Category: Nature and Environment book group

Nature and Environment book group selection. I very much enjoyed most of it—it’s a little scattered—but I didn’t have my post-it flags with me as I read it (note to self about how important that is) so didn’t mark my usual notable passages. The prologue haunted me throughout: Savoy (who teaches at Mount Holyoke, so is local) stands on the ice of a pond, reflecting how it captures time: “The recent past lies beneath me in these marcescent leaves, plucked and blown here by January’s heavy winds. Inches away, they are out of reach.” Her rootedness in/exile from California, her love of place names, her perspective as a person of color on the land ethic (fascinating take on Aldo Leopold)… I would like to read it again!

The best comment from the Nature and Environment group was that this is “a TED talk turned into a book.” It is quite gee-whiz in parts, and it’s ridiculous how very tiny observations are footnoted, then wild generalizations go without support. There’s no bibliography. The most-shared observation was how freakin’ heavy it is—some people had trouble reading it for that reason! It’s printed on heavy glossy magazine stock, which is a very weird choice.

But it’s full of interesting ideas and thoughts, whether they are well-supported or not. There’s a great critique of animal suffering in agriculture. I loved the idea of “the legend of Peugeot”—ie a company like Peugeot SA “is a figment of our collective imagination.”

According to the French legislators, if a certified lawyer followed all the proper liturgy and rituals, wrote all the required spells and oaths on a wonderfully decorated piece of paper, and affixed his ornate signature to the bottom of the document, then hocus pocus—a new company was incorporated.

Tidbits:

• gossip “is essential for cooperation in large numbers”
• the earliest named person was probably Kushim—“It is telling that the first recorded name in history belongs to an accountant, rather than a prophet, a poet or a great conqueror.”
• “History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.”
• “Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively.”

But here’s an example of the gee-whiz: “The leading project of the Scientific Revolution is to give humankind eternal life.” Really??? Ugh. “A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die of some accident, but a-mortal, meaning that in the absence of fatal trauma their lives could be extended indefinitely).” No citation, but the lifespan of C. elegans in the same paragraph gets one.

On to the quote-dump:

Most mammals emerge from the womb like glazed earthenware emerging from a kiln—any attempt at remoulding will only scratch or break then. Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.

The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.

Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can. We must open ourselves to a wide spectrum of emotions; we must sample various kinds of relationships; we must try different cuisines; we must learn to appreciate different styles of music. One of the best ways to do all that is to break free of our daily routine, leave behind our familiar setting, and go travelling in distant lands, where we can ‘experience’ the culture, the smells, the tastes and the norms of different people…
Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible… Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism. Their marriage has given birth to the infinite ‘market of experiences,” on which the modern tourism industry is founded.

The inter-subjective is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals. If a single individual changes his or her beliefs, or even dies, it is of little importance. However, if most individuals in the network die or change their beliefs, the inter-subjective phenomenon will mutate or disappear. Inter-subjective phenomena are neither malevolent frauds nor insignificant charades. They exist in a different way from physical phenomena such as radioactivity, but their impact on the world may still be enormous. Many of history’s most important drivers are inter-subjective: law, money, gods, nations.

How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.” Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others.

I loved the notion of “human worlds” like separate planets:

How many different human worlds coexisted on earth? Around 10,000 BC our planet contained many thousands of them. By 2000 BC, their numbers had dwindled to the hundreds, or at most a few thousand. By AD 1450, their numbers had declined even more drastically. At that time, just prior to the age of European exploration, earth still contained a significant number of dwarf worlds such as Tasmania. But close to 90 per cent of human lived in a single mega-world: the word of Afro-Asia.

[The other 10% are divided between Mesoamerican, Andean, Australian, Oceanic]

The first millennium BC witnessed the appearance of three potentially universal human orders, whose devotees could for the first time imagine the entire world and the entire human race as a single unit governed by a single set of laws. Everyone was ‘us,’ at least potentially. There was no longer ‘them.’ The first universal order to appear was economic: the monetary order. The second universal order was political: the imperial order. The third universal order was religious: the order of universal religions such as Buddhism, Christianity and Islam.

…[T]he fact that another person believes in cowry shells, or dollars, or electronic data, is enough to strengthen our own belief in them, even if that person is otherwise hated, despised or ridiculed by us. Christians and Muslims who could not agree on religious beliefs could nevertheless agree on a monetary belief, because whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something.

Since all social orders and hierarchies are imagined, they are all fragile, and the larger the society, the more fragile it is. The crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman legitimacy to these fragile structures. Religions assert that our laws are not the result of human caprice, but are ordained by an absolute and supreme authority. This helps place at least some fundamental laws beyond all challenge, thereby ensuring social stability.

…[M]onotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe—and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.

In fact, monotheism, as it has played out in history, is a kaleidoscope of monotheist, dualist, polytheist and animist legacies, jumbling together under a single divine umbrella. The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts. Scholars of religion have a name for this simultaneous avowal of different and even contradictory ideas and the combination of ritual and practices taken from different sources. It’s called syncretism. Syncretism might, in fact, be the single great world religion.

…[T]he relationship between science and technology is a very recent phenomenon. Prior to 1500, science and technology were totally separate fields. When Bacon connected the two in the early seventeenth century, it was a revolutionary idea.

…[O]bsession with military technology—from tanks to atom bombs to spy-flies—is a surprisingly recent phenomenon. Up until the nineteenth century, the vast majority of military revolutions were the product of organisational rather than technological changes. When alien civilisations met for the first time, technological gaps sometimes played an important role. But even in such cases, few thought of deliberately creating or enlarging such gaps. Most empires did not rise thanks to technological wizardry, and their rulers did not give much thought to technological improvement. The Arabs did not defeat the Sassanid Empire thanks to superior bows or swords, the Seljuks had no technological advantage over the Byzantines, and the Mongols did not conquer China with the help of some ingenious new weapon. In fact, in all these cases the vanquished enjoyed superior military and civilian technology.

Throughout history, societies have suffered from two kinds of poverty: social poverty, which withholds from some people the opportunities available to others; and biological poverty, which puts the very lives of individuals at risk due to lack of food and shelter. Perhaps social poverty can never be eradicated, but in many countries around the world biological poverty is a thing of the past.

Alas, science and progress pursued [the dying-out Tasmanians] even to the afterlife. The corpses of the last Tasmanians were seized in the name of science by anthropologists and curators. They were dissected, weighed and measured, and analysed in learned articles. The skulls and skeletons were then put on display in museums and anthropological collections. Only in 1976 did the Tasmanian Museum give up for burial the skeleton of Truganini, the last native Tasmanian, who had died a hundred years earlier. The English Royal College of Surgeons held on to samples of her skin and hair until 2002.

But awww…. “As the twenty-first century unfolds, nationalism is fast losing ground,” and later “White supremacy remained a mainstream ideology in American politics at least until the 1960s.” Yes, and not enough people acknowledge that, but it hurts now to think how far back we’ve swung.

After reading 1491 in 2017, the Nature and Environment book group decided 1493 was a definite for 2018, and we pretty much all loved it, some even more than 1491.

The opening and closing frame is Mann in his garden, thinking about how it feels like home and yet it’s full of species from all over the globe: “Rather than being a locus of stability and tradition, my garden is a biological record of past human wanderings and exchange.” He argues that globalization began with Columbus. “Newspapers usually describe globalization in purely economic terms, but it is also a biological phenomenon; indeed, from a long-term perspective it may be primarily a biological phenomenon.”

One of the joys of reading Mann is historical tidbits that sometimes seem obvious in retrospect but which I’d never realized or thought about: “Fun, exciting, and wildly addictive, tobacco was an instant hit around the globe—the first time people in every continent simultaneously became enraptured by a novelty. N. tabacum was the leading edge of the Columbian Exchange.”

Although the potato raised farm production overall, its greater benefit was to make that production more reliable. Before S. tuberosum, summer was usually a hungry time, with stored grain supplies running low before the fall harvest. Potatoes, which mature in as little as three months, could be planted in April and dug up during the thin months of July and August. And because they were gathered early, they were unlikely to be affected by an unseasonable fall—the kind of weather that ruined wheat harvests. In war-torn areas, potatoes could be left in the ground for months, making them harder to steal by foraging soldiers. (Armies in those days did not march with rations but took their food, usually by force, from local farmers.)

There are plenty of tidbits that are just fun or interesting or both. Such a long list I’ll just bullet it:

• the Hakka ethnic group in China and their toulou fortresses
• the Chinese practiced smallpox inoculation as early as the 10th century
• the pre-Malthus Hong Liangji who predicted overpopulation and said “Heaven-and-earth’s way of making adjustments lies in flood, drought, and plagues”
• the description of the Andean potato as “less a single identifiable species than a bubbling stew of many related genetic identities,” complete with an amazing photo of potato variety. “The effects of [the introduction of potatoes] were so striking that any general history of Europe without an entry in its index for S. tuberosum should be ignored.”
• “…at least thirty-seven of the seventy worst insect pests in the United States were recent imports… The late nineteenth century was, in consequence, a time of insect plagues.”
• the importance of rubber. Mann quotes Susanna Hecht, a geographer at UCLA: “Three fundamental materials were required for the Industrial Revolution. Steel, fossil fuels, and rubber.”
• casta paintings (which I’ve now seen at the MFA and the Met)
• Talavera pottery: “More than likely, Puebla’s fake Chinese pottery was created in part by real Chinese potters. If so, they did a splendid job: talavera ware, as it is known today, is now so highly prized that when I visited Puebla shopkeepers complained that the country was fighting an invasion of counterfeits from China—a Chinese imitation of a Chinese-made Mexican imitation of a Chinese original.”
• the huge influence of the sweet potato, with populations “using sweet potato’s high yields and tolerance of bad soil to move into highland areas that had been lightly settled before. New Guinea was so transformed that some archaeologists speak of an ‘Ipomoean revolution.'”
• the history of the Ifugao terraces, which have been assumed to be millenia in the making, but turn out to be just a few hundred years old, and the growing popularity of landrace rice “As growing numbers of Ifugao farmers flock to join the project, a rising percentage of the area’s harvest—a precious cultural artifact—is being sent out of the country to affluent foreign food snobs. Worse, the cooperatives, standardization, and mechanized processing are dramatically changing Ifugao culture—all for the benefit (as one scientist put it) of faraway people who want to pat themselves on the back for their enlightenment as they click the link to order fancy multicolored rice.”
• the history of Muslims in China’s Fujian province: “Fujianese imams, most of whom did not speak Arabic, memorized the original text, declaiming it phonetically in the mosques. As memories faded, the services descended into gibberish, meaningless recitations before uncomprehending audiences. In one way, though, this remote outpost of Islam preserved tradition most faithfully: Zaytun’s Muslim families, old and new alike, were split into quarrelsome factions, Sunni, Shi’ite, and Sufi.”

I didn’t know that some Spaniards found the actions of the conquistadors disturbing and outrageous. And how successfully the slaves often revolted:

Exactly as Adam Smith would have predicted, they were dreadful employees. Faking sickness, working with deliberate lassitude, losing supplies, sabotaging equipment, pilfering valuables, maiming the animals that hauled the cane, purposefully ruining the finished sugar—all were part of the furniture of plantation slavery. “Weapons of the weak,” political scientist James Scott called them in a classic study of the same name. The slaves were not so weak when they escaped to the heights. Hidden by the forest from European eyes, they made it their business to wreck the industry that had enchained them. For more than a century, African irregulars ranged unhindered over most of Hispaniola, funding their activities by covertly exchanging gold panned from mountain rivers with Spanish merchants for clothing, liquor, and iron (ex-slave blacksmiths made arrow points and swords).

and formed maroon communities:

Thousands of fugitive communities dotted Brazil, much of the rest of South America, most of the Caribbean and Central America, and even parts of North America—more than fifty existed in the United States. Some covered huge areas and fought colonial governments for decades. Others hid in wet forests in the lower Amazon, central Mexico, and the U.S. Southeast. All were scrambling to create free domains for themselves—“inventing liberty,” in the phrase of the Brazilian historian João José Reis. They have been called by a host of names: quilombos, yes, but also mocambos, palenques, and cumbes. In English they are usually called “maroon” communities—the term apparently comes, poignantly, from símaran, the Taino word for the flight of an arrow.
American history is often described in terms of Europeans entering a nearly empty wilderness. For centuries, though, most of the newcomers were African and the land was not empty, but filled with millions of indigenous people. Much of the great encounter between the two separate halves of the world thus was less a meeting of Europe and America than a meeting of Africans and Indians—a relationship forged both in the cage of slavery and in the uprisings against it. Largely conducted out of sight of Europeans, the complex interplay between red and black is a hidden history that researchers are only now beginning to unravel.

And others which were complete surprises, like that malaria was widespread in England in the 17th century. It wasn’t very long ago that I even knew that malaria continually undergoes change. In turn that explains, per Mann, one of the reasons for the African slave trade: the imported slaves were more likely to be resistant to the malaria that found a home in the Americas, which debilitated the indigenous peoples: “adult West and Central Africans were and are less susceptible to malaria than anyone else on earth.”

Biology enters history when one realizes that almost all of the slaves ferried to the Americas came from West and Central Africa. In vivax-ridden Virginia and Carolina, they were more likely to survive and produce children than English colonists. Biologically speaking, they were fitter, which is another way of saying that in these places they were—loaded words!—genetically superior.
Racial theorists of the last century claimed that genetic superiority led to social superiority. What happened to Africans illustrates, if nothing else, the pitfalls of this glib argument. Rather than gaining an edge from their biological assets, West Africans saw them converted through greed and callousness into social deficits. Their immunity became a wellspring for their enslavement.

Malaria did not cause slavery. Rather, it strengthened the economic case for it, counterbalancing the impediments identified by Adam Smith.

Then there’s a huge lesson to be learned about money. I had no idea that China’s currency was unstable for so long. Mann vividly depicts the uncertainty and risk when an new emperor could unilaterally decree that the previous regime’s money was worthless, an explains the attraction of silver. A footnote explains “To those accustomed to metal coins, the idea of using shells for money may seem primitive. But they had a signal advantage: unlike the era’s coins, which were often debased or faked, shells could not readily be altered or counterfeited.”

Needing something to pay with, merchants and their customers would use old coins from earlier reigns until the new emperor’s money arrived; given the lack of copper and dynastic inefficiency, this frequently took years, even decades. Then they would use the new coins until the government suddenly banned them. The result, according to the Taiwanese historian Quan Hansheng, was a constant game of financial hot-potato, with everyone trying to use their coins until just before they lost all value—at which point they would try to unload them onto some hapless sucker.

Then silver comes along and “as if in a libertarian fantasy, the money supply was effectively privatized.”

Mann tells the story of “the man known variously as Esteban, Estevan, Estevanico, or Estebanico de Dorantes, an Arabic-speaking Muslim/Christian raised in Azemmour, Morocco,”  and ends with a powerfully-creepy version of his death I can’t find elsewhere:

The Zuni themselves have a different story—stories, I should say, because many have been recounted. In one version told to me, Esteban is not refused entry, but welcomed into Hawikuh. The people have heard of this man and his extraordinary journey. They want to keep him there—want this very badly, at least in the story. He is a man like no other they have encountered, an incredible physical specimen with his skin and hair, a man whose spirit holds a great wealth of knowledge and perhaps more, a valuable possession they have no desire to lose.
To prevent his departure, they cut off his lower legs, lay him gently on his back, and bathe themselves in his supernatural presence. Esteban lives in this way for many years, the story goes, always treated with the respect due to such uncommon figures, always on his back, legs stretched out, with the wrappings on his stumps carefully tended.

All versions of his end are based on stories that people have told to themselves. His actual fate may never be known with certainty. What seems clear is that in the end this man who crossed so many bridges fell into the same delusion that possessed so many Spaniards. He thought that he understood the shook-up world he was creating and that he was in control. He forgot that under bridges is only air.

The book closes in a way that echoes Mann in his garden at the opening: he reflects on a Tagalog song, “Bahay Cumbo,” about an idealized Filipino garden, and reflects on the human relationship to the environment.

Like my own tomato patch, the garden extolled in “Bahay Kubo” is an exotic modern object. Far from being an exemplar of age-old custom, it is a polyglot, cosmopolitan, thoroughly contemporary artifact.

Smart phones, aerodynamic sneakers, beige faux-leather living-room sets—people desire these things. Absent catastrophe, they will get them. Or their children will.
On the other hand, the same people who want to satisfy their desires also resist the consequences of satisfaction. They want to have what everyone else has, but still be aggressively themselves—a contradictory enterprise. Floating in the capitalist stream, they reach down with their feet, looking for solid ground. To be a good place to stand, it must be their own, not somebody else’s place. As human desires bring the Homogenocene into existence, billions of people marching through increasingly identical landscapes, that special place becomes ever harder to find.

Gardeners work in partnership, more or less successfully, with what nature provides. They experiment all the time, fiddling with this, trying out that. People take seeds and stick them in the ground to see what happens—that’s how Ifugao villagers bred hundreds of types of rice in a few centuries. An essential factor is that gardeners experience the consequences of their own actions. They make decisions and expend labor; a few months later they discover what they have wrought. Externalities are rare. Gardens are places of constant change, but the changes are owned by the gardener—which is why they feel like home.

Finally, I loved this pithy statement from Appendix A, “Fighting Words,” about his approach to terminology: “the two definitions of race, genetic and social, are only loosely connected—one reason that discussions of race are so often dialogues of the deaf.”

Yikes, I am so behind on this blog that I’m finishing this December 2017 post in June 2018… trying to catch up but especially prompted on this one because Lab Girl is the UMass Common Read this summer and I may get to see Hope Jahren speak in September. Plus Five Colleges (my workplace) is encouraging us to read and discuss all four common reads for the participating campuses. I love the Pioneer Valley!

This was the December Nature and Environment book group selection, and an interesting contrast to H is for Hawk. Both of them were placed at the end of the year because they were still popular and the library asked us to wait for the demand to die down. They are also both what I loosely classify as “cross-disciplinary” titles for the purposes of the group (a type we alternate with classics of nature writing and oh-my-god-we’re-all-going-to-die current issues).

Overall I enjoyed it a lot, but became more and more impatient with Jahren’s over-the-topness/nuttiness, especially around an epically-disastrous van trip, until she revealed her bipolar diagnosis. Then everything made a lot more sense; I would have had more sympathy had she introduced it earlier. The book still reeks of superhero syndrome, which is how I think of memoirs (most often of teaching) by people in very difficult roles who succeed against all odds in a way that is completely not sustainable or replicable.

In the early memoir section I loved the David Copperfield thread. Her stories of working in a hospital lab prepping IV bags as a teen are fascinating:

If this is for the ER or the ICU, we have about ten minutes to make it happen. Fortunately for the patient, there is a sleep-starved teenager apprenticed to a chain-smoking barmaid in the basement who is ready for action.

(Lydia, the chain-smoking tech who takes Hope under her wing, reminds me very much of a senior kennel aide I worked with at Angell Memorial Animal Hospital in the 80’s.)

[I was forced] to manage the timing and extent to which I could wander through my own thoughts, and I developed a fine control over my ability to reemerge. I could work with my brain in my hands for hours, move it into my head for twenty minutes, and then shunt it back into my fingers in the same way that I could slosh water back and forth in a half-full bucket.

Interspersed between the memoir chapters are shorter bits about the germination, growth, life, and death of plants. These are great (especially in contrast with The Hidden Life of Trees, which we read later). Jahren’s metaphors are both brilliant and illuminating.

Folded within the embryo are the cotyledons: two tiny ready-made leaflets, inflatable for temporary use. They are as small and insufficient as the spare tire that is not intended to take you any farther than the nearest gas station. Once expanded with sap, these barely green cotyledons start up photosynthesis like an old car on a bitter winter morning. Crudely designed, they limp the whole plant along until it can undertake the construction of a true leaf, a real leaf.

The evolution of leaf into spine: “One new idea allowed the plant to see a new world and draw sweetness out of a whole new sky.” Trees are “always doing something.” “Soil is the naturally produced graffiti that results from tensions between the biological and geological realms.”

By suspending each leaf separately, the tree has stacked its surface area into a sort of ladder for light to fall down. Looking up, you notice that the leaves at the top of any tree are smaller, on average, than the leaves at the bottom. This allows sunlight to be caught near the base whenever the wind blows and parts the upper branches. Look again and you’ll notice that leaves low in the canopy are of a darker green; they contain more of the pigment that helps each leaf absorb sunshine, allowing them to harvest the weaker rays that penetrate shade. When building foliage, a tree must budget for each leaf individually and allocate for each position relative to the other leaves.

A cactus doesn’t live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn’t killed it yet. Any plant that you find growing in the desert will grow a lot better if you take it out of the desert. The desert is like a lot of lousy neighborhoods: nobody living there can afford to move.

The later memoir sections are full of touching, hilarious, and horrifying moments. Discovering opal in the hackberry seed: “it still stands out as one of the loneliest moments of my life. On some deep level, the realization that I could do good science was accompanied by the knowledge that I had formally and terminally missed my chance to become like any of the women that I had ever known.”

Jahren’s relationship with her lab manager Bill is mesmerizingly weird and wonderful; Bill is the one other person in the book who’s larger than life in the same way she is. The climax of a strange story about Bill’s hair:

“What is your problem, anyway?” Bill said in exasperation. “You’re acting like a guy shaving off his hair and then hoarding it in a dead tree on the wrong side of town isn’t a totally normal thing. My God, you are hung up.”

segues into a brilliant parody of The Giving Tree (I’m firmly on the “hate” side of that one, as I am on Love You Forever) called The Getting Tree, “about an arboreal parent figure that slowly cannibalized its offspring because of its progressive and oblivious greed.”

I am sick to death of this wound that will not close; of how my babyish heart mistakes any simple kindness from a woman for a breadcrumb trail leading to the soft love of a mother or the fond approval of a grandmother. I am tired of carrying this dull orphan-pain, for though it has lost its power to surprise, every season it still reaps its harvest of hurt.

And my very favorite quote—not a new idea but nicely expressed: “Love and learning are similar in that they can never be wasted.”

The November book for the Nature and Environment book group, and one I’d been looking forward to since its release because of my T. H. White obsession. I also read The Goshawk at a young age, but it didn’t give me any desire to train hawks myself. One of the main critiques the discussion brought up was how little we ended up understanding the attraction of falconry, to people who clearly love hawks, when it’s also clearly a kind of slavery for the birds.The best explanation for me was “The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent.” Macdonald’s vivid description of falling into depression/mental illness after the death of her father was hard to experience, but also helps clarify: “The hawk was a fire that burned my hurts away. There could be no regret or mourning in her. No past or future. She lived in the present only, and that was my refuge.”

I identified strongly with Macdonald’s early life, especially reading so much from the 19th century:

Being in the company of these authors was like being dropped into an exclusive public school… What I was doing wasn’t just educating myself in the nuts and bolts of hawk-training: I was unconsciously soaking up the assumptions of an imperial elite. I lived in a world where English peregrines always outflew foreign hawks, whose landscapes were grouse moors and manor houses, where women didn’t exist. These men were kindred spirits. I felt I was one of them, one of the elect.

Her initial reaction to The Goshawk is priceless:

I’d reached the bit about the sparrowhawks and I was too upset to read any more. I’d jumped from my bed and gone looking for reassurance.
“Is this the Goshawk book you’ve been telling me about?”
“Yes! He’s got his hawk ready to fly free but then he starts making traps to try and catch some sparrowhawks and goes off and leaves the hawk behind and it’s stupid.”
A long pause.
“Maybe he was tired of his hawk,” [my mother] said, the hand with the cloth in it now pressed to the sink.
This made no sense at all.
“But how could he be tired of a hawk?”

Her material on White seems to come fairly straight from the Sylvia Townsend Warner biography, but with some interesting observations about his context:

… the countryside wasn’t just something that was safe for White to love: it was a love that was safe to write about. It took me a long time to realize how many of our classic books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationship with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak.

She mentions Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell (I think I read it a long time ago, but due for a re-read), and a new one to me, A Cuckoo in the House by Maxwell Knight. My Dog Tulip (J. R. Ackerly)  is another that jumps to mind.

I think of what wild animals are in our imaginations. And how they are disappearing—not just from the wild, but from people’s everyday lives, replaced by images of themselves in print and on screen. The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an icon of extinction. There’s little else to is now but being the last of its kind. And in this lies the diminution of the world. How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss?

We  had a great discussion about this in the Nature and Environment book group. I particularly enjoyed the arguments about McPhee’s artifice—“he’s pulling the wool over our eyes,” said one person. The New York Times Magazine article had just come out, and it brought up the structure glyph in the chapter headings—the three triangles on the line balanced on a single triangle–which most of us would not have recognized otherwise. Encounters suffers in comparison to Desert Solitaire, which is so much more vivid, but it’s interesting and very timely. One of our members had known David Brower personally and gave us more insight into what he was like as a person, not the figurehead/symbol he is in McPhee’s book. The three archvillains—Charles Park, Charles Fraser, Floyd Dominy—feel more fleshed out. They get in some zingers, like Park talking about the number of children Brower has (“Population is pollution spelled inside out”), and cataloguing the minerals Brower’s house contains and where they came from. McPhee says about Brower:

When he is in the Yosemite, he seems to be packed in nostalgia, and he appears to be unaffected by the valley’s peeled-log Levittowns, its tent cities, its bumper-to-bumper traffic, and its newsstands—all results of what has been described as the fatal beauty of Yosemite. In all likelihood, he accepts Yosemite whole because the valley was already urbanized when he was young.

But Brower points out: “Wilderness was originally a nice place to go, but that is not what wilderness is for. Wilderness is the bank for the genetic variability of the earth.”

Some funny passages:

The trees were dead because the dunes were marching. Slowly, these enormous hills, shaped and reshaped by the wind, were moving south. They had already filled up half of Fraser’s lake, and, left alone, they would eventually fill it all. Five buzzards stood at the edge of the water. Fraser stood there, too, with the unconcealed look on his face of a man watching a major asset disappear. “We’ve got to stabilize these dunes,” he said.

Cans of beer are known as sandwiches in this red, dry, wilderness world. No one questions this, or asks the reason. They just call out “Sandwich, please!” and a can of Coors comes flying through the air. They catch the beer and drink it, and they put the aluminum tongues inside the cans. I threw a tongue in the river and was booed by everyone.

That story is part of what makes it feel like McPhee is creating a narrative performance rather than sharing his subjects’ feelings on these topics. But his observations are great:

Although there was no way for an automobile to get to Holden except by barge up Lake Chelan and then on a dirt road to the village, we saw there a high pile of gutted and rusted automobiles, which themselves had originally been rock in the earth and, in the end, in Holden, were crumbling slowly back into the ground.

Like Walden gone right. I loved it, but I’m going to have to re-read it later to grab all the quotes I want… how do I manage to read without post-its at hand (sorry, sticky notes!) when I know I’ll never remember what I want to? Too quick to read, too slow to think and write, as usual. But I very much look forward to re-reading and re-savoring this, especially because I wasn’t able to attend the Nature and Environment book group discussion. But then I might just end up quoting big chunks, like this:

[In Delicate Arch] you may see a symbol, a sign, a fact, a thing without meaning or a meaning which includes all things.
Much the same could be said of the tamarisk down in the canyon, of the blue-black raven croaking on the cliff, of your own body. The beauty of Delicate Arch explains nothing, for each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful. (There is no beauty in nature, said Baudelaire. A place to throw empty beer cans on Sunday, said Menken.) If Delicate Arch has any significance it lies, I will venture, in the power of the odd and unexpected to startle the senses and surprise the mind out of their ruts of habit, to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful—that which is full of wonder.
A weird, lovely, fantastic object out of nature like Delicate Arch has the curious ability to remind us—like rock and sunlight and wind and wildflowers—that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship. The shock of the real. For a little while we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels. For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous, then all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on Earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures.

The one of the many, many quotes I would have marked, had I had the sticky notes, that stuck its sticky self in my brain so I had to go back and find it: “the delicious magical green of a young cottonwood with its ten thousand exquisite leaves vibrating like spangles in the vivid air.” The older I get, the more I love trees. Thank you, Edward Abbey.