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From Audubon a look at photographer Joel Sartore’s plan to capture close-up images of every captive species on Earth:
Sartore finds comfort in the species that have thus far been rescued from the brink: giant pandas, black-footed ferrets, California Condors, Whooping Cranes. Those animals’ populations remain alarmingly low—in the mere hundreds—but they might have disappeared altogether if not for publicity, their natural charisma, and determined efforts to save them. “It’s tough to get people to pay attention, because it just doesn’t affect their daily lives. They figure, Why should I care if a rabbit or a frog goes extinct? Is it going to affect what I make at work? Or is it going to affect my love life? Not in the short term. But I tell you, it’s really folly to think that you can doom everything else to extinction and not have it come back to bite us hard.”
Go the main website and see the pictures – they are truly stunning.
I just finished reading Judith Pascoe's The Hummingbird Cabinet
which is about several romantic collectors and the sorts of things they collected (like hummingbirds). Lord Byron is a big player here and lots of other people I had not heard of but found quite interesting. Pascoe does a good job of taking readers through the lives of people who lived a long time ago and explaining what motivated them and their compatriots.
I was most struck by the chapter on Mary Anning however. Anning, (1799-1847), was not a romantic collector as you think of one - she collected fossils for money to support herself and her mother (and younger brother). Anning is, in fact, one of the most famous fossil collectors in history. A lot of very powerful museum men (and collectors) bought fossils from her. What they did not do is invite her into the scientific field that depended upon her fossils. She was always the collector - someone who got her hands dirty and had an uncanny ability to find fossils but not an archaeologist. Not a scientist. Not a peer.
No chance of that.
Pascoe attended a symposium on Anning in 1999 where a lot of very learned people talked about her and a lot of Anning fans (authors, artists, amateur collectors) listened. Pascoe was struck by the different ways in which the Anning "people" mixed...or didn't. And she writes about the discussion of the diaries of Anna Marie Pinney who met Anning in 1831. Anna Marie Pinney was younger and though she became a good friend of Anning's over the years, she was certainly struck by Anning; deeply impressed by her. She was a fan and wrote about her sometimes in a fannish sort of way.
As I am a fan of Mary Anning's, I can totally appreciate that!
But the scientists at the symposium were not so impressed by Anna Marie's recollections; a "hysterical teenager" is how one refers to her. Anning is supposed to be dedicated, "plain, practical, honest, humble" and not a literary figure, not someone brave and exciting, not (to choose a 20th century comparison), a female Indiana Jones uncovering mysteries by the sea.
Anna Marie's stories about her are just too dang exciting.
No one denigrates Anning's finds or belittles her, they just want her to be a certain kind of fossil collector, the kind that doesn't fill the head of teenage girls with big excitement. And honestly, Mary Anning wasn't a wild and crazy woman - she seems to have been a pretty serious individual carving out a living the way she knew best. But what struck me after reading The Hummingbird Cabinet is that even with all her seriousness, she still wasn't serious enough for some people. More than a 100 years after she died, there are still those that wanted to keep the lid on Mary's [mildly] wild ways.
I like Anna Marie's vision a lot more than theirs though. Mary Anning was brave and tough - she was a little bit Indiana Jones out there, fighting the wind and the sea for her fossils. She deserves to be remembered the way the people who knew her best really knew her. Points to Judith Pascoe for making sure we all know this side of Mary now as well.
[Post pic via..]
I reviewed Imperial Dreams by Tim Gallagher last year for Booklist (it received a star and I loved it) but as it has been selected to the Editor's Choice for a Best Book of 2013 (and a top ten in the Science & Health category), I wanted to revisit it here.
Gallagher is the Editor-in-Chief of Living Bird, the magazine for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. He also tracked and wrote a book about the Ivory-billed Woodpecker which I thought was pretty good as well. He traveled to Mexico in search of the Imperial Woodpecker which has not been declared extinct but also hasn't reliably been seen in 50 years. All of that would be daunting enough except the habitat for the Imperial Woodpecker happens to be very difficult territory to traverse. It's also right in the heart of Mexico's drug territory, so if the mountains don't get you then the drug lords will.
But the bird could be there and Tim Gallagher really wants to find it; he really wants to know that this bird is still alive.
Imperial Dreams is a lot of things but mostly it is really excellent writing. There is natural history here, the story of a bird that was TWO FEET long, but also a travel story and an adventure story and an introspective tale about a man and his friends and a maybe, possibly doomed quest that no one can let go. Gallagher wades deep into the territory of Pancho Villa and Geronimo, giving readers some history here, some cultural awareness there plus a moment or two where he had downright fear-for-your-life type thoughts. It's all good, promise.
If you asked him, I bet Tim Gallagher would say that Imperial Dreams is all about a bird and because this bird is so amazing, that would be enough for any book. But as I read more of his work, I am realizing that where Gallagher is going is not so much into the field in search of birds, but into his own heart, into our collective hearts, into the places where a beautiful bird still matters.
In elegant and entertaining prose, Tim Gallagher is reminding us what matters. The Imperial Woodpecker is one of those things and if we have lost it forever then the world really ought to weep.
You can read more about Gallagher's work and the Imperial Woodpecker at his blog.
From the publisher, here is a bit of Vanishing Ice: Alpine and Polar Landscapes in Art, 1775-2012 by Barbara Matilsky:
Beginning in the eighteenth century, collaborations between the arts and sciences contributed to a deeper understanding of snowcapped mountains, the Arctic, and Antarctica. A resurgence of interest in these environments as dramatic indicators of climate change galvanizes contemporary expeditions to the glaciers and the poles. Today, artists, writers, and scientists awaken the world to both the beauty and increasing vulnerability of ice.
For a thousand different reasons, this book appeals to me in a very big way. I saw a copy at PNBA but it was sealed so I couldn't get a look at the interior illustrations. There is an exhibition at the Whatcom Museum however that gives a hint of what's inside. You can also read this article in The Oregonian.
The other day I heard from a publicist who referred to me as someone who covers the "birding beat" and I was delighted by the reference. (She was talking about books I've reviewed at Bookslut and it was a pretty apt description.) I'm not the best sort of birdwatcher; I don't count and I'm lousy at identifying plumage or song. But I do love a good field guide and in fact we have several of them around the windows and we are constantly looking outside and using the binoculars. (The bird feeders bring them in by the tons in our backyard.)
Some of my favorite field guides are from Peterson's (I am a bit of a Roger Tory Peterson fangirl, thus the pic for this blog post). They have a new one coming out, Bird Homes and Habitats, that is kind of an anti-guide. It's not about identification of birds but rather of habitat and how to build homes to attract them. The editors visit with a ton of bird lovers who share their backyards. It's kind of an indepth guide version of a decor magazine, if that makes any sense. Not a how-to, not a crafty book, rather a very pretty, full color more informative backyard version of House & Garden.
Am I explaining this well?
The publisher refers to it as an inspiration guide and I think that's the ticket but it's not glossy, impossible, unattainable inspiration (not that there's anything wrong with that). This is inspiration for the rest of us, kind of like field guides make bird watching or rock hunting, informed star gazing possible for everyone.
Dare I say it - this is an empowering outdoor design book (!).
We should all have a stack of field guides in our houses and we should refer to them everyday. Maybe if we cared more about what was all around us, then we would work harder at taking care of it.
Consider that your public service message of the day. :)
Tony Taylor's Fishing the River of Time came my way from the new Greystone Books, a year after I requested it. I am quite pleased to see that the press has endured - now separate from Douglas McIntyre - and I wish them all the best. They sent Taylor's book with a note apologizing its lateness; for me it's right on time.
On the surface, Fishing the River of Time is about Taylor returning to British Columbia after decades away to meet his eight year old grandson and teach him fishing. Taylor does some reminiscing about his previous work in the area (he's a geologist) and the people he met. He was there during the heavy logging years and has a lot to say on that but mostly it is the places he fished and characters he fished with that make up his memories. As he moves from past to present, noting what has changed and what hasn't, he comments not only on fishing in general but great fishermen and women of the past, books on fishing, and the importance of the act of fishing, as opposed to the fish itself. Here's a bit I really liked:
Lone fishermen, like the kind I used to be, are getting rare. Since the movie A River Runs Through It, the number of anglers has increased exponentially. Rivers like the Cowichan are riddled with anglers and there are hundreds of professional guides modeled on Brad Pitt. Nowadays many books and most magazines emphasize fish capture by showing, without remorse, pictures of giant fish held at arm's length by successful trophy-hunting anglers. A hundred years ago anglers were obsessed with numbers but today it is size. The truth is neither is important, but fishing is.
When his son and grandson arrive, Taylor includes some conversation with the little boy, who has never fished before. I was quite relieved to see that the book never devolved into something cute - Ned is a mature fellow who quickly grasps the significance of fishing as an act rather a contest and Taylor never seeks to make the book about bonding although some of that happens and life lessons are certainly imparted. More than anything - anything - this is a book about what it means to understand and respect the art of fishing and as someone who spent many hours sitting beside my father at the beach waiting for the tip of the rod to "bounce", Taylor's experiences resonated a great deal.
I'll have a formal review in my July column because I think Fishing the River of Time will appeal to older teens, especially if they have ever looked at James Prosek's work with admiration. But if you're looking for a Father's Day gift then you should give this one a serious look - it's lovely.
To open the drawer of an old museum cabinet and find the remains of a creature that lived on a distant tropic isle long since dramatically changed by European impact, and which had traveled halfway round the globe to reach its keeping place, is a magical experience - like traveling in time itself. That moth-eaten skin, or even fragment, may be all that remains of an entire species, tinting the thrill of seeing with with immense sadness. For here lies all, perhaps, that is knowable of a branch of life that may have gone its own way for a million years or more, a life form that once played an important role in an island ecosystem, but which had now winked out, never to be seen again.
From his upcoming title: Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific
[Post pic from The Natural History of the Museum by Mark Dion; it depicts Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, Nîmes. View of the main exhibition room, beginning of 20th century.]
I have just finished Winged Wonders by Peter Watkins & Jonathan Stockland and find myself deeply impressed by how the authors managed to pack so much information about their subject into such a compact, perfectly sized package. There are chapters here on sixteen different birds (from owls to ravens to wrens) and along with a look at state birds, bird illustrators and birdsong the whole book is just barely 200 pages. It is the perfect title for those with curiosity but not a lot of time (the chapters lend themselves to easy bathroom reading) but I'll be recommending it in my June column as an excellent teen read for budding ornithologists (along with a new bird watching guide from HMH).
There are a ton (a ton!!) of references in Winged Wonders (if you are writing any sort of book that requires such information you must grab a copy as a resource) and I kept flagging certain passages merely for my own amusement. There are numerous examples of saints and birds, the whole history of doves = good while pigeons = bad (even though they are the same) and the long perception of eagles as symbols of greatness and nobility (Shelly, Arabian Nights and Zeus all name-dropped in only two paragraphs on that bird). But here was something that truly blew me away:
Thus the great Spanish explorer Juan Manuel de Ayala, as he charted the great sweep of the bay of San Francisco [in 1775], discovers that dangerous rock and, on behalf of his avian deliverers, named it La Isla de los Alcatraces ('The island of the Pelicans'). Many years later the name was shortened to 'Alcatraz' or just 'The Rock,' the most notorious prison in the United States.
de Ayala's ship was spared from colliding with The Rock in a deep fog when a flock of pelicans suddenly "explodes from beneath the very bows of the ship". The ship was swung away from the birds, avoided the rock and everyone lived. But who thinks pelicans when they think of Alcatraz? Fascinating, isn't it?
There is also Charlemagne's mother as Mother Goose, the peacock as a symbol of immortality, the origin of the "Lady's Hawk" (which made me want to watch the movie immediately) (oh how I love that movie!!!) and, well, I could go on and on. Wonderfully smart writing and I think a true companion for literary-minded bird watching aficionados.
I was quite pleased to see the line-up for THE BIG YEAR - I think Jack Black does best in a group dynamic and Steve Martin is pretty much one of my all-time favs. Plus Owen Wilson (of course) and a great supporting cast to boot. Mostly though it is this whole idea of people pulling out all the stops for bird watching that makes me positively gleeful. It's a tonic for all the worries of our times; the best type of escapism as far as I'm concerned.
Birding was one my mind when I stumbled across the clip because I had just heard about THE BIRDING LIFE from Hollister Hovey's (addictive) design blog. I have quite a few bird books around the house and we are avid back porch birders - the hummingbirds come right up to our windows and there are literally dozens of different song birds that visit our feeders. But BIRDING LIFE Is not just about birds in flight but decorating with avian arts and crafts and all of that appeals to me in a Hemingway/Roosevelt/Cabinet of Curiosities sort of way. When we were at Harvard last week we saw an amazing number of taxidermied birds and while I am very glad that we are no longer killing birds for display purposes, they were so beautiful! It was really hard to look away.
The Hovey sisters are in the book plus - "Kristof Zyskowski, manager of the vertebrate collections at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, gives you a behind-the-scenes peek at the museum’s meticulously curated collection, which includes specimens from about 70 percent of the world’s bird species." More museum goodness! I'm so all over this one, it's not even funny. Totally on the Christmas list.
I am reading the Summer issue of Granta, "The New Nature Writing", and was immediately struck by Jason Cowley's opening assertion in his editor's letter:
When I used to think of nature writing, or indeed the nature writer, I would picture a certain kind of man, and it would always be a man: bearded, badly dressed, ascetic, misanthropic. He would often be alone on some blasted moor, with a notebook in one hand and binoculars in the other, seeking meaning and purpose through a larger communion with nature: a loner and an outcast. One such man was Christopher Johnson McCandless, a young educated American from a prosperous middle-class family who, in search of authenticity of experience and influenced by the writings of Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau, dropped out from conventional society in the late 1980s to pursue a life of aimless wandering in the wild places of America. McCandless was disgusted by the excesses of our culture and by how in our rapacity and greed and arrogance we had, in his view, sought to separate ourselves from nature, had tried to place ourselves somehow outside or above it, so as to master it. In April 1992 he headed north to Alaska, because, he wrote in a letter, he wanted to ‘walk into the wild’. He ended up starving to death; his decomposed body was found in a long-abandoned bus. He had hoped his encounter with the wilderness of the Alaskan taiga would heal his wounds: instead, they were ripped open.
I've written about McCandless before and suffice to say, I'm not a fan of envisioning him as anything other than a depressed young man who happened to kill himself in a unique way ("suicide by wilderness"). Cowley goes beyond McCandless to Barry Lopez though, juxtaposing the two and concluding that the difference is that, "It was a moral enterprise: for Lopez, the wilderness of the Arctic was not a means to an end, a trove of oil and gas for Arctic nations to exploit, but an end in itself. He moved through this landscape with wonder, but also with care."
I have Arctic Dreams, Lopez's award winning book and there are parts of it that I love. But as someone who lived in a rather remote place and more importantly made a living sending aircraft all over the true wilderness, I found some of his conclusions about men and nature to be a bit simplistic. This is a problem I find with several different nature writers - that placing men in nature is always and only a bad thing unless they are there like McCandless; to find some higher purpose or worship the wilderness aesthetic. (Or unless they are somehow smart and "enlightened" like Lopez who I think is brilliant but still a bit too proud of that brilliance.) It seems like nature writers can sometimes miss the technology component and its usefulness in how we live with our natural surroudings. I don't mean covering the frontier with oil wells (not a fan of drilling in ANWR) but is it fair to suggest that it is all or nothing - either nature must be locked up to protect it or humanity will kill it simply because that is our habit?
Bookforum also has an issue out highlighting nature writing and Verlyn Klinkenborg's review of the new anthology American Earth directly addresses this notion of man's negative impact on nature. Here is he is quoting Wendell Berry:
Abstinence and fecundity—these are the critical terms in this anthology. To the extent that humans can withhold themselves, can abstain from destroying everything they come in contact with, the fecundity of nature will set things right. The trouble with abstinence (as we know from our own sexuality) is that it requires constant consciousness, the perpetual awareness of purpose. The beauty of fecundity is its blindness. Any real change in our fate depends on a species-wide change in consciousness, a new alertness. Again, Berry sums it up well. What we need, he writes, is not “the piecemeal technological solutions that our society now offers, but . . . a change of cultural (and economic) values that will encourage in the whole population the necessary respect, restraint, and care.” Berry is no romantic, either, for he adds, “Such possibilities are not now in sight in this country.”
I think this is part of why nature writing is not read as much as it could be - people just don't like reading that they are horrible and will be the end of everything. When we discussed Chris McCandless's choices from Into the Wild in grad school there were always arguments over what wilderness meant. Some of my classmates felt that no technology should be present in the wild at all (ironic since McCandless camped in an abandoned bus) and were angry about the presence of aircraft overhead in areas of Alaska. My response was fine - just don't ask us to come find you when you are lost, or medevac you out when you are injured or bring your body home to your family when you are dead. If you want the true wilderness experience then go have it the same way your hero did.
You can imagine how that went over.
In terms of nature writing itself though it seems that we have evolved into two distinct types of writing: investigative or historic pieces about damage to the environment and its complete destruction or eventual repair and more romantic writing about the very concept of nature and what it should or could mean. In the first, humanity is a critical component, both in a positive and negative way. In the second, if humans appear in the narrative at all it is always as the villain or doomed, misunderstood hero. Nature is king and only a precious few can worship it as others dance on its open grave. (And here's a question - when did environmental writing break away from nature writing and become a different genre?)
For my money Roger Deakin remains one of the truly great nature writers, which makes his death (from cancer) that much more upsetting. I reviewed his last book, Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees for Booklist (it's due out in January - I'll post the review here when it is published) and found it as well written as his first, Waterlog. What Deakin did so well was blend both a care and concern for the environment with intimate observation of the forest, lakes and rivers around him. He didn't shy away from writing about grim situations but also considered that there were solutions that incorporated both man's love/use of nature and a desperate need for change in how that relationship was handled. Deakin saw beauty in wildness and he believed all men could be persuaded to see and protect that same beauty.
He was no Chris McCandless seeking redemption in the wilderness but Deakin knew that was asking too much. His vision of nature was both pure and pragmatic - a true 21st century way of seeing the world around us and how we fit within it.
[Granta excerpted some of the Deakin's diary entries in the Summer issue - a collection of those writings is now available in England as Notes From Walnut Tree Farm.]