On the morning my friend Kristina died, I listened and re-listened to the last voice mail she left me. I needed to hear her voice, and the mundaneness of her 35 second message was comforting. She was sorry she’d missed my call. She’d been out for a walk. She was planning a bike ride tomorrow but would call me again before that. She really wanted to connect.
I am notoriously terrible about clearing out my voice mails. I can’t bear to erase them. I have a habit of keeping at least one at all times from the people I love most. The content of the message isn’t important. It’s that I can hear their voice, catch them in the midst of ordinary life, before they are dead. I’ve learned that you never know when someone will be dead.
I once heard a story about a phone booth in Japan where people who lost friends and family in the 2011 tsunami and earthquake go to talk to their lost loved ones. I would use a phone booth like that.
I still occasionally listen to the voice mail I saved from my friend Mona before she died several years ago. I have heard her say that she’s just returned from Tai Chi class dozens of times. In the months after she died, I also texted her more than once. Sometimes I would forget, if only for a split second, that she was dead and feel compelled to follow through on my impulse to tell her something on my mind. Other times, I just needed to pretend for a moment that she wasn’t really gone.
When I got the news that Kristina had died, I had just placed a letter to her in my mailbox. A few days earlier, a loved one had sent a message out saying that Kristina was turning inward and it was now best to send wishes and love by mail rather than text or phone. This was my second note to her in the previous two weeks, and I’m not sure if she ever read the first. After I received the news that she had passed, I stood on the front porch and stared at the little red flag raised on my mailbox at the end of the driveway. I could not make myself go retrieve the letter.
This post originally appeared in 2012, before advances in artificial intelligence brought the possibility of deep fakes and other ways for storytelling artifacts to lie. Here I looked at the ways in which information can be false, and how we typically only look or check for certain kinds of veracity.
Ever since reading the comment thread for Ginny’s Lie to Me piece, I have been searching myself for the truth behind the convenient story that I am vehemently opposed to, and vigilantly on guard against, any kind of untruth in journalism.
Festivities have begun in honour of the 100th anniversary of the Shackleton/Scott expeditions to the South Pole. I know someone who’s going to be re-enacting the Shackleton expedition, tall ship and all, so I headed down to the Queen’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace to see the exhibit of photography from those trips.
Among many artfully arranged photos of penguins and icebergs, loving portraits of sled dogs and triumphant group shots of the team, there hung two photos that were different.
Elephant Island was the site of a gruelling test of survival, with fourteen men sleeping under two overturned boats, waiting for rescue by Sir Ernest Shackleton. Among them was photographer Frank Hurley.
The fall of 5th grade, my parents gave me two options: I could either enroll in Chinese school, or join the youth orchestra. I loved playing cello so I opted for the latter, but as an adult, I wonder if I made the right choice. While I have some basic Chinese conversational skills, I didn’t learn to read or write until college, where I spent three years in a class full of kids like me who grew up speaking the language but had limited reading and writing skills. At one point, I learned up to 2,000 characters, but after years without practice, I’m illiterate again.
I’ve had no shortage of excuses for not practicing my Chinese. First, it was school. Then I got into running and climbing and I told myself I had time for other activities. Finally, over the pandemic, those excuses mostly fell away, and I’ve realized my resistance to learn was rooted in shame, embarrassment, and fear of failure. Am I a “bad” Chinese American for not learning this earlier? What does it say about me that I can’t even write to my grandpa in his native language?
I resolved to get over it, and accept that I’d be starting from almost scratch. I checked out children’s books from the local library: one was about a little boy who found a spider, and the other, about a class who discovered their teacher is also a rapper. I could just barely make out the contours of the story without help from the English translation. My mother was delighted to hear that I’m trying to learn again, and mailed me a book of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales — the same volume she’d recently sent to my cousin’s toddler.
I’ve also been obsessively completing Duolingo lessons. Today makes the 117th day of my streak and I am already worrying about what will happen to my stats once the weather is warm enough to go backpacking, where I’ll be without wifi. I notice the reading has come easier; while practicing writing characters, certain words or strokes came back to me easily, like a long-lost friend.
Sometimes, the app feeds me a sentence to translate that stirs up some unexpected emotion. In a lesson on travel, there was the sentence, “Be careful, it’s not safe there at night,” and I felt like my mom was in the room with me. And “I will try harder to learn Chinese” made me feel like an irritable teen again. I AM trying, Duolingo! Look at my streak!
But then there are the sentences that make me wonder: Duolingo, are you ok? In what world are these the sentences I’ll need to learn? If I were a creative writing instructor, some of these might make interesting prompts or character details. Here are some of my favorites:
He is handsome, but he is not a good person.
How can we be better than other people?
There are 1,500 cat photos on my cell phone.
There are too many people here.
He had three bottles of Baijiu, and now he is sleeping.
None of us like him, so luckily, he didn’t come.
I have a smart little bird. It likes to dance.
I’ll leave you with the question that almost sent me into an existential tailspin the other day:
Have you ever dialed a phone number to get the weather forecast?
This is one of those questions and answers that dates you, like describing your favorite TV show in adolescence, or the brand of shoes that were extra cool in 10th grade.
Dialing a number: There’s the first anachronism in that example. I don’t remember the last time I dialed a rotary phone, like literally turned a dial seven times to reach seven different numbers in sequence. But I am both old enough to have done this in my life, and old enough to have been sufficiently old at the time to form a memory of having done so.
Ancient Roman glass (1st-6th century CE) at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento From the collection of Marcy Friedman. Photo by Emily Underwood.
A little over a year ago I made an unplanned trip to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. I had driven to the city to run errands but then decided to go look at art instead, a moment of pre-pandemic spontaneity that felt indulgent then, and now, I imagine, would feel like intense catharsis. It was a rainy Sunday; I remember stepping over crushed magnolia blossoms on the wet pavement. I paid my admission and declined the headset tour, bought a cup of coffee in the museum cafe and drank it in the light-filled glass atrium, a relatively recent expansion of the oldest public art museum west of the Mississippi River.
I enjoyed all of the exhibits, more or less, but one installation made such an impression on me that I still think about it: A collection of 1st-6th century Roman glass jars, flasks, juglets and perfume bottles called amphoriskos. The placard by the case was succinct, noting only a few physical details like “turquoise twin handles, spiral and zig-zag trailing,” and “globular sprinkler with pinecone.” It didn’t say anything about how the glass was made, where it was found, or how the donor, a local painter, acquired it. I left the museum without asking, not realizing it would be the last time I’d visit.
Here’s something I’ve learned about myself in the pandemic: I open produce bags by licking my fingers. My entire life, after touching the car keys or the inside of the metro, and my shoe, and the cart, and anything else that is around, and before touching my fruits and vegetables, I have been sticking my fingers in my mouth.
Now I know, if I don’t have access to my mouth, I’m just going to stand there muttering to myself and rubbing the end of the bag and poking at it and generally feeling like an incompetent human.
Before, infectious disease was not something I spent a lot of time thinking about.
Now, infectious disease is something I spend a lot of time thinking about.
I used to think very little about introducing novelty into my life. Now, I will purposefully buy a new brand of soap, just to try something different. I’ve been walking down the alleys in my neighborhood to see the back sides of houses. Earlier this year, I tried Fig Newtons for the first time since childhood. (Have you tried them lately? They are so odd. How can a cookie be both mushy and gritty?)
One day a few weeks ago I sat on the opposite end of the couch from usual. It was thrilling.
Sunday I got my first shot of the Pfizer. This feels like another turning point, when after a year of relative isolation I can start to consider a world where I can go places and be indoors with strangers. Novelty will be easier to come by.
But I’m not sure I’m ready to give up my life at home, where all it takes to get a new perspective is a lemon-verbena-scented bar of soap.
Our Michelle wrote a book! It’s called Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, and it has already become beloved by the many readers and reviewers who have been talking about it even before the book came out March 9. The book chronicles the history of conservation and conservationists in the U.S., drawing out stories of both the beloved beasts that people have worked to protect and the people behind these efforts, from Aldo Leopold to Rachel Carson to my new favorite, Rosalie Edge, who showed up at a self-congratulatory meeting of the National Association of Audubon Societies in October 1929 to question whether the organization really was protecting birds, or just its own interests. Earlier this month, I got to talk with Michelle about her book, the process of writing it, and how she hopes it will affect how we see conservation. (This interview has been edited and condensed.)
Cameron: I have been thinking you were working on a book—or maybe hopingyou were working on a book—ever since your assisted migration story came out in Orion. But then when I started reading about Beloved Beasts, I realized that it was not about tree conservation, but about, well, beloved beasts! (And also the beloved and not-so-beloved and just plain human conservationists who have worked for their protection.) Would you mind talking about how the book came about?
Michelle: I’ve been interested in conservation history for a long time, ever since I was a wildlife biologist myself and witnessed a lot of local political battles over endangered species. I knew there was a historical context to these arguments, and I wanted to learn more about it. But the idea for the book came partly from an LWON post I wrote about a study that tried to estimate the effects of conservation efforts on the status of particular species. I was really struck by that study, because while most people can name off a few individual species that are conservation success stories, we don’t have a systematic sense of what the modern conservation movement has meant for life on earth. I started to wonder whether there was a historical story to be told about what conservation has accomplished as a movement.
Cameron: And the book really does this by following the stories not only of these species, but of the conservationists. Each chapter focuses primarily on one person, but one of the things I loved is how the book keeps returning to the links between these people and their work. It’s almost like the conservationists are part of a conservation ecosystem, and without one, the conservation ecosystem would have looked very different.
Michelle: Yes, I worked to weave together the stories of the some of the iconic figures in conservation—the names we all know—with some that are less known, but equally important. I tried to show that these people knew of each other and influenced each other, and that together they built up the conservation movement. None of them was working in isolation. I did want each chapter to revolve around one or two main characters—that helped me keep the whole thing on track!—and I also wanted each chapter and each character to represent some kind of significant development in the movement. I could have included so much more material about each of the people I wrote about. I spent an afternoon reading Aldo Leopold’s schoolbooks, which were adorable. But one elementary-school anecdote is usually enough!
Cameron: Now I want to see Aldo Leopold’s schoolbooks, too! That was one of the things that really blew me away—how much research went into this book. And historical research, too, when I usually think of you on an adventure with scientists out in the field. What was doing this kind of research like?
Michelle: The research for this book was overwhelming but very fun. I’ve always had a soft spot for context (well, what I call context and what my editors sometimes call “too much background”), and I have this romantic view of archives—I think of them as these stashes of fascinating material that are waiting around for us to discover new things about. So I took on the archival research with a lot of enthusiasm, if not lot of skill. A professional historian would probably be appalled by my methods! I did learn to be much more organized over the course of writing the book. And of course I wasn’t only working with primary materials—I drew from many existing biographies and other studies of the individuals I wrote about.
One of the most joyful parts of the archival work was learning about all these connections between people. Letters from Rachel Carson to Stewart Udall, letters from Rosalie Edge to Aldo Leopold, the affectionate relationship between William Hornaday and Leopold—even though those last two also disagreed on many things. It’s so fun to listen in on these conversations that happened so long ago between these influential people.
Cameron: Did you have one of those moments like in the movies, when you’re in the archives and you find the one piece of information you’ve been looking for and you start jumping up and down until the archivists look at you sternly?
Irma Broun, local conservationist Clayton Hoff, Rosalie Edge, and Maurice Broun at the entrance to Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, circa 1940. Courtesy of Hawk Mountain Sanctuary
Michelle: I did have a moment when I got a copy of the exchange of letters between Rosalie Edge and Aldo Leopold—these were known to both Leopold’s biographers and Edge’s biographers, but after I got the chance to have lunch with Aldo Leopold’s daughter Estella Junior, who’s now 94, I sent her a copy of them. She’s an admirer of Rosalie Edge, so she was delighted—she wrote back and said, “We can see that Dad was puzzled about this woman!” I loved the idea of Aldo Leopold, who was usually so poised and generally full of Midwestern reserve and niceness, being befuddled by this woman from New York who said whatever she wanted and did whatever she wanted.
Cameron: I think Rosalie Edge was really my favorite character in this, both because I’d never heard of her before and she was so fun to read about, because I never knew what she would do next.
Michelle: One of the fun things about archives is getting to see the paper these people used and getting to see their handwriting. It’s the historian’s equivalent of on-the-ground reporting—you pick up all these details you aren’t aware of at the time. Seeing the hundreds and hundreds of letters Rosalie Edge wrote, where she addressed her friends and enemies in her big, loopy, bold handwriting, gave me such a better sense of her.
Her life and the people who surrounded her made me realize how important the women’s suffrage movement was to conservation. At the time, the conservation movement in the U.S. was mostly made up of wealthy, white male hunters—and they were getting a bit complacent. Edge and many other women had developed their activism skills through the suffrage movement. They came into conservation fired up and said, we have to take on bigger fights. Their work turned conservation into more of a grassroots movement, and into a movement that was bigger and more ambitious.
Cameron: Along with traveling to archives, you also visited a number of other places for this book, from Aldo Leopold’s shack in Wisconsin to community conservation projects in Namibia. How did these experiences add to your writing and your understanding of conservation?
Michelle: I’m a journalist by training, so I always want to be on the scene, even if the scene is 150 years ago—whether that’s standing on top of a buffalo jump, or sitting in an archive and putting my hands on original letters. But I think the place that most affected my thinking was Namibia. My family came with me, and for most of the time we were there we were deep in rural Namibia. Being there made me feel much more committed to ideas that I might have just nodded my head at before: For example, conservationists need to think much more about human behavior and the constructive role people can play in protecting other species. Most people don’t want their local species to go extinct, and they will work to protect them as long as their own basic needs are also taken care of. I understood this, but witnessing it firsthand in Namibia helped me feel it in a much more visceral way.
Cameron: The end of the book draws from the words of past conservationists and those who work in the field today to look forward into the future. Do you feel like what you’ve learned from conservation history has changed where you think the field is headed, and has it shaped what you’re working on now?
Michelle: When I was close to finishing the book I thought, This book has really helped me answer a lot of questions I had about conservation. (And then I thought, Does anyone else have these questions?) Of course, it also raised new questions for me—for example, I’ve continued to think about the success of community-based conservation in Namibia, and I’ve been writing about how it is and can be replicated elsewhere. I’ve been learning more about the relationship between land tenure and conservation: So much of the land that is important for conservation worldwide is managed cooperatively by Indigenous and other rural communities, but very few of these communities have legal rights to their land. Formalizing those land claims is not only a moral good but an effective way to advance conservation, because it allows the conservation work underway to move forward with more certainty.
Cameron: One thing I really appreciated was seeing the daily lives and the mistakes and missteps of many of these renowned conservationists. It just made me feel like they were people, just like me, who could mess up and still do work that has lasting effects today.
Michelle: Yes! That’s one thing I wanted to get across. They are icons now, but they didn’t see themselves as icons. They were just muddling through like the rest of us, trying to protect the places and species they were passionate about. They had no idea whether what they were doing was going to work out—in fact, most of them probably were pretty convinced that it wasn’t going to work out. I think that we can draw inspiration from that, that people in the past felt hopeless at times. They continued to move forward, and so can we.
It’s so easy to get overwhelmed by the daily drumbeat of bad news about the environment. I hope that people take away from the book that humans can play a positive role in conservation. There are huge opportunities for us to do more, and we know what to do—we just need to find the will and the means to do it.
Among the many rewarding aspects of my well-documented beaver obsession is this: it makes for interesting road trips. Roads tend to follow water, which means that you stand good odds of encountering Castor canadensis and its works during any long drive. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve screeched to a halt on a rural shoulder and leaped from my Subaru, camera in hand, to scope out a picturesque dam in a roadside creek. It’s a dangerous habit, maybe, but it does nicely break up what Seamus Heaney described as the “trance of driving.”
Last weekend I drove from my home in Spokane to the Methow Valley, in an ultimately vain attempt to salvage an edible roadkill deer carcass. (Long story.) My path took me along State Route 17, a two-lane highway that parallels East Foster Creek as it glugs fitfully down to the Columbia River. I’d noticed beaver ponds on East Foster during a previous trip, but it was pouring then, and I hadn’t had the opportunity to explore. This time I was determined to get out of the car and poke around.
I was particularly curious about these beavers because of their location. East Foster Creek lies smack in the middle of the Pearl Hill / Cold Springs Fire complex, which, in September 2020, torched more than 400,000 acres in eastern Washington. As I reported at the time for The Atlantic, these mega-fires incinerated perhaps half of the world’s remaining Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits, an animal as adorably diminutive as its name suggests. Six months later, the area remains a crumbly, charred ashland that would look familiar to the Mars Rover.
This, at least theoretically, is where semiaquatic rodents come in. Last year an ecohydrologist (cool job title, eh?) named Emily Fairfax published a brilliant paper proving empirically what beaver advocates have long known intuitively: wetlands don’t burn. By hydrating their surroundings, Emily found, beavers create wildfire “refugia”: damp, lush spots on the landscape to which other critters — birds, amphibians, small mammals, even livestock — can retreat during fires. “It doesn’t matter if there’s a wildfire right next door,” Emily told me when I covered her study for National Geographic. “Beaver-dammed areas are green and happy and healthy-looking.” The Forest Service, she added, might want to consider a new mascot: Smokey the Beaver.
