My book, The Entire Earth and Sky: Views on Antarctica, is not due out until October 1 but it recently appeared on Amazon.com. Lately, when people other than my writing colleagues ask about the book -- I have taken to talking like a swaggering travelling salesman, as in, "You can pre-order a copy on Amazon.com."
This newish habit of mine makes me feel like an ass, and yet it is hard to stop. Orwell wrote so beautifully about the vanity and selfishness of the writer. He also, I believe, threw in lazy as part of his equation on what writers, in fact, are. Vain, selfish, lazy. Perhaps this is why I enjoy doing historical research, years of combing archives, in search of letters and diaries of men working in Antarctica. I am fascinated by their calm determination, their sense of purpose, and their unending appetite for the unknown. Among my favorite sailors who came to me via letters, was a Scotsman named James Paton. I included a piece of his story in The Entire Earth and Sky.
***
I recall sitting in the Canterbury Museum Archives reading Paton's diary. I was rather distracted by the diary as a physical object -- they used to sell the opening pages to advertisers and the adverts themselves seemed meaningful and illuminating, although I did not ultimately use them in my book. (Too many small portals, or portholes, open as I wandered through the pages and photos. The challenge wasn't to find, but to know what I sought while also being wholly open the new.)Here are my rough notes:
The Diary of James Paton, 1904
The book is dark brown and gold embossed on the cover, an oval “Lett’s No. 101 Diary” in ornate hand; the oval fashioned as a belt, secured with a buckle at the base.
Inside the front cover, several pages of ads, including “Eno’s ‘Fruit Salt’”
“Every household and travelling trunk ought to contain a bottle of Eno’s Fruit Salt for preventing and curing by natural means all functional derangements of the liver, temporary congestion arising from alcoholic beverages, errors in diet, biliousness, sick headache, constipation, thirst, feverish cold, influenza, throat affections, and fevers of all kinds.
“The effects of Eno’s Fruit Salt on a Disordered and Feverish condition is Simply Marvellous. It is, in fact, Nature’s Own Remedy, and an Unsurpassed One.
CAUTION: Examine the Capsule and see that it is marked ENO’S FRUIT SALT!’ Otherwise, you have a WORTHLESS IMITATION.
Lett’s Australasian Rough Diary and Almanac for 1904
Being the fourth year of the reign of his majesty king Edward VII.
Date of Birth of and Age in 1904 of The Royal Family...
Including list of New Zealand rates of postage -/1 for each 1/2 oz.
Paton writes, Saturday 5th December 1903
Cast off moorings from the Alexandria Peir (sic) exactly at noon, there were many friends down to bid us Good-bye and wish us God speed, although our send of (sic) was not quite so enthusiastic as the one from Lyttelton it was no less sincere, the short period we had been in Hobart was not lost…
A letter on the ship Terra Nova stationery: logo is Emperor penguin standing on a globe, with the Antarctic continent underfoot. In the ring band around it, the words, British Antarctic Expedition, Terra Nova RYS
The penguin is in profile, gazing steadfastly to the right.
Christmas 1910
“Knowing only too well how little time we shall have on hand when we get to our destination I think I had better begin my letters now. We left Port Chalmers at 2.30 P.M. on November 29th, and all went well until December 2nd when we ran into a heavy southerly gale our decks were heavily laden with cargo. ...we had to turn to and throw a good part of the deck cargo overboard, this was not our only danger, as it soon leeked out that the water had risen as high as the bottom of our furnaces ...all hands were employed all the time up to the waist in water, with the seas breaking over them while the aftergaurd (sic) (the officers and scientists) were kept passing it from the Engine room in buckets,
All this time we had very little to eat (nothing hot) and no rest, and for our own sakes as well as for the poor dumb animals we had on board, it was a relief the weather moderated.
During this gale we had one dog washed overboard, and two of our horses got down and died but several days passed before we could get them out of the stalls to throw them overboard."
And then Paton recounts how life was at sea -- once they arrived in Antarctica. He travelled there a remarkable 10 times and was among the most highly sought polar sailors in the world. However, you won't find him in any museums, save Lyttelton, New Zealand. Paton, like most of the simple seamen, has been all but erased from history.
11/14/2007
The Ontology of an Oil Spill
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.
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.
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..."
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