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1646221354
| 9781646221356
| B0C1B7YQKD
| 3.78
| 306
| Jan 02, 2024
| Jan 02, 2024
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really liked it
| …deer…occupy a middle zone between …extremes of domestication and wildness. Far from tame, they are nonetheless experts at living with people, and …deer…occupy a middle zone between …extremes of domestication and wildness. Far from tame, they are nonetheless experts at living with people, and in many ways, they actually prefer to share habitat with us. All across North America, as in many other parts of the world, we exist in intimate proximity to deer.-------------------------------------- The FAA considers white-tailed deer more hazardous to U.S. civil aircraft than any other animal.Many images might pop to mind when we think about deer. I am sorry to say that the first one in my tiny mind is the sad vision of road kill. The second is the sheer joy of spotting wild deer in woods, or yards, or, more grandly, in national parks, whether the white-tail native to my part of the world, the mule deer and caribou more prevalent in the west, and even moose. I cannot say I have seen reindeer in the wild, unfortunately. Many visits to the Bronx Zoo introduced me to a much wider range of cervids, the family to which deer belong, including the diminutive muntjacs. [image] Erika Howsare - image from her site Erika Howsare has had more of a connection to deer than, I expect, most of us. She grew up in western Pennsylvania in a family that hunted. In fact, the Monday after Thanksgiving is an unofficial holiday in our state, with most schools, and many businesses closed due to expected high absenteeism. This is one of many foci of interaction between deer and people. I’d had an inkling, even before writing the book proposal, that deer were involved in all manner of controversies, contradictions, and human strivings. That was what got me interested in them. But I didn’t know too many specifics. When I started researching, one of the first things I did was to set up news alerts on deer and several other related terms.Thankfully, Howsare, a published poet, offers a lot more than the daily deer chyron. I did start the book from a fairly cerebral place where I thought, “Oh yeah, great subject. Like, this will bring up all kinds of great questions, and I’ll be able to go down all these roads in terms of the research and make these points, and it’s gonna be a really great opportunity to dig into these intellectual questions.”And a wondrous opportunity it proved. You will learn a lot about the human/deer connection, and a bit about deer behavior as well. [image] White tailed deer - image from PennVet – University of Pennsylvania One thing to consider is just how long deer and humans have been interacting. Pretty much as long as there have been people, judging by the content of ancient cave art. They appear in all cultures, and are a rich presence in mythology worldwide. As our first-hand experience of deer is usually liminal, many have come to see deer as ambassadors of the wild world, crossing from theirs to ours, and maybe offering a route away from the world of living humans. Of course, for many of us there is an UR deer image that has been burned into our brains. Really, can you name any other deer this side of Santa’s team? [image] Bambi - image from Disney via KRCA.com They are beautiful and offer us an image of wildland innocence. But for many they have become pestiferous. Consider having spent months planting and tending your beautiful back yard garden, only to wake one day to find that real-life Bambis and their kin have laid waste to all your work. There is also the carnage caused not just to deer but to people and their vehicles from collisions with deer. There are folks whose job it is to collect the bodies. Howsare spent time with one of them. Deer have been a crucial source of food for people across the millennia, but also of a wide range of materials. Howsare gets trained in earth skills to find out how to make buckskin, and many other useful items formed from deer parts. We usually think of reintroduction of wildlife having to do with trout, or other finned creatures. You may have heard of attempts to reintroduce predators, like wolves in Yellowstone. But the largest and most successful reintroduction in US history occurred in the early 20th century when deer, which had been driven near to extinction, were reintroduced in many parts of the nation. [image] Sweet Tooth - image from Netflix via BBC Ok, this was not at all included in the book but I kinda hoped it would gain at least a mention, as it does speak to the closeness of our species. Factlets abound. Did you know that deer can suffer from a chronic, deadly disease that we usually associate with cattle, chronic wasting disease? Or that maybe the notion of adorning rulers with crowns was a way of imitating the stag rack? You will gain an appreciation for the use of deer-based imagery in the film Get Out. There are plenty more. One of the main points to be gained is seeing how deer are actually quite adaptable, and have managed to carve out an ecological niche at the perimeters of human population. [image] Moose - image rom Britannica A survey course on cervid-sapiens connection makes for an entertaining, informative read on its own. But Howsare incorporates a personal journey into her narrative. Never a hunter, at least not one who shoots anything, she has enough personal connection to folks who do, relations, to want to gain a better understanding of the hunting culture and the rationales of those who kill deer. She looks at her own feelings about deer and hunting. Not all who hunt actually shoot. Hunting can be a group activity, with a diversity of roles, very reminiscent of our prehistoric ancestors. One very appealing element of this learning curve for Howsare was becoming more comfortable with being still, settling into a place and letting herself experience the environment, the moment, fully, a form of meditation almost. She looks at some of the outrages associate with hunting as well. Like releasing or breeding deer in fenced areas to be killed by people fond of killing things, but not much interested in doing all the research and preparation that serious hunters undertake. Think Dick Cheney hunting quail. My only gripe about the book is a petty one. I find that science/nature books always go down easier when the information is spiced with a bit of humor. No danger of that here. So, past my personal preferences, The Age of Deer is an easy thumbs up. You will learn a lot and gain a far greater understanding of the relationship between humans and cervids throughout history and our interactions today, finding yourself saying, whether aloud or internally, “I never knew that.” In the Anthropocene, it seems that far too much of humanity has assumed the position of the prototypical you-know-what frozen in place as the headlights of global doom approach at increasing speed. Deer, at least, have an excuse for such behavior, as their woodland-creature-instinct, however misguided it might be on a paved road, is to become very still so an approaching predator might not see or hear them. Given their abundance on the planet, it is a strategy that has worked out well for them, despite the roadside carnage, as deer remain the last large wild animal in most places. The roaches and rats will not be alone after we are gone. Deer, icons of woodland beauty, are adaptable. They are survivors, and will be keeping them company. If the American project was, in part, to make a pastoral landscape out of a wilderness, deer benefited from that project in a cultural sleight of hand. We thought of them as part of the wild, but we had misconceived them. Their secret was that they, like us—like squirrels, corn, apple trees, clover, ands sparrows—would flourish in our human garden. Review posted - 03/22/24 Publication date – 01/20/24 I received a hardcover of The Age of Deer from Catapult in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review will soon be cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages Profile – from Catapult ERIKA HOWSARE holds an MFA in literary arts from Brown University and has published two books of poetry. She also worked in local journalism for twenty years, covering culture and environmental issues. She teaches writing and contributes reviews and essays to various national outlets. A native of Pennsylvania, she lives in rural Virginia. Interviews -----Poets & Writers - Ten Questions for Erika Howsare by staff -----Flyleaf Books - Erika Howsare presents THE AGE OF DEER -Howsare reads from the book then takes questions – the sound quality is poor -----Phoebe Journal - Hungry Deer and Pissed off Gardeners: An Interview with Erika Howsare by Ashlen Renner Items of Interest from the author -----The Atlantic - An Incurable Disease Is Coming for Deer - an excerpt - but requires a subscription -----Orion - Skin to Skin with a Deer - excerpt -----Virginia Audio Collective - If You See a Deer - a four-episode companion podcast -----Lithub - Erika Howsare on Finding Inspiration in Headlines Items of Interest -----Be vewy, vewy quiet. - Mister Fudd may be hunting a different species, but his approach applies to deer as well My review of Stephen Graham Jones’s - The Only Good Indian - a wronged elk on the warpath -----My review of Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s - The Hidden Life of Deer: Lessons from the Natural World -----Gutenberg - The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Mar 18, 2024
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Mar 20, 2024
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Hardcover
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1646220307
| 9781646220304
| 1646220307
| 4.09
| 197
| Jun 14, 2022
| Jun 14, 2022
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really liked it
| “At a time when our planet is experiencing terrifying and unprecedented levels of change, what corresponding transformations have you witnessed in you “At a time when our planet is experiencing terrifying and unprecedented levels of change, what corresponding transformations have you witnessed in your lives, yards, neighborhoods, jobs, relationships, or mental health?” That’s the question that Tajjia Isen and I asked the contributors to this anthology. We wanted to hear their personal stories, allow then to serve as witnesses of this incredibly complex moment in history. - from the Introduction-------------------------------------- This is what climate change is. It’s what it does to the psyche, along with the body and the places we love. It’s nearly invisible until the moment something startles you into attention. A creeping catastrophe waiting with arms outstretched to deliver a suffocating embrace. And once the knowledge is gained, there is no unknowing it. You are no longer climate blind. You see and cannot unsee.Things change. Often it happens too slowly for us to notice. Sometimes processes have been evolving for a while and take a sudden, tipping point jump into the observable. But often it takes being away for a while to get a visceral sense of change. [image] Tajja Isen - image from Catapult, where she is Editor in Chief What do you notice, and what slips by as just the normal range of expected experience? I have been around long enough to have personal elements that fit in with the editors’ approach. I was not keeping track of the frequency or height of the snowfalls that marked winter growing up in the Bronx. Does it snow more now? Less? Maybe, but not that I could say from personal observation, particularly. Although there was a stretch of years when it began to seem that snow was a thing of the past. Then it returned. I would have to look through tables of data to really know. Summers were hot growing up, days in the 90s, maybe a few in triple digits. Fire hydrants, including the one in front of the apartment building where I was raised, were opened, sometimes by friendly firefighters, sometimes by unauthorized people, so kids like me could get some relief from the heat. Are NYC summers hotter now? I don’t really know off the top of my head. Again, I would have to check tables of historical data. But I do know that Summer nights in New York were increasingly uncomfortable over my many years there, with overnight lows far too often in the 80s. Yes, the city holds the heat well, but it held it well during the entirety of my life. Something had changed. Then there was Superstorm Sandy. [image] Amy Brady - image from LitHub In a way, the editors asked their contributors to respond to a lawyerly question: What did you notice and when did you notice it? With the extra of asking how the noticed change(s) impacted them. Editors Amy Brady and Tajja Isen have put together essays from nineteen writers from around the world, each exploring what they have noticed. In 2022, we are witnesses to one of the most transformative moments in human history: a time when climate change is altering life on Earth at an unprecedented rate, but also a time when the majority of us can still remember when things were more stable. We are among the first—and perhaps one of the last—human populations to have memories of what life was like before. To us, the “new normal” is not how it’s always been. Our lives jostle against incongruous memories of familiar places. We are forced to confront, in strange and sometimes painful ways, how much those places have changed.Being swamped with relentless tales of big scale environmental horror can have a numbing effect. Numbers, estimates, projections, possible outcomes, blah, blah, blah. We can stop hearing after a while, tune it out. Outrage is appropriate and we experience that, but it is not something we can endure continuously. At our core, humans are creatures of story, not statistics. For as long as we have existed people have concocted origin stories, not origin reports. So, maybe story is a better way to communicate, to connect, to inform people, some people anyway, about the real on-the-ground reality of global warming. And that is what we have here. These nineteen stories are memoirish, covering the far reaches of the planet and a range of personal experiences. Landscapes that have been transformed by warming, devastating long-term drought, massive reduction in wildlife, invasive species wreaking havoc on formerly stable ecosystems, growing public consciousness of particles per million in the air, and on. Some are a bit tangential. In Unearthing, Lydia Yuknovich focuses on the harm done by the Hanover, Washington facilities that produced much of the fissile materials used in America’s nuclear bombs. Her witness to the very personal impact of radioactive pollution on a peer growing up is not really a global warming tale, however heart-breaking. Some focus less on personal global warming miseries to look more at human interactions, class, racial and gender politics coming in for some attention Some tales are wonderful in their strangeness. Walking on Water looks at how those charged with relocating both people and native deities to make way for a huge dam in Africa interact with local people and customs. Signs and Wonders notes, and celebrates, the increasing weirdness in the world, as long-hidden things begin to reappear when landscapes change and glaciers recede. Some offer strong imagery. In Cougar, Terese Svoboda builds on an experience she had while driving, in which she narrowly avoided hitting a cougar that was making a dash across a Nebraska highway. She looks at ways the creature is making a comeback, among other elements in her story, and sees cause for hope that humanity can find a way as well. In The Development, one of my favorite stories in the collection, Alexandra Kleeman notes a slice of green near her Staten Island apartment and pays attention as this (at least temporarily) abandoned piece of NYC is taken over by nature, plants left alone to grow, to spread, wildlife moving in. The optimism of regeneration lives side by side with the dread that it is only a matter of time before developers carve a pristine, straight-line urban walkway out of it. Lacy M. Johnson tells of her religious father, in Leap. He was a white collar at a coal plant, justifying the environmental carnage being caused as God giving people the Earth to use however we want. Some focus on illness. Warming has expanded the range of ticks that carry Lyme disease to the chagrin of well, everyone. Having had the pleasure some years back, I can very much relate to this concern. Lyme disease gets a mention in two of the stories. Porochista Khakpour’s Season of Sickness tells of his travails with Lyme and the joys of black mold in his apartment, and on. Is warming only generating more risks, or is it also impacting our resistance? The collection is rich in beautiful writing and insight. The sense of place is particularly strong throughout. It certainly offers a prompt most of us can work from. What have you noticed? And how has it impacted your life? One change that stands out from personal experience is a product of the others, expectations. Growing up, most of us, I believe, expected that the physical world would continue on pretty much as it had. That is no longer the case for anyone who pays any attention to environmental events in the world. While the fear of imminent and instantaneous destruction in the 1950s and 1960s, helped along by duck-and-cover drills during the Cold War, may have dissipated, (although it has certainly not been eliminated) the existential threats of today have more to do with our less flash-bang demise. The ticking up of temperatures worldwide makes us all frogs in the proverbial pot of warming water. And it seems an insuperable task trying to get those in charge of the range to turn off the flame, or at least turn it down enough. Will my children and grandchildren be able to see the places in the world I have been able to see? Will all those places even exist? What does warming mean for their longevity? Human lifespans increased significantly in the USA over the 20th century. I have already outlived my father. Will my children outlive me? We know that change is possible. When I was a kid it seemed that everyone smoked. After decades of effort, smoking was much reduced. Hope is a reason to go on, to keep trying, but one change I see is a whittling back of hope itself. Sure, there are positive developments. Electric cars have arrived and renewable energy production is growing as a percentage of overall supply. General awareness has surely grown. Our understanding of the complicated parts that make up global warming is expanding, increasing the possibility that fixes, or at the least ameliorations, can be identified, whether or not they are implemented. But is that enough to stave off the worst? Is anything, at this point, enough? Are we in the world of Don’t Look Up, where the only sane response is resignation? I sure hope not. We must learn to become conservationists of memory. Otherwise, this damage we have done to our planet will cost us our past, as it may already have cost us our future. And without a past or a future, what are we? Nothing. A flickering violence of a species, here such a short time, insatiable, then gone. - Omar El Akkad Review posted – July 8, 2022 Publication date – June 14, 2022 I received a copy of The World As We Knew It from Catapult in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to Amy Brady’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages Links to Tajja Isen’s’s personal, Instagram, and Twitter pages Interviews -----Publishers Weekly - 'The Raw Data of Someone Else's Life': PW Talks with Amy Brady and Tajja Isen by Liza Monroy -----Writer Unboxed - Seeking the Existential, the Intimate, and the Urgent: Essays That Model Masterful Storytelling by Julie Carrick Dalton Items of Interest from the author(s) -----LitHub - A list of pieces Brady wrote for LitHub -----Orion Magazine - excerpt - Faster Than We Thought by Omar El Akkad ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 05, 2022
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Jul 05, 2022
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1250270235
| 9781250270238
| 1250270235
| 4.25
| 1,486
| Feb 15, 2022
| Feb 15, 2022
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it was amazing
| Big changes are taking place across the vast plain stippled by spruce and striated with water that unfolds below the aircraft at 10,000 feet. The Big changes are taking place across the vast plain stippled by spruce and striated with water that unfolds below the aircraft at 10,000 feet. The skin of the earth is melting, microbial life waking after thousands, possibly millions, of frozen years. The soil is transpiring—perspiring one could say since more moisture is being released than absorbed—and animals and plants are taking note. It is a new world, and intelligent life—the smart genes—is sniffing it out, sending out suckers, seeds and scouts, ranging north, getting ready.The Treeline is a mind-blowing piece of work that will teach you many, many things you never suspected, while feeding your sense of awe and your sense of dread. We look to the margins for evidence of large changes in the world, tell-tale signs like rising levels along water frontages, expanding desert edges, changes in growing seasons, changes in wildlife. The treeline was the edge Ben Rawlence chose. [image] Ben Rawlence - Image from 5 x 15 He had spent years writing human rights reports and trying to get the UN and governments to address refugee issues, but when he started writing through the eyes of the refugees themselves, in several books, many more people began to listen. Understanding that the conflict and the displacement that was going on was driven by climate change I began to look for other examples, other parts of the world where we could see this process in action, where we could see climate breakdown as history already, and we could catch a glimpse of the future that awaits the rest of us. So I began digging around and doing research and came across this very arresting image of the trees and the forest moving north towards the pole. I discovered that the forest was on the move and the trees were turning the white arctic green. They shouldn’t be on the move. That’s not supposed to happen. And this sinister fact has huge consequences for all life on earth. - from the 5x15 pieceSo, what exactly is the treeline? Generically, it is the latitude above which there are no trees, roughly the Arctic Circle. Another measure is the rippled line around the globe south of which the average July temperature is ten degrees centigrade or higher. (The Arctic Squiggle?) Discovering that the Arctic treeline consisted of mostly six types of trees, he set about to look at each of these. Scots pine in Scotland, birch in Scandinavia, larch in Siberia, spruce in Alaska and, to a lesser extent, poplar in Canada and rowan in Greenland. I decided to visit each tree in its native territory, to see how the different species were faring in response to warming, and what their stories might mean for the other inhabitants of the forest, including us.The Arctic treeline is actually fairly squishy, not so much a line as an area of transition, an ecotone, where tree presence diminishes rather than ceases. Rawlence begins with a look at where he lives, in Wales, at the yew, struggling to persist in a world that is no longer conducive to its needs. But that may be changing. Then, it is off to the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland, the Scandinavian interior, Siberia (larch), Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, looking at the role the boreal plays in our environment, and at the impact of global warming on these borderlands. More than the Amazon rainforest, the boreal is truly the lung of the world. Covering one fifth of the globe, and containing one third of all the trees on earth, the boreal is the second largest biome, or living system, after the ocean. Planetary systems—cycles of water and oxygen, atmospheric circulation, the albedo effect, ocean currents and polar winds—are shaped and directed by the position of the treeline and the functioning of the forest.One of the things that most impressed me, among the many fascinating nuggets to be found here were descriptions of the structures underlying forests. Wherever there are mushrooms, ferns, bracken and particular kinds of woodland plants like violets there was once forest. Rings of mushrooms are usually the outline, the long-ago earthwork of a tree stump. There are between fifteen and nineteen ecto-mycorrhizal fungi (fungi growing around the roots) in a mature pine forest, and they play a role in everything from carbon and nutrient transport to lichen cover, taking sugar from the tree and providing it with minerals in exchange. Planting trees without regard for the essential symbiotic “other half” of the forest below ground may be far less effective than allowing the ground to evolve into woodland at its own pace. Oliver Rackham describes a planted oak wood in Essex that even after 750 years still does not possess the orchids, plants and mushrooms that you would expect of a natural wood.I was reminded of what it might look like to see a city like New York or London from above and believe it to be constructed entirely of the visible structures, not appreciating that there are vast underground networks, water lines, sewer lines, gas lines, electrical lines, communication cables, transit tubes, and the like that provide the lifeblood which allows the above-ground, visible city to survive. Globally, these threads of mycorrhizal fungi make up between a third and a half of the living mass of soils. Soil is in fact a huge, fragile tangle of tiny connected threads. Having done some digging in our back yard, I can very much appreciate that. Another impressive feat is Rawlence’s strength in communicating how local populations interact with the trees among which they live. There are many surprises to be found here, in the range of specific benefits trees provide for one, which includes the fact that they transmit aerosols carrying chemicals that help maintain health in humans, that their leaves, berries, bark and other parts providing medicine for a wide range of illnesses, that they provide materials that oceans need to sustain life, that they drive planetary weather. Did you know that there are birch trees with things called trichomal hairs on the underside of their leaves, that capture particulates from the air, natural air filters that then allow the materials to be dropped to the ground, and washed away with the next rain? They also act like a fur coat for the leaves. The list goes on. You will be surprised by many of the uses that Arctic peoples have devised to make use of their local trees. Will it be possible to continue such a positive relationship as the land becomes less supportive of human endeavors? The Sami people, for example, are finding it increasingly difficult to manage their reindeer herds. Snowmobiles are less than ideal when there is no snow. Substituting four-wheel All Terrain Vehicles may allow them to herd their critters, but using them damages the landscape even more. At what point will it be impossible to continue at all? There are plenty of dark tidings. In this ring of melting ice global warming is taking place at a rate far in excess of what we experience in the more temperate zones. And then this unnerving bit; with more Co2 in the air, trees do not need to work so hard to get what they need, thus will produce less oxygen. Uh oh. As the forests of the northern hemisphere migrate north (race actually, at a rate of hundreds of feet a year in some places instead of inches per century) they are pursued on their southern end by increasingly fire-prone conditions. How much of our forest land will be consumed by a Langolier-like army of drought and flames before finding more welcoming climes? And then there is methane, pretty pearl-like bubbles when seen through clear Arctic ice, but how about this cheery nugget as permafrost becoming permaslush? Some studies have suggested that an unstable seabed could release a methane “burp” of 500–5000 gigatonnes, equivalent to decades of greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to an abrupt jump in temperature that humans will be powerless to arrest.In pop science books, the author acts as a guide to the subject matter, introducing us to the places he visits, and the experts he consults. Rawlence is an engaging and informative teacher with a gift for extracting local cultural lore and area-specific histories, as well as reporting the science in accessible terms. He seems like someone you would want to hang out with. You would certainly like to sign up for any class he teaches. You will learn a lot. He is also a lyrical writer, able to offer not only straight-ahead exposition, but poetical, sometimes emotion-filled reactions to the places he visits and the experiences he has on this journey. The brilliant sun on the pinkish cliffs and the starched blue of the sky, which has been mostly hidden all week, make the morning sing. The scent of a meadow is so heady it should be bottled. The hay has been freshly cut: huge plastic-covered bales guide the eye to a combine harvester abandoned mid-job, its windows covered in sparkling dew. Beyond, the path crosses the meadow to a wide bend that the flooding river has worked into a series of interlinked channels. The little bridges have been overwhelmed and carefully placed stepping-stones lie visible in the clear stream, half a meter underwater. Feet have cut a higher path along the edge of the valley, around drowned shrubs, riparian willow now floating midstream. The roar of the main river is all around. Gray water cradling slabs of dirty ice meanders around a cliff and then widens into a foaming skirt over even-sized white granite boulders that snag the ice and make it dance and nod until it falls apart and joins the sea-ward torrent.Rawlence a not a fan of western capitalism, and it would be difficult to argue that the short-term profit motive is not at variance with the long-term health of the planet, but places that were at least nominally socialist did a pretty good job of devastating their environments too. Maybe the problem is a human one first, and a economic-political one second. Maybe if we lived as long as some trees (not all are long-lived) we might have a more long-term view of what matters, and not keep rushing to use everything as fast as we possibly can before someone else does. Rawlence keeps his eyes on the scientific and anthropological issues at hand. How is warming impacting these trees, the landscapes in which they exist, the societies that have lived with them for centuries, and the wider world? What can we learn from the changes that have already taken place? What can we look forward to? What can we do about it? Despite the growth of electric car usage and renewable power generation, we have arrived at this party too late, and relatively empty-handed. Attempts to mitigate global warming cannot change the fact that there is warming to come that is already baked in. We can do nothing to change that. It will continue, even were we to cease all carbon usage tomorrow. Not that we should abandon attempts to reduce emissions. But we should know that we will not see the benefits of those actions. The mitigation work we do today may impact future generations, but the planet will continue heating up for quite some time regardless. The most we can hope for in the short term is to slow the rate somewhat. The Treeline is a must read for anyone interested in environmental issues, global warming in particular. Who doesn’t love trees? After reading this you will love them ever more. As Rawlence points out, we are at our core tree people, having evolved thumbs to get around in an arboreal world, and having lived among or near trees for all of human history. We have evolved together, and will continue to do so. But we will have to adapt to the new Anthropocene world rather than attempting to force it back into its prior form. In the future, when the ice is gone, there may be no such thing as a treeline at all. Review posted – February 18, 2022 Publication dates ----------hardcover - February 15, 2022 ----------trade paperback - December 12, 2023 I received an ARE of The Treeline from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review, and a promise to plant a few saplings. Thanks, folks. And thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s Twitter page Lizzie Harper, a Welsh illustrator, provided many images for the book. Sadly, there were none in the e-galley I read. But you can see some on her site. Here are links to Harper’s personal, FB, LinkedIn, PInterest, and Twitter pages Interview ---InterMultiversal - An Interview with Ben Rawlence by Simon Morden Items of Interest from the author -----Video trailer for the book – 1:09 -----5 x 15 - Ben Rawlence on The Treeline - video -----The Big Issue - ‘As the planet warms, the forest is on the move’ ny Rawlence Items of Interest -----Patagonia Films - Treeline (Full Film) | The Secret Life of Trees - video 40:16 -----Cairngorms Connect - 200-year vision to enhance habitats, species and ecological processes across a vast area within the 600 square kilometer Cairngorms National Park. -----NY Times - February 4, 2022 - Seen From Space: Huge Methane Leaks, by Henry Fountain -----The Nature Conservancy - February 28, 2022 - Second Nature - A 2020 study suggests letting forests regrow naturally can help boost efforts to fight climate change - by Kirsten Weir You Might Also Want To Check Out -----Land by Simon Winchester -----Being a Human by Charles Foster -----The Earth’s Wild Music by Kathleen Dean Moore -----Road of Bones - not in form, obviously. But this one offers a fictional horror-story take on the great north rebelling against the outrages of humanity Music -----George Winston - Forest -----Sondheim - Into the Woods ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 29, 2022
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Feb 09, 2022
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Feb 09, 2022
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Hardcover
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0593136381
| 9780593136386
| 0593136381
| 4.34
| 2,371
| Aug 17, 2021
| Aug 17, 2021
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it was amazing
| The wind slammed against the Harding-era transmission tower, ripping a heavy electrical line from its brittle iron hook. It was 6:15 A.M. The 143-p The wind slammed against the Harding-era transmission tower, ripping a heavy electrical line from its brittle iron hook. It was 6:15 A.M. The 143-pound, 115-kilovolt braided aluminum wire—known as a jumper cable—fell through the air. A piece of the rusted hook fell with it. The energized line produced a huge bolt of electricity, reaching temperatures up to 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit and zapping the steel tower like lightning as it charred the pillar black. Droplets of molten metal sprayed into the dry grass. That’s all it took.------------------------------------ …this was how the fire spread so quickly: It wasn’t a single unbroken front but a hail of embers.Welcome to the new normal. [image] sign - may you find paradise to be all its name implies - Image from KQED In November 2018, one hundred fifty miles north of San Francisco, the town of Paradise became the epicenter of what would be called The Camp Fire. It was the most destructive wildfire in California history. (The Dixie Fire that was raging at the time this review was prepared had not yet been controlled, so we do not yet know if it was even worse.) The Camp Fire does not even make the top ten list for the most acres destroyed by fire. That dubious honor goes to the August Complex fire of 2020, which burned over a million acres. The Camp Fire destroyed only 153,336 acres. But in other metrics it leads the way. Almost 19,000 structures were destroyed. The property loss was over $10 billion, (I have seen a report indicating that the cost exceeded $16 billion) about 10 percent larger than the 2017 Tubbs Fire, the former title holder. Most importantly, the official death toll from the Camp Fire was 85, an undercount of at least fifty according to the author’s tally of wrongful death suits lodged against PG&E, and her knowledge of deaths that did not fit into the very restrictive official definition. In looking at lists of the worst wildfires ever, concentrated as it is in the last few years, and with no likelihood that conditions will improve any time soon, it is a certainty that we, as a planet, the USA as a nation, and California in particular are living in a powderkeg and giving off sparks. [image] Lizzy Johnson - Image from her site Johnson had been the fire reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle prior to the Camp Fire. (She has since moved on to the Washington Post) …this book is the product of more than five hundred interviews and nearly five years of full-time wildfire coverage. I even enrolled in a professional firefighting academy to better understand fire…It’s the product of coming to love a community that I embedded in: spending hours strolling across Paradise on my evening walks, buying ice cream sandwiches from the Holiday Market, eating more containers of green curry from Sophia’s Thai than I can count. The people whose lives I’ve chronicled in this book offered me unfettered access to their day-to-day lives without any expectations. They were not compensated for their time. - from Acknowledgments [image] Burned vehicles during Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif. on Thursday, November 8, 2018 - image and text from SF Gate She even stayed with some of them. Johnson provides a wealth of detail. Not just two dimensional, or even three, but adding time into the mix to make for four. We get personal histories of people who were impacted by the fire, specifically in how they came to be there, and the history of the place from before the 1850 goldrush. This includes some history on the Native American Konkow tribe, with lore that addresses the challenges of coping with wildfire. She also looks at PG&E’s history of poor line maintenance, and the legal system’s history of failing to make them pay for their malfeasance or force them to adequately change their ways. [image] Timeline – from the National Institute for Standards and Technology As for the structure of the book, I was reminded of The Longest Day, an epic 1962 war film that told, from a variety of perspectives, the story of the D-Day invasion of Europe in World War II. By knitting the diverse experiences together we get a sense of the overall event that would have been impossible in a more linear Boy-Meets-War type narrative. Paradise is a lot like that. We jump from the desperate bus-driver to the town manager to the maintenance man at the hospital to the pilot trying to dump flame retardant on the blaze, to the people on their off-road vehicles trying to find a location in which to shelter that had no combustible foliage, to the police chief, to the town manager, to the fire chiefs, to a woman who gave birth by Caesarian section that very day, and winds up being driven around by a stranger, trying to find her husband and a way out. and on. But somehow, the book never felt disjointed. Each person is given sufficient detail. We get to know them some, not too much, but enough to care. And we track their progress over that terrible day. I found it helpful while reading to have a browser tab open to a Google map of Paradise so I could follow each person on their fraught peregrinations. Johnson tracks the progress of the fire, from its ignition by the downed power line at 6:15 am on November 8, 2018, step by step. She tracks her residents through that day to where they are now, in August 2020. [image] Fire tornado explainer - from the San Francisco Chronicle Johnson’s focus is on the personal. There is a reason for that. Early in her fire reporting, Johnson noticed that many fire stories—hers included—sounded similar; they often relied on the same beats, the same kinds of quotes, the same tropes. (A woman who left her wedding ring at home, for example, only for it to burn.) Johnson began to wonder if disaster fatigue happened when stories felt predictable. So she changed her approach to make the fire secondary, a “supporting character” in a more surprising and nuanced human story—and readers paid attention. Too often, she said, coverage tries to hit people over the head with a “climate change caused this” moral. “I’m now thinking more like, What does climate change feel like? If we changed the model, maybe people will listen more, and we can do more work with our storytelling. - from the Columbia Journalism Review interviewOne can only hope. [image] The Camp Fire burns in the hills on November 10, 2018 near Big Bend, California. Fueled by high winds and low humidity the Camp Fire ripped through the town of Paradise - image from SF Gate Simple human error accounts for some of the carnage. A public emergency warning system failed to reach half the residents because it had never been tested locally, and a systems flaw had not been detected. And our old bugaboo of inadequate communication and coordination among the responsible emergency authorities was not helpful. In the larger context, it is the myopic focus on immediate financial or political motives that has created much of this problem. For example, a Code Red system for alerting people of an emergency is privately owned, requiring people to subscribe. Only 11% did. [image] from the Camp Fire - image from Cal Fire Maybe, after a four-lane road had been paved on the western edge of town several years before, cutting two lanes from the Skyway, providing extra parking for downtown businesses and removing the “expressway” feel of the road, ignoring pleas that this would be a deadly choice the next time a major fire hit, might, just might have been an incredibly bad, short-term decision with deadly long-term consequences. Someone in Paradise should be nominated for the Larry Vaughn Award for exceptional short-sightedness in the face of mortal peril. [image] NASA shot of the fire The experience of reading this book was unlike that of anything else I have read in recent memory. The closest I can think of is Five Days at Memorial, several years back. How quickly, how easily our civilization can be overwhelmed, our safety completely compromised. [image] Evacuating the hospital - image from The Daily Mail There were moments when I had to step away from reading, and just breathe, because the specifics of the fire were so upsetting. The stories Johnson tells are heart-wrenching, and often horrifying. It was like reading a real-life end-times, zombie-apocalypse novel. Someone hiding from the flames under a vehicle, pokes a hole in a tire just to get breathable air. After a victim of the fire is lifted from a flat surface, a layer of molten flesh remained. Just writing these words brings a sob. [image] A Cal Fire pilot maneuver's an S2-T tanker to make a drop on the Walbridge fire at sunset near Healdsburg, Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2020. - Image from the Press Democrat – photo credit Kent Porter – What it would have looked like had planes not been called back due to 70 mph winds and horrific down and updrafts Another part of the experience was learning new things, many of them dire, like the fact that trees were becoming so hot that the water and sap inside them heated to a point where they basically exploded. Things like the temperature becoming so high that metallic elements in the ground solidified into shards, and propane tanks became missiles and major sources of shrapnel. AT&T’s landlines melted. Internet service cut out as communications hardware on towers was destroyed. Things like the underground pipes carrying the town’s water becoming so hot that they melted, leaching carcinogenic materials into the water supply. (Repair/replace cost $50 million.) Things like the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere from this one fire matched the output of the entire state’s factories and traffic in a week. Things like the incineration of so many structures created clouds of toxic sub-2.5 micron particles that lodge in the lungs of any breathing thing. There are plenty more things to be learned here, not all of them quite so extreme. But all of them worth knowing. She looks at the topography, and how that impacts wind currents, the changes in the local flora, the psychology of disaster response. The scientific explanations in the book were clear and informative [image] Firefighter Jose Corona monitors a burning home as the Camp Fire burns - image and text from SF Gate It is easy to engage with the folks Johnson profiles, and root for them to survive. It helps that we can presume that all of the primary actors here make it out, else Johnson would not have been able to interview them, and we would not be reading their stories. But she succeeds in showing us what global warming means on the ground, to actual human beings, over 125 of whom are no longer with us, and many of whom have been scarred, physically and or emotionally, for life. [image] shot from the fire – image from The Daily Mail There is very little mention of political party here. Local representation is heavily Republican. Everyone burns at the same temperature, but maybe voting for the party of climate change denial while living in a tinderbox might be seen as somehow ironic, if not feckless and arrogant. Trump popped by for a photo op and a chance to blame Californians for the fire, claiming that they should have been raking out the leaves in the woods. (The largest wildland property owner in California is the federal government, by the way. The state is in charge of about 3% of it.) The town voted for him in 2016, but by 2020 had seen quite enough orange light and switched, at least at the presidential level. [image] Sheriffs yell to drivers to evacuate the area off of Pentz Road during the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, on Thursday, Nov. 8, 2018 - image and text from SF Gate As this book and countless other reports make clear, we have a wildfire problem. Serious research into the causes, both global and local, has been done. More is ongoing, and there will, for sure, be more ahead. Even more than has already been done, public policies will have to be crafted to encourage, and where possible, mandate best practices, and enforce restrictions on private and public use of land in the wildland-urban interface. There are many facets to this, from power line protection, roadway construction, widening, or even closing, development requirements, such as mandating fire-safe materials for new construction, and supporting retrofitting older buildings. Communications among first responders has been improved, but much remains to be done. Total deregulation, allowing property owners to do whatever they want with their property can very concretely endanger the property and lives of all those around them. We have an obligation to each other to not be totally indifferent about the safety of our communities and neighbors. Common sense regulation should be implemented. In the wider view, gaining new knowledge of areas that are likely to burn should inform policy on where new development is allowed at all, where further development should be halted, and where rebuilding burned areas is ill-advised. ( Between 1970 and 1999, 94 percent of the roughly three thousand houses destroyed by wildfires in California had been rebuilt in the same spot—and often burned down a second or third time.) Your freedom to do whatever the frack you want ends where my charred skin begins. Insurance companies, with the most to lose financially, have already made getting fire insurance tougher, if it is available at all, in fire-prone communities. [image] Cars escape the Camp Fire as they drive south on Pentz Road in Paradise, California, on Thursday, Nov. 8, 2018 - image and text from SF Gate I love this book. It is among my favorites for the year. I have much praise to offer and very few gripes. While I understand that the author’s intent was to make global warming on-the-street real, and appreciate that she has succeeded in doing just that, I would have liked a bit more on the long-term medical impact of wildfires, and the politics of the local public officials, particularly their views on global warming. [image] A bulldozer dislodged abandoned vehicles from a blocked roadway after the fire. The scene suggests that a burnover, a dangerous event where fire cuts evacuees off from escape routes, took place. There were at least 19 over the course of the fire. – image and text from National Institute for Standards and Technology Trade paperback - August 16, 2022 ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. As of August 2021, GR will no longer allow external links in comments, so, if you want to see the entire review in one place please head on over to my site, Coot's Reviews. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 02, 2021
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Aug 09, 2021
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Aug 02, 2021
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Hardcover
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1250244145
| 9781250244147
| 1250244145
| 4.10
| 90,832
| Aug 03, 2021
| Aug 03, 2021
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it was amazing
| I had always known there was something different about me, but that was the day I first recognized it to be dangerous. It was also the day, as I st I had always known there was something different about me, but that was the day I first recognized it to be dangerous. It was also the day, as I stumbled out of the shed into a long violet dusk, that I looked to the trees’ edge and saw my first wolf, and it saw me.-------------------------------------- They’re more dangerous than we are.”Inti Flynn had always had a feel for nature. Her father had been a woodsman, first working for a lumber company, then, later, living a mostly solo subsistence life, in Canada, trying his best not to contribute to the global demise. He taught Inti and her twin, Aggie, about how to live in and with the wild. Their mother, a detective in Australia, was more concerned with teaching them how to contend with the wild in civilization. There is a lot in here about parents (and a little about wolves) teaching children (or pups) how to cope in the world, how to defend against predators. The human sorts offer different approaches, some counseling firm defenses, others advising understanding, and some resorting to extreme kinetic measures. There are plenty of parents teaching questionable lessons. [image] Charlotte McConoughy - image from If.com.au Dad used to tell me that my greatest gift was that I could get inside the skin of another human. That I could feel what nobody else could, the life of another, really feel it and roll around in it. That the body knows a great deal and I have the miraculous ability to know more than one body. The astonishing cleverness of nature. He also taught us that compassion was the most important thing we could learn. If someone hurt us, we needed only empathy, and forgiveness would be easy.Inti’s gift is not metaphorical. Her ability to experience what others feel, gives her a unique advantage in understanding both wildlife and people. It also makes her very vulnerable. I am unlike most people. I move through life in a different way, with an entirely unique understanding of touch. Before I knew its name I knew this. To make sense of it, it is called a neurological condition. Mirror-touch synesthesia. My brain re-creates the sensory experiences of living creatures, of all people and even sometimes animals; if I see it I feel it, and for just a moment I am them, we are one and their pain or pleasure is my own. It can seem like magic and for a long time I thought it was, but really it’s not so far removed from how other brains behave: the physiological response to witnessing someone’s pain is a cringe, a recoil, a wince. We are hardwired for empathy. Once upon a time I took delight in feeling what others felt. Now the constant stream of sensory information exhausts me. Now I’d give anything to be cut free.McConaghy’s prior novel, Migrations, looked at the demise of wildlife (birds in particular, and even more particularly terns) in a slightly future world. In this one, she continues her interest in the impact of people on the natural environment. Officially, the last wolf in Scotland was killed in 1680. There are reports of wolves being seen as late as 1888, but Scotland has been essentially wolf-free for well over three centuries. Sadly for Scottish woodlands, it has not been farmer, sheep, or climate-change-free. Part of the problem is that the local deer population tends to linger in place long enough to lay waste to new shoots. A great way to keep them moving is to reintroduce wolves. Good for the goal of restoring natural forest, re-wilding at least part of Scotland is good for the health of the deer population as well. Thus, Inti’s presence. She is leading a team charged with re-introducing a small population of wolves to a remote part of Scotland, near the Cairngorms, a mountainous area in the highlands. [image] The Cairngorms - Image from The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds As one might imagine, there is considerable resistance among farmers concerned about the potential loss of livestock. The minimal-to-non-existent actual danger to humans is played up by those opposed to the reintroduction. Battle lines are drawn. The program has official sanction, but the locals have guns, and itchy fingers. And then someone goes missing. Inti’s primary concern is with the danger to the program, as she expects her wolves to be blamed. The mystery for us is why, and how this person vanished. After a meet-cute early in the book, Inti and the local sheriff, Duncan MacTavish, team up, in a way, to try figuring out what happened. There are other mysteries as well, albeit of a different sort. What happened to Inti’s sister that had left her so damaged? Is Duncan trustworthy? The book alternates between the present and looking back at two periods in Inti’s and Aggie’s lives, with their father in British Columbia, where they learned how to live off the land, and as adults, when Inti was working on a wolf project in Alaska. [image] Red deer are Scotland’s largest surviving, native, wild land mammal. It’s estimated that there are 400,000 of them in the Scottish Highlands - image and text from Good Nature Travel Inti struggles with her desire to protect her wolves, and her need to engage with the locals as something other than as a know-it-all outsider. The complexity of the town’s social relations is quite fascinating. Duncan is our eyes on this, and a big help to Inti, knowing so well the people in the community in which he had grown up, understanding motivations, relationships, and local history much better than any outsider could. Abuse is a central issue, in both the Old and the New World, whether at the hands of the distraught, the damaged, or the downright evil. Multiple characters in Scotland come from homes in which there was violence, whether against spouses, children, or both. It is clear that one of the locals has beaten his wife. Other instances of family violence are important to the story. The abuse that does take place is mostly done off-screen, reported, but not seen first-hand. Inti’s attempt at restoring the Scottish landscape, of giving new opportunities to a much-reviled species mirrors her attempt to heal, to restore the vitality of her own family. [image] A wealthy landowner in Scotland is hoping to bring wolves from Sweden to the Scottish Highlands to thin the herd of red deer. - image and text from Good Nature Travel One can probably make too much of it (I am sure I did), but I found it fun to look at the wolves for indications of comparison to the human characters. Was Inti like Six (the wolves are given numbers not names, for the most part). Who might be lone wolves? Who is fiercest in protecting their pack/family? Who are the alphas? There is much resonance with Migrations. Both leads are working far from home. Both are trying to do something to help in a world that seems set against accepting any. Although she has her sister with her in Wolves, Inti is primarily a solo actor. She finds a family of a sort with charming, and not-so-charming locals, in the way that Franny Stone in Migrations teamed up with the fishing boat crew. Like Franny, Inti bears the burden of deep, traumatic family secrets. Like Franny, she is trying to find her true home, whether that be in Scotland, Canada, Australia, or maybe wherever the wolves are. Inti has a near-magical power of sensitivity. Franny had special abilities in the water. Like Franny, Inti teams up with a guy in a position of some power. In Migrations it was Ennis Malone, captain of a fishing boat. Here it is Duncan McTavish, the local sheriff. In both novels McConaghy shows the concerns of those imperiled by the front lines of attempts to correct a bad ecological situation. Of the two, this novel struck me as a bit more optimistic about the possibilities of making meaningful change. In the real world, wolves have not been officially introduced back into Scotland, but there is one wealthy individual who is looking at doing so in a limited way. Who knows? Maybe the re-wilding of Scotland is not entirely a pipe dream. Once There Were Wolves offers a close look at the issues involved in programs of this sort. The locals are accorded plenty of respect for and insight into their legitimate concerns, as we get to see past the rejectionist veneer. Very hard choices must be made, and the decision-making is very adult. Inti is a tough young woman with a challenging responsibility. It is easy to care about what happens to her. McConaghy keeps the action flowing, so there is no danger of losing interest. The main mystery is very intriguing and the final explanation is twisty and wonderful, with Inti finding her inner Miss Marple to sleuth her way to the truth. Once you sink your canines into this one, you will not want to let go. There are hankie moments as well. Tears will be shed. Set in a wintry place, it seems an ideal book to cool off with in the hot summer months. (Of course, if you read this in cooler months, it is distinctly possible that you will be wearing some wool, and thus will be reading a book about wolves while in sheep’s clothing. Just sayin’.) It seems appropriate to keep a modest supply of whiskey near to hand, just for ambience, of course. Or for those of the teetotaler persuasion, maybe some Irn-Bru. As for the best place in which to read this book, and read it you should, that should be obvious, in a den. There is violence in me, in my hands, which vibrate with the need to exert some kind of control, some defiance, and if it is revenge for the things that have been taken from me then fine, I will have that too. I am done with falling prey. I will be predator, at last. I will forget the walls and the self-protection and I will become the thing I hunt and feel it all. Review first posted – July 9, 2021 Publication dates ----------Hard cover - August 3, 2021 ----------Trade paperback - May 3, 2022 I received an E-ARE of OTWW in return for a fair review. Thanks to Amelia at Flatiron, to NetGalley for hosting the book and to MC for facilitating. The review has been cross-posted at my site, Coot's Reviews =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Instagram, Twitter and FB pages Interviews Interviews with CM re this book have been as tough to find as Scottish wolves, but I did unearth an oldie, from 2014. I am sure after the book is released there will be more interviews available. There are several interview links in my review of Migrations -----AusRom Today - AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT: Charlotte McConaghy - from 2014 – this relates to her very early, romantic fantasy writing My review of McConaghy’s previous book -----2020 - Migrations Items of Interest -----Sea Wolves - Panthalassa.Org - mentioned in Chapter 8 -----Good Nature Travel - Bringing Wolves Back to Scotland by Candace Gaukel Andrews -----The Guardian - Stories to save the world: the new wave of climate fiction by Claire Armitstead -----Wiki on mirror touch synesthesia - yes, this is a real thing -----Travel Medium - Why Are There No Trees in Scotland? by Paul McDougal – this is a wonderful overview of how Scotland lost so much of its woodlands over the last 6,000 years -----Public Domain Review - Werner's Nomenclature of Colours - Inti’s father kept a copy for use in his work - Chapter 3 -----The Guardian - Rewilding: should we bring the lynx back to Britain? by Phoebe Weston - 8/16/21 - One proposed re-wilding site is the same one used in this book -----December 18, 2023 - AP - Colorado releases first 5 wolves in reintroduction plan approved by voters to chagrin of ranchers - by JESSE BEDAYN ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 28, 2021
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May 08, 2021
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Hardcover
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1640093672
| 9781640093676
| 1640093672
| 4.32
| 208
| Feb 16, 2021
| Feb 16, 2021
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it was amazing
| Except during the lockdown to slow the COVID-19 virus, cities drown us in sound. Buses grind gears, trucks beep, and street-corner preachers call d Except during the lockdown to slow the COVID-19 virus, cities drown us in sound. Buses grind gears, trucks beep, and street-corner preachers call down damnation on it all—what does this do to the human being, whose ears evolved as a warning system? In daylight, our eyes can warn us of danger in front of us. But our ears alert us to opportunity and danger twenty-four hours a day, from every direction, even through dense vegetation and total darkness.It’s quiet, too quiet. And it’s getting quieter. There is a soundscape, a world of vibrations, wherever we are. I started reading this collection in a laundromat, pen and notebook at the ready. The wall-mounted TV blares The Goldbergs, an upgrade from the unspeakable Judge Judy, but still, noise that attempts to pierce my concentration, vying for attention. I sit on a bench at a table just inside a set of long, tall windows. A soft drink vending machine hums a steady note. Washing machines and dryers rumble. The irregular shmoosh-shmoosh of traffic passing on a wet street is muted by the window, higher tones intercepted by the glass. The only natural sound is a man with an operatic voice eager to engage on the subject of marriage as he folds newly-dry clothing on a table. While the urban orchestra may be largely comprised of mechanical instruments, it is not entirely so. The occasional dramatic crack and bang of nearby lightning are giant cymbals and following kettle drum, fading to a flutter-tongue trombone. [image] Kathleen Dean Moore - image from her site The sounds of nature we experience most are weather-related. The howl of a gale, the whistle of a sustained wind as it slips past constructed edges, the susurrus of wind-shuddered trees, the plik-plik-plik of hail, the long shushing notes of rain. The screech and hiss of cats fighting offers the sudden blare of a coronet and soft mallets on a high-hat. Aside from that, we do not hear mammals beyond, for the most part, neighborhood canines who make their presence felt when mail or packages are delivered or when someone approaches too close to their no-walk zone. I seriously doubt you have heard much from our fellow urbanites of the rodent family. Ground hogs save their conversation for underground, raccoons chitter on occasion when deciding among themselves which garbage can is most accessible. Roaches, ants, bedbugs and termites being notoriously quiet, the buzz of crickets and cicadas is the likeliest insectile sound we will experience, depending on whether you live in close proximity to a hive of bees, yellow-jackets, or hornets. And, of course, the occasional pestiferousness of a horsefly, or mosquitoes. Depends what part of the world you inhabit, of course. [image] Gulls on Anacapa Avian life probably offers the most sound from creatures in our natural aural canvas, the pik-o-wee of a red-winged blackbird, towee-oh-towee-ooh-towee-oh of a robin the hee-ah, hee-ah of the blue jay, the caws of covids, and gurgle of pigeons as they strut on an adjacent rooftop out of reach but within lunging distance of murderous pet felines safely contained behind windows, the rustle of feathers as a startled mourning dove launches. It is the sounds of avian life that receives the most coverage here. [image] Great Blue in the Everglades All this competes with the incessant onslaught of the television, 24/7, or so it seems, spewing news and noise into the world. City traffic also offers ongoing background noise. In my neighborhood there is the added joy of numberless hordes eager to blast car stereos at teeth-shattering volumes, as they pick up pizza next door. And there’s the hair place across the street that has proven resistant to civil pleas to lower the volume on the music they blast onto the sidewalk in hopes of attracting, I am guessing, the hearing-impaired. Silence is a rare event, and is unnerving because of that infrequency. [image] Frigate Bird in the Dry Tortugas I was living in Brooklyn when 911 happened. The sirens were ever-present, well, more ever-present than usual, masking the sudden absence of all air and most street traffic. Any city resident could tell from auditory clues alone that something very bad had happened. The soundscape changed, more than the hush created by a large snow. There was a different quality to it all, and it was unnerving, as if the quiet was in anticipation of another disaster. That was a sudden shift, and thus noticeable. The shift Kathleen Dean Moore writes of is a very different sort, more like the apocryphal frog in a pot of boiling water, which does not notice the gradual increase in heat until it is too late. [image] Great Egret in Everglades It is necessary to leave the larger cities (unless, of course, yours features sufficient acreage to allow one true aural relief from the urban) to have a chance at a more natural chamber orchestra. The sound of waves at oceanside, of burbling streams in the woods, or rushing rivers before they become major thoroughfares. In the absence of prowling predators, there is usually no such thing as woodland silence. Particularly at night the airwaves are alive with diverse calls and responses, come-ons and threats, warnings and conversations. But the rich chorus of the unpeopled world is being silenced, as member after member of that grand orchestra has been removed from their seat. Vivaldi incorporated the sounds of wildlife into his masterpiece, The Four Seasons. Let’s hope that critter-mimicking played-instruments or recordings are not all we have left of the sonic scape of the world of wildlife. [image] Green Heron in the Everglades It is, of course, not just creatures that Moore writes of. There are plenty of other sounds she celebrates, the song of dripping water in a luminous cave, the calming sounds of a singing mother soothing a squalling infant, the roar of the surf, the music of wind playing over cacti spines like a bow over strings, and plenty more. While a wide range of auditory experience is noted in this book, the largest representative of sounds that may be lost is the songs of birds. [image] Anhinga in a tree - Everglades I am no one’s idea of an outdoorsman, thus my very urban point-of-reference noted above. But neither have I been locked in a box. National Parks hold a magnetic attraction and I have been fortunate enough to have visited a bunch. Moore’s effervescent tale of a pika sitting on her son’s shoe while somewhere above the treeline, and squeaking out a warning when Moore happened to move about in the family camp downhill from her progeny reminded me of having seen a pika sitting atop a rock in Glacier National Park, and issuing the same squeak. There is an excellent chance that a few of the critters she mentions here might be found in whatever part of the states you live in, or similar creatures in places outside the states. That occasional direct connection adds to the enjoyment of reading about experiences she has shared with us. [image] Tri-colored Heron – Everglades In Earth’s Wild Music, Kathleen Dean Moore, has produced a cri du couer about the anthropo-screwing of our planet. She notes, in particular, the auditory element of our world, our experience of it, and the diminution of the actual evironment of sound on our planet as species go extinct. [image] Juvenile White Ibis – Everglades It is a book rich not only with a blaring call for recognition of what is taking place, for concern and action, but with notes of information, many of which will make you say to yourself, “Huh, I never knew that,” whether silently or aloud. The calls of shorebirds, which evolved at the edge of the sea, have high frequencies, audible over the low rumble of surf. In the forest, birds have low-frequency voices because the long wavelength of the low tones are not as quickly scattered or absorbed by the tangle of leaves and moss.or The true gifts of the saguaro are the stiff spines set in clusters on the pleats of their trunks. When the wind blows across the spines, they sing like violin strings. Better yet, when you pluck a spine, it will sing its particular tone. If a person is patient in her plucking she can play music on a saguaro cactus.It was a jaw-dropping read for me, not just for the content, but for the gift of poetic description that Moore brings to her mission. I experienced the same piercing joy in reading this book that is usually reserved for books by Ron Rash or Louise Erdrich. The gifts of nature tell us there is a persistence to life that no measure of insolence or greed can destroy…the natural world holds us tight in its arms—calm as we tremble, patient as we mark the days “until this is over,” strong as we weaken. When the time comes, the natural world will embrace us as we die. It will never leave us. If we are lonely, Nature strokes our hair with light winds. If, frightened in the night, we wander outside to sit on a bench in the moonlight, it will come and sit beside us. If we are immobilized, having lost faith in the reliability of everything, still the Earth will carry us around the sun. If we feel abandoned, the Earth sings without ceasing—beautiful love songs in the voices of swallows and storms. This sheltering love calms me and makes me glad.Moore has been at this for some time. This is her eleventh book, continuing her lifelong dedication to writing about the moral imperative for protecting the only planet we have. I am two things, a philosophy professor and a natural history writer. They speak to the same thing, I think, which is developing a responsible relationship with a place, so that you can openly learn about it and it can openly inform you and you feel this moral urgency in protecting it. - from the NHI interviewIt is not so much that this book should be read slowly, it MUST be read slowly, sips, not gulps, savoring the stunning beauty of her words, the appreciation of, the wonder at our world, the sorrow at what has already faded. It reads like a novel that does not link scenes through action, but through theme. Yet those scenes can be compelling. There are 32 essays. In a chapter set in Washington state, flooding had loosened the grip on the earth of a stand of huge cedars, sufficient so that biblical winds could push them over, into each other, causing a cascade of tree onto trailers, stoving them to ruin, across roads, requiring the liberal use of chainsaws to clear passage, with the residents holed up in a local tavern hoping for surcease like a science fiction town hoping for the best against an invading zombie army. In another, she comes face to face with a cougar in a cow field. There is the song of water dripping in a luminous, unsuspected cavern, more like glass than stone. [image] Pelicans – Everglades ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] I also cross-posted the entire, un-broken-up, review to my site, Coot's Reviews. Stop on by and make some noise [image] [image] [image] [image] Re-posted February 18, 2022 for release of the trade paperback - February 22, 2022 ...more |
Notes are private!
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| 4.14
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| Jan 05, 2021
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it was amazing
| Like a bird flying repeatedly into a pane of glass, I kept seeking Heathcote. Each time I reached out for him, the crack yawned open just a little Like a bird flying repeatedly into a pane of glass, I kept seeking Heathcote. Each time I reached out for him, the crack yawned open just a little wider, until eventually. I hurtled straight through.-------------------------------------- How do you let go of someone you never had?Charlie Gilmour was living in southeast London when his partner’s sister came across an abandoned chick. Magpies leave home far too soon—long before they can really fly or properly fend for themselves. For weeks after they fledge their nests, they’re dependent on their parents for sustenance, protection, and an education too. But this bird’s parents are nowhere to be seen. They’re nor feeding it, or watching it, or guarding it; no alarm calls sound as a large apex predator approaches with footfalls made heavy by steel-toed boots. It could be no accident that the bird is on the ground. If food was running short, a savage calculation may have been performed, showing that the only way to keep the family airborne was to jettison the runt.[image] From infancy to adulthood – From Charlie’s eulogy for Heathcote –photos by Polly Sampson and Charlie This small bird with a huge personality caught his attention. Charlie’s struggles to care for, to raise, this raucous magpie parallels his growth as a person, and his lifelong struggle to get to know the man who had abandoned him as a an old boyhood dream Of having a jackdaw on your shoulder, like a pirate. Whispering secrets in your ear Charlie seizes on this connection when he discovered the poem his father had written about the experience. “Initially it was just meant to be a light-hearted story about this magpie that came to live with me, roosted in my hair, shat all over my clothes and stole my house keys. When my biological father died, though, it became a much, much more complicated story. Honestly, I really didn’t know what the book was about until I was quite far into the writing process.” - From the Vanity Fair interviewWilliams was quite a character, a merry prankster, a Peter Pan sort, grandly creative but not the best at responsibility, able to charm all those around him, doing magic tricks, persuading people that he really was there for them, while never really being able to handle the demands or needs of the people who needed him most, leaving domestic carnage in his wake. Charlie had never really understood why, one day, he suddenly just got up and flew the coop on him and his mother, Polly Samson. This memoir tracks Charlie’s quest to make sense of the father he never really knew. [image] Charlie Gilmour and his beloved magpie Benzene – image from Vanity Fair - photo by Sarah Lee Charlie lucked out in the parent department in another way. When Mom remarried, it was to David Gilmour of Pink Floyd fame. None of David’s music career is addressed here. But he is shown as a stand-up guy, a supportive, understanding, and loving father who takes Charlie under his wing by adopting him. Absent fathers are hardly uncommon. In 97 percent of single parent families, it’s the mother who ends up taking responsibility for the kids. The child’s impulse to seek them out is just as widespread: psychiatrists call it “father hunger”. I was lucky: I was adopted, and the man who became my dad is both a brilliant man and a brilliant parent. But the longing to know your maker is something that lives on. - from the Public reading Room pieceWe follow the growth of Charlie along with Benzene. It is made clear early on that a magpie presents both challenges and delights that are uncommon in human-critter relations. Tales of bird behavior that might have one pulling out hair in clumps (which might actually be useful, as the bird stores food in Charlie’s hair) are told with warmth, and, frequently, hilarity. My favorite of these occurs when Benzene is under the sway of a nesting instinct, having settled on the top of the fridge as a place on which to construct her DIY nest. At a birthday party for her: My dad strums her a song; my younger sister reads a poem; and a family friend, a venerable literary academic named John, unwillingly provides the sex appeal. This rather reserved man of letters is too polite to do anything but quote Shakespeare as Benzene places her birthday bluebottles and beetles lovingly up his sleeve and tugs the hem of his trousers insistently nestward. [image]= Heathcote Williams planning one of the Windsor free festivals in his Westbourne Park squat, London, in 1974 - Image from his obit in the Guardian - Photo by Richard Adams Charlie’s nesting life is also under development. After he marries his partner and they talk about growing their family, he must confront his fears of being a parent himself. Nature vs nurture. Will he be the absentee his biological father was, or the rock-solid mensch of a parent he lucked into in David Gilmour? Clearly a concern that requires some resolution before going ahead and fertilizing an egg. The issue extends to a question of mental illness. Heathcote had been ill-behaved enough to get institutionalized. It was certainly the case that his behavior often crossed the line from eccentric to certifiable. Did Charlie inherit his father’s proclivities? Is genetics destiny? Charlie had committed some behavioral excesses of his own, consuming vast quantities of illegal substances, which fueled some extremely bad behavior. This landed him on the front pages of the local tabloids, swinging from a beloved and respected war memorial during a protest, and then in prison. [image] Charlie with David Gilmour – image from The Guardian - photo by Sarah Lee Charlie takes us through the attempts he made for many years to connect with Heathcote, but his father offered only teases of interest, always managing to disappear before Charlie could latch on, a hurtful bit of legerdemain. In addition to the title, the names, which largely focus on feather development, given to the five parts of the book, set the tone. All the expected imagery is used throughout, including fledging to nest-building, to mating behavior, to molting, egg-laying and so on. It could easily have been overdone, but I found it charming. In rooting about in Heathcote’s history Charlie offers us, in addition to his personal tale, some of Heathcote’s outrageous adventures from back in the day. Charlie’s personal growth as a person adds heft. I was reminded of a few other memoirs. In Hollywood Park, musician and writer Mikel Jollett tries, a lot more successfully than Charlie, to connect with his missing father, confronting issues of nature vs nurture. Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk looks at her training a goshawk as a coping mechanism to help in grieving for and remaining connected to her late father, similar in feathery subject matter, although it is quite a different book. Alan Cumming, in Not My Father’s Son, looks at the damage his father had done to him, trying to figure out how this mercurial man had become so cruel, as Charlie tries to figure out how his mercurial, if not overtly cruel, father had become so nurturing-phobic. John Grogan’s Marley and Me looks at the difficulties of caring for a difficult pet, and the corresponding rewards. It is not necessary to love the memoirist to enjoy their book, but that is not an issue here. Charlie behaved rather poorly, both as a child and an early twenty-something, but learned his lesson, grew up, straightened out, and became a likable, decent sort, a very good writer who is very well able to communicate the struggles through which he has grown. It is easy to root for him to get to the bottom of what made Heathcote tick, and to find a way to make peace with what their minimal relationship had been. His writing is accessible, warm, moving, and at times LOL funny. You will need a few tissues at the ready by the end. Just for padding your roost, of course. In the Archive, the sour smell of mold is somehow even more overpowering than it was at Port Eliot, as if the material is rebelling against the light. At the end of each day I come away filthy, sneezing, and feeling lousy—but I keep going back for more. I need this. My approach is far from methodical. I attack the body of words and images like a carrion bird, looking for the wound that will yield to my prying beak, the original injury that unravels the man. I peel back layers of skin, pick over the bones, snip my way to the heart of the matter. A patchwork biography begins to emerge; a rough story told in scavenged scraps. It feels almost like stealing, like robbing the grave, except it’s not the treasure that interests me. Heathcote’s glories get hardly a glance. It’s the traumas I’m searching for. Answers to those same old questions. Why does a person disappear? What makes a man run from his child? Why was Heathcote so afraid of family? What forces guided that nocturnal flight in Spring so many years ago? Review first posted – February 19, 2021 Publication dates ----------January 5, 2021 - hardcover ----------January 11, 2022 - trade paperback [image] [image] [image] [image] I received an ARE of this book from Scribner in return for an honest review. No feathering of nests was involved. Thanks, folks. And thanks to MC for bringing this to my attention. You know who you are. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter pages Interviews -----The One Show - The One Show: Elton John meets Charlie Gilmour -----David Gilmour: ‘I’ve been bonded to Charlie since he was three. We were incensed by the injustice’ - Charlie and David Gilmour on their relationship and history -----Bookpage - Charlie Gilmour: From feathers to fatherhood by Alice Cary -----Vanity Fair - Birds of a Feather. Interview with Charlie Gilmour by Chiara Nardelli Nonino Songs/Music -----Donovan - The Magpie -----The Beatles - Blackbird Items of Interest from the author -----Vogue - What Raising a Magpie Taught Me About My Famous, Troubled Father -----Waterstones - a promo vid for the book - 1:52 -----5x15 Stories - Featherhood - a story about birds and fathers -----The Guardian - ‘One spring morning my dad vanished’: the son of poet Heathcote Williams looks back -----Public Reading Rooms - Heathcote Williams: Eulogy to the Dad I never knew ----- Charlie’s articles for Vice Items of Interest -----BBC - My Unusual Life | The Man Who Lives With a Magpie - a short doc on Charlie -----Wiki on Pin feathers -----The Guardian - David Gilmour: ‘I’ve been bonded to Charlie since he was three. We were incensed by the injustice’ -----Straight Up Herman – an arts journal blog - Being Kept by a Jackdaw - Heathcote Williams’ poem Other memoirs of interest -----Hollywood Park by Mikel Jollett -----H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald -----Not My Father’s Son by Alan Cumming -----Marley and Me by John Grogan ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 02, 2021
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Feb 10, 2021
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Jan 13, 2021
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Hardcover
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0393634973
| 9780393634976
| 0393634973
| 4.11
| 687
| Jul 28, 2020
| Jul 28, 2020
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it was amazing
| In the Bible, the apocalypse is not the final battle between good and evil—that is Armageddon, a word derived from an ancient military stronghold o In the Bible, the apocalypse is not the final battle between good and evil—that is Armageddon, a word derived from an ancient military stronghold on a trade route linking Egypt and the Middle East. An apocalypse is a revelation—literally an uncovering—about the future that is meant to provide hope in a time of uncertainty and fear.The above was quoted from the book. But in Olson’s Twitter feed he offers a slightly different take. The title is The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age. To be clear, apocalypse refers to the threat of nuclear war, not to the site itself.Most of us, if asked, could probably identify the Manhattan Project as the national undertaking that produced the atomic bombs used in World War II, and as the Ur prototype for every future absolutely-positively-got-to-do subsequent development drive, to be referred to forever as A Manhattan Project for [insert your national need here]. Many people, certainly those of my (boomer) generation, can easily recall seeing film clips of that first test explosion in New Mexico, and probably later tests that vaporized large portions of Pacific islands. But if we, as a group, were to be asked where the material that fueled those terrible explosions came from, I doubt that a majority would know. It was manufactured, primarily, in Hanford, Washington. [image] Nuclear reactors line the riverbank at the Hanford Site along the Columbia River in January 1960. The N Reactor is in the foreground, with the twin KE and KW Reactors in the immediate background. The historic B Reactor, the world's first plutonium production reactor, is visible in the distance. - Image and text from Wikipedia Steve Olson must have a fondness for things that go BOOOOOM!!! His last book was The Untold Story of Mount St. Helen’s. At least his earlier work did not deal in things that would be stopped by the TSA. This is a history. It was the drive during World War II to develop a nuclear bomb that drove the establishment of Hanford, and many other places. There have been a lot of books written about Los Alamos, and fewer about Oak Ridge, Tennessee. But the place that made the glowing special sauce has received scant historical attention, relatively. Olson, a local, sought to correct that imbalance. [image] Steve Olson - image from his Twitter pages I’ve been getting ready to write this book pretty much my whole life. I grew up in the 1960s in Othello, Washington, a small town in the south-central part of the state just over a ridgeline from a mysterious government facility called Hanford. We knew that Hanford was involved in the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Some people in town knew that it manufactured a substance called plutonium. But it was the Cold War. It was best not to ask too many questions. In 1984 I visited Hanford to write a story for Science 84 magazine, and by the end of the trip, I had decided to write a book about the place. Thirty-six years later, the book is done. - from the NASW interviewThis is a story of war, science, politics and people. It is a story of what was known, what knowledge was needed to move forward, whether known or not, a story of personal ambition and national requirements under the direst of circumstances, a story of patriotism and risk. Yes, we know how it all turned out, but maybe did not know where the turns were that needed to be made to ensure that outcome, maybe had less of an idea about who was involved, what they worked on, where, and why. And maybe did not know what blind alleys were entered before a clear route was constructed. [image] Aerial view of Hanford Construction Camp - image from the National Building Museum And that development began with science. Olson walks us through the steps that had to be taken to advance from theory to implementation. Here is some of it: 1932 - discovery that neutrons are the glue holding electrons and protons and the nucleus of atoms together 1934 - a French scientist discovers that bombarding any material with subatomic particles creates unstable materials that decay down to stable ones. This was a huge discovery, artificially induced radioactivity. 1939 - German scientists discovered that bombarding uranium with neutrons does not cause it to change into materials adjacent on the periodic table, but to split, releasing vast amounts of energy. Uh oh. Might be a good idea to get some control over this before it was developed by someplace Hitlerian and applied to a dark purpose. And so on…There were many steps leading from the science to the making of an operational bomb (and using nuclear power to generate electricity for that matter). I bet that for most of us many of these details will be news. Many were for me. In 1941, the US government, alarmed by the possibility of a Nazi-bomb, gets cracking, FDR accepting the recommendation of Vannevar Bush, head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), established earlier that year.. [image] The B Reactor at Hanford was the world’s first large-scale nuclear reactor. It produced plutonium for the device tested at the Trinity site in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, and for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. The B Reactor was permanently shut down in 1968, and is now being converted into a museum. - image and text from The National Buildings Museum – Secret Cities exhibition ”I knew that the effort would be expensive, that it might seriously interfere with other war work. But the overriding consideration was this: I had great respect for German science. If a bomb were possible, if it turned out to have enormous power, the result in the hands of Hitler might enable him to enslave the world. It was essential to get there first, if an all-out American effort could accomplish the difficult task.”Even before it was known if a bomb could be made at all, it was known that there were materials that would be needed for it, and at a large scale. December 16, 1942 found Col. Franklin T. Matthias…and two DuPont engineers headed for the Pacific Northwest and southern California to investigate possible production sites. Of the possible sites available, none had a better combination of isolation, long construction season, and abundant water for hydroelectric power than those found along the Columbia and Colorado Rivers. After viewing six locations in Washington, Oregon and California, the group agreed that the area around Hanford, Washington, best met the criteria established by the Met Lab scientists and DuPont engineers. - from The Atomic Heritage FoundationOlson writes of the displacement of locals that took place. Part of the project entailed housing tens of thousands of new Hanford workers. Five years before Levittown, the United States government built the first standardized suburb. Of course, it came with a surveillance state attached, and provided endless fodder for conspiracy theorists and science-fiction writers with diverse notions of an Oddville sort of place. (All hail the Glow Cloud) He tells of the construction of the first nuclear reactor, and many that followed, and the enormous buildings that were used for chemically extracting plutonium from the product of the reactors. We learn about the environmental degradation that resulted and the eventual acceptance of responsibility for cleaning up. (without, of course, adequate funding to do the job completely, now estimated to require $300 to $600 billion) [image] Aerial view of “Queen Mary” chemical separation plants at Hanford, Washington - image from the U.S. Department of Energy. Olson tells of the various teams that were working on different aspects of the Manhattan Project, even where the name for the project originated, as well as the origin of the element name plutonium. He uses a familiar technique for history writing, focusing on specific individuals and letting us follow them through at least part of the story. This gives the events the more personal feel of a human element, relieving us of the perils of a straight up recitation of facts. Prime among these is Glenn Seaborg, a co-discoverer of plutonium. We follow him from his education in Physics and Chemistry at UC Berkeley, headed by Ernest Lawrence and Robert Oppenheimer, through several stages of the big project to come. We get to know Enrico Fermi, Leona Woods, the only woman on Fermi’s team, Susan Leckband, who arrives at Hanover in the 1980s with a high school degree, and winds up running the place, and others. There were plenty of personality conflicts that made forward movement sometimes difficult. Olson gives considerable space to a very moving description, by Nagasaki resident Dr. Raisuke Shirabe, of his experience of the bombing and its after-effects. [image] A 1963 explosives test near Hanford to determine the safest underground spot for disposing of radioactive waste – image and text from NY Times - Credit...Associated Press And we learn details that are amusing and alarming, like a radioactive vending machine and the surprising material used for swabbing aluminum tubes for the reactors, and the considerable challenges entailed in transporting plutonium and other dodgy materials from Hanford to (well, that’s classified). Add in the challenge of maintaining a safe work environment without letting the workers know what it was that they were working on. [image] A contemporary (6/3/2020) view of Hanford from the ridgeline between Hanford and Othello, where Olson was raised - his photo, from Twitter Olson brings us up to the present with the changes Hanford has gone through in the years since the war, the environmental toxicity that became apparent, cleanups that have been done, and remain, and how the facility is being used today. It does seem quaint that the expectation in the 1940s, when large amounts of radioactive waste were first being generated, was that science would come up with a solution to that problem before too terribly long. We are still waiting for that. [image] Many roads around Hanford are marked with signs warning travelers they're entering a hazardous area (The Oregonian) Hanford, Washington, provided a critical service to its country in a time of war, and got our nation militarily prepared, for good or ill, for the Cold War to come. It did this at considerable cost to its people and its environment. It holds a unique place in the annals of our nation, and should never be forgotten. By writing a popular history that is informative as well as entertaining and very readable, Steve Olson has made it likelier that Hanford will be remembered by a wide swath of Americans, who might never, otherwise, have learned of it, and thus, has done a service to us all. The Apocalypse Factory is not a disastrous ending to anything, but a very welcome revelation. The most recent studies indicate that a nuclear exchange of even 50 Nagasaki-type bombs would produce climate changes unprecedented in recorded human history and threaten the global food supply. A large-scale exchange of nuclear weapons would so reduce temperatures that most of the humans who survived the initial bombing would starve. Many people are concerned today that climate change poses a threat to human civilization but the most certain and immediate threat still resides in the nuclear weapons sitting in missile silos, bombers, and submarines around the world. Review first posted – August 7, 2020 Publication dates ----------July 28, 2020 - Hardcover ----------January 4, 2022 - Trade paperback [image] [image] [image] [image] I received an ARE of this book from Norton, but was sworn to secrecy until this review was unleashed on the world. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and GR pages Interviews -----National Association of Science Writers (NASW) Steve Olson: Apocalypse Factory -----NPR - Main Street on Prairie Public - audio – 53:00 – by Doug Hamilton Items of Interest -----Atomic Heritage Foundation - Hanford, WA -----Wiki on Vannevar Bush - it was his recommendation to FDR that got The Manhattan Project started -----Wiki on the Hibakusha, survivors of the nuclear bombs -----Atomic Age - The Trinity Test ...more |
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Jul 06, 2020
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Jul 18, 2020
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Jul 20, 2020
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125020402X
| 9781250204028
| 125020402X
| 4.14
| 78,341
| Aug 04, 2020
| Aug 04, 2020
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it was amazing
| There is nothing so disturbing as a creature born to flight being bound to dull lifelessness.-------------------------------------- A nameless s There is nothing so disturbing as a creature born to flight being bound to dull lifelessness.-------------------------------------- A nameless sadness, the fading away of the birds. The fading away of the animals. How lonely it will be here, when it’s just us.Franny Stone has always had large volumes of wanderlust coursing through her veins. From? To? Both? Neither? It seems that this is an ancestral gift. Excellent for seeing vast swaths of the planet’s landscape. Maybe not so good for establishing a secure base of operations in, say, maybe, a family, living in, oh, a home. [image] Charlotte McConaghy - image from Fantastic Fiction About twenty minutes into the future, a breathless Franny turns up at the town of Tasiilaq, in Greenland. The fauna of planet Earth have been vanishing at an alarming rate for a long time already. Mass extinctions are no longer the exception, but the rule. Franny wants to hitch a ride with a fishing boat. Her mission? To track the last Arctic terns on the planet as they make their globe-spanning annual migration from the Arctic to the Antarctic. She is happy to take on seamen’s chores while aboard, although her skill-set is somewhat slim. But what she can offer of value is tracking hardware. Terns with trackers on them and a computer that can check where they are. This is of significance to a particularly hard-core fishing boat captain, Ennis Malone, as terns are excellent locators of large schools of fish, and Malone is desperate for one last ”golden catch” before he, and all other fishermen, are banned from practicing their trade, the oceans having been pretty much drained of sustainable piscine life. [image] Tasiilaq Greenland - image from Travel with 2 of us Franny’s time talking her way onto, and then shipping out on, the good ship Saghani, is our home-base present for the novel. From here we flip back to several times in Franny’s life. Two, four, six, ten, twelve, nineteen years, and one year before. Each peels back a part of her life. We learn more of Franny’s many secrets with each look back. McConaghy sustains tension by showing us just enough, getting us to bite, then yanking us into the next chapter, the next time and place. Franny has several loves as well as secrets. She is a creature of the sea, an amazing swimmer, having an unnatural tolerance for oceanic chill, which she demonstrates by diving into such frigid water on rescue missions, with no apparent attention being paid to her personal safety. You wouldn’t be surprised if she crawled out of the water sporting an Ariel-like flipper instead of legs. The sea for her is one of the great loves of her life. Maybe it’s the family she never had. She feels more connected to her body, and weightless, and almost able to fly like the birds she loves. - from the -WriterUnboxed interviewShe is smitten with birds. We learn that she had had a particularly connected dealing with crows as a child. In another one of the lookbacks she is working at a University, decides to pop into an ornithology class, to bolster her innate interest, and finds, unsurprisingly, that she loves it, that she has an excellent feel for the course material. This does not go unnoticed by the professor, who is soon gaga over her. Niall’s love for the natural world, birds in particular, is as great as Franny’s love for the sea, but he is able to fulfill this passion by study, research, and teaching, without having to give up everything to pursue his interest. His is a stable passion, although no less a passion than hers. Niall is absolutely symbolic of the birds for Franny. He represents the idea that you can study what you love without taking away from the magic in those things. - from the Dead Darlings interviewTheir relationship takes flight, Franny’s third true love, but her wanderlust remains overpowering. It was always there, still is, and e’er will be. I tried for Niall, like I did for my mother. I really did. But the rhythms of the sea’s tides are the only things we humans have not yet destroyed.The family piece is important. Her mother encouraged her to read a lot. In addition to expanding her brain, it was a way for Franny to leave, without having to physically take off. And it worked. Her mother was particularly sensitive to leaving, having been abandoned by her mother as a child. Franny knew about this, and her mother’s promise that if Franny ever left it would be the last straw for her. The call comes when Franny is ten, and she does an adventurous runner with a fellow adventurer. But when she comes back two days later, Mom is gone. And Franny is packed off to her grandparents in Australia, her father having been out of the picture for a long time. Adult Franny goes on a search to find out what had happened to her mother, one of several lookback threads. It was really important to me to write the moments in Franny’s past that make her who she is, and for the reader to be able to experience those moments on an intimate level with her, because I felt that this would allow readers to connect more deeply with her and what drives her through the story. There’s also a lot of tension to be built in using suspension and mystery—you leave clues peppered throughout and only reveal information at moments that will create catharsis for your readers. - from the Amazon interviewFranny sustains a number of secrets. Aboard the boat she suffers from night terrors, even to the point of some life-threatening somnambulism. Why? What’s the deal with all those letters she writes but fails to send? What happened with her mother? Is that even a secret or just a mystery? There are more. And she is not the only one. Some of the Saghani crew have plenty of their own. [image] Arctic Tern – image from Discover Magazine The migration theme is worked vigorously. Franny’s innate pull to here or there is certainly of a kind with the migration urges of birds. We get to see the migration of the terns in action. There is even mention of a very long-term migration involving ocean currents. The fishermen must migrate to follow the fish, who also migrate. One of Franny’s needs is to try to find or construct a family. Niall presents one way in which to have an actual home base. He offers her a lot of space to be who she is. One can also see the Saghani crew as a kind of family. They certainly look after one another in a familial way. She can be herself to a significant degree with them, salve her loneliness as they have theirs. Franny’s searching for her mother is also driven by this familial need. Even if you are going to be in and out, you need a place to hang your hat, or maybe it is not so much defined by the place but by people. Home, then, is wherever you are, when you are with the people you love. The future McConaghy portrays is grim, but she had not set out to bum everyone out, or parade back and forth wearing a sandwich board, screaming “Repent!” She is not interested in tossing harpoons. One measure of this is how sympathetically she portrays the fishermen, even knowing that their work is part of the problem. It is a very human look at things. I didn’t want to write a dystopian novel about the physical impacts of climate change, such as what would become of our food supply. I wanted this to be an existential look at the way the loss of the animals would make us feel, and I think this was a refusal of the idea that humans are the most important things on this planet, and that everything exists in service to us. I wanted the world I drew to look almost identical to the world today, apart from that one major difference, hoping that this would be a more confronting way to predict how close a future without animals really is. - from the Amazon interviewFranny Stone is a fascinating and engaging character. Admittedly, most of us will not share her compulsion to just go. But, while it is likely that our traumas do not match hers, we have all suffered trauma of one sort or another. And while few of us have had to endure the chained up, tied down feelings or experiences Franny has, many of us have spent long stretches of time in places and/or situations we would rather not inhabit (I certainly have). And while we may not have the NEED that Franny experiences, we all have things we want, desires that are unfilled, whether in lower case or bolded caps. So, while we may or may not identify with the specifics of her experience, we can certainly identify in one way or another with Franny’s pain, with what remains unquenched, fueling potential movement. Migrations is a remarkable book that will transport you, but to a place you will want to see. You will meet interesting characters along the way, try to figure out some mysteries, uncover some secrets, and consider that we are not all made alike. There is on offer here a look at love made difficult by what is inherent, but also a look at how that might be managed. Hopefully, you will consider optimism, the possibility that courses through these pages as well as the dark future they portend. Migrations is a journey well worth taking. A shiver of delight finds me as we set out into the dark water. We hug the coast, traveling north by the ceaseless circling light of the lighthouse. The salty smell of the sea and the sound of its crash, the sway of the waves and the black abyss of its depths, the reaching dark of it, up to where it meets the inky velvet sky pricked through with glitter. With the stars reflected in the water we could be sailing through the sky itself; there is no end to it, no end to the sea or the sky but a gentle joining together. Review posted – August 14, 2020 Publication dates ----------August 4, 2020 - hardcover ----------July 6, 2021 - trade paperback I received an e-book ARE of Migrations from Flatiron via NetGalley. No long-distance travel was entailed. I did, however, feel unshakably pulled to write a review. And thanks too, to MC. You know who you are. Ok, sometimes I get a dark urge, a compulsion that I cannot resist, try as I might. The result is safely tucked under a spoiler tag to protect the innocent. But if you are driven by investigatory instincts, I urge you to reconsider before going there. (view spoiler)[ Ok, my real closing line… In writing Migrations Charlotte McConaghy has left no Stone un-terned. Ok, there it is done. Yes, I know I have a problem. Don’t judge me. (hide spoiler)] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Instagram, Twitter and FB pages This is the author’s first book for adult readers My review of McConaghy's 2021 follow up, Once There Were Wolves Interviews -----Amazon - An interview with "Migrations" author Charlotte McConaghy by Al Woodworth on 8/6/20 -----Bookpage - Charlotte McConaghy - To the moon and back three times by Cat, Deputy Editor - 8/4/20 -----Bookweb - A Q&A With Charlotte McConaghy, Author of August’s #1 Indie Next List Pick By Emily Behnke – 7/21/20 -----Dead Darlings - Interview with Charlotte McConaghy, Author of Migrations - 8/4/20 -----Libro.fm Audiobooks - Author Interview: Charlotte McConaghy by Kelsey Norris – 8/8/20 -----Writer Unboxed - A Glimmer of Hope from a Dark Future: An Interview with Charlotte McConaghy by Julie Carrick Dalton – 8/6/20 Items of Interest -----Chasing daylight - tiny trackers reveal the incredible flight plans of the Arctic tern -----Nemo’s Point -----Reading Group Guide -----The Wild Geese - a poem by Mary Oliver – it is referenced in chapter 2 – four years ago in Franny’s life - not really a spoiler, just a piece of the poem (view spoiler)[ Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things. (hide spoiler)] Songs/Music -----Luke Kelly - Raglan Road - Franny gets weepy in Chapter 22 on hearing this song ...more |
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liked it
| I recognize the ways in which running is transforming me. Through it, I am inflicting violence on myself and my body, submerging myself in pain lik I recognize the ways in which running is transforming me. Through it, I am inflicting violence on myself and my body, submerging myself in pain like I did when I was working in the warehouse alongside my mother, so that I may control the turmoil within me. But unlike any other labor, running relieves me of the weight that I should become better than my parents, my people.Noé Alvarez was at the beginning of his adult life, but he had seen a few things. Growing up near Yakima, WA, at 17, he took a job in a fruit packaging plant where his mother had worked for decades, in order to bring a bit more income into the household. Even though he had worked in the fields and done other physical labor as a kid, it gave him a lot more appreciation for how hard her life had been for all those years and gave him also a feeling of pride in doing his job well. The area promotes itself as The Palm Springs of Washington. Uh, no. It is, however, the area from where Raymond Carver hails, and Carver has provided a less than Palm-Springs-like look at it in his fiction. Hard-scrabble would be a better description. The train tracks that demarcate the town into East and West are no longer representative of the division between poor and rich neighborhoods—only poor and slightly less poor…We still seem trapped in the cycles of Carver’s narratives, as if his words condemned us to a world of loneliness, tarnished relationships, and violence. Seen differently, his words urge youth like us to rewrite ourselves out of these sinkholes. To sprint out of them.His parents had urged him to get out, and it looks like he will. Alvarez is accepted to Whitman College, with a generous aid package. The Hispanic Academic Achievers Program helps out more, so he winds up with a free ride. Off to Walla Walla in 2002. [image] Alvarez running in the event – image from WBUR.ORG In April 2004, two years into his college experience, he hears a speaker on Peace and Dignity Journeys (PDJ), a North American run through indigenous communities, from Alaska to Panama, held every four years. Alvarez had done some running, but was hardly a seasoned long-distance runner. Struggling with the demands of college, and buying in to a negative stereotype of himself and Hispanics generally, he decides this is for him, even asking Whitman for some money to get him started on it. They fork some over, which seems pretty sweet of them. Gotta say, that if it had been my kid dropping out of a free-ride college deal after two years, I would have been less than excited. Why not wait until you get your degree and catch this train the next time through? Sounds like Noé’s parents felt similarly. The man giving the presentation, Pacquiao, warned him of the hardships, but presented it as an event that promoted unity among indigenous peoples. But ok, college was not going all that well for him, so maybe a break was called for. Like, every step of the way, college was a very difficult thing for me. And it happened to coincide then when I was 19 years old with the Peace and Dignity Journeys, a six-month-long run that's organized every four years. And so it kind of saved me. It came - it coincided perfectly. I said, I needed to get out. I couldn't face my family. This is an opportunity for me to kind of hit the restart button and go and figure myself out. - from the NPR interviewThis is how Noé Alvarez found his way to the PDJ, but it is not how the book opens. There are many people who participate in this megamarathon. In the opening, we get a peek at each of the main ones before the event, strobe-light flashes of where they were just before deciding to join, maybe what prompted them. We get a where-are-they-now at the end of the book, a nice book-end. There is also a discontinuity between the event and Alvarez writing about it. I definitely wasn't ready to tell a story at 19. It's a lifelong process to make meaning out of it. I talked to some of the runners and I checked in with them too. I said, "Look, this is what I remember about you, this time. Do you remember that?" They shared information with me that I had blocked out. Then I just got to writing them. I took it scene by scene, just getting it down and figuring it out later, not thinking about the bigger picture because there were so many components to it. Runner's story, my story, dad's story, mom's story. It's a day by day thing. That's how the run was. - from the Salon interviewAlvarez reports on his experiences on this massive run, how he personally endures (or not) the physical demands, his attempts to extract meaning and connection from the PDJ, and his struggle to forge a clearer sense of his identity. In the run, he is only nineteen years old, so there is plenty of identity left to construct. He also fills us in on the uplifting welcomes given the runners in some communities and the occasional hostility of others sharing the road, including being hit by rocks courtesy of passing motorists, and concerns like encountering a mountain lion while running solo in a remote location, or waking up with a back full of blisters, courtesy of some crickets, getting lost in Los Angeles or seeing his knees swell to the size of melons. Though the run was physically taxing on the body, Álvarez joked, “running is the easy part.” Getting along with flawed people with broken histories could be challenging under the best of circumstances. - from the WBUR interviewWe meet, again, the runners whom he joins on the torturous trek from Alaska to Panama. Not all will last for the entirety. One of the strong points of the book is the stories he hears while hanging around the equivalent of a campfire after each day of extreme running. This was a highlight. Interesting, but not so compelling was the dysfunction within the group. The people on the run did not exactly seem like the most welcoming sorts. It certainly works as a descriptive, but does not exactly make us feel all that supportive for many of the runners and managers in this enterprise. People are people, whatever their origin, so this is not a huge shock, but I guess I was hoping that among a group of people who were engaged in a six-month test of their endurance and commitment, it might have been a bit less like middle school with more booze, sex, and snottiness. On the other hand, I have been around positively-minded political people at various stages in my life, and while most are pretty nice, there always seem to be some who are just awful. So, probably, bad on me for having unreasonable expectations. [image] Alvarez today - image from NBC News There is a duality here. Alvarez wants to support and identify with his working-class family, while wanting to feel a connection to a wider world, maybe a chance to fulfill his parents’ wish for him to have a better life than they had had. I know, why can’t one manage both? But it seems that the author, now in his thirties, has made some sort of a divide between the two. I seek elsewhere the spiritual and philosophical truths that running provided me. But within myself I believe that these truths can be achieved without a college education. The world tells me that achievement has to look one way, but I struggle with that.I take serious issue here, as the author appears to be conflating university education with a search for philosophical truths. Sure, it serves that purpose for many people. But it is a meaningful tool that allows one, or at least helps one, to make a decent enough living in the real world that one can afford to continue such truth-seeking without having to scrounge for cash. And Alvarez had some post-college work that was doing some real social good. In a description of his more contemporary life, he is working at lower end jobs than he really needs to. One was as an overnight guard at a museum. Here I contend not only with the mental fatigue of museum silence, but the nervous reality that has haunted and pestered me all my life: that I will always be working class.No shite, Sherlock. Been there, done that. I have my own guard uniform tucked away as well, but unlike Noé, I never really doubted my class status, despite college and graduate school. Sure, some can get out, but for the vast majority, while we may swap collar colors, our relationship to real power remains where it began. And it is likely to remain that way for our children as well. It is called a class-based society, whether the slots we are born into are Indian castes, or striations in the increasingly ill-named American middle class. The clacking dress shoes over marble floors remind me that I am surrounded by people who know where they’re going in life. In these small spaces, even in the most trivial conversations, I pretend that I matter, that people value my insight into random matters of life, literature, and local events.I would not project any sort of peace or direction onto anyone based on the sounds their shoes make on a marble floor. I have worked with many such people, as has Alvarez, and they are as likely to be as unhappy, or as undirected, as anyone walking on softer rubber soles. And if that is not persuasive, a quick look at any decent newspaper coverage of things political or economic should disabuse one of such notions. And maybe some people do value what you have to say. You can be working class and still have something to contribute that is of value, beyond physical labor, if sweat-based work is not sufficient to offer the feelz you need. That this book exists is absolute proof of that. Speaking of which, some of Alvarez’s writing can be beautifully descriptive, while lyrically evocative. It is an ink wash of a world here in rainy Chiapas where we traverse steep highlands with heavy feet, mobbing about the clouds as if in some dream world that smells of firewood. Roads coil around remote Mayan villages that appear and disappear in the fog like ghost towns. The silhouettes of women hunching over the land can be seen in the clouds, working the land, and carrying bundles of firewood on their backs.And then it can sometimes be clunky, for which I blame editors more than Alvarez, unless, of course, things of this sort were raised and changes were overruled by the author. My eye sockets sink with exhaustion… Not likely. Maybe your eyes sink, or it feels like they are sinking, within the sockets, but I expect the sockets stayed exactly where they were. Another. When the rhythms of working-class life cut inside me like broken beer glass, I run. Maybe broken beer bottle glass? What is, actually, broken beer? This sort of thing should result in DMV-like points on one’s poetic license. One further concern. Much is made of the importance of this run to healing. It was never clear enough to me how exactly that worked. Maybe I was missing something. Always a possibility. But repeating what sounded to me like a mantra about how this was about healing and that was about healing without really explaining how, made me feel in need of some healing of my own. There are plenty of wrongs that have been foisted on indigenous people. How does this run help heal those lesions? It sounded to me like a line of political truism taken in, and repeated, by a new, young (19) adherent, who was fully on board, but who did not yet have a deep grasp of the content under the slogan. I am not saying there was not healing of some sort going on, just that it could have used a bit more explication. I did like, in Alvarez’s introductory remarks on the NCRL site, (linked in EXTRA STUFF), his piece about running as a form of connection and prayer. The road is a classic image of the journey of self-discovery. We expect our narrator to begin in one place, both physically and emotionally or psychologically, and end his road trip someplace else, both internally and externally. I am struck ultimately by how little this run actually seemed to impact the author’s life. There is an immediate result, though. He does return to school, completing his expected education and much more, doing work that is of obvious value in the world. Yet finds insufficient psychic reward in that. Surprisingly, he seems no closer to finding what he was looking for years after the event than he was before he joined. While Alvarez may have picked up a nice trove of tales to tell, it was not at all clear that there was enough growth here to write about, given where he is when he writes the story. Does Alvarez feel more connected to his indigenous brothers and sisters, the indigenous communities through which the run passed? Sure. But what does one do with that? Is this a purely personal effort? Does it lead him to look for ways to help support Native American communities, or groups, after the race was over? If so, it was not obvious. He seems shifted more to a generic desire to help poor people. It seemed a very personal journey, despite the initial rationale, and his initial enthusiasm for being included. Which leads one to consider whether this was the intent. He even admits it was a need for a personal restart that was a great motivator. Maybe not all journeys really take you somewhere. Intended or not, that was where this one dropped me off. But the run certainly helped Alvarez embrace who he was at one level, furthering his sense of connection with his family. ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 24, 2020
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Jun 03, 2020
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May 24, 2020
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0316412007
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it was amazing
| There is a vast arterial power humming all around us, hiding in plain sight. It has shaped our civilization more than any road, technology, or poli There is a vast arterial power humming all around us, hiding in plain sight. It has shaped our civilization more than any road, technology, or political leader. It has opened frontiers, founded cities, settled borders, and fed billions. It promotes life, forges peace, grants power, and capriciously destroys everything in its path. Increasingly domesticated, even manacled, it is an ancient power that rules us still.---------------------------------------- …not only are we humans an urban species, we are also a river species. Indeed nearly two thirds (63 percent) of the total world population lives within 20 kilometers of a large river Some 84 percent of the world’s large cities…are located along a large river. For the world’s megacities the number rises to 93 percent.We are river people, most of us anyway, although we may or may not be aware of it. The places where we live, work, and gplay tend to center around our streaming waterways. Even settlements at the coast of seas and oceans tend to be located where rivers empty into the larger bodies of water. As significant as light, land, breathable air, and tolerable temperature ranges, rivers have powered the development of homo sapiens from hunter-gatherer to space traveler. As with most things that underlay, and power our lives, I expect that most of us do not give our rivers much thought. [image] Laurence Smith - (looking suspiciously like the character Bernard Lowe of Westworld – we presume Smith is human) - image from Institute at Brown for Environment & Society I grew up, as most of you probably did, near a river. At the breakfast table in our third-floor apartment in the Bronx, the morning light was so bright, so glaring that we had to pull down the shade in our single kitchen window. The golden beams came at us from the west, reflected off the windows of George Washington High School in Manhattan, across the Harlem River, which was about four blocks to the west. I never thought much about the river, although it was so close by. Unlike the morning glare, it was not directly visible from any of our windows, and was not in clear sight from most of the places I frequented. In Rivers of Power, which could as easily have been titled The Power of Rivers, geographer Laurence Smith offers a drop of geological history on how they came to be, but focuses mostly on how rivers and humans have worked together throughout our shared time on Earth. His analysis cites the challenges rivers present to their neighbors, but mostly the benefits they offer, which he divides into five general categories, Access, Natural Capital, Territory, Well-Being, and Means of Projecting Power. He then looks at major rivers of the world through this quintuple lens to broaden and deepen our appreciation for this very necessary, but sometimes unseen partner. [image] The Sherman Creek Generating Station on the Harlem River, the Hudson River visible at top – image from Hidden Waters blog The river was bordered on the Bronx side by Penn Central tracks, accessible through holes nicely cut in chain-link fences. It was a good place to tape coins to tracks allowing rolling stock the chance to flatten and stretch them to the delight of wastrel urchins. The most frequent floating stock I recall passing by just beyond the tracks consisted of barges loaded with coal for a local powerplant. [image] A Nilometer on Rhoda Island, Cairo – image from Wikipedia It will come as no great surprise that the first great societies in human history arose around rivers. You will know about early Mesopotamia on the Tigris and Euphrates, and Egypt on the Nile. But you may not know about another that far pre-dated both, the Harappan civilization of the Indus and Ghaggar Hakra river valleys. It is one of the great joys of this book that it brings to light such nuggets of information that were completely new, well, to me, anyway. I had never before heard, for example, of a nilometer (see image above), a significant tool used by Egyptian leaders. It allowed those in charge to see the clarity of the water and depth of the river at a given moment and thus be prepared for excessive or insufficient annual flooding of the Nile River Valley, with huge implications for the harvest to come. [image] Guns along the Hudson - Saratoga Battlefield - my shot Laurence looks at how civilizations grew up along rivers. There are obvious advantages, from fresh water for drinking and cleaning to irrigation, from transportation to military defense. While rivers provided water for community needs, and as technology progressed, could be used to power waterwheels and cool manufactories, they were also a tool that could be used by those upriver for political and/or military advantage. A nation, or community located upriver could divert so much of the river’s water that a downstream community could find its crucial resource seriously diminished or totally gone, and, in addition, the disadvantage of being downstream from polluters. Rivers allow for the emplacement of forts and armaments that could protect a community from a naval invasion, and offer highways on which raiders could attack poorly defended communities (think Vikings). [image] The Ganges - image from Encyclopedia Britannica - © Jedraszak/iStock.com But there are many other ways that rivers impact our lives, and have done so for as long as there have been people living in communities. They have served as a focal point for religious practices. The Ganges is used as a site into which Hindus deliver the cremated remains of their dead. The river Jordan was a memorable site in Christian lore as the place where Jesus was baptized, and today rivers are still often used in baptismal rites. And let us not forget underground waterways in myth, like the Rivers Styx, Acheron, and Lethe. River as judge-and-jury has a place in history too, not necessarily a good place. In the Hammurabi Code, for instance, a charge of sorcery was adjudicated by tossing the accused (one wonders if a local rat-bastard accused some poor schmo of turning him into a newt) into the Euphrates. If the newly dunked swims to shore, not guilty. If the accused drowns, oh, well. (that turning people into a newt thing would have really come in handy). I expect there are probably books to be written (undoubtedly some already have been) about rivers, real and imagined, in religion, literature, and mythology. Smith touches on this in this book, but it is not a major focus. I had a small unfortunate intersection with the Harlem as a young man. A friend and I were at the water’s edge, very close to the Washington Heights Bridge. I was there helping him clean his car, at some point in the late 60s, on a summer afternoon. I availed of a very lengthy bit of rope that some daring soul had tethered to the underside of the bridge. There was a knot at the bottom, but I did not have the firmest grip on the rope with my hands or on the knot with any other body parts, and my arm strength not being what I might have hoped, I soon found myself swinging out over the Harlem River, for a brief bit of fun, then desperately plunging toward the water as my grip gave way. I can’t say it was awful, no body parts or other unspeakables floated past, but it was not considered an ideal bathing venue, so I swam back to shore, soaked, somewhat gritty, and mortified. Smith offers a considerable survey of what is happening in the great rivers of the world today, physically and politically. The great dam building that is going on echoes the burst of dam building that took place in the early-mid twentieth century in the West. When the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), across the Blue Nile, was completed in 2022, it became the largest hydroelectric plant in Africa. The Three Gorges Dam in China, across the Yangtze, achieved a generating capacity of 22,500 megawatts when it was finally finished. It has also required the displacement of over a million people and has caused significant ecological damage. Many older dams in the west are being taken down, with an eye to reviving stifled ecological systems. [image] The Three Gorges Dam - as of 2009 – image from Wikipedia Not very far west the Hudson offered a much grander vista, and probably cleaner swimming, although it would take some years before environmentalists, led by Pete Seeger, forced a river cleanup. The view from the train on the Hudson Line, of what is now Metro North, is ta-die-faw. The Palisades formation on the western side of the Hudson was and remains magnificent, particularly celestial in its autumnal finery. The view is even better at the more leisurely pace afforded by the Day Line cruise from the western piers of midtown Manhattan up-river to places like Bear Mountain Park and West Point. This was a most welcome respite for someone who had experienced worlds that were not entirely composed of brick and concrete only on day trips in summer camp. There has been considerable change in the use of river-front land in cities across the world. Rotting piers of earlier mercantile and industrial ages have given way to increasing development of waterside property for high-priced residences, office towers, and commercial spaces, AND for public use. Smith points out the history of law that preserves riverine access for all. It has certainly been far from universally applied. But today, most major world cities have been working to make their rivers accessible to the general public. As people become more urbanized, the need, and yes, it is a need for most, for exposure to the outdoors, for a connection to nature, can be satisfied at least somewhat by walks along or other activities in riverfront parks. There came a time when my ancient car still ran, when I could still drive to work in Queens late at night, and drive (if you can call the stop-and-go nightmare of NYC rush hour traffic driving) home to Brooklyn in the morning. But on Sunday mornings, after my overnight shift, I went elsewhere. Eventually I would diversify, but for a while I would tote my digital SLR to Brooklyn Bridge Park, and environs, to shoot urban landscapes, as the more remote ones were no longer within my means. The need to shoot was powerful, but equally as strong was the comfort to be had in being in a place where the East River was coursing under a series of bridges, on it’s way to meeting up with the outflow of the Hudson en route to the Atlantic. It was an idyllic time of day to be there, early morning, as the sun rose, or soon after. Floods of tourists have yet to arrive. A trickle of joggers trot past. Winter is best for relative solitude there. I told my son once that seeing the beauty of such places, whether urban or wilderness, filled me with a kind of transcendental joy that seemed to my atheistic self something like religion. “Why something like?” he asked. Why indeed. [image] While most of my BB Park shots were taken early in the morning, I did manage an evening outing there once or twice. Smith concludes by looking ahead at what amazing new tech promises for the future, and for what global warming portends for rivers. Advances in coming technology, particularly small hydro power installations, amelioratives like a project planned for New Orleans, Los Angeles working on finding new sources of fresh water, new satellite swarms that allow incredibly greater monitoring of earthly waterflows and conditions. I cannot say that I have any real gripes about the book. It is well-written and informative, presenting a wealth of information about the history of humanity’s relationship with rivers, and explaining how rivers have helped found and shape civilizations. It will definitely remind you of Jared Diamond’s work. Not a gripe, but I do enjoy a bit of levity in non-fiction. I guess it serves a similar purpose to comic relief in dramas. No danger of running into that here. Still, Rivers of Power will get your gray cells flashing, and maybe push you to think a bit about the river that is nearest you now or the river you recall from when you were growing up. Instead of memory lane, it might be more like memory creek. Today it is bedrock legal principle across the globe that rivers cannot be owned. Even in countries with strong capitalist traditions, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, rivers are a class apart, reserved for the public good. This puts rivers in a category distinctly different from other natural resources. It is extremely common for land, trees, minerals, and water from other natural sources (e.g. springs, ponds, aquifers) to be deemed private property. Rivers, air, and oceans, however, are treated very differently. Review first posted – March 20, 2020 Publication date – April 21, 2020 ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 17, 2020
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Feb 07, 2020
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