A bird in the hand

By: | April 30, 2019

The marmoset looked unlikely on the filing cabinet. It reclined on a piece of poster board, its skinny arms folded across its chest. Its cotton-stuffed eyes stared at the low, tiled ceiling. The specimen room smelled strongly of tea and cornmeal.

Carina pulled the handle of a taller cabinet, and Mo and I leaned in. The three of us—college student, photographer, and writer—had other things we were supposed to be doing. But here, behind the door, there were rows of enticing labeled drawers. Each cabinet, a family—the corvids, the alcids, the procellariids. Each drawer, full of birds. We lifted the owls, the nighthawks, the warblers. We tested their weight. They were light as paper in our hands. I noted the way their feathers layered over one another into soft curves and colors, like summer clouds. The way they gave under the press of fingertips. We moved from family to family, touching clawed feet and folded wings. We exclaimed over this great collection of the dead the way others might coo over kittens. My people, I thought, looking at the other women.

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The Neolithics of Stony Run

By: | April 29, 2019

The path I take in the mornings has a stream, Stony Run, running along one side.  The path and the stream are in a tiny wooded floodplain you could throw a rock across.  The floodplain and stream are more or less maintained by Baltimore city and by the surrounding community associations – “maintained” as in, a massive re-engineering of the stream and massive clean-ups by the communities twice a year.  But between massive efforts the floodplain is left to its own devices and being a floodplain, sometimes it floods.  Mostly it just seeps.  And after a rain, the path is a muddy patchy swamp.  I can’t walk on it until it drains and I am sad.

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Science Metaphors: Hysteresis

By: | April 26, 2019
etching of a person fleeing from a skeleton
My future self running from the mistakes of my past self

My first encounter with the word “hysteresis” was ten years ago when I was editing a particularly difficult electrical engineering feature. That story was one of my favourite I’ve ever worked on, the wild first-person account of the researcher who had unearthed an ancient prediction of a fourth circuit design element, foretold by the laws of mathematical symmetry to augment the holy trinity of electrical circuit design elements: the resistor, the capacitor and the inductor.

What distinguished this fourth mythical element – today known as the “memristor” – from its workaday siblings was its behaviour, which depended more on its history than on any stimulus hitting it at any given moment. This tendency is called hysteresis, and the makers of memristors hope it will make the computers of the future act more human.

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Cathedrals on Fire

By: | April 25, 2019
The Domes of the Yosemite, by Albert Bierstadt, 1867 (Wikimedia Commons)

Notre Dame is on fire! one of my oldest friends, Jessica, texted me from New York the morning of April 15th. 

I saw. So awful, I typed back.

Then I lost cell service. Pete and I were driving toward Yosemite, taking advantage of his spring break from teaching high school to explore the park. After paying the entrance fee, Pete and I drove through a natural arch formed by two massive boulders, like granite gargoyles touching noses. With the burning spire still flickering in my mind, I turned off my phone.

It was strange to be in Yosemite that day. Feeling tired, Pete and I chose the easiest path in the valley, a paved boulevard that leads straight to the base of Yosemite Falls. We raised our faces to the mist, surrounded by international tourists. A few spoke French, and I wondered what it felt like to be in Yosemite’s so-called natural cathedral while the world’s most beloved human-built cathedral collapsed in flames.

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Out for a walk in Big Sur

By: | April 24, 2019

We camped this past weekend at Big Sur, meeting up with some friends from the north. I made the reservations in November and wasn’t really looking at the calendar, so I didn’t realize that the weekend was a nexus of holidays—Passover, Easter, Earth Day. It felt right, though, being under the trees and in the ocean-tinted air, with the river rushing so fast and close that it sounded like rain.

I woke up earlier than everyone else in the mornings and walked through the campground with the moon setting above the ridge. I remembered when I’d found the campsite, the campground had seemed enormous—hundreds of spaces—and I wondered whether it would feel more like being in the middle of a music festival than camping. But no—the combination of the river and the big trees made the sites feel sheltered, and the air had a hushed feeling, even when our neighbors began playing a drum on the verge of quiet hours.

People talk about Big Sur being special, magical. Does the air have something to do with it? Several companies make perfume and candles that are supposed to recall redwoods and ocean waves, rainwater and eucalyptus. Febreze even makes an air freshener called Big Sur—which has some combination of sandalwood, jasmine, and cherry, according to the description.

The air is what brought Charles David Keeling to this campground, too, in 1955. As a post-doc at Cal Tech, he constructed instruments to measure carbon dioxide in the air, but found that the CO2 concentrations in Pasadena varied. So he took his equipment to a campground in Big Sur, an isolated stretch of the California coast.

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Spring Break

By: | April 22, 2019

Oh spring — a time for renewal. I’m finally (mostly) home from book tour, and I’ve been taking a little break from the grind to breathe in and focus my attention on things that replenish my creative energy and make me feel connected and fully present in my place. 

Perhaps the most soul-nourishing thing I’ve done is launch a new podcast with the poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, who is also one of my best friends. Emerging Form is a podcast about the creative process, and it’s given my own creative spirit a boost. The podcast is an excuse to stay up late drinking wine and exchanging stories about the creative life with Rosemerry and some interesting guests. It’s a passion project with no external expectations or constraints, and it’s been energizing to create something new that’s just for fun. The podcast feels a lot like this blog — a creative habit that feeds my muse and releases me from feelings of obligation.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time outside. Yesterday I passed some of the afternoon standing underneath one of our apricot trees, just taking in the fragrance of the blossoms and listening to the sound of pollinators buzzing around, doing their jobs. There’s something incredibly comforting about witnessing nature proceeding without human intervention. We’re less important than we believe.

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Parks without people? A response to Jason Mark

By: | April 19, 2019

A few days ago, environmental writer Jason Mark published an essay in Sierra, the national magazine of the Sierra Club, in which he advocates for “a provocative idea”: establishing nature reserves that would be “off-limits to most people” except “working scientists.” These preserves would be managed exclusively “for wild nature alone.” Mark invokes conservationist icon Aldo Leopold, who argued that the “land-community”—that is, the whole of an ecosystem including water, soil, plants, animals, and people—has a “right to continued existence.”

“The establishment of people-less parks would recognize that right and mark a grand gesture of ecological solidarity,” Mark writes. “Like any true solidarity, the giver gains in the course of the sacrifice. Preserving a place truly beyond us would, in the end, be a blessing to ourselves.”

I had a strong negative reaction to Mark’s essay. Although he acknowledges that many parks were created by evicting and then excluding Native peoples, along with the grim history of Jim Crow policies in parks, he seems to acknowledge these legacies only insofar as they would “complicate” the approval of his proposal for off-limits protected areas. And he confusingly asserts in the same essay that “[f]rom their inception, American parks have prioritized the interests of people.” I mean, yes, some people—mostly affluent white people who want to recreate in them but not, obviously, the indigenous and non-white people who were excluded.

The piece seemed to me to be insulting to Native Americans, seeming at first glance to be arguing that since European settlers stole Native land and then screwed it up, now no one should be able to have it.

In addition, much of my work has been focused on recognizing and tracing the implications of the fact that humans are part of nature and have never been separate from it. Yes, many of our current modes of interaction with the nonhuman world are destructive and thoughtless. But walling-off nature from people isn’t the answer, in my opinion. The answer is to learn or return to positive relationships with nature.

So I contacted Mark and asked him if we could talk about his essay, and he graciously agreed. 

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