The Last Word On Nothing

At a biological field station in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeast Arizona —  towering canyons and clear-running creeks — a Stanford scientist attending a poetry workshop volunteered to get up for an evening reading. He’d spent the week studying with poet Sherwin Bitsui in an environmental writing program put on by Orion magazine, using specimen labs and the cafeteria as workspaces, people sitting outside in sun and sycamore shade with their notebooks. He explained to the audience in folding chairs that as a climate scientist, he grows frustrated communicating empirical thought and seeing little result in the real world, which is why he chooses to practice a different kind of writing. With a page in his hand, he came to exercise his poetic side. 

The scientist-poet is Rob Jackson, head of a multi-disciplinary global research lab at Stanford. The lab studies the consequences of climate change, such as droughts and forest die-off. Scientific journal articles he’s authored are extensive and urgent, how swiftly global energy growth is outpacing decarbonization, or methods of removing methane for atmospheric restoration. Last week he co-authored a New York Times op-ed on carbon emissions.

He’s “still learning to write,” as he puts it, but has published poetry in more than a dozen literary journals. In Cold Mountain Review, from his poem “White Noise,”

The sound of glaciers melting
isn’t towering cliffs of ice
thundering into the azure sea
or the crescendo of meltwater
swelling from purl to torrent.
It’s the pop of gunshots,
bubbles snapping free
from frozen translucent cages.

“There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing,” wrote John Cage. Is science the possession of a thing, and poetry the realization that what you study does not belong to you? If so, science needs poetry.

Jackson said what he appreciates about writing outside of science is not having to use a passive voice. I hadn’t thought of science as inactive, but now that he mentioned it.

When I asked about the role of science at this point in human and Earth history, he told me, “Societies need shared vision and values. Technological societies like ours also need good data and critical thinking. The Greeks deduced the earth was round by reading its shadow during lunar eclipses. How brilliant was that?”

Science and poetry are observational, relying on cause and effect. The cause is everything in the world. The effect is that you understand it a little more about it.

They both serve the same purpose: to see the invisible.

From Jackson’s poem “Frog Calls” in Stanford Magazine:

Frogs are calendars.
The chorus frogs start first, on warm winter evenings,
their call like running your thumb down a comb.

What he read that night in the mountains came from moving his mom, who had a brain tumor. The drive to Ft. Myers, Florida, took them through miles of strip malls and across Sanibel, what he called, “one of the most beautiful barrier islands in the world.” Pollution and warm ocean water, he said, are giving the island terrible red tides, algal blooms that starve the seawater of oxygen, killing wildlife. The tide gives off brevetoxins, oderless, tasteless neurotoxic compounds dangerous to swimmers, people breathing nearby, and anyone eating shellfish.

Jackson later explained, “In memory, I can’t separate the poisons in the Gulf water from the poisons in her brain, even though I know they didn’t cause her sickness. It isn’t fair to Ft. Meyers, and it isn’t rational. It just is.”

To convey this emotion — what is inferred and what is known — he turned to poetry, reading off his page to a group of mostly scientists who had come to learn a new way of writing,

Red Tides

The sea gasps
as crabs litter white Sanibel sands,
claws outstretched and flexing.
The pocked hand
of a starfish
clenches slowly skyward.
Soles plate the beach,
eyes dark and lusterless,
gulls gorging jelly.
A manatee bloats near high tide
as blow flies swarm
to pierce its skin.
Onshore winds whip
panicgrass over beach dunes,
raw in their exposure,
and a child bears water’s malice,
a rash from swimming,
the scratch of asthma’s rise.

This Orion workshop was taught by Shirwin Bitsui, Amy Irvine, and me, and happens every year at the Southwestern Research Station with different instructors.