I'll probably return to this before trips to the neotropics. So far it seems like a good overview of some of the basics, though sadly no help in underI'll probably return to this before trips to the neotropics. So far it seems like a good overview of some of the basics, though sadly no help in understanding tropical plant diversity....more
I wish every bioregion had an overview like this. I particularly appreciated the sections on climate, geology, and plants. The animal sections were a I wish every bioregion had an overview like this. I particularly appreciated the sections on climate, geology, and plants. The animal sections were a bit underwhelming, as they seemed either too broad and too generic, e.g. entire insect orders treated together with quite a bit of text spent on general descriptions of the group. I also suspect a fairly strong bias toward southeastern Arizona where the Desert Museum (and most of the authors) are based, but that worked well for me since that's probably the part of the Sonoran Desert I wanted to learn about. Of course, now I want to visit more Sky Islands, the Sierra Madres, more of Baja....more
Truly an outstanding book that every Californian, certainly everyone in the Bay Area, should read. Cunningham's rich drawings and paintings evoke pre-Truly an outstanding book that every Californian, certainly everyone in the Bay Area, should read. Cunningham's rich drawings and paintings evoke pre-contact California in a way that I've never seen before, largely because I've never seen anyone try! Most historical ecology is strictly prose (a form Cunningham also handles with elegance and precision), but to *see* our familiar landscapes denuded of houses and replete with bears is another thing entirely. There may not be another person alive who combines Cunningham's scientific and scholarly sensibilities with genuine artistry and a deep understanding of California natural history borne of direct experience.
Some random reflections:
Did you know there were 30+ ft long sea cows in our kelp forests 30,000 years ago? That's the length of a city bus. Imagine finishing a dive with a safety stop next to a bus-sized sea cow.
Cunningham disputes the claim that contact-era animal abundances encountered by Europeans were the result of advanced waves of diseases that had killed off the top predators in those ecosystems, i.e. indigenous people. I first encountered this idea reading Charles Mann, and I admit I'd sort of assumed it was the accepted explanation. There are definitely underlying philosophical agendas at play, since if you prefer to believe that Europeans are horrible and screwed everything up you probably prefer the view that America was a bountiful utopia of plants and animals before Europeans ruined it all, whether that abundance was cultivated by indigenous peoples or not, and if you prefer to believe that all humans exert similar ecological influences you'd probably prefer it if Indians were keeping down animal populations through hunting. Merits some further reading, I imagine. Cunningham claims a lot of the evidence used to support the predator release theory is pretty scant.
I had this wonderful "a-ha!" moment after reading the section on fire. Cunningham writes that Californian Indians would burn grasslands and oak woodlands to (among other things) promote the growth of wild food crops, which I kind of knew in theory. Days after I read that this spring I went for a hike in a part of Lake County that burned last fall, and the insane density of wildflowers really brought home how effective fire would have been in promoting a crop you could really harvest and eat a lot of. The Ithuriel's spear was particularly dense, and the USDA claims that several tribes ate the bulbs: http://www.plants.usda.gov/plantguide....
One of the things I appreciate most about this book is its frank approach to our ignorance. Cunningham does not shy away from pointing out what we don't know about the past, in many cases what we can't know, and while she does theorize and extrapolate, it's always clear when she's doing so....more
Humboldt: not just a Californian county shrouded in cannabinoid haze! Turns out, he was also a dude. It's hard to read the works of 19th century naturHumboldt: not just a Californian county shrouded in cannabinoid haze! Turns out, he was also a dude. It's hard to read the works of 19th century naturalists without picking up on the Humboldt name-dropping, but this welcome biography definitely provided me with a fuller understanding of what he was all about. And what he was all about was pretty much everything, from geology to salps to flowers to race relations to income inequality. Also talking a lot. I suspect I, like Darwin, would have idolized Humboldt from afar but been deeply annoyed with him in person. Such is life.
This book is a pretty straightforward chronology of Humboldt's times, with the primary purpose of reintroducing this critical 18th and 19th century scientist to English-speaking audiences who have largely forgotten him, possibly due to the anti-German backlash following World War II, as Wulf suggests. It is also a scholarly, thoroughly-cited and well-researched work based on sources spanning several languages. If you want to learn more about this fascinating figure, this is a great starting point.
That said, I found Wulf's habit of quoting people in tiny fragments to be deeply annoying, and perhaps representative of a larger inclination to cherry-pick portions of Humboldt's life that fit Wulf's depiction of him as one of the first syncretic ecologists and a modern humanist. The tiny quotes thing just made me feel like I wasn't getting a taste for Humboldt in his own words, which made me wonder if I should just be reading his own books instead of a biography. I'd prefer a biographer allow their subject to speak a little more.
The larger issue of selection was most glaring to me in Wulf's attempts to describe Humboldt as a man with modern ethics regarding race and social justice. "Unlike most Europeans," she writes, "Humboldt did not regard the indigenous people as barbaric, but instead was captivated by their culture, beliefs and languages" (p. 71). No doubt he was closer to our modern ideals than his contemporaries, but it's never that tidy when you dig a bit deeper (with people of the 18th century or people of today). Here's an excerpt that complicates:
The assemblage of Indians at Pararuma again excited in us that interest, which everywhere attaches man in a cultivated state to the study of man in a savage condition, and the successive development of his intellectual faculties. How difficult to recognize in this infancy of society, in this assemblage of dull, silent, inanimate Indians, the primitive character of our species! Human nature does not here manifest those features of artless simplicity, of which poets in every language have drawn such enchanting pictures. The savage of the Orinoco appeared to us to be as hideous as the savage of the Mississippi, described by that philosophical traveller Volney, who so well knew how to paint man in different climates. We are eager to persuade ourselves that these natives, crouching before the fire, or seated on large turtle-shells, their bodies covered with earth and grease, their eyes stupidly fixed for whole hours on the beverage they are preparing, far from being the primitive type of our species, are a degenerate race, the feeble remains of nations who, after having been long dispersed in the forests, are replunged into barbarism.
Reading Voyage of the Beagle is largely the same: Darwin often lamented the injustice and violence inflicted by Europeans on everyone else, but even he couldn't find empathy for the native peoples of Tierra del Fuego.
Regarding Humboldt as a kind of father of ecology, again, he seems to have been a critical force, though not the only player. Such is nature of biography I guess. I did appreciate Wulf's emphasis on his holism, which encompassed not just different scientific disciplines, but also the arts. Her excerpt from Wordsworth's The Excursion (p. 171) regarding the meanness of reductionism is brilliant:
Inquire of ancient Wisdom; go, demand Of mighty Nature, if 'twas ever meant That we should pry far off yet be unraised; That we should pore, and dwindle as we pore, Viewing all objects unremittingly In disconnection dead and spiritless; And still dividing, and dividing still, Break down all grandeur, still unsatisfied With the perverse attempt, while littleness May yet become more little; waging thus An impious warfare with the very life Of our own souls!
Wulf describes Humboldt's many close male friendships, and seems to fall just short of suggesting he was gay given the strength of these friendships and his disinterest in women (pp. 82-83), but she leaves it at that. I guess we can't know he was gay, but Wulf seems convinced of it, and it seems probable given the evidence she presents. Part of me feels her unwillingness to investigate his sexuality is appropriate since, in theory, that has little bearing on his life as a scientist, but on the other hand, if Humboldt was gay and closeted, surely that had enormous impact on his science and every other aspect of his life, whether or not he would choose to admit it. His male parters were very often fellow scientists, intellectual as well as emotional companions, so these relationships were clearly scientifically important. If Humboldt had not been gay would he have married, and how would that have affected his career? If Humboldt was gay, shouldn't we be celebrating him as such?
Also, how amazing is it that Goethe, Humboldt, Darwin, Jefferson, Babbage, and countless other thinkers with huge influence on our times were both contemporaries and correspondents! The part where Humboldt drops by the US and hangs out with Jefferson was incredible, particularly the fact that Jefferson was capable of conversation about science. Like, when Neil deGrasse Tyson drops by the White House, do he and Obama actually talk about cosmology? I doubt it. Not sure if this is a consequence of the complication of science, where no one person could speak intelligently about anything other than a tiny slice of it, or the reductionist bent of our age, where you can be a politician or a scientists but not both, and certainly not at the same time.
Some Notes
Jefferson, like all humans, is problematic in his own right, but here's something for the religious right to keep in mind next time they try to claim him:
History, I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. this marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.
And, for liberal humanists hoping to do the same, from the same letter:
You know, my friend, the benevolent plan we were pursuing here for the happiness of the Aboriginal inhabitants in our vicinities. we spared nothing to keep them at peace with one another, to teach them agriculture and the rudiments of the most necessary arts, and to encourage industry by establishing among them separate property.
"The only thing in heaven or Earth that M. Humboldt does not understand is business." (p. 181, attributed to Helen Maria Williams, who translated some of AH's works into English).
"I loathe, I abhor the sea, & all ships which sail on it." 27-year-old Darwin in a letter to his sister Susan, toward the end of his voyage on the Beagle, 1836, quoted by AW on p. 227.
"I am grown the dullest old owl in Christendom." George Perkins Marsh to Spencer Fullerton Baird, 26 August 1869. http://cdi.uvm.edu/collections/item/g.... "Dullest owl in Christendom" is either going to be the name of my band or my epitaph. Quoted by AW on p. 283....more
For my own reference, I want to read this (or at least skim it) b/c of the quote cited here suggesting the author thinks we are actually *more* in tunFor my own reference, I want to read this (or at least skim it) b/c of the quote cited here suggesting the author thinks we are actually *more* in tune with the natural world now than we've ever been, which is pretty much the opposite of what most environmentalists claim, including myself, though that claim is based entirely on anecdotal evidence on my part and is probably bunk, or at least worth investigating. It could be that we know less about nature than hunter-gatherers, but you could also argue that the average person today knows more about nature than an agrarian from 1000 years ago, and is more self-consciously aware of how it reacts to human activity. To flip it again, you could argue that said agrarian knows what he knows through direct experience, and thus has a much richer understanding than most of us do about how plants react to water and sun light....more
Just want to jot down my thoughts about this book BEFORE actually reading it. This book is constantly cited in discussions about connecting Pre-review
Just want to jot down my thoughts about this book BEFORE actually reading it. This book is constantly cited in discussions about connecting people to nature (which is kind of my thing) , but I've avoided reading it b/c I've also gotten the impression that it's not based on any kind of reasonable evidence, and by reasonable I mean quantitative, peer-reviewed research, and that's a problem for me. But, as Constance pointed out to me, the fact that it has traction in my circles is reason enough to read it, I guess, if only to knowledgeably refute it or repackage its message when it comes up in discussion.
...and the review
I think if you read this as an editorial and not as an attempt to present evidence supporting the thesis, the book is actually quite good, and relevant. If you are a parent and you haven't thought about the value of unstructured play in the outdoors, or you simply live in a largely man-made landscape, I suspect there's a lot to be gained by reading Louv's occasionally eloquent, always impassioned plea that kids need the freedom to explore and experience the non-human world on their own terms, as almost all children have until our current urban era, even if that world is a weedy abandoned lot. His collected anecdotes from kids and parents are beautiful, and resonant for those of us who grew up, as Louv and I did, with easy access to forests and streams and abundant time to explore them.
What I wanted, though (what I always want, really), was evidence, which was generally lacking or unconvincing. Sometimes this was Louv's fault, e.g. single-observer descriptions of events (doesn't that break a fundamental rule of journalism?) [1], un-cited facts and figures [2], over-reliance on the work of a handful of academics [3], or worse, reports that did not undergo any form of peer review [4]. That being said, I'm pretty sure the underlying problem is that the concepts here are complicated and hard to reduce into forms of evidence I find persuasive, even when Louv did cite research (which he often did). What is nature, anyway? What is a "connection" to nature, and how does one operationalize it in such a way that one can study it? These are the kinds of issues that make social science hard and its findings maddeningly impossible to generalize, so it's difficult to fault a journalist like Louv for not providing evidence that is not only not there, but practically impossible to collect in the first place (not that it stopspeople from trying, though). Calling this "scholarly" or "well-researched" as the back cover blurbs do seems a bit extreme, though.
So while I can't exactly thump my forefinger against this book and cry out, "The proof is here, people!", I think I can recommend it in the way I can recommend Pollan's books, as a thought-provoker and a conversation-starter. For me, the ideas presented aren't novel, so I found the lack of supporting evidence frustrating, but for those who've never considered this stuff, like I hadn't considered the source of my food before reading Omnivore's Dilemma, I think this one's worth reading.
[1] Louv has this great anecdote on p. 27 about a neighborhood association in San Diego chasing away kids who were fishing in a pond and making bike trails in the woods b/c it violated housing association rules, but it's all based on one friend's testimony. Isn't this too good to go unverified?
[2] E.g. "Copious studies show a reduced amount of leisure time experienced by American families, more time in front of the TV and computer, and growing obesity among adults and children because of diet and sedentary lifestyles" (p. 32). Totally without citation. "new studies suggest that exposure to nature may reduce the symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder" (p. 34), also without citation.
[3] He cites a lot of different researchers, but relies heavily on Chawla and Sobel, both of whom seem like cool nature-loving people in their own right, but neither of whom seem to publish much in the scientific literature.
[4] E.g. "CLOSING THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP: Using the Environment as an Integrating Context for Learning" (executive summary, full text), p. 204
This was one of my first guides to CA natural history, and it's a wonderful comprehensive look at the state's ecosystems. Definitely merits some re-reThis was one of my first guides to CA natural history, and it's a wonderful comprehensive look at the state's ecosystems. Definitely merits some re-reading....more
I think I need to re-read it to say anything coherent about this, but it came with a solid sororal endorsement, which are rarely wrong, and was not inI think I need to re-read it to say anything coherent about this, but it came with a solid sororal endorsement, which are rarely wrong, and was not in this case....more
Anyone who thinks about nature will find things to love and despise about Desert Solitaire. One moment he's waxing on about the beauty of the cliffrosAnyone who thinks about nature will find things to love and despise about Desert Solitaire. One moment he's waxing on about the beauty of the cliffrose or the injustice of Navajo disenfranchisement and the next he's throwing rocks at bunnies and recommending that all dogs be ground up for coyote food. He says "the personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself" (p. 6) and then proceeds to personify every rock, bird, bush, and mountain. He's loving, salty, petulant, awed, enraptured, cantankerous, ponderous, erudite, bigoted and just way too inconsistent to figure out what he's really trying to say.
Which, clearly, is the wrong question all together. This book is about the desert and it is about Abbey and I don't think judging either of them is a particularly fruitful line of inquiry. Instead, think of Abbey as the naturalist's Id, the unfiltered conservationist urge, and the desert as the distilled un-human world where that beast rages and sleeps. If you love nature and you're appreciating an amazing view, you probably feel a very basic, child-like wonder. And if you then see some idiot drive by and throw an empty bottle out of his Hummer, I bet that at least for a moment, there is an Abbey-esque part of you that wishes the humans were dead. Well, most of the humans. Except for the ones that you like. And the ones that they like. And you know, the Hummer guy probably isn't all bad, just ignorant. But that first set of emotions, that, to me, seems to be the human half of this book, and in that sense, Abbey does a wonderful job exploring a wide range of emotional, personal reactions to the outdoors. And in the end, I think he provides so many contradictory personifications of the desert that they get all get stuck in the door Three Stooges style, and you're left with fairly dehumanized sense of the desert itself.
I've never been to Utah myself, so I put together this gallery of some of the scenes and things in the book.
Words & Notes
demesne (n): a feudal lord's land, where the serfs labored. (p. 5)
usufructuary (n): the holder of an usufruct, which is the right to use or benefit from property that you do not own. (p. 5) "Loveliness and exultation." This line made me consider the possibility that my favorite nature writers tend to spend as much time describing discomfort and horror at the hands of nature as they do adulating it. Abbey definitely gets at the former later in the book. I wonder if part of the reason some people find this kind of writing boring is a surfeit of ecstasy most readers don't share.
gelid (adj): icy, cold. (p. 16)
"Don't really care for ants." He also apparently doesn't like tarantulas. Sad. (p. 26)
pismire (n): an ant, apparently because formic acid smells like piss. (p. 26)
"There is no beauty in nature, said Baudelaire." Would love a citation. (p. 36)
sinecure (n): an office without power or responsibility. (p. 41)
"To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealist all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head: if he ducks he's a liar." (p. 97)
"Fear betrays the rabbit to the great horned owl. Fear does the hard work, making the owl's job easy. After a lifetime of dread it is more than likely that the rabbit yields to the owl during that last moment with a sense of gratitude, as pleased to be eaten—finally!—as the owl is to eat." This is the kind of anthropomorphism I'm talking about (p. 98)
"Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction." (p. 125)
"'In the desert', wrote Balzac, somewhere, .there is all and there is nothing. God is there and man is not.'" I would love to source this quote but I just can't find it. Was Abbey's recollection faulty? (p. 184)
He occasionally makes the point that the most horrifying thing about nature is not its capacity to mame, murder, and eat us, but its "implacable indifference." We don't fear the world because it's out to get us, we fear it because it doesn't even notice us, it doesn't even care enough to despise us. I like this idea. Oceans crush us, storms flatten us, lions eat us, viruses subvert us, not because we deserve it, but just because we happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They're scary because they don't acknowledge us, and make us doubt our own reality. This is why Alien will always be scarier than the Predator. (p. 191)
"Gaze not too long into the abyss..." Apparently this is Nietzsche. Reminds me of Neal's paraphrasing, "If you look too long at a makefile, the abyss looks back at you." (p. 210)
I had no idea delphinium was toxic enough to kill cows. Go delphinium! (p. 222)
In possibly his only citation, Abbey notes (I think) 2 Kings 3, which describes how the armies of Israel, Judah, and Edom lay waste to the Jordanian land of Moab. Not sure what he was getting at. That Moab, UT also suffers at human hands? Incidentally, the Moabites were founded when Lot's own daughters seduced him and got preggers. Scandalous! (p. 227)...more
All Pollan's books explore the ways people relate to the world around them, from plants to food in general to space itself. This one's about gardens aAll Pollan's books explore the ways people relate to the world around them, from plants to food in general to space itself. This one's about gardens and gardening, and is probably the book in which he most explicitly addresses man's relationship to nature.
The oft-repeated thesis of this book is that all American concepts of the physical world and our place in it stress a division between nature and culture, and that while this notion has been useful in its various forms (Puritan establishment to the Wilderness Act), the present demands a more holistic metaphor to guide us. Pollan proposes the garden as this metaphor, a place where humanity must both acknowledge impotence in the face of white flies and early frosts, while at the same time assert its own history, culture, and opinion in order to harvest tomatoes, appreciate a dahlia, or feel fully at peace. He explores this idea by examining various aspects of the conceptual garden and his own real, cultivated corner of Connecticut, dealing variously with vegetables, lawns, seed catalogs, weeds, etc.
My reactions to Pollan's work are remarkably consistent: fascination; admiration for the quantity and diversity of historical, literary, and scientific references he can apply in his analysis of almost anything; simultaneous frustration with his dogged refusal to cite these references in a regular fashion; and dissatisfaction with his failure to distinguish the personal shortcomings of scientists from the legitimacy of science itself (i.e. science as a good, if not the best, way of learning about the world). This book was Pollan's first, published almost 20 years ago, and it pretty much hits all these points.
That said, I also almost always come away from his books feeling enlightened, and more importantly, convinced. Honestly, he didn't really have to twist my arm to persuade me that romantic and/or radically preservationist environmentalism isn't a particularly useful philosophy if we want to survive the next 1000 years with both our world and our culture relatively intact, but I hadn't thought very much about gardening as a way toward a better mindset. Sentences like, "What we need is to confound our metaphors, and the rose can help us do this better than the swamp can" (p. 97) intrigued me, because I'm definitely more of a swamp kind of guy.
My main critique of this book is really more of a question: if the garden is the metaphor that best embodies our relationship with nature, what does it tell us about right and wrong? The garden teaches us to engage the world instead of dominating or kowtowing to it, but it doesn't seem to tell us why we should engage, and to what end. For instance, in his discussion of a local stand of old-growth pine that was blown down in a storm, Pollan describes the conflicting views of the Nature Conservancy land owners (leave it alone, let nature take its course), utilitarians (harvest and sell the wood), and romantics (restore the grove), and then offers some of his own motives for various plans of action (restore the grove to perpetuate the locals' relationship with the land, restore to our best guess at what the pre-Colonial state might have been so people can feel connected to the pre-Colonial experience). Pollan's garden ethic might encourage us to consider a more diverse array of options beyond entrenched commercial interest or the equally inflexible (and somewhat irrational) position of the Nature Conservancy, but it doesn't actually help us choose one path. There is no one true reason to garden, so garden ethics are not particularly helpful in decision-making. I guess Pollan might argue that his garden ethic isn't meant to be proscriptive so much as informative: the absolutism of our country's childhood and adolescence needs to give way to a harder, more self-conscious way of life, one that acknowledges that the most important decisions often must declare a new righteousness rather than adhere to an existing code.
Some Words
Maginot Line: France's fortified border with Germany in WW2, the implication here being that it was ineffectual. (p. 53)
antinomian (adj): Christian (Protestant) belief that faith alone is sufficient to achieve salvation. (p. 60)
Old review from 2005, when I thought I would be a scientist instead of a web lackey
This is E. O. Wilson’s autobiography. I picked it up because he’s oOld review from 2005, when I thought I would be a scientist instead of a web lackey
This is E. O. Wilson’s autobiography. I picked it up because he’s one of the few famous ecologists I can think of off hand, I would like to know more about the kind of people who populate the fields of science I may enter, and because anything with the word ‘naturalist’ in the title draws my eye. I don’t usually read biographies of any kind, let alone of scientists. Perhaps reading the autobiography of a man who’s lead a life of the highest scientific achievement, public aclaim, and derision wasn’t the best way to get a representative look at the life of an ecologist, but I think it was informative. Feeling a little better about grad school now, I think… [2010 hindsight: hahahahaha]...more
This is a book that I enjoyed without loving, but it nevertheless provided some novel experiences and food for thought, and what more can we ask of ouThis is a book that I enjoyed without loving, but it nevertheless provided some novel experiences and food for thought, and what more can we ask of our books? I mean, besides spaceships and explosions. Dinesen's writing (and Dinesen herself) seems alternately lyrical and pragmatic, equally direct in describing grisly accidents with firearms or the otherwordly sensation of flying, but the whole was too fragmented and impressionistic to ever really dig its claws into me.
That said, it did get me thinking a bit about race and prejudice, so here's my ridiculous digression on the subject that you will no doubt find naive and/or boring:
"The years in which Lulu and her people came round to my house were the happiest of my life in Africa" (p. 82). Dinesen anthropomorphizes wildlife as readily and as unapologetically as she stereotypes other people and cultures. While the latter can seem repellant to post-civil rights Westerners, the former imposition of her own mores and expectations should offend environmentalists of the biocentric persuasion as well. Aren't animals their own creatures? Don't we do them a disservice when we choose to see "good" in them and are then disappointed when they confuse or disgust us? This sort of ethics is logical, but I personally doubt anyone with any appreciation for the natural world actually feels that way, nor do I think they should. I think imposing some of your own expectations (and prejudices) is a precondition for any kind of appreciation or understanding. You might have a more accurate understanding of a deer by not assuming it loves its fawn in the way we love our children, but why would you seek that knowledge in the first place without the emotion triggered by that assumption?
Dinesen is full of this kind of love of nature, but she is also in love with the landscape and the people, all of which she she sees as inextricable (they "were different expressions of the same idea" p. 21). This made me wonder about the consequences of being non-judgemental, not only to other species but to other people. Middle class Americans like me feel uncomfortable when we read things like
All Natives have in them a strong strain of malice, a shrill delight in things going wrong, which in itself is hurting and revolting to Europeans. (p. 35)
because we believe all people are morally equivalent and assigning a characteristic like "malice" to a large group is both inaccurate and unjust. But people who aren't like you are still obviously different, and therefore at least a little bit scary, so while we choose not to judge them (consciously), we may also avoid them, and never actually get to know them. As off-putting as some of Dinesen's statements might seem, she obviously doesn't avoid people who are different from her. She generalizes and she judges, and though her relationships with people might therefore be based on false assumptions, in the end I feel like she left Africa with a better understanding of the people there than I have of the different kinds of people that live in Oakland. Much better.
So the lesson, for me at least, is that trying to be unbiased is nice, but not to the exclusion of engagement. When dealing with things we don't understand, especially things we feel the inclination to judge and generalize, we shouldn't write off our assumptions because we feel guilty about them. Assumptions should be proven or disproven by engaging the unknown.
Here endeth the log-winded rant.
Notes
sine die: Latin for "without day", in legal terms indicating that proceedings are suspended indefinitely, without a date set for resumption. (p. 46)
Hagar: Sarah's servant, Abraham's second wife, mother of Ishmael. I always thought Hagar was a bumbling bearded viking.(p. 65)
tardive (adj): belated, delayed. (p. 79)
brass serpent: I didn't know this Bible story. Apparently in the Book of Numbers, God commands Moses to put a snake on a stick, an everyone who looked up of it would be cured of snakebite, so Moses made a snake out of bronze / brass / copper and put it on a stick. (p. 111)
herborize (v): to geek out over plants, or, to do that thing that Ken-ichi likes to do around this time of year. (p. 127)
belemnite (n): an extinct cepahlopod that left behind conical fossil shells. (p. 153)
Dinesen says the Maasai have no religion, but that doesn't seem to be the case. They're monotheists! (p. 155)
taradiddle (n): a fib, nonsense. (p. 196)
(p. 246) Lovely commentary on flying:
"The language is short of words for the experience of flying, and will have to invent new words with time."
"But in the air you are taken into the full freedom of the three dimensions; after long ages of exile and dreams the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space."
(p. 263) She writes that Brillat-Savarin said "that if the Revolution had lasted five years longer, the art of making a chicken-ragout would have been lost." Would love to find that quote.
enceinte (n): a fortified enclosure. As an adjective, it means "pregnant"! (p. 270)
An old lady sat in a party and talked of her life. She declared that she would like to live it all over again, and held this to prove that she had lived wisely. I thought: Yes, her life has been the sort of life that should really be taken twice before you can say that you have had it. An arietta you can take da capo, but not a whole piece of music,—not a symphony and not a five-act tragedy either. If it is taken over again it is because it has not gone as it ought to have gone." (p. 285)
"Your Excellency," he said at last, "you must needs love snakes. There is no way round it. Out of my own experience in life, I can tell you so, and indeed it is the best advice that I can give you: You should love the snakes. Keep in mind, your Excellency, how often,—keep in mind, your Excellency, that nearly every time that we ask the Lord of a fish, he will give us a serpent." (p. 314)
Peter Schlemiel: protagonist in Adelbert von Chamisso's (apparently) famous "Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte" ("Peter Schlemihl's Remarkable Story"). I had never heard of it, but I was happy to encounter Chamisso, who, aside from being a French-German poet, was also one of the first botanists of California! He was the first to collect and name the California Poppy, after his collecting bud Eschscholtz (Eschscholzia californica). (p. 374)
Clown Agheb: no idea! If anyone has any idea what story this character comes from, give a holler. (p. 374)
(p. 386) Dinesen writes that when the Maasai were forcible relocated, they named all the features in their new landscape with the same names from their original one. They took their names with them. "The Masai were carrying their cut roots with the as a medicine, and were trying, in exile, to keep their past by a formula." ...more
I think this is the only field guide exclusively dedicated to the opisthobranchs of the nearshore Eastern Pacific, so I guess we should be grateful thI think this is the only field guide exclusively dedicated to the opisthobranchs of the nearshore Eastern Pacific, so I guess we should be grateful that it's pretty good. Fairly comprehensive, including undescribed species, with photos and range information for all (no maps, though). Most entries have etymological info, which is always a plus. My main complaints are 1) it doesn't seem to respond too well to getting wet, which sort of happens a lot when you're tidepooling, and 2) there is usually only one photo per species, which can be a bit limiting for species with multiple morphs (e.g. Acanthodoris rhodoceras)....more
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