin to understand the history of a place, to bridge present and past with narrative, when the facts of place shift because of human culture?
These days, I live on a dune above the Pacific Ocean and walk the beach each day. Some days, it is only me and people who are paid to walk other people's dogs -- odd as this seems to me, it is rather common in San Francisco. One of the regular dog walkers, a large, red-faced young man chasing 10 dogs around the beach, talks to his dogs like this: OK! You are not supposed to run. You have a hip problem! No more running!
I think about this young man, the dogs, the absent people who own the dogs, and the largely empty beach. Inside the huge homes overlooking the Pacific, I imagine dog owners getting pedicures, selling stocks, and never looking out the window. Except when they have guests over.
Then they need the Earth to work for them. Look, they say, look at how beautiful the ocean and beach are, as though the world exists in a snow shake.
Later, when I read accounts of similar moments -- when James Clark Ross first spotted the Ross Ice Shelf and compared it with the White Cliffs of Dover, it occurred to me how few places on Earth offered this view: Unaltered wilderness, one that looked precisely today as it did when another was there in the mid-19th century. Lately, this idea has come to occupy my mind. The question is, how can we begin to understand the history of a place, to bridge present and past with narrative, when the facts of place shift because of human culture?
These days, I live on a dune above the Pacific Ocean and walk the beach each day. Some days, it is only me and people who are paid to walk other people's dogs -- odd as this seems to me, it is rather common in San Francisco. One of the regular dog walkers, a large, red-faced young man chasing 10 dogs around the beach, talks to his dogs like this: OK! You are not supposed to run. You have a hip problem! No more running!
I think about this young man, the dogs, the absent people who own the dogs, and the largely empty beach. Inside the huge homes overlooking the Pacific, I imagine dog owners getting pedicures, selling stocks, and never looking out the window. Except when they have guests over.
Then they need the Earth to work for them. Look, they say, look at how beautiful the ocean and beach are, as though the world exists in a snow shake.
10/10/2007
And yet they do walk upside down...
A bucket of icy water down the neck checks the fiercest vomiter. – Frank Arthur Worsley, Shackleton’s captain, on his cure for Antarctic seasickness.
Sometimes we are given our opportunities, and we take them and make something fine, and the story will live forever; and so we have our bodhisattva moment.
– Kim Stanley Robinson, Antarctica.
Antarctica is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace continent, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. The Antarctic continent is the fifth largest of the seven – Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, South America, and North America. If you want to fix its size, imagine the U.S. and Mexico combined. Antarctica is ranked number-eight by geographic size of all the Earth’s features.
Most of us have trouble calling to mind an overall image of Antarctica. This is because Antarctica gets edited off most world maps. The familiar mapped views of the world are Mercator projections, which maximize the area of mid-latitude countries, thus making them appear larger than their geographic reality. Antarctica presents a pesky problem for mapmakers – as a circle it doesn’t lend itself to being cut into one long, wide strip. The solution has been to leave it off maps entirely. So it was that the fifth-largest continent became a lacey fringe.
Lurking mysteriously off the map, Antarctic events invite geographic context by scientists and news agencies. When an enormous iceberg broke off from the Antarctic Peninsula in 2002, its official name became B-22, a code describing location and time frame. The U.S. National Ice Center assigns these coded names, then monitors the bergs’ journey northward. The agency is located outside of Washington, DC, and most trackers have never seen an actual iceberg.
The gargantuan B-22 made news across the world – and caused editors and scientists to fish around for the words to describe its heft. The BBC described B-22 as nine times the size of Singapore, which presumably draws a picture for UK residents, all clear on their former colony’s actual size. The Associated Press noted the berg rivalled the State of Delaware. In Canada, they offered Prince Edward Island as comparison. Reuters decided not to play that game, simply referring to the berg as “large.” The game of scale is infectious for most, however. Want to imagine B-22 at its birth? Think of two Hawaiis or the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.
B-22 had a short reign as a headline grabber. Within days, the British Antarctic Survey announced that satellites had captured the break up of the Larsen B Ice Shelf. The images of its demise, recorded by a passing camera miles above the Earth, made The New York Times’s front page, albeit below the fold. The Larsen B Ice Shelf weighed in at 500 billion tons, and filled Antarctica’s Weddell Sea with miles of floes. What was the biggest floe, you ask? According to the New Scientist, it was about the size of Greater London.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)