Bill McKibben at Miami University: The Education of an Unlikely Activist

Bill McKibben looks like he’s been to activist training camp to me—or like he could be running the training camp himself.  Jedi material, even.  But, apparently, he has surprised himself.  Maybe he surprised a lot of people.  He is a self-proclaimed introvert and I suppose society doesn’t expect its introverts to move into center stage, make a fuss, and go to jail for justice.  (Rosa Parks might though.  Or Gandhi.)  But he seems like a likely activist to me.  An ideal activist who was moved by the reality of the data to take a position and build a movement that, with the thoughtfulness of an introvert, could undermine the money that is trying to buy out the potential for reasonable solutions. He is pragmatic and perspicacious. And he gave a great talk with great pictures of environmentalists all around the world. Here’s one from Ghana (from 350.org’s Flicker page):

My students and I have been reading his book from 1989, which is completely relevant 25 years later (although this fact is not ideal)—The End of Nature.  My young, hopeful students were looking despondent and sounding depressed in their blogs.  I felt a pressing need to take their pulses (which I refrained from).  His talk, however, offered the energy and optimism they look for.  Actions that we could all take to be part of the 350.org movement to spread the word that we need to divest from fossil fuels to minimize the damage to the future planet, actions big and small.  Near the end of his book, McKibben says “There is no future in loving nature.” Well, damn it.  Too late.  And it was too late for him, so he did what a person who loves does—he began looking for solutions, and initiating them, even with the knowledge that they may not work.  In The Cloister Walk (1996), Kathleen Norris says that “Maybe monks and poets know, as Jesus did when a friend, in an extravagant, loving gesture, bathed his feet in nard, an expensive fragrant oil, and wiped them with her hair, that the symbolic act matters; that those who know the exact price of things, as Judas did, often don’t know the true cost or value of anything.”  Bill McKibben knows too.  I hope that all of us who are committed to change will make the symbolic acts that have personal and global implications.  It may matter a great deal, so that at the end of the nature we’ve known in the last umpteen thousand years (as a species…I’m not that old), we will be able to begin the humbler path McKibben talks about, where we learn to live within nature’s bounds. 

McKibben said that “The only power to combat money is a people movement…to build a currency of people.”  Money can’t beat a bunch of committed people when there are enough of them.  At least, here’s hoping.  

The End of Nature (What the Heck--We’re Still Here)

My class & I have been reading Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989) in anticipation of McKibben’s visit to Miami U on April 8^th.  The book is 16 years old at this point, but like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), it is still disturbingly current.  (There is even a dead bird on the cover McKibben’s book, which harkens back to Carson with her roadsides “silent, deserted by all living things”—especially the calls of birds.)  The End of Nature is rather more depressing, however, than Silent Spring—perhaps because we know that many of the most (obviously) egregious pollution problems are at least adequately dealt with, while our response to climate change appears to be not equal to the magnitude of the challenge.  Within 10 years of Silent Spring, you had the Clean Air Act (1963), formation of the EPA (1970), a rewriting of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (1972), and the Clean Water Act (1972).  Within 16 Years of The End of Nature, the first book dedicated to the topic of climate change for general audiences, we have…inaction and denial, as well as some movement and momentum for change.  Perhaps by writing this book, he thought we would be motivated to change and address the problem—the way the public outcry in 1962 led to regulatory action.  (Oh well!)

His premise is that “nature” is dead because humans have altered the earth to the point that things that used to be beyond our control are within our ability to manipulate.  It is an interesting idea that I am trying to inhabit a bit.  Although I wrestle with this too.  If we are to consider ourselves as members of the community (Leopold), then is it really in our ability to end nature?  Forests generate change and create weather. (Although, of course, “good” weather.) Elephants change nature.  Sure, the current changes in greenhouse gases are resulting in giant changes, global changes—we are a natural species capable of creating holes in the ozone layer.  We create rather large problems that reveal our short-sighted idiocy at times.  But does nature end?  Odds are in favor of nature persisting, albeit in some altered form—and perhaps drastically altered—despite us.  Most species alter the environment.  But still, I think I get what he’s saying.  Humans are filling the atmospheric tank with gases that will alter the course of the planet for centuries to millennia and that is fundamentally problematic to life as we’ve known it and to life as we’ve liked it. 

He uses a rhetoric of fear, and I wonder how effectively that works on the short-sighted (most of us) humans.  But, honestly, a rhetoric of optimism grounded in reality does seem a more challenging path to take.  I buy the science, but I am playing close attention to how effective his approach is in capturing the imagination of people in a way that ultimately alters behaviors.  Only a few of the students have started writing about this book in their blogs, but so far, they seem down on what they view as a pessimistic message in general (see here).  

Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“Sometimes there is no leaving, no looking westward for another promised land. We have to nail our shoes to the kitchen floor and unload the burden of our heart.  We have to set to the task of repairing the damage done by and to us.”  --Janisse Ray

One of the joys of being at a liberal art institution and actually interacting with the humanists as a scientist, is that you discover writers who are writing the exact book you have been dying to read, but that you have failed to find. Janisse Ray is one of those discoveries. She visited Miami U a few weeks ago and talked about “Being Human in Wild Times” – she gave a wonderful talk and reading, so I ordered her book Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (1999)--her first book and the first of hers that I have read, but it will not be the last.  She weaves a tale of her human family with that of the natural world in southern Georgia where the long-leaf pine forests once dominated. She makes you feel the loss of the diversity that was harbored in the long-leaf forest. With less than 3% of the long-leaf pine ecosystems persisting today, there has also been a decline in the species associated with this habitat:  Bachman’s Sparrow, the gopher tortoise (and all the species that goes along with it), the indigo snakes, red cockaded woodpeckers, wiregrass. 

Ray links the poverty in the land to the poverty of the people, who in many ways suffer more once the habitat is destroyed.  In many cases, people were destroying what they didn’t understand and didn’t know.  She says:

“Passing through my homeland it was easy to see that Crackers, although fiercely rooted in the land and willing to defend it to death, hadn’t had the means, the education, or the ease to care particularly about its natural communities.  Our relationship with the land wasn’t one of give and return. The land itself has been the victim of social dilemmas—racial injustice, lack of education, and dire poverty.  It was overtilled; eroded; cut; littered; polluted; treated as a commodity, sometimes the only one, and not as a living thing.  Most people worried about getting by, and when getting by meant using the land, we used it. When getting by meant ignoring the land, we ignored it.” 

But this book is not just an environmental lesson and a reminder of how the condition of the people affects the condition of the land, it is a story of how place shapes families and communities and connects multiple generations.  It is a story of discovering the ecology of an ecosystem that her family (and many others) has altered and loved--it is about a relationship with the land, one that needs repair and awareness and connection.   

I have long been interested in how nature and the science of conservation biology can be translated to more general audiences with a message that is inspiring instead of devastating, emotionally authentic instead of contrived, and enlightening rather than didactic.  Janisse Ray translates the data of habitat destruction into a story that is both personal and scientifically astute without the reader left feeling that they are being emotionally manipulated to a specific end.  Thank you, Janisse Ray for translating the data in such an engaging and moving way.  Janisse Ray said at her talk to pick up her books at the library.  I was happy to have a copy of my own, because there were many sections worth starring and underlining! So, you might want to get your very own copy--and we will all say a small prayer that long-leaf pines were not felled to publish this book (ah, actually, published on recycled paper).  

Flip-Flops in Winter with Leopold

These are not Aldo Leopold's feet.  To my knowledge, Leopold never wore flip-flops.

It is getting to be political season again and there is talk of the flip-floppers, the wafflers, the crowd pleasers who will switch their opinions as it suits them.  Although I understand the concern—it is nice to feel that we can trust what someone says is based in truth—flip-flopping can be the logical outcome of new information or greater awareness.  (Oh how I wish some people that I know and love would flop on some issues.)  In science, we should always be able to flip or flop if the evidence overwhelming says we should do so.  So the talk of flip-floppers always makes me as uncomfortable as actual flip-flops (what a questionable piece of footwear). 

Our Conservation Biology class is finishing A Sand County Almanac – I have read it a few times now and I must say it does get better with each read as I get older and, naturally, wiser.  I listened to an interesting video of one of Aldo Leopold’s former students who read some of the essays and told Leopold that they sounded a bit preachy and that he needed to explain how he came to his conclusions.  In essence, I think, the student was saying, reveal your flip-flops.  In “Thinking Like A Mountain” Leopold does this.  I have come to think of this passage as his road to Damascus as where in the bible Saul comes to a dramatic realization that he’s after the very people whose side he should be on and in a blinding revelation he flip-flops and becomes Paul.  Leopold’s revelation may have not been quite as swift and dramatic, but his trigger happy finger had been more than ready to shoot at any wolf his eye saw, a practice encouraged and condoned as part of their pervasive predator-control.  He says:

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.  I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain.  I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise.  But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.” (P 130) 

There’s even a light in Leopold’s story—perhaps we should have renamed Aldo at this point.  (Waldo?)  It was years before he formally changed his position on predator control, but something shifted for him here.  He flipped.  In light of new observation and additional evidence, he changed his position.  We are lucky he did so—otherwise, we might not have this book and we might be less likely to admit our own mistakes and be ready to reverse course and hope that in the end we can make up for our past sins.  

January to December: A Sand County Almanac

Writer and naturalist Janisse Ray recently visited Miami University to tell us about “Being Human in Wild Times.”  She hails from southern Georgia’s long-leaf pine territory not so far from the place I grew up in coastal SC—she sounded like a long forgotten friend and she had a passion for pines which is rare in those parts. As she spoke of the long-leaf pine ecosystems that she loved (I would say who would not, but history suggest the answer may be many), of which 97-99% have been lost, she made a connection between fragmentation of the habitat and fragmentation of our communities and families, suggesting that our detachment from the land has perhaps became possible as we left the communities of our upbringing and the natural habitats that were part of our cultural heritage to move on to somewhere better where we were more anonymous and less tied to our past and surroundings.  Would we be better stewards of our natural resources if we knew we would live and die in the same place we were raised, where we would watch our children and grandchildren grow up? 

One of the joys of rereading A Sand County Almanac with my students is rediscovering the love that Aldo Leopold has for his small patch of land in Wisconsin and what a great student he is of his 80 acre parcel.  I no more hear geese without thinking of him. He makes me want to love my 0.5 acre parcel a lot more even if there is slightly fewer grouse in my yard—but there are weeds buried somewhere under that snow that I regularly fail to cherish.  From January to December he finds himself out at his “shack” on the weekends getting to know his community—the chickadees and grouse, the rabbits and deer, the prairie chickens and woodcocks, and of course the plants that many of us never take enough notice of—the white pines (his beloved) and red birch, the Silphium and Draba. He relishes the least of these.  And from an old agricultural field, he helps the land return to what it once was even it was on the verge of forgetting and in doing so build a natural community.  He doesn’t speak so much of the human community that he may or may not build when he is there, but he mentions the neighbors who have treed a coon or collected the honey from his trees, and he doesn’t seem to mind sharing his bounty. So perhaps loving the land can also connect us to community. Or at least slow the pace down. 

It is a work-weary world, it seems, that keeps us too much out of nature and too much glued to the keyboards and the warm glow of our screens.  In Ohio, we are quite enveloped in snow and a brisk chill, which I have been enjoying on my daily walks with the geese flying in the blue sky with great purpose.  Tonight the edge of the chill is being taken off by the heater, as well as a log in the fireplace, which Leopold notes “is the sunlight that is now being released, through the intervention of my axe and saw, to warm my shack and my spirit through eighty gusts of blizzard. And with each gust a wisp of smoke from my chimney bears witness to whomsoever it may concern that the sun did not shine in vain.”  He reminds us that we are connected and part of the land, that we will leave our mark on it one way or the other, with the axe and with footsteps we leave tracking across the snow.     

Neil Young in the Anthropocene

(I did not insert any links in the text--I'm not sure why they are popping up and I can't seem to get rid of them.)

The Anthropocene--the proposed new epoch starting with the Industrial Revolution when the impact of humans became geological--it's a good word.  It rolls off the tongue and you can fit it into almost any conversation. Even conversations where you wouldn’t think were related: mammograms, the Lego Movie, Yellowstone, Martha Stewart’s Southern Comfort Punch—it doesn’t take long until you see it all points to the Anthropocene.  One conversation where it does belong is in any chat related to Neil Young’s new song, “Who’s Gonna Stand Up.”  Have you heard it?  If not, you can find it on YouTube:

The refrain *currently* goes like this: 

Who's gonna stand up and save the earth?
Who's gonna say that she's had enough?
Who's gonna take on the big machine?
Who's gonna stand up and save the earth?
This all starts with you and me

However, I would like to respectfully submit a suggestion to Neil Young: 

Who's gonna stand up and save the earth?
Who's gonna say that she's had enough?
Who's gonna take on the big machine?
Who's gonna stand up in the Anthropocene?
This all starts with you and me

Sure, it’s got two more syllables, but if anyone can do, Neil Young can.

Anthropocene is a word that makes you sit up and look around at the strip malls around you, at the ground tremoring from fracking, at the human expansion that has trimmed habitat into quarter acre squares. If you’re going to revise a song, fitting in the Anthropocene is a reason that makes some sense.

Flight Behavior: Science in the Arts

Monarch butterfly at Fernald Preserve in Harrison, OH where they are part of a program that marks butterflies to help study their migration patterns and basic life history--a topic that dominated Kingsolver's 2012 book, Flight Behavior.

I just finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, a fictional story about the migration of the monarch butterflies that suddenly goes awry, leaving butterflies overwintering dangerously north of their traditional spot in Mexico due to changes in the climate.  Kingsolver does what we hope a program we are developing at Miami University will do:  cross-pollination between the sciences and art to result in science-infused art that conveys some science along with being a valid piece of art.  Kingsolver has the luxury of collaborating with herself since she is trained and has worked as a scientist and she also has a talent for writing.  (Ah, collaborating with yourself—the introvert’s ideal; the NSF’s antithesis.)  The book is interesting and worth a read for sure, but it also reveals the challenges of this science-arts cross-pollination: does a scientific message get in the way of the art?

I spent last summer with a group of talented MU students from science and the arts. The group I worked with, “the pesticide group,” involved a poet working with scientists in my lab. It took us quite a while to figure out what the message was—it wasn’t just an academic exercise, because I wasn’t sure what the message should be, which I found astounding given that I had been working with pesticides for the last 20 years!  The message from the poet was expected to be “pesticides are bad,” if we boil it down. We spent a lot of time thinking about and deliberating a more nuanced message—something closer to the science, but that was worth communicating to the public.  Pesticides, certainly, can be bad, but they are also useful—whether “natural” or synthetic.  Ants in the kitchen? Do you learn to live together or pick up some ant traps at the store?  Personally, I go for the ant traps and we have certainly used more natural methods as well, but the ant traps are pretty standard around here.  And, of course, pesticide use is certainly a major part of our agricultural practices, for better or worse or somewhere in-between.  So what messages or insights do we draw from our lab’s research that can be translated into poetry?  Can the art transform the science to a new audience?  (Stay tuned for that reveal!)

I do wonder how the normal public responds to Kingsolver books.  I know a lot of my science friends love her books.  Her messages tend to be right on target for science communication, but should art have such a blatant message or should it be more nuanced and complicated?  If the message is more direct, does it end up singing to the choir or reach new audiences and open their mind?  Or is a direct message sufficient for the people who fall in the middle of an issue?  I have family members that I know wouldn’t be convinced by a novel and would find Kingsolver’s message irritating, getting her marked off their reading lists—given that they’ve rejected objective data and scientific expertise, a novel with such a direct message seems unlikely to leave much of a mark. Perhaps though for the people who have not thought about it, it makes them think about it in a new way—the way Uncle Tom’s Cabin influenced people’s opinions on slavery. Inviting people to think about something in a new way and welcoming them to a new conversation --that perhaps is a noble goal and a valuable outcome.

In any case, the monarchs are on my radar and I have a few conservation biology students next spring who will also find them on their radar too (although not specifically this book).  I would love to hear your thoughts on Kingsolver’s books:  she gets the science right, but does that hinder the artistic effort?