I never knew it needed explaining until someone asked me — why is singletrack so much more fun than wider trails like double track or dirt roads? We’re talking here about mountain biking and the allure of the singletrack trail — a narrow path, usually 18 to 24 inches wide, that meanders through a given terrain.
The most obvious answer is that a singletrack is more aesthetically pleasing than a wider road. Continue reading
It’s not obvious how to draw a snake. Here, let Isabel Cooper tell you about it, in a 1924 article she wrote for The Atlantic Monthly.
For instance, there’s no such thing as a school of snake artists, so when the problem of making a portrait of a snake presented itself I had to think up the technique for myself. There are many odd little worries connected with this problem, such as the invention of the proper anaesthetic for deadly reptiles, to put them out of the misery of posing and yet allow the colors of life to linger from day to day.
Unlike birds and butterflies, she explained, the snakes and frogs don’t look so nice after you preserve them and put them in a museum collection.
Most remarkable and significant in the appearance of most of these creatures—and soonest extinguished by death—are their eyes. This is especially true of snakes. The instant they pass, a dreadful mildew creeps up over the sparkling black pupil and the decoration of the brilliant iris, until the eye looks like a mouldering moonstone.
In 1920, photography couldn’t touch the glory of these animals. But watercolor could. Cooper painted this snake’s portrait at a field station called Kartabo in British Guiana (now Guyana), established by the explorer William Beebe.
I’d been reading a book by Colm Tóibín called House of Names. The house is the House of Atreus; Tóibín explained through a character why he substituted “names,” but I didn’t understand it. He took the story pretty faithfully from the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripedes about one or all members of the family. The family was dreadful, every one of them, and Tóibín made each individual dreadfulness understandable, as did the original Greek playwrights. The family is soaked in its own blood, generation after generation; crime begets murder which bets revenge killing and more revenge killing and revenge killing that never stops. The translator of the Greek plays, Robert Fagles, calls it an “inherited infection.”
Somewhere in the middle, I started to wonder about the strange discrepancy between these revenge-addled murderers and the rational, educated ancient Greeks who were the foundation of Western civilization; who founded much of our sculpture, architecture, philosophy, literature, math, and science; and who told these terrible stories over and over. Continue reading
July 10 – 14, 2017
Guest Elizabeth Preston’s baby — what’s she doing? what’s she thinking? Darwin had some ideas about that.
Emma is in Tahiti — isn’t everyone? — and sees a flower so rare, so strange, so precious, that it has to be kept in a cage.
If only mental illness were simple, says guest Laura Dattaro. We could just take pills, instead of dealing with gray scales on every known axis.
Michelle is stretching a bit on Harrison Ford’s chest waxing being a metaphor for the deforestation of the tropics.
Don’t listen to the climate Cassandras, say Cassandra. Well, ok, listen, but calm down a bit.
When my mother named me Cassandra, she didn’t know anything about Greek mythology. She had never heard of the princess who prophesied the destruction of Troy. But I inherited some of Cassandra’s attributes all the same. I’m a doom-and-gloom kind of girl. My visions of the future involve illness, poverty, and untimely deaths. Each headache surely heralds a brain tumor. Each sidewalk stumble will no doubt beget several busted teeth.
But unlike Cassandra of Troy, I’m a terrible soothsayer. My visions are mostly wrong. This fact allows me to revel in worst-case scenarios without entirely believing they’ll come true. I get to spout death and destruction, yet I still manage to get up each morning and face the day. I know the worst probably won’t come to pass.
But what if it does? Continue reading
The latest issue of the journal Environmental History features an article titled “Chest Hair and Climate Change: Harrison Ford and the Making of ‘Lost There, Felt Here.'” Stop snickering! This is a serious thing. At least, I think it’s a serious thing. Section editor Finis Dunaway acknowledges that while “readers were not expecting to find an essay about chest waxing in this issue of Environmental History,” said essay “addresses critical questions about global responsibility and global power dynamics.”
Let’s see here. The essay, by University of South Carolina geography professor David Kneas, concerns a public-service announcement, commissioned by Conservation International in 2008, that does, in fact, show Harrison Ford getting his chest waxed. (You can watch it here.) Kneas describes it as follows: Continue reading
ONE OCTOBER DAY in the fall of my junior year of college, I found myself sitting in a chair across from a small blond woman with a look of deep concern on her face as she stared into mine. She had something to tell me, she said, and it was clear she knew that the something would upset me. Her eyes were wide, her hands on the arms of a chair that would have been more appropriate in a public library lounge. Her windowless office was warmly lit with a few small lamps, none of the bright fluorescence and antiseptic shine of a doctor’s office. Still, it was a doctor’s office, or at least it was an office in which something resembling medical care was taking place, and I had the feeling she was about to tell me that mine could no longer take place here.
I was right, but for the wrong reasons. At 20, a good student from a good suburban family, I felt I had no right to sit there and lament to a professional who was here purely to solve the hardest of personal problems. I knew she was about to tell me I had to go, that there were precious few time slots available and I was taking one from someone who actually needed it.
Instead she looked at me with that genuine concern, and told me, gently, that she suspected my troubles were not something she could address in the 12 free sessions university students were allotted at the counseling center, that I needed someone who could help me long term if I were to ever stop crying in front of near strangers, if I were to ever get better.
That moment in her office turned into months, then years, of starting and stopping treatment, of bouncing between doctors, searching for the single thing at the bottom of it all: the one memory, the one trauma, the one blemish on my makeup that could explain everything, that could be wiped away to make me a happy person. That is how I had come to understand mental illness, as a simple disease that could be treated if only one could figure out what the disease was. Continue reading
About 150 miles northwest of Tahiti lies Raiatea, 65 square miles, and the spiritual center of the Polynesian world. This week, a holy site there, Taputapuatea, was added to the list of UNESCO world heritage sites.
Another world-famous marvel on the island is the tiare apetahi, an incredibly rare flower found only on Raiatea, and only on the high plateaus in the center of the island. The common tiare is a flower that grows all over the Pacific. It is in the gardenia family, and has a lovely scent. In Tahiti, it is often used used to make flower necklaces called heis (like Hawaiian leis) and flower crowns.
But the tiare apetahi sports just half a corolla of five petals, looking a bit like a fingered hand—a resemblance that comes up in a local legend about the flower.
Alas, like so many rare and beautiful things, the tiare apetahi is being loved to death. In a recent story in the newspaper la Dépêche de Tahiti, correspondent Jean-Pierre Besse recounts how 81% of the plants have died since 1995, mostly due to souvenir-hunting tourists who snap off bits of the bushes, often resulting in the death of whole limbs or plants. In response, the students of the mechanics class of the Protestant vocational school Tuteao a Vaiho of Uturoa have built physical cages to surround the remaining bushes.
Islands are worlds in miniature and, where ecology is concerned, they are often tiny versions of the future. Ecological change is faster and more dramatic on small isolated islands. Non-native species, rapacious hunting or collecting, pollution, sea-level rise—all are more dangerous where there’s little space and no place to run to.
Putting a stainless steel cage around a rare flower is a sobering image to confront when thinking about the future of our world. Extreme measures in conservation are not new. Already, the Guam Kingfisher waits in protective custody for humans to rid its island of the exotic brown tree snake; the Hawaiian crow or ʻalalā languishes at the San Diego Zoo; and the last toromiro trees yearn for Easter Island from Kew Gardens outside London. But the tiare apetahi, which apparently resists transplantation, is the first plant I’ve heard of to be transferred into “captivity” in situ. If all the plants have cages built around them, then has it become “extinct in the wild”? Or do the cages become an extended part of its morphology—a deterrent supplied by humans to a plant with neither thorns nor poisons to keep away the selfish and greedy—much the way our phones have become extensions of our memories and minds?
Most simply, the cage is a message from the students to the tourists: you can’t be trusted not to destroy this species. The students can’t cage up the tourists, though I am sure they would be tempted if they could. I suppose the real deep work of environmentalism is to create a global culture in which cages wouldn’t be needed.
We all know that many of the species with which we share the planet are in danger because of humanity’s actions. Things are bad—but not so bad that most of the world’s endangered species cannot yet be saved. There is still time to stave off the “6th great mass extinction” that you may have heard has already begun. There is still time!
We know what we need to do. Now we must simply do it. Reduce emissions drastically; set undeveloped land aside; reduce our footprints in land, water, carbon, etc; educate women and work for easy and socially acceptable family planning worldwide; commit to making our decisions on behalf of all species and not just ourselves. Stop picking the tiare apetahi! Maybe in our lifetimes the flowers can be uncaged.
Image from Wikimedia Commons, from 100zax.
