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Desert Solitire

2/22/2015

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Desert Solitaire

Edward Abbey

“What do the coyotes mean when they yodel at the moon? What are the dolphins trying so patiently to tell us? Precisely what did these two enraptured gopher snakes have in mind when they came gliding toward my eyes over the naked sandstone? If I had been as capable of trust as I am susceptible to fear I might have learned something new, or some truth so old we have all forgotten it!”

The above passage appears near the beginning of Desert Solitaire, the first of Edward Abbey’s books to catch my attention and reinforce me love of wilderness. His descriptions of the parched landscape in and around Arches National Monument are both eloquent and revealing whether he is describing the arches themselves, the rivers and springs, the wildlife, or the rocky terrain. The descriptions reveal that Abbey was a first rate naturalist.   The book, Desert Solitaire, does not stop there. Abbey also included an angry polemic on mechanized (he uses the term industrial) tourism, decrying the destruction of natural parks by roads and motors. He feelt that the parks are best seen on foot.

The book also includes stories of the people of this desert land. Abbey appears to be sympathetic with the solitary prospector, unable to compete with corporate mining interests, the small rancher put out of business by agribusiness, the unemployed cowboys, and the Indians. For a man sometimes labeled a misanthrope, he includes a lot of sympathetic stories of these people.

 

My favorite of all the essays and stories in this lovely book though is simply titled “The Moon Eyed Horse.” In this narrative, Abbey walks up a box canyon trying to recapture a feral horse, blind in one eye and roaming the land after escape from a local ranch. The horse lived on its own for several years. He fails to capture “Ole’ Moon Eye,” and seems sympathetic to the horse, almost appearing to envy its wild state.  

Though Abbey’s work is often cited as forecasting a future where the work of man continues to erode wilderness, his most prophetic passages are perhaps those in the chapter titled “The Dead Man at Grandview Point.” In this chapter, Abbey has joined a search party to find an elderly man missing in the desert for two days. Coming home from this job he recorded his feelings of identifying with the dead man. The passage prefigures his own illegal burial in an unmarked grave in the desert by sympathetic friends carrying out his last request, years later:  

“I feel myself sinking into the landscape, fixed in place like a stone, like a tree, a small motionless shape of vague outline, desert colored, and with the wings of imagination look down at myself with the eyes of the bird, watching a human figure that becomes smaller, smaller in the receding landscape as the bird rises into the evening – a man at a table near a twinkling campfire, surrounded by a rolling wasteland of stone and dune and sandstone monuments, the wasteland surrounded by dark canyons and the course of rivers and mountain ranges on a vast plateau stretching across Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, and beyond this plateau more deserts and greater mountains, the Rockies in dusk, the Sierra Nevadas shining in their late afternoon, and farther and farther yet, the darkened East, the gleaming Pacific, the curving margins of the great earth itself, and beyond earth that ultimate world of sun and stars whose bounds we cannot discover.”             - Reviewed by Ray Zimmerman

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Disproving Sea Level Rise

2/11/2015

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Disproving Sea Level Rise

 

            I have noted, with great amusement, an argument circulating that purports to disprove sea level rise as a result of melting ice caps and glaciers. The argument posits a glass of water with ice cubes floating in it as an analogy for the world’s oceans and points out that as ice melts in a glass, the water level actually lowers. This is a well known phenomenon to scientists since ice has a very different physical behavior than most solids. It expands as temperature lowers. Ice does in fact take up more volume than liquid water. This is why it floats.

            The flaw in the ice in the glass argument is that it is only partly true. The Arctic ice cap is floating on water and is already part of the world’s ocean systems. The Antarctic ice cap, which is much larger, is not floating. It rests on the large land mass of the continent Antarctica. The world’s glaciers also rest on land. In terms of the ice in the glass argument, both the glaciers and the Antarctic ice cap are not in the glass. They are outside the system.

            A better model for Antarctica would be to melt ice in another container and then pour it into the glass. This is a more accurate analogy to the world wide reality of sea level rise. As the Antarctic ice cap and glaciers melt the resulting water leaves the land and flows into the oceans, increasing the overall volume of the water.

            Of course there are those who argue that the ice isn’t melting at all, but that is an entirely different question.


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February 08th, 2015

2/8/2015

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By Ray Zimmerman

The book Best Science and Nature Writing: 2006 presented two contrasting views of the relationship of conservation groups to indigenous peoples. I see problems with both perspectives. A list of all the articles in the books appears after these comments. 

 

It’s no secret that millions of native peoples around the world have been pushed off their land to make room for big oil, big metal, big timber, and big agriculture.  But few people realize that the same thing has happened for a much nobler cause: land and wildlife conservation.  Today the list of culture-wrecking institutions put forth by tribal leaders on almost every continent includes not only Shell, Texaco, Freeport, and Bechtel, but also more surprising names like Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).  Even the more culturally sensitive World Conservation Union (IUCN) might get a mention. – “Conservation Refugees,” Mark Dowie

 

            Mark Dowie partnered with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005 to conduct the research that led to his article “Conservation Refugees” which originally appeared in Orion.  He brought to this enterprise a wealth of experiences gained by writing over 200 articles, which won him eighteen journalism awards.  He is a former editor of Mother Jones magazine and a seasoned investigative reporter.

As The World Bank and its Global Environmental Facility encourage countries on every continent to set land aside for conservation through such programs as the debt for nature swap, Dowie is adamant that conservation organizations must begin to respond to the challenge of including indigenous people in the planning process.  He quotes Masai Leader Martin Saning’o, who makes the claim, “We are the original conservationists.”

Dowie traces the history of evicting native people from their lands for conservation as far back as the creation of Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks in the United States and challenges conservationists to find a better way.  He mentions India’s official figure of 1.6 million conservation refugees in that nation alone.

“Conservation Refugees” is only one article appearing in The Best American Science and Nature Writing: 2006.  His arguments are balanced by a later article in the volume “Out of Time” by Paul Raffaele.  This second author took readers of Smithsonian on a narrated journey to the land of the Batwa people in Brazil’s Javari Valley, a well protected “exclusion zone” in the Amazon region.

            Raffaele introduces the readers to Sidney Possuelo, South America’s leading expert on remote Indian tribes. Possuelo researches by helicopter and airplane, and rarely makes contact with the groups he is sworn to protect as a government agent. He interprets the term protect to mean interfere as little as possible with the native culture and allow the people to continue their traditional ways.

Possuelo has been threatened, and his camp surrounded by those who would enter the exclusion zone for profit or missionary work. Loggers, miners and other entrepreneurs would conduct commerce with the Indians, or displace them to carry out extractive industry.  Church leaders are especially interested in contacting these indigenous people for the purpose of winning new converts. Interestingly enough, these twin motivations of commerce and conversion also first brought Europeans to the American continents.

Possuelo would only allow Raffaele to visit one village of people with a nearly stone age culture. This group had wondered so close to the edge of the exclusion zone, that contact was inevitable. This gave Raffaele an opportunity to meet and investigate this one small sample of the Batwa before they rejoined the more isolated main village of their tribe.

This pair of articles offers only a slight sample of the many topics addressed in Best Science and Nature Writing: 2006.  The editors looked at hundreds of articles to select the best for this volume. Topics range from a description of the Chandra orbiting X-Ray telescope to the source of antibiotic resistance in bacteria.  Computer aficionados will especially like “The Blogs of War” from Wired and “Torrential Reign” from Fortune.  The second of these articles describes the development of Bit Torrent software – the first software for transfer of large files on the internet.

Two articles even unmask the pseudo-science intelligent design.  In “Show me the Science,” from the New York Times, Daniel C. Dennett quotes intelligent design proponent and affiliate of the Discovery Institute, George Gilder, “Intelligent Design itself does not have any content.”  He also proposes a few steps the intelligent design proponents could take to legitimize their claims, including the publication of a peer reviewed journal, conducting experiments with testable hypotheses, and investigating genomes and the fossil record.

Each of the articles in Best Science and Nature Writing: 2006 is both informative and enjoyable. A few articles on physics and astrophysics are highly technical, but most articles in the volume are an easy read.

Sidebar

Articles and Contributors

 

Brian Greene, Guest Editor, is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University. He has published two books, The Elegant Universe, and The Fabric of the Cosmos.

Tim Folger, Series Editor, is a contributing editor at Discover and writes science articles for several magazines.

“Almost Before we Spoke, We Swore” by Natalie Angier appeared in The New York Times.

“Dr. Ecstasy” by Drake Bennett appeared in The New York Times Magazine.

“His Brian, Her Brain” by Larry Cahill appeared in Scientific American.

“My Bionic Quest for Bolero” by Michael Chorost appeared in Wired.

”Show me the Science” by Daniel C. Dennett appeared in The New York Times.

”How Animals do Business” by Frans B.  M. De Wall appeared in Scientific American.

“Buried Answers” by David Dobbs appeared in The New York Times Magazine.

“Conservation Refugees” by Mark Dowie appeared in Orion.

“The Blogs of War” by John Hockenberry appeared in Wired.

“The Forgotten Era of Brain Chips” by John Horgan first appeared in Scientific American.

“The Mysteries of Mass” by Gordon Kane first appeared in Scientific American.

“Future Shocks” by Kevin Krajick first appeared in Smithsonian.

“The Mummy Doctor” by Kevin Krajick first appeared in The New Yorker.

“X-Ray Vision” by Robert Kunzig first appeared in Discover.

“The Illusion of Gravity” by Juan Maldacena first appeared in Scientific American.

“The Coming Death Shortage” by Charles C. Mann first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.

“The Dover Monkey Trial” by Chris Mooney first appeared in Seed.

“Remembrance of Things Future” by Dennis Overbye first appeared in The New York Times.

“Out of Time” by Paul Raffaele first appeared in Smithsonian.

“Torrential Reign” by Daniel Roth first appeared in Fortune.

“Are Antibiotics Killing Us” by Jessica Snyder Sachs first appeared in Discover.

“Remembering Francis Crick” by Oliver Sachs first appeared in The New York Times Review of Books.

“Buried Suns” by David Samuels first appeared in Harpers Magazine.

“Lights, Camera, Armageddon” by John Schmollmeyer first appeared in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

”Taming Lupus” by Moncef Zouali first appeared in Scientific American.



 

By Ray Zimmerman

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Down the River

2/6/2015

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This review is a found item. I wrote it several years ago on a computer which has since crashed. I recently found it while searching for other items on the file backup from that computer. I do not believe it was ever published.

 

Down The River

Edward Abbey

ISBN 0-525-4767-8

E. P. Dutton, Inc.

 

            Henry David Thoreau once said “Time is but the stream I go a fishing in.” This statement aptly describes the opening chapter of Down the River, a chapter dedicated to journal entries and ruminations on the writings of Thoreau. Abbey reread Thoreau while traveling down the Green River, a tributary of the Colorado, with a group of friends. The journal entries are dated sequentially, making the time element especially apropos.

            For a writer like Edward Abbey though, the river is a metaphor much more complex and varied than what one chapter can illustrate. The title “Down the River,” also harkens back to a chapter of the same title included in his classic work Desert Solitaire. In this chapter he traveled down the Glen Canyon portion of the Colorado with his friend Ralph Newsome. That trip was just before completion of the Glen Canyon Dam, nemesis of all that Abbey held sacred in nature, and the creation of Lake Powell, which he called a sewage lagoon.

            The view of the Glen Canyon dam as symbol of the wilderness despoiled introduces yet another meaning of the title. Specifically the meaning is, “Sold down the River.” This phrase sums up what Abbey thinks of mechanized tourism and most construction projects. He sees nature and man falling before the progress of what he calls the “military-industrial state,” and encourages his readers with the thought that this state, in both capitalist and communist forms, is on the verge of collapse. These thoughts are essential to understanding Abbey’s writings as equally condemning liberal and conservative thoughts from an anarchist perspective.

            The book Down the River is divided into four sections, each of which includes a journal of a river trip as well as assorted essays on nature, pollution, rural lifestyles, natural areas, and people. Although Abbey’s detractors have labeled him a misanthrope, his essays in this book show him not as hating mankind so much as industrial society. His essays value the simple life of the wilderness and condemn technology, especially the Rocky Flats nuclear fuel plant, the MX missile system, and dams on the remaining free flowing rivers.

            The rivers described in the book’s four sections include the Green, the Tatshenshini (in the Yukon), the San Juan, and the Rio Doloris. The sections on running the rivers include some of Abbey’s best natural history writing. The other portions are equally good, but I have difficulty grasping the book as a unified whole. The river metaphors are powerful. They speak of time, lost values, and unblemished nature, but they don’t quite hold the book together. Although Down the River lacks a single thread of continuity, it emerges as a tapestry of landscape, friendships, protest, and difficulties overcome. It is well worth the read.

                                                            - Reviewed by Ray Zimmerman

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Meditating with Annie Dillard by Ray Zimmerman

2/5/2015

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This profile appeared as the installment of my Nature’s Bookshelf column in Volume 8 Issue 6 of Hellbender Press (November/December, 2006), Knoxville, Tennessee. The publication was named for a large species of salamander (The Hellbender), native to the American southeast, and has since ceased publication.

Henry David Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately and was largely ignored as an author by his own generation. Unlike Thoreau, Annie Dillard lived in a cabin on Tinker Creek and emerged a Pulitzer Prize winning author. Although Dillard has been compared to Thoreau and the other New England Transcendentalists, many reviewers see her as more similar to Melville.

Many natural history writers concern themselves with the how – the great question of all science. Dillard is concerned with why, a question more at home in theology than in science. She comments in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that some people extol the thriftiness of nature where the leaves of trees are recycled into soil to grow more plants. She then asks if it wouldn’t be more efficient to keep the leaves on the trees in the first place.

Dillard is horrified at the wastefulness of nature. She notes that many insects lay thousands of eggs, only to have most of them eaten, sometimes by the parent. She compares this scheme to a railroad company building thousands of locomotives and turning them loose on a section of track that can accommodate only three. At the end of their experiment, the company would learn that only three locomotives were necessary. She imagines a board of directors chastising their managers for running the company in such a wasteful way. She then states that nature is wasteful in exactly such a manner.

Although this line of thought seems to put Dillard outside the mainstream of nature writers, she is in fact a keen observer of the natural world. Early in the pages of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek she sees a frog skin shrivel in the grasp of a predacious diving beetle. She observes a shed snake skin with a knot in it, a creek overflowing its banks and flooding the neighborhood, and a praying mantis laying eggs. She augments these observations with remembrances of her childhood experiences. She recalls viewing pond life through a microscope, and watching a moth hatch inside a glass jar.

In Holy the Firm Dillard continues her metaphysical probing. She asks what the relationship is between the temporal and the eternal. In the first chapter, she seems to be echoing the statements of Saint Francis of Assisi, who said “Praised be You our Lord through mother earth who governs and sustains us.” In the second chapter a child is badly burned in an airplane accident, and Dillard wrestles with the eternal question as to why the innocent suffer. She seems to receive the very answer received by the Old Testament character, Job. The answer is that suffering is part of the world and that we are too small and insignificant in view of the beauty and vastness of the universe to question its nature.

After publishing one book each in the genres of literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and memoir, Dillard returns to the narrative nonfiction style in her 1999 book, For the Time Being. Here she records travels in China and Israel. She observes Chinese peasants working in a field and a crab digging for water near a Kibbutz. She describes clouds and a tsunami off the coast of Bangladesh. She describes the extraordinary lives of the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Tielhard de Chardin and the Ukrainian Hasidic Rabbi Baal Shem Tov.  She continues to ask why suffering is part of the human condition, and why evil exists.

Aside from her many books, Dillard has published several poems and short works of fiction and nonfiction in periodicals. These are listed on her official web site, http://www.anniedillard.com. The site also includes a list of derivative works: paintings, music, and one act plays carried out by others but inspired by her work. Most of these are derived from Holy the Firm.

Dillard’s writing style is perhaps best illustrated by a selection from the first chapter of Holy the Firm. She had been reading by candle light one night when a moth, drawn to the light, got caught in the wax at the top of her candle. It was gone before she could respond. The following passage is a hallmark of observation and narrative:

“And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The month’s head was fire. She burned for two hours until I blew her out.

She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning – only glowing within, like a building glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.”

Sidebar – Dillard’s Published Works

Tickets for a Prayer Wheel - Poems
University of Missouri Press, 1974
Several poems have titles indicating natural history, but are actually metaphysical. The title poem is an invitation for the eternal to break into the temporal.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – Nonfiction Narrative
Harpers Magazine Press, 1974
Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction
This book received mixed reviews when it was released. Eudora Welty, the great Southern writer, said that she was uncertain of Dillard’s intent and that the writing left something to be desired. A portion of her review, and segments from other reviews, are available in Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, Volume 3 (Gale Research Company, Detroit, Michigan).

Holy the Firm – Meditations
Harper and Row 1977
In this work she asked what relationship the temporal has to the eternal. She then asks why the innocent must suffer.

Living by Fiction – Literary Criticism
Harper and Row, 1982
This book is a technical work primarily useful to graduate students in university literature programs.

Teaching a Stone to Talk – A Collection of Essays
Harper and Row 1982
This book includes essays on natural history and metaphysics. The essay on the Galapagos Islands is an excellent investigation into creation and evolution.

Encounters with Chinese Writers – Journalism
Wesleyan University Press, 1984
The author identifies this work as jolly journalism.

An American Childhood – Memoir
Harper and Row, 1987
The author tells her own story.

The Writing Life – Narrative Nonfiction
Harper and Row 1989
This book includes some practical tips for writers. The author advises writers to edit ruthlessly and to throw out unnecessary prose, even if it is that on which they worked hardest. Several chapters appeared previously as essays in periodicals.

The Living – A Novel
Harper Collins, 1992
This fictional work is set on Bellingham Bay in Washington State.

The Annie Dillard Reader – Selected Reprints
Harper Collins, 1994

Mornings Like This – Found Poems
Harper Collins, 1995
Dillard mined old books on natural history, theology, and navigation for these lines. They are rearranged into poems. The meaning of the poems is far different from that of the original text.

For the Time Being –Narrative
Knopf, 1999
After working in several other genres, Dillard returned to the nonfiction narrative for this book. The author weaves several themes together into a unified whole. The book includes narratives on birth, death, the nature of evil and current events. She includes stories of the Jesuit Palentoligist Teilhard de Chardin and the Hasidic Rabbi Baal Shem Tov who expressed religious fervor by dancing.


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