Category: Nature and Environment book group

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.

Another classic I’d been meaning to read for years that the Nature and Environment book group tackled. It’s a great book, with one of the broadest sweeps of anything I’ve read except maybe A Brief History of Everything. Diamond succeeds admirably in what he sets out to do—illuminate why human development “proceed at such different rates on different continents”—and it’s one of the delights of the book to see how his particular background enables him to do it justice, from having a linguist and a doctor as parents, to being obsessed with birds, to spending years in New Guinea. As we discussed in the book group, though, the title is a bit of a misnomer since guns are made out of steel, and it omits the huge role played by animal and plants species which the book itself emphasizes. “Domesticated Species, Germs, and Guns” wouldn’t have the same ring though.

Things I learned: how recent many of our familiar diseases are (mumps 400 BCE, leprosy 200 BCE, polio 1940); the orientation of continental axes (east/west in Eurasia vs north/south in Africa and the Americas) makes a big difference to agricultural diffusion because of day length and temperature changes; how irregularly large-seeded grass species are distributed (32 species in the Mediterranean zone vs only 11 in all of the Americas).

On political leadership in small groups: “The chief may either combine the offices of political leader and priest in a single person, or may support a separate group of kleptocrats (that is, priests) whose function is to provide ideological justification for the chiefs.” It’s interesting and depressing that the non-food-producing specialists who develop as a consequence of food surplus always include kings and bureaucrats, and not just craftsmen and artists.

In a band, where everyone is closely related to everyone else, people related simultaneously to both quarreling parties step in to mediate quarrels. In a tribe, where many people are still close relatives and everyone at least knows everyone else by name, mutual relatives and mutual friends mediate the quarrel. But once the threshold of “several hundred” … has been crossed, increasing numbers of dyads become pairs of unrelated strangers. … [M]any onlookers will be friends or relatives of only one combatant and will side with that person, escalating the two-person fight into a general brawl. Hence a large society that continues to leave conflict resolution to all of its members is guaranteed to blow up. That factor alone would explain why societies of thousands can exist only if they develop centralized authority to monopolize force and resolve conflicts.

And yikes:

Even in democracies today, crucial knowledge is available to only a few individuals, who control the flow of information to the rest of the government and consequently control decisions. For instance, in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, information and discussions that determined whether nuclear war would engulf half a billion people were initially confined by President Kennedy to a ten-member executive committee of the National Security Council that he himself appointed; then he limited final decisions to a four-member group consisting of himself and three of his cabinet ministers.

A local light pollution activist, James Lowenthal, requested that a Forbes book group read this. My Nature and Environment book group alternates between classics of nature writing, “issue books,” and cross-disciplinary works, so this seemed perfect as an issue book choice and we pushed The Selfish Gene to next year in order to read this one. It’s so well-written (I think–not everyone agreed!) and comprehensive that it verges into cross-disciplinary—way better than I expected. James and his wife came to the discussion and brought interesting brochures from the International Dark-Sky Association, and we discussed various local issues around street lighting (Northampton put in a lot of new LED lights that are terrible for glare and night vision). But we spent plenty of time talking about the book as well. It’s an elegy to so much that we’ve lost without even recognizing it.

When I think of how light pollution keeps us from knowing real darkness, real night, I think of Henry David Thoreau wondering in 1856, “Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature that I am conversant with?” He was writing about the woods around Walden Pond and how the “nobler” animals such as wolf and moose had been killed or scared away. “I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess,” he explained, “that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars.” Some 150 years later, this is exactly what we have allowed our lights to do. “I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth,” Thoreau concluded. Every time I read this I think, Me, too.

Bogard interviews François Jousse, a lighting architect in Paris, who describes his work:

“I want that the building says something with the light,” he explains. “But the speaking can be different. Maybe it’s an architectural speech, maybe it’s a historical speech, maybe it’s humorous. Sometimes the speech can be spiritual. Sometimes people say to me, But nobody will understand what the building says. And I say, It’s not a problem, the building says something and it’s beautiful because the building says something.”

Bonnie, who encourages other women to go out at night:

“It’s this manufactured fear that creates a perception that something bad is going to happen to you.” The reality, she says, is that as you sit at home watching TV “something bad is happening—you’re getting sick, and you’re missing out.”

…already in Australia they’re speaking of solastagia, about missing a loved place that still exists but to which the old birds and plants and animals no longer come. A word newly coined for our time, solastalgia combines the Latin word for comfort (solacium) and the Greek root meaning pain (algia) and differs from nostalgia in that it’s a yearning for a place you still inhabit rather than one you’ve left behind. It’s a word we’ll be hearing more often, for wherever we live, the climate has changed, or soon will. Next to my own death or that of my family this is the darkness I fear most, this sadness at the ongoing destruction of the wild world.

It’s a tremendously sad book in some ways, mourning the loss of what most people don’t even recognize we ever had, and yet light pollution is something, unlike climate change, which is instantly fixable and reversible. Turn off the lights, and the stars are still there in all their majesty. Not one iota has been truly lost.

The turning Earth, the presented universe—in the dry desert air the stars come down to the horizon, in the west blinking out as they fall from the world’s edge, and in the east blinking on, as though lit and set into the sky by some happy wild creatures just on the mountain’s other side.

Bogard briefly mentions the artist James Turrell (misspelled as “Terrell”), who’s building an installation near Flagstaff to facilitate the experience of “celestial vaulting,” where you feel like you’re falling into the stars. Earlier this summer I’d attended MassMOCA’s grand opening of the new Building 6, where a number of Turrell pieces are installed as “Into the Light.” They are great ways of experiencing dark adaptation, as you need to enter dark rooms and stay there until you can fully see the works.

At the very end, Bogard quotes Wendell Berry’s “To Know the Dark,” which also serves as the epigraph:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Usually you have to flip back to the front of the book to check the epigraph, and it’s easy to forget. I love the book-ending here. One of my favorite books I’ve read this year!